As of right now, the McCain campaign is nothing more than a firehose of lies. Period.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and countless others from both parties have spoken highly of John McCain, praising his honor and dignity.  I’ll take it on faith that McCain may have once possessed those qualities… but not anymore.  There is not a shred of honor in how the McCain campaign is being conducted.  He may have handed off the reins to subordinates, but it’s his name on the door.  His staff and his campaign are his responsibility.

John McCain is a corrupt, unprincipled, ethically bankrupt old man.  His personal judgment is abominably bad.  And he is a liar.

Conveniently for me, South Carolina’s The State has stated in their endorsement of Barack Obama the exact reason that I support him:

due credit: Andrew Sullivan

On positions from Iraq to health care, the policy differences between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama are minute… The one most significant difference between them can be found in how they would approach the presidency – and how the nation might respond.

…[We] have a good idea what a Clinton presidency would look like. The restoration of the Clintons to the White House would trigger a new wave of all-out political warfare. That is not all Bill and Hillary’s fault – but it exists, whomever you blame, and cannot be ignored. Hillary Clinton doesn’t pretend that it won’t happen; she simply vows to persevere, in the hope that her side can win. Indeed, the Clintons’ joint career in public life seems oriented toward securing victory and personal vindication.

Sen. Obama’s campaign is an argument for a more unifying style of leadership. In a time of great partisanship, he is careful to talk about winning over independents and even Republicans. He is harsh on the failures of the current administration – and most of that critique well-deserved. But he doesn’t use his considerable rhetorical gifts to demonize Republicans. He’s not neglecting his core values; he defends his progressive vision with vigorous integrity. But for him, American unity – transcending party – is a core value in itself.

…Despite America’s bitter partisan divide, all sides should agree on this: In such an environment, little gets done. Congress has been largely useless under both Republican and Democratic leadership. Setting aside the ideological conflict for conflict’s sake to get anything worthwhile done has fallen severely out of fashion.

And America certainly has things to get done.

About a year ago I wrote that punditry was dead. It seemed pretty final at the time, and it was. Punditry is still dead – in fact, it’s getting deader all the time.

How dead? I don’t mean to set off a panic, but I feel duty-bound to report that punditry have made a terrifying transition. No longer is it merely dead, it is more than that: Punditry is undead. Hollow-headed pundits roam our airwaves even now preying upon the uninformed, the ignorant, and the credulous. These unsuspecting targets are guilty of nothing more than having lost track of the remote, and for this they are damned to a netherworld of petty, bloviating irrelevance.

The problem with having an insatiable thirst for ignorance is that you are what you eat. It’s one thing to be a little out of touch… but to still somehow be unaware that there are a lot of random nutjubs and lowlifes on the internet? That level of inattention is just plain freaky. To say that it’s inhuman doesn’t cover it – I mean, even my dog knows about internet trolls.

Compounding the indignity of getting served by Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman, our Faux News friend was subsequently undercut by his own legions. AMERICAblog’s John Aravosis pointed out comment threads on Mr. OhReally’s own blog that contained hateful rantings and death threats against Sen. Clinton. Well, knock me over with a feather. The essential detail:

…while O’Reilly holds others responsible for the words strangers leave on their Web sites, on O’Reilly’s Web site, he’s not responsible at all for the hate and threats his readers leave behind… and I quote:

“BillOReilly.com will not be held liable for any user activity on the message boards. We do not actively monitor user-submitted content.”

I’d wager that Bill O’Reilly himself doesn’t even passively monitor user-submitted content. Having demonstrated a knowledge of the internet roughly equivalent to Sen. Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens (R-AK), it’s safe to assume that he scarcely, if ever, has monitored any part of the site that bears his name. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – most famous people hire lackeys to run their web sites. The difference is that most of them are sensible enough to readily admit doing so, and don’t claim to understand much about their sites. In other words, they can afford to pay someone else to be accountable for this part of their public presence, allowing themselves to remain blissfully ignorant.

For the pundit undead (or “pundead”), though, ignorance is not blissful. At least, not in any lasting way Ignorance is the virus that they exist in order to spread. And spread it they do – a quick flip through the TV or AM radio dials shows what a contagious little bastard it is. The good news is that you can defend yourself from the pundead and their orgy of ignorance. In a post (or maybe two) that will appear here at C&B in the next few days, I will provide practical information about how to identify the pundead when you see them, and about how to repel their attempts to ignoramucize you or others. Until then, just try to avoid televised news and AM talk radio.