Who then would have guessed George Orwell’s predictions in his novel 1984 might simply have been premature?  One of the novel’s most memorable features was depicting the endless stream of lies the government used to manipulate the people and justify its endless wars.  These distortions were imposed therough a deliberate debasement of language, called Newspeak, such as we are seeing today, where Sarah Palin’s abysmal ignorance is considered a virtue.
The lies of the McCain campaign simply put into electoral politics what has become standing operating procedure for the government and its right wing enablers.  One of my favorite online reporters, Glenn Greenwald, captured this point in a perceptive observation:

Way beyond Fox, this is the same thing that our media generally (and with some important exceptions) has been doing for years, at least — mindlessly repeating and confirming false Government claims. That’s what makes Carlotta Gall’s on-scene actual investigation of the Pentagon’s Afghanistan claims so notable — it’s so unusual. From Jessica Lynch’s heroic Rambo-like firefight to Pat Tillman’s murder by Al Qaeda monsters to pre-war claims of the Iraqi menace to post-war claims of Glorious Progress to current claims of the Grave Russian and Iranian Threats to the concealment and then justification of virtually every act of government radicalism over the last eight years, our media has, by and large, done what Fox News did in the Azizabad case — offer itself up as an uncritical conduit for state propaganda.

and

for the last seven years, virtually every American news program has employed as “independent analysts” people who were part of a formal, coordinated and likely illegal U.S. Government propaganda program run out of the Pentagon, a program which resulted in countless false stories broadcast by these networks to boost Government lies. And even after all of that was revealed and documented on the front page of the NYT, these media outlets — all 3 networks, plus CNN and others — continue to employ the propagandists, and worse, refuse even to tell their viewers about what happened, or even to disclose to their viewers the existence of the story, and then — at best — actually defend it all when forced on their obscure blogs to mention it.

Greenwald is abut as peceptive analyst as there is.  Read him at Salon.
One fascinating aspect of this national disaster is the failure of the arument that privately owned press is sufficient to preserve the media’s watchdog functions in a free society.  It clearly is necessary, but it just as clearly is not sufficient.