One of the things that makes close observers of politics so jaded and cynical is the fact that at one time or another, to one degree or another, every politician will lie.

Now everyone tells little white lies all the time. Some evolutionary biologists theorize that our ability to lie (usually to spare another’s feelings regarding their self image or self worth) assisted hominids in forming tight knit groups and therefore improved their survivability. Such behavior has been seen among chimpanzees – but in a more “political” way. A less dominant male who has mated with a female will seek to hide that fact from the Alpha male (as will the female). This is lying done to prevent a bad outcome – something with which any American politician is very familiar.

Most political lies are transparent. It’s almost as if a game is being played with the voter. The politician is saying “I am lying. You know I am lying. I know that you know I am lying. But let’s keep the fiction going because it sounds good anyway.” This kind of lying is common whenever a politician tries to convince us of their superior motives for supporting or voting on a particular bill. They are doing it “for the children” or “for seniors” or for some other selfless reason.

Just once I’d like to hear a politician get up and say “I am supporting this bill because the National Association of Widget Manufacturers donated $100,000 to my campaign and besides, it’s popular in my district and voting for it will make me a shoo in for re-election.”

It seems that the higher a politician rises, the bigger the lies. Take Barrack Obama, for example. Today’s headlines feature a real whoppers told by Obama over a not inconsequential matter. The only people who seem surprised at this turn of events are partisans on both sides who profess to be shocked – shocked I tell you – that politicians would lie about a position they took on a hot button issue or about an incident that they say has defined their character and informed their faith in God.

In Obama’s case, the lie is as bald faced as a politician can get. This is true of most Obama lies so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Rarely in recent political history has a candidate for president so consistently and shamelessly – so easily – lied about past positions he has taken on a myriad of issues. There have been occasions where he has lied about changing a position he held as recently as 24 hours previously.

Like any good liar, when challenged on the lie, the Obama camp bristles at the suggestion that the messiah could ever utter an untruth. The more blatant the lie, the louder the denunciation of those who have caught him in the fib. Only after a few days have passed and the hubbub dies down will some surrogate or campaign aide like David Axelrod go on TV and admit the truth. Since the lie is no longer a story, the “clarification” rarely receives any play.

There is nothing new in this. Obama is not the first candidate to try and obscure problematic positions on the issues. Nor is John McCain guiltless in trying to hide some of his more contrary stances on policy matters that would get him into trouble with one group or another. In Obama’s case, however, it is the naked cynicism of his lurch toward the center on many issues while claiming that his position has always been the same that causes many to roll their eyes and look in askance at the man’s integrity.

And in Obama’s case, it is not just lies told to cover up his liberal/radical views on policy. His blatant fibbing about his personal relationships with everyone from Rev. Wright, to William Ayers, to Tony Rezko have been shockingly direct, challenging the media to call him out for his lack of candor and outright lies told about his associates.

No one believes Obama when he says he never heard Wright utter his poison while sitting in church. No one believes Obama when he says that Ayers was “just a neighbor” rather than someone he had known for at least 15 years and worked with on a charitable board among other connections. And his characterization of Rezko as just one of thousands of donors to his campaign beggars belief when you consider that the now convicted political fixer is the man largely responsible for putting Barack Obama where he is now.

All of this plays as background to Obama’s latest problem with the truth; his position on the so-called “Born Alive” bill. He voted against the measure while serving in the Illinois senate -a bill that contained the exact same language as the federal legislation passed a few years ago.

Obama swore he opposed the bill because he said it “weakened Roe v. Wade” but he supported the basic idea of trying to save any baby born alive even if the result of an abortion procedure.

Now we learn that in fact, Obama’s explanation was less than candid. Here is what he told CBN interviewer David Brody after the Saddleback debate:

I have said repeatedly that I would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported – which was to say – that you should provide assistance to any infant that was born – even if it was as a consequence of an induced abortion.

That was not the bill that was presented at the state level. What that bill also was doing was trying to undermine Roe vs. Wade. By the way, we also had a bill, a law already in place in IL that insured life saving treatment was given to infants.

Obama’s strong denunciation of those who he claims were lying about his radical position on abortion was as tough as any that the campaign has given to critics who have caught him in previous lies:

So for people to suggest that I and the IL Medical Society, so IL doctors were somehow in favor of withholding life saving support from an infant born alive is ridiculous. It defies common sense and it defies imagination and for people to keep on pushing this is offensive and it’s an example of the kind of politics that we have to get beyond.

It’s one thing for people to disagree with me about the issue of choice, it’s another thing for people to out and out misrepresent my positions repeatedly, even after they know that they’re wrong. And that’s what’s been happening.

Who was doing the “misrepresenting?” The New York Post reports on a statement released by the campaign that lets loose with one whopper to hide another:

Indeed, Mr. Obama appeared to misstate his position in the CBN interview on Saturday when he said the federal version he supported “was not the bill that was presented at the state level.”

His campaign yesterday acknowledged that he had voted against an identical bill in the state Senate, and a spokesman, Hari Sevugan, said the senator and other lawmakers had concerns that even as worded, the legislation could have undermined existing Illinois abortion law. Those concerns did not exist for the federal bill, because there is no federal abortion law.

There was nothing in the bill that would have undermined anything except Obama’s good standing with NOW and NARAL who opposed this bill and others like it not because it “undermined” abortion rights but because it would cause some physicians to think twice about performing a late term abortion. Obama, representing what is arguably the most liberal district in the state of Illinois, could hardly have supported anything that was opposed so strenuously by the leading liberal lights of the feminist movement.

So after saying for weeks that no, this was not the same bill passed at the federal level and that he opposed it because it would “undermine” abortion rights, the Obama camp was forced to admit to the lie while still trying to maintain the fiction that it would have kept women from getting an abortion – and by the way, it was unnecessary because Illinois already had laws protecting infants born alive. This too is a lie because Illinois has no such specific law and no prosecutor would ever take a doctor to trial for allowing a baby to die who, once removed from the womb during an abortion procedure, breathed on its own.

There is nothing wrong with a liberal politician pandering to special interest groups like NOW and NARAL. But trying to obscure that fact with a lie and then blasting those who have discovered your fib by, in turn, calling them liars is just one more example of Obama’s monumental problems with telling the truth about anything he stands for – something that could potentially cost him the election if the Republicans are effective at making that case.

Not to be outdone by the right, lefties have attacked John McCain over a story he has told many times about a guard during his captivity who helped inform his faith.

It is a touching story – whether it is true or not. One of the guards was less cruel to him than the others and even showed mercy by coming into his cell one night and loosening the ropes that bound him so tightly:

In the months that followed, I occasionally saw my Good Samaritan when I was moved from one part of the prison to another. He never allowed himself a glance in my direction, much less spoke to me, until one Christmas morning, when I was briefly allowed out of my cell to stand alone in the outdoors and look up at the clear, blue sky. As I was looking at the heavens, I became aware of him as he walked near me and then, for a moment, stood very close to me. He did not speak or smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground in front of us, and then, very casually, he used his foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood looking at his work for a minute until he rubbed it out and walked away.

McCain claims that the experience helped him “to form my lasting appreciation for my own religious faith, and it took the faith of an enemy to reveal it to me.” But is it true? This Kossak believes not:

The version that he gives in his book “Character is Destiny,” is different than the dramatization from a primary campaign commercial he released in 2007, where the guard uses a stick to draw a cross.

We’ll get back to these different versions in a moment.

But, people are now questioning the truth of this entire story.

Why?

Because Alexander Solzhenitsyn had a very similar experience:

Indeed, Solzhenitsyn relates an eerily similar story:

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly, he lifted his eyes and saw a skinny, old prisoner squat down next to him. The man said nothing. Instead, he drew a stick through the ground at Solzhenitsyn’s feet, tracing the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.

As Solzhenitsyn stared at the sign of the Cross, his entire perspective changed. He knew that he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet in that moment, he knew that there was something greater than the evil that he saw in the prison, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that the hope of all mankind was represented in that simple Cross. And through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.

Has this kind of thing never happened in the history of the world? Tom McGuire points out the obvious:

Uh huh. Because the sign of the cross is a pretty well-kept secret, so how could prison guards invoke it twice in one century? FWIW, the story appears in McCain’s 1999 “Faith Of My Fathers”, although I have no idea whether McCain told it earlier. Lexis mavens?

The Kossacks are on this search for the truth, so we know it will be kept classy.

Actually, the Solzhenitsyn story had another prisoner drawing the cross rather than a guard so that would be one extremely significant difference there. But McCain is a huge Solzhenitsyn fan and it would not be beyond imagining he would steal it and use it in his own narrative that reveals his religiosity.

Hilzoy sensibly warns us to look before leaping on this story:

I mention this because I think people should be very wary of leaping to conclusions about what it means that John McCain’s story of a guard who scraped a cross in the dirt on Christmas is (reportedly) similar to an anecdote from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. It’s not a gesture so unusual that it could not have happened twice. Christianity is not unknown in Vietnam. To my mind, it means next to nothing that the details varied slightly from one version to the next: that happens all the time in normal life, especially forty years after the fact. The only odd thing is that McCain didn’t mention it in his first account of his captivity, which is quite detailed, and does bring up religion. But there are a whole lot of reasons why he might have omitted it other than its not being true.

The point being, we should look in askance at anything these two guys are telling us because as politicians, they were born to lie. And while some may see this attitude as cynical, the fact is it saves a lot of time and heartache if you pronounce a politician guilty of lying until he proves his innocence. And despite the fact that there are many politicians with a rough kind of integrity, they all lie about one thing or another. And separating the lies from the truth becomes harder the higher up they go.