During her debate with Sen. Joseph Biden, Gov. Sarah Palin took an interesting stance: she claimed that any mention of Sen. John McCain’s record, particularly of supporting the Bush administration, was off topic, since the debate should be about the future.

Say it ain’t so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future.

Since then, both she and the McCain campaign seem to have had a change of heart. All they want to talk about is the past. More specifically, doggone it, their twisted, out of context version of Sen. Barack Obama’s past.

• John McCain’s campaign released a new ad Monday that targets year-old comments from Barack Obama about the conflict in Afghanistan, calling them flat out “dishonorable.”
  Palin: “Say it ain’t so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. Now doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future.”

  …The ad refers to an answer Obama gave at an August 2007 town hall meeting with New Hampshire voters, during which the Illinois senator was asked whether he had plans to shift U.S. troops out of Iraq to other terrorist hotspots like Afghanistan.

  “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there,” Obama said of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

  Those comments were immediately seized by GOP critics. The Republican National Committee sent out a press release shortly after the remarks calling them “offensive,” and demanding he apologize. The McCain campaign has also highlighted the comments several times this campaign season. An AP Fact Check later reported Western forces had been killing civilians at a higher rate than insurgents.

• Palin on the stump: “Well, I was reading my copy of The New York Times the other day [Editor's note: Palin made sure to indicate it was "her copy" of the Times; too bad she couldn't remember that paper when Katie Couric asked her which ones she reads], and I was really interested to read about Barack’s friends from Chicago.

  Turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers. And according to The New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, “launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol.”

  Wow. And there’s even more to the story. Barack Obama said Ayers was just someone in the neighborhood. But that’s less than truthful. His own top advisor said they were, quote, “certainly friendly.” In fact, Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers’s home. And they’ve worked together on various projects in Chicago.

• McCain senior adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer included a new target this morning, citing Obama’s ties to Tony Rezko, a man who has been convicted of fraud and who helped Obama obtain a mortgage on his Chicago home…

  In addition, Palin suggested in an interview with The New York Times that Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was also fair game for criticism…

  Despite Palin’s willingness to go after Wright, McCain senior adviser Mark Salter said that the campaign will not attack Obama’s relationship to the fiery minister.

Sounds like the McCain campaign thinks the past is very relevant — as long as it’s only Obama’s past being examined.