By now the magnitude and frequency of lying by the McCain/Palin campaign has been fully established. It has been called out by the blogosphere and nearly every major mainstream media outlet, from the New York Times to the Washington Post to CNN. Here's why waiting for a guilty course correction by an overreaching campaign is beside the point. The blatant falsehoods are key to the Steve Schmidt and Karl Rove strategy to sideline the drive-by MSM in public discourse, simply removing what a McCain spokesman calls "the media filter" from the GOP's PR channels.
The Bush administration has been working toward this end for years, telling bigger and more transparent untruths while daring the press to cover them as lies. Anyone who thinks that Bush and Cheney are merely "stubborn" for repeatedly linking Iraq and 9/11 is not paying attention. Imagine an alleged democracy in which there was no Fourth Estate, no scientific viewpoint, no independent watchdog groups -- no extra-governmental authority with enough status and leverage to bust the ruling party for anything. Wars, lies, another depression -- the people in power could just do what they want to do and never be voted out, because few voters will know enough to believe anything but what official sources tell them, cheered on by a chorus of partisan shills, attack dogs, and campaign managers on sabbatical.
This is Karl Rove's America, and we are more than halfway there, isolated by embarrassingly inept and corrupt leaders at what was supposed to be the dawn of the digital post-nationalist age. Already the press and oversight role of Congress have been so thoroughly discredited and slimed in the minds of a near-majority of American voters that many can't tell the difference between the New York Times and the Daily Kos: it's all "the liberal media," hemming and hawing to no effect. At the same time, the cynical theatrics around evolution and global warming have marginalized science as just another special-interest group pushing a partisan agenda. As McCain made clear on The View, he is willing to pound the final nails into the Supreme Court as payback for the election. Anyone who knows enough to know better is clearly biased.
With Rove chiding the McCain campaign on Fox for going "beyond the 100% truth test" providing the signature bit of spectacle, the "Palin and McCain administration" is intent on winning this election over the dead bodies of the tut-tutting op-ed writers and skeptical anchorpeople. If the GOP can sell four more years of Republican administration on Sarah Palin's hockey-mom charisma, racist whispers, and cheerfully delivered zingers during an economic collapse, they will have attained a kind of power no government in the history of this country has had: the power of zero oversight.
That's what's at stake in this election.