Two dots make a straight line. Time to connect them.
Dot one: Bush/Cheney are the biggest liars in American presidential history.
They lied about the connection between September 11 and Saddam. They lied about the President's Daily Briefing warning them about al-Qaeda. They lied about having indisputable WMD evidence. They lied about illegal wiretapping. They lied about torture. They lied about... well, this paragraph would take about eight years to complete.
Dot two: McCain/Palin are liars.
They're lying about Obama on taxes, they're lying about Obama on education, they're lying about McCain's "mavericky" record, they're lying about Palin's "reformer" record, they're even lying about their own lying.
This isn't just garden variety political hardball. It isn't even routine Atwater/Rove slime. It's as ugly as anything Orwell predicted in 1984, as reptilian as any propaganda spewed around the world by authoritarian governments of the left or the right.
And because the "news" media today are run by a profit motive that elevates entertaining coverage above enlightening reporting, and by a definition of journalism so bizarre that it recuses itself from even the possibility of pursuing objective truth, the Republican disinformation blitzkrieg has found in the mainstream press its ideal epistemological enabler.
There is a straight line from Bush/Cheney contempt for the truth, to McCain/Palin contempt for the truth, from Bush/Cheney/Iraq to McCain/Palin/fill-in-the-blank.
For reasons that seem particularly ridiculous from the perspective of the current campaign, the impeachment of Bush/Cheney was considered politically impossible -- "off the table." Two terms of Bush/Cheney are what you get when the elected government voluntarily deprives itself of its legitimate Constitutional power to prevent the abuse of power.
The McCain/Palin campaign is what you get when the press abdicates its role as the Fourth Estate, and instead is played like a piccolo by the Republican ministry of propaganda, and covers the race like a reality show. If the GOP ticket were under oath, they'd already be guilty of perjury many times over.
And a McCain/Palin presidency? Just try to imagine it without recourse to the checks and balances our Founders gave us.