TIME Magazine calls John McCain a liar!

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. Normal political practice would be for McCain to say, "Obama says he's 'open to' offshore drilling, but he's always opposed it. How can we believe him?" This persistence in repeating demonstrably false charges is something new in presidential politics.

Worse than the lies have been the smears. 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.) The accusation that Obama was referring to Sarah Palin when he said McCain's effort to remarket his economic policies was putting "lipstick on a pig" was another clearly misleading attack — an obnoxious attempt to divert attention from Palin's lack of fitness for the job and the recklessness with which McCain chose her. McCain's assault on the "élite media" for spreading rumors about Palin's personal life — actually, the culprits were a few bloggers and the tabloid press — was more of the same. And that gets us close to the real problem here. The McCain camp has decided that its candidate can't win honorably, on the issues, so it has resorted to transparent and phony diversions.

Well of course this is nothing new to the blogging community, we have been calling John McCain a liar for months now, but it is very significant that publications as respected as the TIMES have decided to chime in as well.

The sad fact is that John McCain, who used to be synonymous with integrity, has sold out everything he seemed to believe in for this one long shot at gaining the Presidency. He is now for things he was always against. He now embraces tactics that he called scurrilous in past years. And he has allowed pressure form the Right Wing fringe to force him to put a running mate on his ticket who represents everything that he hates about his own party.

And then there is Sarah Palin. If John McCain has just recently learned to embrace the lie, Palin appears to have been born with lies pouring out of her mouth. Palin is a habitual liar who finds doing it so as simply as taking a breath.

And she also brings with her an SUV full of scandal. John McCain may be labeled many things, but the man had few if any scandals to impugn his character. But Palin has enough scandal for everybody! One has to wonder if the Republicans just cannot bring themselves to support a ticket with out some scandal associated with it.

Well if that is the case then Sarah Palin certainly solved that little problem now didn't she?