Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has published an unsettling book dissecting what he considers the most serious failing of the Bush presidency: "a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed." Ranging from the invasion of Iraq to the retributive outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, McClellan's revelatory memoir is the most scathing indictment yet from a member of Bush's inner circle. "The top White House officials who knew the truth--including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney--allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie."

The repetition of lies as a Republican strategy is not a surprise, of course. There is a purposefulness with which outright fictions have flowed from the right's propaganda mills. Obama is a Muslim. Hillary is a lesbian. And before McCain kissed and made up with the Rovian cohort, he reportedly fathered a daughter with a black prostitute.

What's more intriguing is why the persistent fraudulence of the Republican machine remains so widely known yet so widely ignored. Bush's obvious corruption has hardly diminished the ongoing power of the expert liars who continue to pump dirt into the drinking water of our democracy. Karl Rove, Richard Viguerie, Ralph Reed and Jesse Helms are all busily at work behind the scenes. We know this and yet the purchase--even among liberals--of Willie Horton-ized, xenophobic images is astonishing. If it's not entirely surprising to see George "macaca" Allen standing behind McCain at every event, it's more disturbing to hear Yale alumna Hillary Clinton deploy the term "elitist" against Barack Obama, in exactly the way Republicans deployed "liberal" as an insult against her.

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