It did so with a new ad showing McCain back in 1982, the year he entered congress, with an announcer saying "things have changed since then - but not McCain."

Pictures of people wearing unattractive early-eighties apparel, speaking on massive cinderblock-sized mobile phones, and fiddling with Rubiks cubes pass by, as the mocking narrator intones: "He admits he doesn’t know how to use a computer! He can't even send an email!"

So much for economy, war, health care and everything else we really ought to be debating. Bring on the pigs! And the lipstick!

It must be said that while there is a comical (or asinine) side to this, there is a more sinister aspect as well.

The McCain campaign is shamelessly spreading what the mainstream media squeamishly refers to as 'mischaracterisations' but which I will call, simply, lies.

One recent McCain ad claims Obama sponsored legislation mandating comprehensive sex education for kindergarten children.

In fact, the Illinois legislation, which Obama voted for but did not sponsor, was intended to teach kindergarten-age children how to fend off sexual predators.

Public 'awareness'

An example of candidate's seemingly being less than truthful on the campaign was also provided by none other than Sarah Palin, who, as she bid farewell to a group of Alaska National Guard soldiers en route to president Bush's disastrous war in Iraq, publicly linked the attacks of September 11th 2001 to Saddam Hussein and the ongoing combat between US troops and armed Iraqi groups.

The notion that the Iraqi government under Saddam was behind the attacks was pushed relentlessly by George Bush and Dick Cheney as they sold the war to the gullible and shell-shocked public back in 2002 and 2003.

But it has long since been discredited and even Bush has had to retract his earlier insinuations.

In Palin's case, however, this may be less about deliberate falsehood than simple confusion.

Palin, who showed in her first US network TV interview that she's probably never heard of the Bush Doctrine by which the US reserves the right to pre-emptively invade countries it thinks might be a threat, might very well be one of the 50 per cent or so of Americans who still believe Saddam was behind 9/11.

Of course, only about two out of five US citizens are able to name the three branches of the US federal government.

And barely one in seven can find Iraq on a world map.

So perhaps its not surprising US presidential politics sound pretty dumb.

We sound pretty dumb, too, for allowing ourselves to be diverted by this idiocy, and not demanding that the mainstream news media outlets quit behaving like giggling seven-year-old's with a short attention span.

'Bridge to nowhere'

Another area where Palin has seemed at the very least confused is her stated opposition to a controversial and expensive federal public works project in Alaska, the so called 'bridge to nowhere.'

In fact she lobbied hard for it until it became a national laughing-stock and it was cancelled.

Then she came out against the bridge but her office kept the money congress had appropriated for it.

Nonetheless Palin keeps on telling the same story as a way of proving that she is a fiscally disciplined cost-cutter, against wasteful spending, just as McCain himself claims to be.

The truth is, Alaska is notorious for grabbing as many federal tax dollars as it can for extravagant and wasteful projects, and Palin has lobbied for funds as a mayor and governor as avidly as the rest of Alaska's politicians.

Here's an excerpt from Palin’s interview with ABC News:

Question: "Governor, this year, requested $3.2 million for researching the genetics of harbour seals, money to study the mating habits of crabs. Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that John McCain is objecting to?"

Palin: Those requests, through our research divisions and fish and game and our wildlife departments and our universities, those research requests did come through that system.

Pigs, pitbull dogs, seals, crabs — what's with all the animals all of a sudden?

Maybe next week we can talk about some human issues.