Back when I was posting in public forums on social and political issues, a right-winger played a little trolling game. He started a new topic and made a declaration which, after all this time, I cannot even remember, but it was some rather lame right-wing assertion; he said that he wanted to see how long it would take for a liberal to come around and “whine” about it.

No question about it, I should have stayed away; taken by itself, the posting was obnoxious and should have been ignored. The poster in question, however, was someone we interacted with a lot–it was along the lines of someone you’d worked with for a while doing the same thing. You would not fall into the specific trap, but you might say, “hey, you’re being an ass, you know that?” Which is what I did; I posted saying that I would not comment on his assertion, but the “game” itself was inane.

That, of course, was enough, and the guy started doing a virtual-online victory dance. Within hours, the moderator deleted the offending posts and must have come down hard on the guy, as he emailed me privately and apologized–something he clearly would not have done on his own.

I mention this because I was reminded of the episode when reading about the McCain campaign’s latest attack tactic. He creates an ad in which Barack Obama is shown in sequence with two “sexually available white women” frequently perceived as vacuous attention-seekers. While this could just barely within the bounds of credibility be explained away as interposing Obama with “top celebrities,” almost no one missed the racial and sexual innuendo.

Obama replied, somewhat obliquely, that McCain was trying to scare voters, making fun of his name and that he “doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills.”

McCain’s campaign immediately accused Obama of “playing the race card.”

That’s right, all you have to do is make a poorly-concealed stab with racial and sexual innuendo just barely deniable enough, wait for your opponent to respond in any way whatsoever, then accuse him of bringing the whole thing up. Similar in nature to that wingnut on the public forum I frequented, but a lot slicker, of course–and the media is not as honest as the moderator of that forum was.

Anyone else here see the Hand of Rove at work?

So, if Obama played a commercial calling McCain a “kidder” showing McCain along with images of George Burns and Bob Hope (in photos where both were around 100 years old), and McCain inevitably made a reference to age, could Obama then accuse McCain of “playing the age card”? And how would conservatives respond to that?