Tapped has a great piece on the late days of the Dole campaign, and how nasty it got. Tim Fernholz quotes a Michael Lewis line from a New Republic article that precisely nails one thing that bugs me so much about the McCain campaign (and Republican politics more generally):

"...from the beginning the Dole people have preferred to insult your intelligence than to craft more plausible lies."

Instantly my mind jumped to Tucker Bounds, our own domestic Baghdad Bob, and I realized this line perfectly described McCain's entire operation.

It is a strategy that worked for a very long time, too, we must admit. The campaigns (Dole, Bush x2, McCain) knew they were lying, the press knew they were lying, but the reporting somehow overlooked the obvious fact that the reporters' intelligence, and thus the intelligence of the American people, was being insulted.

Somehow, though -- perhaps through the magic of Sarah Palin's truly monumental anti-intellectualism -- the press has finally gotten fed up, on the whole. And without the Potemkin pundits toeing the line, McCain and Palin suddenly look like the liars they have been all along.

Naturally, there are plenty of Democratic politicians who have drawn from the same toolkit, but at least the better ones, even if they were simplifying, usually don't do it in a way that insulted everyone's intelligence. And one of Obama's great virtues has been his ability to sound human and serious when presenting material that is simplified -- because he obviously recognizes real complexity.

Republicans (and radical reactionaries more generally) don't like complexity, but when you mix that with hatred of thinking, perhaps it simply becomes too obviously self-destructive for most of the media -- (intelligent, well-educated, articulate, engaged) -- to go along.

High time too!