There was a time when I honestly believed that John McCain might actually hold true to his promise to wage a clean and respectable campaign against Barack Obama for the high office of President of the United States. There was a time when I bore McCain no personal enmity despite my political allegiance to his opponent. Perhaps this is only because I didn't know as much about McCain as I know now; perhaps I had been told about McCain's "maverick" status so many times by the media that I actually believed it; perhaps I hoped that McCain's experience with Bush-Rove tactics in 2000 would prevent him on moral grounds from employing the same tactics in 2008. Whatever the case, that time has now passed.

John McCain is attempting to win the White House by dragging the 2008 presidential election into the same pit of Rovian filth that won for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. McCain is running a campaign based, not on issues and ideas, but on cheap shots and negative personal innuendo. Clearly unable to compete intellectually with Obama, McCain has deliberately sought to lower the level of discourse in this contest to that of the locker room and the back-alley brawl. While Obama strives to maintain the high ground, McCain wallows in sewage and asks the rest of us to join him. If this general election contest has taken a hard negative turn of late, it is entirely McCain's doing. It didn't have to be this way.

John McCain deserves no mercy from Democrats. He deserves no respect, no personal or professional consideration, no hero treatment. He deserves to be hit hard, again and again and again, until there's nothing left of his campaign but a bloodied corpse. He deserves to have every personal failing drawn out for all to see, every bit of dirty laundry from the McCain past taken out and waved before the cameras, every skeleton exumed. He deserves to be pummeled by Obama in the upcoming presidential debates until he is reduced to a helpless, quivering blob of hairy cottage cheese. He deserves to have his infamous temper provoked, and to be baited into making a public ass of himself just as he has done so many times before. He deserves all this, and more - much, much more. If in the end his Senate career is destroyed along with his presidential bid, so much the better.

When John McCain tells Americans that he has always been a passionate supporter of civil rights, Americans need to be reminded that McCain voted against the federal Martin Luther King (MLK) holiday in 1983, that he supported a Republican governor who rescinded Arizona's state MLK holiday in 1987, that he voted to eliminate federal funding for the MLK Federal Holiday Commission in 1994, and that he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1990 no less than four times. Only days ago, however, McCain claimed to "have  supported hundreds of pieces of legislation which would help Americans obtain an equal opportunity" and to have been instrumental in "fighting for the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday in my state." John McCain is a liar.

When John McCain tries to convince Americans that he has always been right on the war in Iraq, Americans need to be reminded that back in 2003 McCain told us victory would be achieved easily and quickly, and that US troops would be greeted in Iraq as liberators. When John McCain tells Americans that he is a reformer, Americans need to be reminded of his role in the "Keating Five" scandal, of his more recent improprieties as a member of the Senate Commerce Committee with corporate telecom lobbyists, and indeed of the fact that his campaign is entirely run by lobbyists. When John McCain talks about "family values," Americans need to be reminded how he flip-flopped on Jerry Falwell, calling the late religious bigot an "agent of intolerance" one day and then kissing Falwell's fat, hairy behind the next. When John McCain talks about the "sanctity of marriage," Americans need to be reminded how McCain shamelessly dumped his own first wife, following her crippling injury in a car crash, in favor of the younger, prettier, and much richer woman who bankrolled his entry into politics and to whom he is married today. John McCain is a hypocrite.

While I am pleased that the Obama campaign has begun to hit back against the McCain attack machine, I also understand Obama's need to hold the high ground and not allow himself to be dragged into the same cesspool McCain occupies. This, alas, is the difficult balance Obama must maintain if he is to win. Thankfully, the rest of us have no such tightrope to walk, and no such need to go easy on one bitter old gas-bag who needs to be put out of his misery and ours. For Democratic leaders in Washington, for local Democratic activists, and for Democratic bloggers, the time has come to start taking John McCain apart.