Yesterday Obama released his August fundraising numbers, but Obama’s camp doesn’t say why those numbers are being released a week early. It’s clearly an effort to squelch more whispering about the campaign’s disappointing trajectory. Attracting much less notice are the abysmal fundraising numbers for Howard Dean’s DNC. With the DNC virtually sidelined while the RNC can spend in excess of $100 million, Obama’s hard-money edge is worthless. In another sign of desperation, Obama has apparently decided that Joe Biden is useless as an attack dog, so he has to surrender his former image as the purveyor of “a new style of politics.” That announcement was followed by a desperate ad that picked on McCain for being old–except that the Obama campaign specifically denied that they were making an issue of McCain’s age. In case you were inclined to believe them, you only had to wait two days to see that the Obama campaign was lying. That’s how long it took Obama’s backers to argue that McCain is too old to be President: