John McCain is mad about this ad.

The ad is pretty tame, and it's targeted at two North Carolina gubernatorial hopefuls, but the use of Barack Obama and his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is too much for McCain.

"They're not listening to me because they're out of touch with reality and the Republican Party. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and this kind of campaigning is unacceptable," McCain told NBC's "Today" Show.

"I've done everything that I can to repudiate and to see that this kind of campaigning does not continue," he added.

Yet, simultaneously, McCain goes on the campaign trail and hammers Obama over the fact that a representative of the terrorist group Hamas (not Jimmy Carter) has endorsed Obama.

Apparently there's some nuance that I'm missing here, because I can't discern much of a difference in the political tone of these two attacks. In fact, if I had to rank these two on a "nastiness" scale, McCain's Hamas dig would be the nastier of the two.

For the record: I think neither the ad nor the Hamas charge crosses over the line of acceptable politics.