Unbelievable

I've followed the US presidential election with more interest than any of the year's three Canadian elections. Normally I'm not all that passionate about politics, but lately I've been astounded by the flagrant hypocrisy of the Bush-Cheney campaign. I think today's example, from this AP story, is mostly unintentional but still telling:

"For a political candidate to jump to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief," Bush said... "Unfortunately, that's part of a pattern of saying almost anything to get elected."

Wow. This is from a man whose purchase on "the facts" would be generously described as marginal, whose rationale for invading Iraq was the most spectacular example of conclusion jumping in recent memory, and whose campaign strategy is almost entirely based on fear- and rumour-mongering. I know these kinds of lines play well with "the base" but, come on, anyone living within arms-length of a newspaper could see through this fatuous crap.

Another interesting story makes the counter-intuitive claim that the Democrats have been responsible for the most serious "distortion" of the election:

On the whole, analysts say Bush's use of distortion has been more audacious than Kerry's. But the Massachusetts senator has left much of the dirty work to outside advocacy groups whom Jamieson blames for one of the most serious attacks of the campaign.

"You've got to come back to the 527 ads that accused the president of lying to take us into war. It's probably the most serious charge you can make," she said, referring to the so-called "527" groups that work independently from the candidates.

"But I don't think you can warrant that inference from the available evidence," she said. "So I think that is a deceptive claim."

America, you can be hard to figure out. You have a national debate over the meaning of "intercourse" while you impeach Clinton. But you let Bush and Cheney drag you into a $200 billion war to depose an impotent dictator (who had nothing to do with the terrorists) by manipulating scant evidence and suppressing other important evidence--and you don't want to call that lying.

That, my friends, sets a new standard for lying. Many future lies will be measured against it and, we can only hope, fall far short in their scale, cost and temerity.