To Tell the Truth

I haven't had any Paul Krugman articles in a while, but today's definitely merits mention, as it brings together the themes of this week in a compelling package.

And what themes are those? McCain and Palin are running a deceptive campaign. A stupidly deceptive campaign. They are the sort of lies their partisan base, weaned on Limbaugh and Coulter, will believe whole heartedly. But for those with the sense to check them out, the truth can come out fairly quickly.

He concludes with these words which are devastatingly accurate.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

He's not wrong.