McCain has a new ad out, saying that Obama’s only accomplishment on education was a bill to teach sex ed in kindergarten. This sounds preposterous.

Well, it is. The law Obama supported (in the Illinois state senate) was to teach kids “age appropriate” information about avoiding sexual abuse and sexual predators. It’s not teaching kindergartners how to have sex, or even what it is—it was a bill to teach kindergartners that it was okay for them to stand up to people trying to grope them.

The Obama campaign responded quickly, saying, “It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls…”

They got in a jab of their own, too: “Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn’t define what honor was.  Now we know why,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.” It’s referencing his bizarre interview with Time Magazine, which Time describes as “prickly.” (That might be putting it lightly.)

Vote for who you will, but for the love of God, don’t fall for the “Obama wants to teach sex to kindergartners” line.

EDIT: FactCheck has it debunked, too. It seems the ad was even more full of fail than I assumed… Obama didn’t even cosponsor the bill (which didn’t even institute “sex ed” in kindergarten); he merely voted for it. Obama did sponsor/cosponsor bills to actually improve schools, but McCain’s ad doesn’t mention those. And the quotes bashing Obama? All three are ‘technically accurate’ quotes, but two are from articles that actually painted Obama more positively than McCain.

The third, the Chicago Tribune editorial? It apparently wasn’t a Chicago Tribune editorial, and was written by a conservative journalist. And what does the conservative columnist think of his piece being used in the ad? Much like Paris Hilton and Heart and Jackson Browne, he’s not terribly happy about it: “But really, I don’t mind at all when McCain cites something I wrote praising him… But the ad itself… insults our intelligence by expecting us to believe that Obama thinks kindergarteners should be taught how to use condoms before they’re taught to read…”

And he ends, as I will, by adding, “This commercial doesn’t tell us much about Obama. But it sure provides an education about McCain.”