Blizzard of Lies

In his column today Paul Krugman looks at the almost unbelievable level of lying coming from the McCain/Palin campaign. One would think that after the disasters the Chimperator has brought upon the USA through all of his lies and half-truths the American public would have wised up by now and made it very clear that politicians who are constant liars will be punished at the polls. Apparently not so based on the fact that McCain is not hugely down in the polls. Although the worthless media which achieves new levels of laziness and synchophancy daily bears a huge responsibility for allowing liars to go unpunished. I find it ironic that the self-anointed party of God is the most truth challenged rather than the alleged godless liberals. McCain/Palin truly sicken me. McCain/Palin obviously thinks the majority of Americans are morons. If they win in November, then they will be proven correct. Where are those of us who are not morons supposed to go?? Here are some column highlights:

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Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere? These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

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I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

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Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

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[H]ow a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern. . . . . Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

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And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country? What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.