Desperate times: McCain & Palin to lie bigger, more often

Faced with an increasingly dire campaign situation, the McCain team has clearly made the decision to begin hitting Barack Obama with all they've got left: lies, more lies, and bigger lies.

Addressing supporters in California yesterday, VP candidate Palin repeated the claim that a President Obama would "pal around" with terrorists and -- in an indirect reference to one of a number of deer-in-headlights moments she experienced being interviewed by Katie Couric: Couric had asked her what news periodicals Palin got her facts from and Palin could not name a single newspaper or magazine -- Palin cited an article she claimed to have recently read in the New York Times, saying, according to the LA Times:

"I was reading today a copy of the New York Times. And I was really interested to read in there about Barack Obama's friends from Chicago. Turns out one of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to the New York Times, was a domestic terrorist, that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the United States Capitol.' "

She's referring to William Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago, but who was, almost a half century ago, a founding member of 60s leftist group, the Weather Underground, who sat on some of the same education boards as Obama.

What she doesn't mention is that the New York Times also determined that, though acquainted, the men were never close, and that Obama has repeatedly denounced Ayer's radical past -- which occurred when Obama was a small boy.


Despite John McCain's now empty promises that he would run a clean campaign, observers have long expected that McCain or his supporters would attempt to inflate Obama's acquaintance with Ayers into the kind of character assassination through association practiced by right wing witch hunters since the 30s, when they tried to derail FDR's plan to save the US from the effects of the Great Depression with any insult, exaggeration or outright lie they could think of. It didn't work then. We'll have to see if the same kind of shameful lies will work today.

The exceedingly tenuous connection to Ayers has already received the Big Lie treatment from McCain supporter, Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, the primary force behind the so-called "Swift Boat" attacks against John Kerry that tried to paint the Medal of Honor winner as a coward. Ads backed by Simmons have played in some markets since August.

Will non-partisan fact-checking operations like Factcheck.org have any affect in fighting the blizzard of lies expected in the last month of the campaign from an increasingly desperate John McCain?

Stay tuned...