Addicted to Lies

Early on in this endless election cycle, one of the thoughts I had is that it wouldn't be so bad if McCain won, because at least he's an honorable man. Perhaps he will win, and perhaps it won't be so bad. But I've been scratching my head a lot lately about the "honorable man" business.

Politicians are not noted for being a truth-telling crowd. But some are better and some are worse. For years I had thought of McCain as a reasonably straight shooter. Lately, however, his campaign has been trafficking in outright whoppers.

Sarah Palin's line about the Bridge to Nowhere is by now a well-documented lie. But long after that became clear to everybody who was paying any attention, the campaign kept trotting it out.

It would be one thing if McCain said "Obama claims he'll lower your taxes, but his record shows that he's a tax-and-spend liberal. Don't believe him." That might be fair or it might not. But that's not what McCain's campaign did. They keep saying that Obama's plan is to raise taxes on the middle class. Whatever Obama will actually do, McCain knows full well that the proposal Obama has floated calls for large tax cuts for the middle class. The record is clear, and the point has been made many times, not least by factcheck.org. But the McCain campaign just kept on saying it.

And speaking of Factcheck.org... There have been a lot of viral emails about Sarah Palin, and some of them say things that are not only nasty but just plain false. Factcheck did its usual good job of debunking. But the McCain campaign picked up the Factcheck piece and twisted it into an ad that made Obama into the source of all those false claims. Factcheck.org was not impressed. Look here for the story from Factcheck itself.

And then there's the BS about Obama and sex education. This is one of those tricky political lies. McCain's campaign says: Obama is for comprehensive sex education, starting in kindergarten. And it's true that the word "comprehensive" did show up in the bill that Obama backed. But it referred to a whole program running from kindergarten through 12th grade, and the focus at the kindergarten level was to help young children realize when adults are molesting them and to tell their parents about it. It's too much to believe that McCain's people really didn't know what this was all about.

Perhaps that one is in the category of political business as usual. But the lipstick on a pig affair ought to make McCain squirm. Obama wasn't talking about Sarah Palin. It feels silly to have to say that. Nothing in his words, nothing in the context, gives any reason at all to think that he was making a personal comment about Sarah Palin. McCain really ought to have climbed down on this one. But for a great head-shaking moment, have a look at this bit from The View on ABC.

John McCain did get one thing right in that exchange: Obama is a man who chooses his words carefully. In fact, that's one of the reasons I plan to vote for him. He's a thoughtful man, not afraid of subtlety. Subtlety, unfortunately, doesn't always make for good politics. But in any case, McCain can't have it both ways: if he agrees that Obama chooses his words carefully, then any sensible rendering of the "lipstick" remark won't make the McCain campaign's charge stick -- no more than the same charge would stick against McCain when he used the same words himself not all that long ago.

I want to believe that John McCain is a fundamentally decent man. I still haven't given up on that notion. But that makes it all the more distressing to watch him give in to a decidedly less than decent addiction to lies. When he was smeared by Bush's operatives, a good many of us were appalled. I think that at least some of us thought it might inoculate him against going along with the same tactics in his own campaign. But John McCain seems to want to be president very badly. When or lose, it would be a shame if a good man found himself having to look back with shame on the crowning effort of his political career.