I am John McCain -- And I Approved This Lie

John McCain has approved a multitude of lies against Senator Barack Obama. It is the old propaganda technique of “if you repeat it enough, people will think it is true.” But he and his campaign’s continued use of lies and half-truths is doing a terrible thing to the morals of America.

Any devout Christian, Jew, or Muslim worth his or her salt should decry the terrible example the McCain-Palin lies give to our children and youth. What is honorable about telling lies?

Writer Joe Klein, in Time magazine, points out that McCain's lies have ranged from the annoying to the sleazy, and the problem is in both degree and kind. "His campaign has been a ceaseless assault on his opponent's character and policies, featuring a consistent—and witting—disdain for the truth. Even after 38 million Americans heard Obama say in his speech at the Democratic National Convention that he was open to offshore oil-drilling and building new nuclear-power plants, McCain flatly said in his acceptance speech that Obama opposed both."

Klein also writes that worse than the lies have been the smears, such as when McCain ran a television ad claiming that Obama favored "comprehensive" sex education for kindergartners. (Obama favored a bill that would have warned kindergartners about sexual predators and improper touching.) It appears, says Klein, “that the McCain camp has decided that its candidate can't win honorably, on the issues, so it has resorted to transparent and phony diversions.” I could not agree more.

McCain's campaign has been a series of snide and demeaning ads accompanied by the daily gush of untruths that have now been widely documented and exposed. As Klein writes, “the strategy is an obvious attempt to camouflage the current unpopularity of his Republican brand, the insubstantiality of his vice-presidential choice, and his agreement on most issues — especially economic matters — with an exceedingly unpopular President.”

Jonathan Chait writes in the New Republic that “McCain's untruths, in their frequency and their audacity, defy any modern historical precedent. He has been concocting falsehoods for months on end, all of which serve a clear political purpose.

Chait reveals that even after Sarah Palin’s lie that she said “no to the Bridge to Nowhere”, was revealed, and that she had, in fact, vigorously championed the project until it was no longer tenable, the McCain campaign continued to assert it anyway, day after day, dozens of times in all. Even after its falseness had been affirmed in almost every media outlet, they kept playing the untrue ads.

Chait states that what happened after that was even more unusual, and possibly without precedent: McCain's supporters simply suggested that the truth or falsity of their statements didn't matter. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said this to Politico about the increased media scrutiny of the campaign's factual claims: "We're running a campaign to win. And we're not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it."

Republican strategist John Feehery made the point even more bluntly, telling The Washington Post: "The more The New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there, and the bigger truths are: She's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent." Then, he added, "As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

This reminds me of the time, years ago, when I was a night manager at a Burger King in central Florida, when I called the police on a group of young people (who none of us had ever seen before) who were soliciting donations for an alleged youth center in town, using particularly aggressive techniques, and bothering customers. The police came and investigated, discovering there was no youth center really planned, and the young people were actually from Miami – they were “Moonies” affiliated with the Rev. Sun Yung Moon, and they went by the motto, “a lie to stop a bigger lie is not a lie at all.”

Well, sorry Rev. Moon, but I called it a lie then, and I call what McCain and his henchmen are doing a bunch of lies in our time. This is an insidious thing the Republicans are doing here, folks, and it is ruining our country.

Chait writes with a wonderful clarity: “Here we have the distilled essence of the McCain campaign's ethos: Perception is reality. Facts don't matter. McCain has presented himself as the grizzled champion of timeworn values. But the defining trait of his candidacy turns out to be a postmodern disdain for truth. How could McCain--a man widely regarded, not so long ago, as one of the country's most honor-bound politicians, and therefore an unusually honest one--have descended to this ignominious low?”

Well, Jonathan, and everyone else, I will tell you. McCain went to the prevarication bed with the Bush boys and girls and they converted him to Bush-Rove politics – which is lying, cheating, and smearing at the lowest possible levels.

It got Bush-Cheney elected twice. That was a travesty. But the even bigger problem is that it is also how Bush-Cheney governed.