McCain: That lying thing

It has become one of the main battle cries of the liberal blogosphere the past few days "Hey media, please call out McCain/Palin on the massive torrent of lies they spew". Now that message has taken hold within the liberal pundit class.

PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Because the press won't do its job, John. I criticized Barack Obama when he hasn't been tough enough. Barack's job is to run against John McCain, right. Don't shoot the monkey when you can shoot for the organ grinder. His job is not to focus on number two but number one. But it is the media's job when a politician flat out lies like she's doing on this bridge to nowhere so call her on it. Or this matter of earmarks where she's attacking Barack Obama for having earmarks, when she was the mayor of little Wasilla, Alaska, 6,000 people, she hired a lobbyist who was connected to Jack Abramoff, who is a criminal and they brought home $27 million in earmarks. She carried so much pork home she got trichinosis. But we in the media are letting her tell lies about her record.

Even Barack Obama has taken the McCain/Palin ticket to task for their dalliances in the imaginary, their campaign based solely on John McCain biography and the most baldfaced lies they think they can get away with.

I think we all know where this is headed: The media narrative that accusations about the truthiness of the McCain campaign are totally partisan arguments made by liberal wags. Pointing out objective truth like say Sarah Palin was for the bridge to nowhere and for earmarks (netting the highest dollars to citizen rate in the country) or John McCain sure seems to agree with and support the President an awful lot, morphs into "Some liberals say..."

Thus the McCain campaign gets to continue to invent whatever reality they wish and construct a whole new biography for Sarah Palin out of whole cloth because objective reality gets morphed into a left-wing narrative that only partisans harp on. McCain is a truth teller because the media says only Democrats are criticizing his lies, which are then downgraded to misstatements or places where the campaign was taken out of context. This all goes for Obama too, if he wants to tell everyone he went over Niagara in a barrel and was the man who convicted Al Capone, call him on his bullshit. Unlike with Al Gore though, make sure it's actual bullshit.

But alas, the media is a neutral conduit of information, they can only present statements, it is not their place to judge truth or travel into the wild and woolly lands of fact checking. They walk wide eyed into spin rooms and take press releases and it is their sworn duty to report said spin and press releases verbatim, without a reality filter. Because this is America.