Democrats are getting apoplectic about this year's flat-out lies by Republicans in their candidates' statements and TV commercials, with Obama supporters' fact-checking falling hopelessly behind the opposition output.
On his Washington Post blog, Michael Kinsley notes that "the routine acceptance of obvious lies now corrodes our politics as much as the money that was the subject of McCain’s famous act of Republican apostasy: McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform.
"McCain has described his motive for McCain-Feingold as a giant mea culpa for his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. Maybe when this is over, one way or another, McCain will swear off corrupt lying the way he has sworn off corrupt money."
Fat chance. FactCheck.org is as busy as Mickey Mouse, the Sorcerer's Apprentice in the Disney classic, trying to sweep up the misstatements, half-truths and whoppers flooding the national consciousness from the Karl Rove-trained McCain minions.
It all brings back my first experience with official lies as a reporter for the college newspaper. In an interview, a dean kept telling me things I knew weren't true, that he knew I knew weren't true but that he kept saying with a straight face.
In time, the dean went into his natural calling, politics, to become Deputy Mayor of New York but eventually had to resign in disgrace for misusing taxpayer money for personal purposes.
The happy ending to that story may have misled me into believing that liars are always eventually caught out, but this campaign is creating severe doubts.
Will McCain be able to do to Obama this year what Bush and Rove did to him in 2000? If he succeeds, we'll have to stop reading our children and grandchildren the Pinocchio story.
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2 comments:
Thanks for this post. We need to keep pushing back against the lies and the stupid empire building. They think they can wear us down. Not this time. No neocon Amerika Uber Alles. Fight back!
"Empire building?" That would be 100 years in Iraq and Georgia in NATO.
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