Meme Watch

Let it be known that this was the week that the press caught up to everyone closely following the Presidential campaign and finally started reporting on John McCain's troubling pattern of consistent lies. It has now become a staple of campaign coverage, and the McCain campaign is on the record as calling it a deliberate strategy.

To top it off, McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said this to the 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.”

What they're saying is that they don't care about the truth. They have contempt for the electorate and are cynical enough to believe that their voters will ignore reality while they create it themselves.

If you doubted that McCain offered a third Bush term, read that previous sentence again.

By the way, the lies keep on coming, about all things great and small. Turns out Sarah Palin has never been to Iraq, and her team admitted that she was only in Ireland on a refueling stop. The crowd size at recent McCain-Palin events has been inflated. It was revealed that Palin is still actively pursuing a "Bridge to Nowhere" project with federal money, all the while repeating the stock line in her stump speech that she said "thanks but no thanks" to it (even after Charlie Gibson called her out on this on national television). More fact-checks show recent ads and statements to be full of lies. They even lie in multiple languages:

The campaign Friday launched a 30-second Spanish-language television ad charging that Democrat Barack Obama and his Senate colleagues torpedoed meaningful changes in immigration laws.

"The press reports that their efforts were 'poison pills' that made immigration reform fail," the ad charges. "The result: No guest worker program. No path to citizenship. No secure borders. No reform. Is that being on our side? Obama and his congressional allies ready to block immigration reform, but not ready to lead."

What that's wrong: Media accounts cited two votes as effectively killing immigration reform last year — and Obama was on the same side as McCain in both.

The Obama campaign is absolutely making this an issue. Here's a piece of their memo to reporters:

Here are the facts. Governor Palin supported the Bridge to Nowhere, requested hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks, never visited Iraq, increased spending as governor, increased taxes as governor, and was about as successful selling that luxury jet on eBay as the McCain campaign has been selling her reputation as a reformer. Oh yeah, and the gas pipeline she touts won’t be usable for at least a decade, if it’s completed at all.

While the media is slowly starting to call the McCain campaign on their dishonest tactics, McCain’s staff boasts that they don’t care.

They also said yesterday that McCain is running a campaign not worthy of the office he is seeking. And they're right. If McCain were still in the Navy he would be tossed out for this kind of conduct.

Honor has suddenly taken center stage in this Presidential campaign. And McCain's is gone.

...in a way, McCain's entire focus on earmark spending as the biggest problem in the federal budget is a lie all its own. Earmark spending is miniscule. The military budget is far more central to government waste, but of course McCain procures a lot of that for his contractor buddies in Arizona, so that's sacrosanct.