Richard Cohen’s column in which he goes from lap dog to attack dog, The Ugly McCain, is sweeping through the blogosphere. A snippet:

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains — his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that’s all — but just as honorably. No more, though.

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician’s lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that.

I am reminded of a column from Slate’s Farhad Manjoo last week in which he wondered, Why isn’t Obama stretching the truth more often? Manjoo counted up the lies of McCain and Obama and concluded McCain was a bigger liar than Obama by a margin of 22 to 12. Manjoo’s conclusion?

[I]t wouldn’t be surprising if McCain’s lies worked. In my book True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society, published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call “media fragmentation”—the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio—lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don’t, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it’s clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.

Manjoo wants Obama to beat McCain at his own game:

Obama has inherent, obvious disadvantages in pushing a message in which “little facts don’t really matter.” For one thing, he’s boxed in by his oft-repeated search for a different kind of politics. But given the tenor of the campaign, Obama’s audience might be happy to see him take the low road. […]

The misstatements of 2004 suggest a category of lies that Obama could get away with—ones that the public is already primed to believe about McCain. McCain’s signature policy goal is cutting out earmarks. But as the Washington Monthly‘s Steve Benen points out, in promising to veto all earmarks, McCain has inadvertently called for cutting some popular programs—including all U.S. assistance to Israel, which is technically provided through a kind of earmark. Of course McCain doesn’t really want to stop giving aid to Israel; an ad that suggested McCain’s cost-cutting zeal would lead to abandoning Israel would be as dishonest as McCain’s sex-ed ad. But it might also be effective, reinforcing the idea that McCain wants to cut too much.

Or what about that 100-years war? Picture an Obama ad showing McCain saying that the war in Iraq will last 100—or even 1,000!—years. The ad patches in footage of McCain singing “bomb Iran” and describing all the devastating effects of war. Actually, that ad exists—a comedy group posted it on YouTube in February. Nearly 2 million people have watched it. It’s hilarious, effective, and a complete lie. Obama’s advisers should be pushing him to approve that message.

I have long understood that our facility to believe whatever we want to believe is fostered and supported by the new media technologies at our disposal. I’m not at all sure I agree with Manjoo’s prescription for righting what ails us.