Lies, damn lies and John McCain
By Mark Mellman
Posted: 09/16/08 06:20 PM [ET]
(Stolen from The Hill -
)http://thehill.com/mark-mellman/lies...008-09-16.html

While he appears to have been a wanton and callow youth, John McCain
tells us he discovered honor in a North Vietnamese prison camp. McCain
has either forgotten what honor means, or sacrificed it on the altar of
ambition.

Truth is integral to honor, and the definition cannot be stretched to
include lying to the public. Yet that is exactly what John McCain is doing.

Everyone from editorial boards to Factcheck.org has assailed him for it,
yet he persists. Newspapers and foundations are not the sole
repositories of wisdom or decency in our society, and are themselves
sometimes just plain wrong. However, when every objective observer
agrees that McCain has shown a callous, blatant and reckless disregard
for the truth, there ought to be a consequence. At the very least, John
McCain has forfeited the right to tell himself he lives by a code of honor.

I’m not naive. I know this is a tough business where we thrive on
transforming vague ambiguities into absolute certainties. In one of my
first races, I advised attacking our opponent for voting to cut Social
Security. He called it a lie, saying each time an amendment was offered
to protect benefits, he supported it. We countered that unlike others,
he voted for a budget that cut Social Security.

We won the biggest upset of that year by transforming an ambiguous
record into an absolute stance, and our vanquished foe still no doubt
considers me dishonest and disreputable. But at least we had an
argument, we had facts, we had a case. And in every race I have done, no
matter how much fur is flying, our attacks have always at least
encapsulated a basic, if sometimes oversimplified, truth.

McCain crossed the line from truth to lie, from honor to dishonor. He is
not the first to do so — the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth also lied.
However, as much as they helped George Bush, they were not the candidate
himself and Bush advisers have said publicly and privately (perhaps even
honestly) that they would never have employed those tactics.

Yet John McCain himself stands behind the lies and the dishonor. There
is not a kernel of truth in the statement that Barack Obama called Sarah
Palin a pig. There is not an iota of reality in McCain’s attack on
Obama’s supporting comprehensive sex education for kindergartners. As we
all know, he voted to help children avoid sexual predators.

By McCain’s logic, Obama should be attacking him for wanting to make it
easier for child molesters to prey on our kids. While some will no doubt
counsel that course, arguing we need to match their dishonesty, I doubt
we will see it — not because Democrats aren’t tough, not because we lack
an instinct for the jugular — but because unlike John McCain, Democrats
insist on acting honorably, on doing right as well as good.

Perhaps I’m only revealing my age or musical tastes, but I still
remember Stephen Stills singing (or, OK, shouting), “But you know we’ve
gotta do it … Cause if we don’t do it, nobody else is gonna. But you
know if we can’t do it with a smile on our face, you know if we can’t do
it with love in our hearts” — and I would add, with truth on our lips —
“then, children, we ain’t got no right to do it at all. Cause that just
means we ain’t learned nothing yet. And we’re supposed to be some kind
of different ...”

John McCain told us honor made him “some kind of different.” But without
truth there is no honor, and with John McCain there is neither truth nor
honor.