McCain just doesn’t care about the truth. He is lost in a fog of his own truthiness. It began with some pretty outrageous stuff–Obama canceled a visit to the troops because reporters with cameras wouldn’t be there, Obama wants to lose the war so he can win the election, and so forth. He lied about himself–that he doesn’t know how many houses he has, that he is reluctant to talk about his war record, that he’s a reformer, he’s not surrounded by lobbyists, he will bring change from the Bush campaign, etc.

And now, he has a whole new half of the ticket to lie about, and the lies come more smoothly and quickly, as if he has stopped trying to make the lies sound plausible in the light of any fact-checking, as if he can change any detail he wants to make it sound good. Palin was thoroughly vetted. Palin was against the “bridge to nowhere.” Palin fought against pork. Palin has executive experience because she lived in proximity to Russia. Palin is the best qualified person in the Republican Party to step up and be president should McCain pass away.

Now he seems to be starting a Two For One sale. He said:

You know what I enjoyed the most? She took the luxury jet that was acquired by her predecessor, and sold it on eBay — and made a profit!

Except that she didn’t sell it on eBay, and she sold it for a loss. Now, maybe somebody told him that story and he just bought it fully, showing him to be irresponsibly gullible and irresponsible with the facts. But frankly, I think that at this point, he’s just making things up. I think that he has gotten away with blatant lies so often, for so long, that he thinks he can just let them flow like a river and nobody in the media will call him on it.

After all, Gore, at most, lied about a few small things, like how many times he’d visited the scenes of forest fires and with whom–the kind of thing that is far more easily seen as a slip or something in the blur of PR appearances–and got branded a serial liar, a label which the media gleefully adopted. McCain has been lying outright for quite some time, and even now, with the eBay story, you get headlines like “The eBay Myth,” or “McCain version of Palin’s eBay story goes a bit far.” Myth? Goes a bit far? McCain was lying.

Gore told the truth when he said he took the initiative in creating the Internet and is still called a liar for that to this day; McCain makes crap up out of thin air and says the most preposterous untruths, and he “goes a bit far” in his “mythmaking”? As John Kerry said, you gotta be kidding me.

Just one more thing, not fully related. How can the Republicans all cheer when their candidates so snidely insult the act of community service, when half the people in the arena are waving “service” signs, and when the theme of the entire campaign is “country first”? As if being mayor of a small town, firing people because of personal vendettas, and running up a huge debt is far more noble and selfless than helping build housing for the poor and the needy? “Country First,” my ass. These people simply have no morals when it comes to winning elections, none at all.