Prometheus 6

He has forced the major media (except Fox News, of course) to confront the truth.

All campaigns fall short, but some fall far shorter than others. And it is a phony evenhandedness, comfortable for journalists but ultimately misleading, that equates these failures without measuring the grossness of their deviation from the standard of decency.

In the 2008 race, and especially in the past few weeks, the imbalance has become unnervingly stark. Ideological differences aside, John McCain's campaign has been more dishonest, more unfair, more -- to use a word that resonates with McCain -- dishonorable than Barack Obama's.

This phony evenhandedness has been the hallmark of American media for as long as I can remember. Of course they would apply it to politics. Republicans knew this and spun things accordingly. And there's still some of that in the media mix.

Both candidates are guilty of playing trivial pursuit in a serious season, campaigning from gotcha to gotcha. Obama also has eagerly taken every cheap shot -- McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years [P6: He said he'd be willing to do so, not that he wants to. That's still absurd], doesn't get the economy [P6: Oh come on, you GOTTA give that one up entirely after the last few days], can't count his own houses [P6: He never said McCain can't count his houses, just that he didn't know how many he owned]. Neither candidate is running the honest, confront-the-hard-questions campaign he promised. 

But the McCain campaign has taken it to another level...a level he's been buiding toward for eight years.

No candidate has felt this tension so keenly, or written about it as movingly, as McCain. In his memoir "Worth the Fighting For," McCain describes the sickening sensation of renouncing his views about the Confederate flag to curry favor with South Carolina voters in 2000 -- "reading it as if I were making a hostage statement."

He wrote that his "theatrics" were designed to "telegraph reporters that . . . political imperatives required a little evasiveness on my part. I wanted them to think me still an honest man, who simply had to cut a corner a little here and there so that I could go on to be an honest president."

Whatever McCain used to be, how can an honest person see him as an honest man now?

McCain has presented the major media with a choice: do your job or help install the most dishonest President in the history of the nation directly after the closest competitor for that 'title'. Who, with false evenhandedness, they also helped install.