When you are being tortured, there are two lessons you can learn:
- I'll do my damnedest NEVER to allow this to happen to anyone else; or
- I'll fight my heart out to torture, abuse, and lie. If I had to suffer, everyone else has to as well. I'm so angry, I'll destroy everything I can in my path.
It's clear that John McCain learned lesson 2.
It's not just that McCain is now for torture after once being against it and that he refused to join the Democrats in a bill that would ban torture by the CIA.
It's more than that. John McCain is a vicious, vicious! dirty campaigner. He approved a message with lie after lie after lie. And McCain knew that every word in that ad is a lie.
I guess we shouldn't be surprised. The extremely few specifics in his RNC speech were specifically lies.
Here are the facts:
McCain says he'll do spending cuts, without saying what he'd cut!
Obama has outlined spending cuts, from Iraq to corporate welfare.
McCain says he'll have tax cuts, but they're only for the super-wealthy.
McCain will RAISE taxes on poor people who have employee-sponsored health care (the ones who need tax increases the least).
Obama will LOWER taxes on 95% of households with children and 81% of households overall. He will only raise taxes on households earning more than $250,000 a year and on oil companies.
In sum, McCain will give us INCREASED deficits, above and beyond the massive deficits we have now, but he promises us a balanced budget. Bet he's chuckling to himself about that one.
Obama hasn't promised a balanced budget, but with reduced spending on Iraq and increased taxes on millionaires and oil companies, the budget will come closer to balance.
The Republicans know that they can only win this election if they convince Americans to believe in some mighty whoppers of lies. Let's hope the media doesn't let them get away with it. (That's why they have to attack the media as well, lest their lies be exposed.)