Politics is so confusing, isn't it? It's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world -- except, it seems, for John McCain, who wants folks to vote in November with a clear, unfettered vision of him. And of Barack Obama.

His strategy is so simple, it could fit on a bumper sticker. McCain = former POW, American hero. Obama = lightweight celebrity, albeit a well-spoken one. Given that choice, how could McCain lose?

My observation is, of course, not breaking news. Nor is it terribly surprising; Republicans are, essentially, adapting Hillary Rodham Clinton's primary campaign strategy, which may have been more effective in defeating Obama if she had started to pursue it in December, rather than March.

But the GOP's messaging is popping up these days in the most curious places. Take, for example, spokeswoman Nicolle Wallace's angry response this week to charges that McCain broke the "cone of silence" rule at Saddleback Church. "The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous," she fumed to the New York Times.

Huh? The five years McCain spent in a Vietnam prison camp has earned him high respect from just about everyone. But what, pray tell, does that have to do with Saddleback?

Meanwhile, it's rare these days to find a McCain operative who doesn't make at least a passing reference to Obama's rock-star appeal. "Notwithstandng his celebrity status, is Barack Obama ready to lead? My answer is no," Sen. Joe Lieberman, I/D-Conn., said recently on NBC's "Meet the Press," paraphrasing a recent McCain campaign TV ad.

"Celebrities like to spend their millions. Barack Obama is no different," an announcer says in a radio ad McCain's camp started running Wednesday. "Only it's your money he wants to spend."

"As new polls highlight Obama's vulnerabilities, the world's biggest celebrity gets testy, launching a hard-hitting advertising campaign," RNC press secretary Alex Conant wrote in an e-mail distributed Wednesday to the media.

Putting aside the curious notion of McCain or his supporters trying to accuse anyone of being a celebrity politician with anger management issues, the GOP's strategy is, of course, not rocket science. It's the 2008 version of one the Bush-Cheney campaign, led by many of the same savvy operatives now advising McCain, employed effectively against John Kerry four years ago: Take your opponent's greatest perceived strength (in Kerry's case, his own military record from Vietnam) and turn it into his biggest weakness.

While there's no evidence of coordination, it's notable that the strategy appears to be gaining steam within McCain circles at the same time Jerome Corsi's anti-Obama book, The Obama Nation, is hitting the stores. Four years ago this month, another Corsi tome, Unfit for Command, started the slow unraveling of Kerry's presidential prospects.

Indeed, McCain's camp increasingly appears to be taking pages directly from the Bush-Cheney playbook. The latest example: Just as they did four years ago in Boston, Republicans are planning to stage a major presence at the Democratic convention in Denver next week.

It was during his convention that Kerry essentially lost the race in 2004, by failing to respond aggressively enough to relentless attacks on his military record by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and other groups. Will Obama suffer a similar fate?

He won't, Democrats insist. They've learned the lessons of 2004. They'll respond in kind, they say, and then some.

Those are tough words. But are they true? In 2004, just two years after Republicans defeated Sen. Max Cleland in Georgia by turning a Vietnam war hero into a terrorist sympathizer, Democrats gave Cleland a prominent role in Boston, introducing Kerry on the night he accepted the nomination. The message to Republicans: We're on to you. But were they?

Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times... ?