The economy is in tatters and shambles, and it's tattering and shambling its way along no matter what bailouts and rescues and Jim Cramer rant choruses are thrown at it. Now's the time for our presidential candidates to show leadership and vision, right? Not according to Bill Kristol, who thinks America needs to find out if our market woes weren't actually caused by a secret plan, hatched during a meeting of the Annenberg Challenge, in which Barack Obama and William Ayers agreed to use Weather Underground mind control techniques to convince Henry Paulson to stand back and do nothing while Ayers terror-bombed Lehman Brothers with his radical liberal derivatives. That's the basic gist of what Kristol was spitting at Fox News Channel this afternoon, as he stoically made the case for McCain going negative, forever. Why can't America understand that everyone got deep into bad mortgages and crazy credit default swaps because Barack Obama attended a Chicago Machine Church?
[WATCH.]
KRISTOL: The economy will be center stage but I disagree with some of the advice that McCain is giving. Saying you have to talk endlessly about the economy. These attacks on Obama on Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright don't matter. I don't agree. It is a severe economic crisis and McCain and Obama don't know what they would do. They both supported the bailout. It's not clear except on taxes that there are huge divisions about what to do with the credit markets. McCain has to show is he concerned about it and willing to be a strong leader and say look, when you're in a crisis you have to judge the character, the judgment, the background of the person you are putting in charge, that's more important than trying to evaluate the details of Obama's plans on credit swaps. I don't think we will be able to judge what the best way to handle bad debt. So McCain has to tie the economic crisis to Obama's character and judgment and say who you want in charge in difficult years, who is up to the job, liberal democrats who has hung out with characters, do you want him to run the country. That's got to be the core of McCain's message.