...and the Obama campaign made a mistake like this, we'd be going NUTS (as would our equivalent - if we had one - of Drudge and Faux News)!
...the same afternoon McCain aides were complaining about Obama's fundraising success, we also learn that the McCain campaign sought illegal contributions from the Russian ambassador to the United Nations.[...]
Accepting foreign money is, of course, against the law. The McCain campaign was, in effect, asking the Russian ambassador for an illegal campaign contribution.
Now, in fairness, this was almost certainly the result of some kind of innocent mix-up. Churkin received a generic email solicitation, probably by accident. Russian officials don't believe the McCain campaign was deliberately asking for an illegal donation. Ruslan Bakhtin, press secretary of the Russian mission, told Ben Smith, "We just find it amusing." As do I.
I'm curious, though. If the Obama campaign had inadvertently sought illegal campaign contributions from a Russian official, do you suppose the McCain campaign and Fox News might raise a fuss?
Exactly right. This was almost certainly an inadvertent, amusing mistake, and we don't have our own "Unfair and Unbalanced" propaganda network to blast out hysterical distortions to the dittoheads 24/7. Instead, since we're NOT Republicans, we know that the McCain campaign would almost certainly not be asking for money from the country that Sarah Palin can see from her house (ha). And we know that the McCain campaign CERTAINLY would not do such a thing when they're busy flinging false (and desperate) accusations at the Obama campaign about its fundraising.
Anyway, that's the difference between the "reality based" universe and...well, whatever universe the McCain campaign, Jeff Frederick et al. live on. A "teachable moment," so to speak...