Michael Kinsley (yes, him again!) writes at PostPartisan, a group blog for The Washington Post's opinion writers. "McCain has described his motive for McCain-Feingold as a giant mea culpa for his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. Maybe when this is over, one way or another, McCain will swear off corrupt lying the way he has sworn off corrupt money."

Kinsley later adds:
[N]o one — not the media, not the campaign professionals, not the voters — cares enough about lying. To some extent, they even respect a well-told lie as evidence of professionalism. If a candidate complains too much about an opponent's lies, he or she starts being regarded as a bad sport, a whiner. Stoic silence doesn't work either. People start asking why you don't "fight back." Pretty soon, the victim of the lies starts getting blamed. C'mon: this isn't paddycakes; politics ain't beanball; and so on. This happened to Al Gore in 2000 and to John Kerry in 2004. And it's already starting to happen to Barack Obama this year.

Sure, if he loses, it will be his fault. Sure, he and everybody ought to know that the Republicans play this game for keeps. But that shouldn't let John McCain off the hook. He says he'd rather lose the election than lose the war. But it seems he'd rather lose that honor he's always going on about than lose the election.

Time magazine's Mark Halperin made a similar complaint on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," and Jason Linkins of The Huffington Post provides a partial transcript (and the video). "To spend even a minute on this expression [lipstick on a pig], I think, is amazing and outrageous," Halperin said.

He later added:
The "bridge to nowhere" thing is outrageous. And if you press them on it, they'll fall because they know they can't defend what they're saying. They're staying it on the stump as a core part of their message, it's in their advertising. I'm not saying the press should be out to get John McCain and Sarah Palin. But if a core part of their message is something that every journalist — journalism organization in the country has looked at and says it's demonstrably false, again, we're not doing our jobs if we just treat this as one of many things that's happening.


NYT Opinionator