Here’s a clue that your chronic mendacity has gotten out of hand: The Washington Post editorial board is calling you on it:

John McCain is a serious man who promised to wage a serious campaign. Win or lose, will he be able to look back on this one with pride? Right now, it’s hard to see how.

One can almost imagine the single tear rolling down Fred Hiatt’s cheek as he penned that sentence. How could McCain do this? How in god’s name could America’s favorite maverick betray his base like this?

But McCain’s thoroughly un-serious campaign isn’t a new development, and it’s hard to see how anyone could say that it’s being managed by a serious person. We found out exactly what kind of campaign McCain intended to run in the general election on August 18, when he responded to allegations that he had “cheated” during a town hall with the following:

“The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” [Nikole Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain] said.

Uh, what? What does being a POW have to do with anything? Considering both the quantity and quality of the sheer chutzpah on display here, outrage seems insufficient. Instead, it seems all you can do is adopt an awed expression and mutter, “Christ, look at the balls on that guy.”

This is the surreal, practically otherworldly, campaign that McCain has decided to run: he makes his war heroism the centerpiece of his convention speech and tries to dismiss completely irrelevant accusations with it, but stands next to his running mate with a straight face while she tells an assembled crowd that he doesn’t like to talk about it.

It’s not that these things are lies. We’ve seen plenty of typical, run-of-the-mill lies from the McCain campaign as well - such as distorting a bill Obama supported intended to warn children about pedophiles to make it sound like it encourages kindergartners to start “inappropriately touching” each other - but more and more, the campaign has come to rely on a special kind of lie. I’m talking about the kind of lie that’s so obviously untrue, and already been so thoroughly debunked, that you have to be kind of amazed at the audacity of anyone who would even think of repeating it.

Let’s run down the list of some of his other greatest hits:

1.) Just look at McCain’s convention speech again, in which he denounced “constant partisan rancor,” the day after Rudy Giuliani and running mate Sarah Palin gave us the most vituperative prime-time partisan rancor since the days of the Roman Senate. They even ripped into, of all things, community organizing. Community organizing! What the fuck? And it’s not like we had to dig for these comments - they were broadcasted on national television the day before McCain’s speech.

2.) Sarah Palin keeps asserting her stump speeches that she said “thanks but no thanks to that bridge to nowhere.” In fact, she ran for governor on a pro-bridge to nowhere platform. We have video!

What’s amazing about this particular lie is that it’s been so thoroughly debunked, in everywhere from USA Today to Hardball. And yet the campaign keeps making the assertion, over and over again. They know they’ve been caught in a lie, and they simply don’t care.

3.) The Washington Post editorial I linked to at the top of this post concerns some remarks Obama made about putting “lipstick on a pig.” If you look at the full context of the quote, it’s fairly obvious that Obama was talking about policy, but the McCain campaign chose to interpret it as a sexist jab against Palin. They immediately put up an ad attacking Obama for the remarks which CBS forced them to take down because it misleadingly quoted one of their anchors.

4.) Similarly, Palin’s being held up as an anti-earmark champion, when … just watch the video.

5.) More fun with Palin’s qualifications: after continually raising questions about Obama’s experience and readiness to lead, the McCain campaign’s justification for making the two-year governor of a miniscule state their running mate was that Palin has foreign policy experience because Alaska is sort of close to Russia.

Which is technically true! But I’m including it anyway, because no critically thinking human being can possibly believe that Palin learned foreign policy through - wait for it - “osmosis.”

As Obama recently said: “They must think you’re stupid.” Why else would they keep saying things that are so obviously untrue? The amount of contempt being shown for the intelligence of the American people here is really amazing.

And that’s one more reason why this election is so important. Whatever happens on November 4, we’re probably not going to be able to blame widespread voter fraud or a Supreme Court decision - the American people are going to make a choice. And if John McCain wins, then what that suggests about us is too horrifying to contemplate. McCain will have gambled that the American people are gullible enough to swallow a huge crock of shit with a grin, and he will have been right.

Photo by Flickr user talkradionews used under a Creative Commons license.