Slow learners

American voters are that special needs kid in elementary school who keeps making the same mistake over and over again. The kid is sweet but easily manipulated by the class bully to do what the bully wants done. The bully doesn't spend any time actually helping the special needs kid. He uses people.

Of course, the Republicans are the bully. But the special needs American electorate never learns that practically everything the Republican say is either an out and out lie or bullshit puffery.

This story alone should be enough to swing the election to any yellow dog. Imagine the controversy if Hillary Clinton had fibbed about being under fire in Bosnia. Or just remember. American swing voters are incapable of this. They would think that I know all I need to know about England; after all, I changed planes at Heathrow once.

It's not that foreign travel is essential. It's that they are puffing up refueling stops into visits and next door visits to a trip into Iraq.

The Obama campaign -- which has increasingly accused the McCain campaign of deliberately lying in ads and on the stump -- was quick to highlight that story, along with a news report that explored whether the McCain campaign has been sending out wildly inflated crowd estimates.

The McCain team has twice pointed to law enforcement as the source for those estimates -- but the same officials denied to Bloomberg News that they had provided the numbers cited by the Republican nominee's campaign.

"The McCain campaign said Gov. Palin opposed the bridge to nowhere, but now we know she supported it," said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor in a statement. "They said she didn't seek earmarks, but now we know she hired a lobbyist to get millions in pork for her town and her state. They said she visited Iraq, but today we learned that she only stopped at the border. Americans are starting to wonder, is there anything the McCain campaign isn't lying about?"

For that slow kid, here it is in a nutshell: You can't believe anything a Republican politician says.