Frank Rich opines today in the NYT that Truthiness Stages a Comeback. Frank Rich's column neatly starts out about how and why McCain's (McSame's) Rovian Spinomatic Political machine spews lies. He then points out the lies with links for all to see. The entire column is worth the read but this quote jumped off the page at me.
Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.
Rich goes through the lie machine starting with Steve Schmidt as the lie master and how Schmidt taunts the press in saying "we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say" about the campaign’s incessant fictions".
That said, McCain slides down the slippery slope from there.
Rich carefully lays the groundwork of the lies and laments the fact that John McCain received his most hostile interview from The View from Barbara Walters and Joy Behar, a stand up comedian.
He wonders why Cindy McCain has received a pass on her substance abusing past.
Rich points out McCain's lies stick since 50% of those polled don't know that Obama's tax plan is to leave tax rates the same of reduce taxes for 98.1% of all Americans.
The white wash of Palin's support the Alaskan bridge was effectively erased in her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
The most important pack of lies Rich explains is that McCain's call for an investigation of 9/14 was pure political savvy.(...or is it cynacism?) It's hard to believe that John McCain doesn't understand the banking, investment firm, real estate meltdown. He was Senate Commerce Committee, and John McCain he claims to have overseen "every part of our economy."
John McCain should know about our economic melt down. He was there for most of the dismantling of the laws that were meant to protect us from this happening again. McCain is a member of the 1989 Keating Five. Rich says it like it is:
Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion.
John McCain's relationship with Keating was troubling because John McCain received:
$100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.
The result?
After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for "poor judgment." He had committed no crime and had not intervened to protect Keating from ruin.
But McCain's lesson wasn't lasting. True, he did learn to be more careful with choosing his friends but every so often he gets too close to the fire. Early in the campaign the association between a female lobbyist and McCain troubled his campaign advisers. McCain's votes in the Senate belies his call for a 9/14 investigation as Rich points out:
McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.
The most telling thing about McCain is that he's for something until he's against it.
McCain has reversed himself on every single economic issue this year, often within a 24-hour period, whether he’s judging the strength of the economy’s fundamentals or the wisdom of the government bailout of A.I.G. He once promised that he’d run every decision past Alan Greenspan — and even have him write a new tax code — but Greenspan has jumped ship rather than support McCain’s biggest flip-flop, his expansion of the Bush tax cuts. McCain’s official chief economic adviser is now Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who last week declared that McCain had "helped create" the BlackBerry.
The Cliff Notes version of Frank Rich's well documented Op-Ed is that McCain's a lying, flip flopping reincarnation of BushCo.