Lying With Impunity

As the McCain campaign discovered last week, journalists are occasionally willing to point out when one candidate blatantly lies about the other. When McCain accused his opponent of snubbing wounded troops because they wouldn't allow him to bring cameras, many members of the media--who were there and knew better--called him on it.

But that's the exception, not the rule. As Republican campaign managers long ago discovered, there is one area where you can lie with relative impunity, and that's about policy. If you lie about your opponent's policy positions, even egregiously, the media almost never calls you it.

To take an obvious example, in McCain's speech to the Urban League today, he made the following claim:

Sen. Obama and I have fundamental differences on economic policy, and many of them concern tax rates. He supports proposals to raise top marginal rates paid by small business and families, to raise tax rates on those with taxable incomes of more than 32,000 dollars . . ."

McCain makes this claim in virtually all of his speeches and he's run ads making the claim in Virginia and Ohio. And it's, of course, demonstrably false.

It refers to a vote that Obama made on a budget resolution that would have allowed some of Bush's tax cuts to expire. But Obama has made it crystal clear for years now that he only supports raising taxes on those who make more than $250,000 per year. His plan actually includes tax cuts for those in the lower income brackets.

But when you talk policy, particularly when you start using numbers, journalists' eyes just glaze over. You can lie all you want about this stuff and they'll never call you on it.