In her Sun-Times column today, Lynn Sweet reports on the sparring between the Obama and McCain camps yesterday over foreign policy. The piece is headlined: "Obama 'delusional'? McCain, ex-CIA chief doubt Obama's readiness to deal with terrorists." In it, she quotes former CIA head James Woolsey and McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann wailing away on Obama's foreign policy approach:

During a McCain campaign conference call with reporters, former CIA head James Woolsey said Obama's support of giving terrorists access to U.S. courts was an "extremely dangerous and an extremely naive approach to terrorism."

McCain senior foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann said if Obama "got that 3 a.m. phone call" -- a reference to an ad Sen. Hillary Clinton ran before the Texas and Ohio primaries questioning Obama's experience -- his response would be to "call the lawyers in the Justice Department." He also called Obama "delusional." [...]

Scheunemann also invoked a stereotype as he tried to make the point that terrorists are not common criminals. These terrorists, he said, were not "your run-of-the mill drug dealers on the South Side of Chicago."

In turn, Sweet devotes one graf to Obama's response:

"These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could've pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11," Obama told reporters on his campaign plane. "In part because of their failed strategies, we've got bin Laden still sending out audiotapes, so I don't think they have much standing to suggest that they've learned a lot of lessons from 9/11."

It's a decent rebuttal. Nonetheless, when a low-information voter reads about a terrorism-related back-and-forth between a politician and a former CIA director, whose argument do you think they're more likely to trust? That's why it would have been nice if Sweet had noted that Richard Clarke, former counter-terrorism adviser under the Clinton and Bush administrations, hammered the McCain camp hours before Obama himself responded.

During a conference call with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Clarke described himself as "disgusted" by the McCain campaign's tactics and accused the Republican surrogates of "completely and utterly distorting" the GOP record on terrorism. Clarke also noted that Obama has a "comprehensive terrorism strategy" and demanded that the McCain camp "show where in the record Senator Obama has ever said he is favor of a pure law enforcement approach."

Take a listen to his comments:

Internal mp3