(I'm a bit pressed for time, so I thought I'd print the opening bit of a post I started -- but never completed -- about a week ago. It sort of ends in medias res, but what the hell...)

All over progland, you can see the meme: McCain is running a campaign of deception; McCain lies. Even the formerly reliable Paul Krugman and Bob Somerby have dived into this meme-stream. Here's a very silly article from the New Republic which exemplifies the genre.

Here we have the distilled essence of the McCain campaign's ethos: Perception is reality. Facts don't matter... 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?

The most giggle-inducing part of this piece -- by Jonathan Chait -- suggests that Barack Obama bears some slight tinge of the same sin:

Certainly, Barack Obama is not totally innocent. Last March, Obama said that McCain "wants to continue a war in Iraq perhaps as long as one hundred years," when in fact McCain said that he would favor an indefinite peaceful military presence.

A few other (relatively unimportant) unfair barbs are mentioned. The giggles give way to guffaws in this passage:

I love how conservative apologists forget how hard the media probed Obama's Rev. Wright associations, his meeting with Ayer, Father Phlager, and every other somewhat shady person he happened to be in the same room with for a few minutes while in Illinois.

No mention here of TONY REZKO, ROD BLAGOJEVIC ( a cinch to be indicted), or any of the other crooks mentioned in Evelyn Pringle's pieces and in the Chicago news media. Pringle exhaustively proves, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Obama is guilty of the same sleaze that put Duke Cunningham in jail -- making sure that contributors got hefty chunks of taxpayer monies.

(I've made that point before, many times. None of the many Obots who visit this site have even tried to deny the statement that I have just now placed in boldface.)

Here's the really fun part...

These allegations are not new - they have been beaten TO DEATH during the Democratic primary, and have all been answered effectively to the mind of anyone not already against Barack. He's explained time and again about these facts - if Republicans weren't paying attention to the news during the Dem primary, thats not the medias fault. NYT, New Republic, DailyKos, all these and every news media left and right have spoken about these issues. Its been done, to death.

(Emphasis added.) The Daily Kos? The Daily Freakin' Kos? The cesspool that gave us the darkened video smear and all those lies about Bristol Palin? Markos Moulitsas -- who instantly deletes any defense of Hillary Clinton -- never censored the post that explicitly called for her murder. Moulitsas, who said that Hillary was not even a Democrat any more, is largely responsible for the abominations cataloged here and here and here.

If Chait cites Kos as a source, he is one sick, sick pup. What's next? Will he vouch for the reliability of the Weekly World News?

As for the NYT and New Republic: They are both firmly biased in Obama's favor (especially the latter), and neither one has ever looked into the truth about Obama's relationship with Ayers.

"beaten TO DEATH"? Heh. Let's take a closer look at that claim. A simple test should suffice to reveal the truth:

Go to Google, type in "New Republic" "Ayers" "Annenberg" and "Obama." You'll find zero responsive results from TNR.

The New York Times did, in fact, publish some hint of the truth quite recently, although Ayers receives only a glancing reference. For the truth of the matter -- including some behind-the-scenes dish on the NYT article -- see here. Turns out that an email released under FOIA reveals the bias of NYT writer Sam Dillon.

Was the Ayers/Obama linkage "beaten to death" by the NYT and TNR? Hardly. For "beaten to death" read "covered up."

As for Pfleger: He may be just an offensive clown, but the Pfleger/Wright/Farrakhan axis (appropriate word, that) is troubling and insufficiently researched. Never forget that Farrakhan's ultimate goal is, in essence, the same as that of the Confederacy: Separation of states.

Palin's alleged links with Alaska's kooky seccessionists have been the source of endless moanings and maunderings from the prog left. But Sarah Palin was never part of the Alaska Independence Party. Meanwhile, Barack Obama remained -- for twenty years -- a congregant within a church that offered full support to Louis Farrakhan.

Splitting the union is the entire point of Farrakhan's existence. He has never given up on his crazed goal of being the sole ruler of a new black nation carved out of some unspecified portion of the existing United States. That goal has driven every single decision the man has made since the early 1960s.

You'd think that the least we could ask of our president is that he not endorse the Jefferson Davis position on the question of union vs. disunion.

Chait's list of McCain's alleged lies strikes me as a pack of silly, overblown allegations. For real lies, look to Barack Obama. Here's a sampler pack:

1. NAFTA. This one remains my favorite example. During the primary campaign in Ohio, Obama put out flyers that said that "Only Barack Obama consistently opposed NAFTA." The interior text offers this Obama quote: "I don't think NAFTA has been good for America -- and I never have."

However, in 2004, he said: “The United States benefits enormously from exports under the WTO and NAFTA.” A few months ago, he once again explicitly endorsed NAFTA.

Obama lied. Just plain lied.

2. Hillary's NAFTA stance. This is a subsidiary of the original NAFTA lie. Another piece of Obama campaign literature claimed that

"Hillary Clinton believed NAFTA was a "boon" to our economy."

She never said that. Obama lied -- just plain lied.

3. The back channel. This is yet another subsidiary of the NAFTA lie.

During the primary, Obama's economic adviser Austan Goolsbee sent a back-channel assurance to the Canadians that the Senator's anti-NAFTA rhetoric was just campaign fibbing.

Obama's online supporters -- especially the ones at the execrable Daily Kos (functioning, in essence, as an arm of the campaign) -- created a fake story which pretended that Hillary Clinton, not Obama, was responsible for the back channel. A Canadian investigation cleared Hillary and confirmed the Goolsbee story.

Team Obama issued a flat denial that when the back-channel story was first revealed. And Goolsbee even tried to pretend that he had nothing to do with the Obama campaign. The Canadian investigation proved these statements to be false.

Obama lied. Just plain lied.

4. FISA and telecom immunity. During the primaries, Obama announced his opposition to FISA. He even promised to filibuster any legislation that contained immunity for the telecoms. In July, he voted for just such a bill.

Obama lied. Just plain lied.

5. "I barely know Tony Rezko." Obama said these words in the South Carolina debate with Hillary Clinton. At the time, he didn't know that John Thomas, an FBI informant in Rezko's office, would spill the beans: Obama had met frequently with Rezko in his office; the two men were in almost daily communication. For a list of Obama's changing stories, see here.

Rezko has always been a huge Obama funder. The notorious Chicago slumlord offered Obama a job while the latter was still at Harvard; Obama eventually got work with a law firm whose primary client was Tony Rezko. (The head of that firm was himself involved with shady Chicago dealings.) Obama helped Rezko pick up those notorious slum properties, at massive taxpayer expense; he also helped Rezko and his cronies get their fingers in the Hospital Board money.

And then, of course, there's the small matter of Obama's house. Why would Tony help a man he "barely knew" to purchase a mansion?

In this recounting, I have merely unsettled the dust atop the veneer of the Rezko story. To reach a deeper level, read Pringle's work (based, in large part, on reports in Chicago newspapers). Of course, a committed Obot like Chait would rather slice off his own nipples than read Pringle's articles (which are right here).

But those willing to face the facts understand that Obama lied. Just plain lied.