Teepen: McCain is relying on the GOP tradition of lies to win the presidency

The grit and commitment of John McCain's near martyrdom as a POW in Hanoi 40 years ago were admirable, as have been his occasional apostasies from partisan orthodoxy and his willingness at times to join ad hoc bipartisan efforts to push Congress out of this or that stalemate.

But, as a presidential candidate, McCain has become a liar, a serial liar at that, and not through any inadvertence but quite deliberately.

Barack Obama has had his falls from grace, too, as when he twisted a comment of McCain's to make it seem McCain was up for a hundred years of war in Iraq. Nor was that Obama's sole lapse.

But McCain's lies overwhelm in their number, calculation and cynicism. Lately he has been on a rampage of untruths.

No, Obama does not intend to tax everyone. He would limit any income tax increase to households with incomes of more than $250,000. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center finds that Obama's tax plan would cut taxes for 81 percent of all households, 95 percent of households with kids.

No, as an Illinois state legislator Obama did not push for "comprehensive sex education" for kindergarteners. He supported a proposal for age appropriate sex education — which, for kindergarteners, would have meant only making them aware of the possibility of sex abuse and teaching them means to counter it.

No, Obama did not compare Sarah Palin to a pig. He used an old saw – if you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig — to scoff at McCain's recent reinvention of himself as a candidate of change. McCain has often used the pig quip himself.

No, Obama didn't, sexist-like, "dismiss" Palin as just "good-looking." Obama's running mate Joe Biden used the term but only in amused self-deprecation, as one of several ways the vice-presidential candidates differ from one another.

No, it is not true that Obama "doesn't want to drill offshore." He has supported offshore drilling as part of a comprehensive energy plan that would include conservation, development support for non-fossil fuels and, if safety concerns are satisfied, nuclear energy.

No, Obama wouldn't "force families into a government-run health care system where a bureaucrat would stand between you and your doctor." Obama's plan would create a voluntary public option for the uninsured. Others would keep their current insurance.

The list unfortunately goes on. And — unfortunately again — not surprisingly. This is the third election in a row in which Republican candidates, their campaigns and their surrogates have relied heavily on overweening smears for success.

Bush's first election was greased in important part by the promotion of a long list of supposed boasts by which Al Gore was said to have revealed himself as a compulsive fibber, perhaps even as unstable. Remember? Gore had said he invented the Internet, had claimed he discovered the Love Canal environmental disaster and so on. In fact, every charge was itself a lie or so gross a misrepresentation as to amount to one.

Four years later, John Kerry's challenge to Bush was undermined by a relentless, and cruel, campaign to defame his service with the Navy in the Vietnam war as a fraud and to denigrate, as somehow a miscarriage of military justice, the Purple Hearts and Bronze and Silver Stars the Navy had awarded Kerry.

John McCain has joined his campaign to that tradition.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.