Has the Republican campaign stuck strictly to the facts this week? [AFP]

In the time honoured tradition of presidential campaigns, both John McCain and Barack Obama proclaimed early on that their efforts to convince voters to give them the keys to the White House would be all about real, nitty-gritty issues, like the economy, the wars the US is fighting, and how to remedy the failed healthcare system.

And, in an equally time-honoured tradition, both campaigns have tossed the issues aside to get into truly idiotic political territory, all about pigs, lipstick, and Rubiks cubes.

First came the McCain camp's feigned high indignation over Obama's comment that saying the McCain economic plan was new was like "putting lipstick on a pig."

McCain operatives immediately screamed that Obama had made a nasty, sexist insult directed at Sarah Palin, because Palin joked in her Republican convention speech that the difference between 'hockey moms' like herself and pitbulls (not a bull, actually, but a kind of nasty attack dog) was 'lipstick'.

In focus

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They closely analysed whether Obama meant that Palin herself was the 'pig' in the context of the remark, or whether he meant (as he obviously did) that the 'pig' in question was McCain’s economic plan.

But wait, maybe Palin is actually the lipstick and McCain is the pig?

Obama appeared on a popular late night talk show, and the host asked him if he had every actually tried to put lipstick on a pig.

He said "that would be a no."

On National Public Radio, the host called up a farmer in Iowa and tried to get him to apply actual lipstick to an actual, squealing pig, out in the barnyard.

This experiment ended badly for all concerned.

Out of touch?

Now, after weeks of attacks from McCain, Obama's camp says its ready to strike back 'furiously'.

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.

Sarah Palin seemed confused about why US troops were in Iraq [Reuters]

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.