Lies, damn lies and John McCain

The Hill
By Mark Mellman
Posted: 09/16/08

While he appears to have been a wanton and callow youth, John McCain tells us he discovered honor in a North Vietnamese prison camp. McCain has either forgotten what honor means, or sacrificed it on the altar of ambition.

Truth is integral to honor, and the definition cannot be stretched to include lying to the public. Yet that is exactly what John McCain is doing.

Everyone from editorial boards to Factcheck.org has assailed him for it, yet he persists. Newspapers and foundations are not the sole repositories of wisdom or decency in our society, and are themselves sometimes just plain wrong. However, when every objective observer agrees that McCain has shown a callous, blatant and reckless disregard for the truth, there ought to be a consequence. At the very least, John McCain has forfeited the right to tell himself he lives by a code of honor.

I’m not naive. I know this is a tough business where we thrive on transforming vague ambiguities into absolute certainties. In one of my first races, I advised attacking our opponent for voting to cut Social Security. He called it a lie, saying each time an amendment was offered to protect benefits, he supported it. We countered that unlike others, he voted for a budget that cut Social Security.

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