Can’t even respectfully disagree?

The New York Times is reporting that Sen. John McCain is finally speaking out about Sen. Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright’s controversial comments. And that his scrutiny of the comments criticizes their content.

McCain had held back on commenting about Rev. Wright before now.

But Mr. McCain took a different approach at a news conference here when he criticized Mr. Wright for, as the senator paraphrased him, “comparing the United States Marine Corps with Roman legionnaires who were responsible for the death of our Savior, I mean being involved in that” and for “saying that Al Qaeda and the American flag were the same flags.”

“So I can understand, I can understand why people are upset about this,” said Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. “I can understand why Americans, when viewing these kinds of comments, are angry and upset.”

Mr. McCain said that he did not believe that Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, shared those views and that he was still against the advertisement in North Carolina. But he suggested that Mr. Obama had made the subject fair play by declaring in an interview shown over the weekend on “Fox News Sunday” that questions about Mr. Wright were “a legitimate political issue.”

“If he believes that,” Mr. McCain said, “then it will probably be a political issue.”

Fair play? You’d think. Seems logical to draw that conclusion, and engage the subject on a plane of reason. But politics are politics…

The Obama campaign accused Mr. McCain of breaking his promise to run a respectful campaign.

And all of this was on Sunday, before Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s televised speech before the NAACP.