The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Read the whole thing. Particularly this:

And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) visited the Palestinian territories during that time. Daphne, please weigh in.

President George W. Bush, today, Carlisle, Penn., Army War College, magical-thinking tour:

While there’s room for honest and healthy debate about the decisions I’ve made — and there’s plenty of debate — there can be no debate about the results in keeping America safe.

He’s right, just not in the way he means. Hundreds of billions disappeared into the corruption pits of Iraq and Afghanistan, and we have a tottering war in central Asia, an Iraq where the new government forces us to withdraw in a few years and the populace embraces a man who throws his shoes at the president who thinks he’s a liberator. We have a reputation as an outlaw nation that kidnaps people and tortures them, and it’s deserved. We have a reputation as a nation that abrogates unto itself the right to preventively invade nations that displeases us, and it’s deserved.

Bush wants to say that he kept us safe because there hasn’t been another terrorist attack domestically, even if there’ve been thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan and Turkey and Spain and Holland and Britain and Israel and Lebanon and so forth. What a thing to offer as a final judgment! I suppose he’s never heard the Chris Rock routine about boasting over the fact that you paid your child support on time. But even still — we don’t know what al-Qaeda’s operational timetable is. I hope to God Bush has stopped terrorist attacks. But al-Qaeda waited eight long years between the two World Trade Center attacks, and who knows what it did, or didn’t, plan in the U.S. between 2001 and today. If he really did prevent these attacks, let’s see the actual evidence. A man who cries WMD deserves no benefit of any doubt.

I can think of exactly one way Bush’s policies actively strengthened this country’s defenses. The Army and Marines who’ve returned from Iraq and Afghanistan are today more experienced with stability operations and counterinsurgency than at any time in their history. And that’s in large part because of the mistakes he and his secretary of defense made, which left the Army and the Marine Corps to address as best as they possibly could.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)(WDCpix)

For a man who once considered the press his “base,” and the truth a trusted ally, part of a package of integrity and “Straight Talk,” Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, finds himself on unfamiliar terrain these days. Now, on the verge of the apex of his political career, McCain is in the dead center of a whirlwind of honesty issues that he might not have foreseen when he began this campaign.

He is a now man surrounded by a hostile press that questions his truthfulness, running a campaign that even former Bush strategist Karl Rove is calling “one step too far” in its attacks on Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee. McCain, the one-time avatar of transparency and candor, finds himself shadowed by the media –people he now tends to call ” little jerks” — yelling “Liar! Liar! Pants on Fire!”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Of course, McCain still literally rides the Straight Talk Express, both in the air and on the ground. He still belts out the same jokes about lawyers and congressional approval ratings and has deep rhetorical grace when speaking about his experiences in Vietnam and his concern for soldiers in the field. He still stumbles through prepared remarks as if racing to get to the town-hall portion, where he eagerly speaks to admirers.

But the old soldier, who watched his 2000 presidential ambitions felled by dark tactics, ugly rumors and outright falsehoods during the GOP primary campaign in South Carolina, is now orchestrating those same kind of attacks. Instead of being the one standing up to mis-truth, he is mis-truth’s master — using outright lies about his opponent’s record and stands, while exaggerating the strength of his own campaign.

This is not a statement created by the Obama campaign. This is something based, as Marlon Brando’s Jor-El once said in “Superman: The Movie,” in “undeniable fact.” The New York Times, in a news story — not an editorial – chronicled McCain’s misdeeds. First, the GOP campaign twisted Obama’s words regarding lipstick-gate; then it ran an advertisement suggesting Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners as well as complete distortions of his rivals tax, energy and health-care plans.

Both the Washington Post and The Associated Press ran pieces in a similar vein and Bloomberg News questioned — correctly — whether McCain officials had begun over-estimating the crowd size at McCain-Palin events. For god’s sakes, a hapless McCain was taken — quite effectively — to task by the hosts of “The View.”

“I am always reluctant to use the word ‘lie’ — but in this case there is no alternative,” said Dee Dee Myers, the former Clinton White House press secretary who now serves as a commentator on MSNBC. “I think the McCain camp thinks the mainstream media is so discredited in the eyes of the Republican base, that they think any red flag raised will be ignored as something created by the liberal establishment.”

The more pressing question, however, is what should be the proportional level of response?

History doesn’t do Obama any favors here. Certainly he can find little that is instructive in the 2004 election, when the Vietnam career of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who had earned two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star, came into question though the facts said there should have been none. As a relative new player on the stage, Obama cannot appear to whine, though both the age and experience he brings to the Oval Office have been viewed scantly by even some within the Democratic Party.

Should Obama decide to remain above the fray and not answer these continuing attacks, he risks falling into the same dark hole that Michael S. Dukakis did in 1988. He was called a “card-carrying liberal” again and again and again, which in Ronald Reagan’s America was a label only slightly less sinister than Communist smuggling atomic weapon plans to Fidel Castro in exchange for cigars.

Only a few weeks ago, on a warm night in Denver, Obama stood before the world and declared he would not be a punching bag for the Republican Party. The question now is “How?”

“One of the problems we had is that we simply didn’t have the money to go after the Swift Boaters and for the general election,” said Robert Shrum, the Democratic political adviser who served as the campaign manager for the Kerry effort in 2004. “That’s a problem the Obama campaign simply doesn’t have.

“The fundamental challenge of the Obama campaign is to get this back to the issues,” Shrum said. “More than simply pushing back, he has to get it back to what was for at months was the center of the campaign — change, the economy, the war in Iraq. The only change McCain offers is in subject matter, not in substance.”

Gerald Rafshoon, President Jimmy Carter’s communications director, has also dealt with his share of political attacks.

“You have to respond to it and you have to knock it down,” Rafshoon said. “You can’t let his message dictate your message. He does this by coming tight back at them, as fast as he can. He does it with surrogates and he does it with advertisements and you hope it will boomerang negatively for McCain.”

Complicating matters is the way that many in this country feel about news outlets. McCain has not actually talked to the reporters spending thousands of dollars to travel with him since before mid-August. Palin herself has sat for two interviews, one with ABC and the other with Fox News, and has remained at arms-length from anyone else seeking to speak with her. Moreover, as Myers pointed out, news outlets have become the virtual bogeymen in the eyes of the GOP’s conservative base.

This makes fighting a proxy war through the press nearly futile. We — and I include TWI here — are caught in the cross-hairs of the culture wars that still burn with fury in America. We are mistrusted by both left and right.

On one hand, is the image of a scoop-driven machine gone mad, going to any lengths to humiliate conservatives, overstepping our bounds — as many would argue Dan Rather did in 2004, while investigating President George W. Bush’s time in the Air Force National Guard. To the left, we are the weak lackeys who showed no vigilance in reporting the evidence that the Bush administration used to take us to war in Iraq.

Thus, if this McCain no longer cares about the press, or, for that matter, the truth, the key could be to use these well-documented fabrications to attack something he does care for: his moral code.

“He’s based his whole campaign around ‘Putting Country First’,” Myers said. “These attacks have begun to erode at something much more important. It’s eating away at the foundation of his campaign. McCain’s not a policy guy. He’s an honor guy.

“Obama, when talking about these attacks on the stump, should use the word ‘honor.’ Use the word ‘honor’ and McCain’s head blows up. On some level he McCain knows what he’s doing. He’s going to a very dangerous place with all of this

“To question his honor, the very thing he thinks about in the dark of the night is the one thing that would work,” Myers continued. “I think for Obama to do it in person, during the debates, would be pretty powerful. You know, it would get McCain really mad, and it would have to force him to answer for his deeds. No one likes negative ads — with the exception of Paul Begala — but Obama has to show he can throw a punch. We’ve seen that he can take a punch. Now we have to see more.”

Obama’s true plans for dealing with these lies will certainly unfold quickly, for Nov. 4 is ever closer.

McCain’s ads and actions have not only damaged his reputation as a maverick and besmirched his honor, they hold greater consequences for the American people. The philosopher Sissela Bok wrote in her landmark book, “Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life,” about the consequences one faces when lying becomes part of the norm. Bok explores consequences not only for an individual, but assesses the damage on a wider level.

“I don’t think people understand how much it damages them,” Bok said on the telephone from her home in Cambridge, “maybe not in the short run. In the short run, the cost of integrity, for instance, it might not seem to matter. But they have to understand that when they lie simply to win an election, they must be prepared to sacrifice their self-respect.

“Moreover, they’re doing harm to society,” Bok said, “Once people have the notion that people in public service are all dishonest, the whole profession of public service, or journalism, is damaged. Everyone is seen as dishonest — when we know there are good, honest people who choose to serve in public duty, in public life.”

Now, McCain must ask himself the cost of such lies. Has he come all this way, run this strong campaign, to win in this way? This is something only he can answer — and something he must ultimately answer for.

While the assertion was newsworthy, since it fits into a pattern of deception by the campaign, it would seem less important — politically and journalistically — than news about the candidates’ responses to the financial crisis.

Yet the story climbed to the top of the Web by Tuesday afternoon, according to the political news aggregator Memorandum, with liberal bloggers suppyling plenty of bandwith. Within hours, in fact, a new site launched, JohnMcCainInventedTheBlackBerry.com.

A Facebook group has also sprung up to mock McCain’s contribution to modern technology. “Thank You John McCain for inventing the BlackBerry!,” hollers the group, which was founded by Bill Fuhry, a Democratic statagist, and includes prominent bloggers like Duncan Black of Eschaton.

Berry-gate ruled political news on Tuesday.

The McCain campaign swiftly backed away from the BlackBerry gaffe, and if this were one stray inaccuracy, people might let it go as a dumb comment or joke. But McCain’s aides have announced that they don’t care about the issues or corrections from the press. In addition, they have demonstrated a contempt for honest debate by repeating falsehoods on the campaign trail, in speeches, ads and surrogate appearances. Writing for NYTimes.com today, the Democratic speechwriter Michael Cohen argues that this approach is unusual — and dangerous:

Politicians generally go to great lengths to avoid being seen as acting dishonestly, because the consequences are usually so great…. During the last week, the McCain campaign has unabashedly engaged in the active spreading of mistruths and falsehoods.

Then Cohen fact-checks the recent lies. You can skip over this summary if you know the drill:

It said that Barack Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for children in kindergarten (“dishonest” and “deceptive” said The Washington Post); that Obama used the colloquial expression “lipstick on a pig” to describe Sarah Palin (GOP Senator Orrin Hatch labeled the charge “ridiculous”); that Palin never accepted earmarks as governor of Alaska; (this is patently false, she actually requested $450 million in earmarks as governor); that Obama will raise taxes on middle-class families (his plan would give a tax cut to 80 percent of Americans); that his health care plan will force families into a government-run health-care plan; (a public health expert quoted in this paper called that “inaccurate and false”); that Palin told Congress “thanks, but no thanks” on the Bridge to Nowhere (she initially supported the bridge and kept the congressional funds earmarked for the project)….

Here’s the kicker:

Even after the press debunked each of these lies, the McCain campaign has refused to concede the truth. Though news outlets have consistently shown that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s claim about the “Bridge to Nowhere” is not true, she continues to repeat it to the point where MSNBC’s “Hardball” began to keep a running tally of how often Ms. Palin made the same false assertion on the campaign trail. According to Brian Rogers, a McCain spokesman, “we’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

McCain has not earned the benefit of the doubt for his aide’s BlackBerry assertion. Add it to the list of falsehoods that McCain must personally answer for.

Holtz-Eakin: McCain helped create BlackBerry

Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the commerce committee so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.” Al Gore, call your office.

The Obama campaign sent around the article on Tuesday morning with a terse response: “um, what?”

Within the hour, chief spokesperson Bill Burton released a statement putting the falsehood in context: “If John McCain hadn’t said that ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ on the day of one of our nation’s worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week.”

Now let’s briefly correct this latest McCain campaign whopper.  McCain did not “help create” the “miracle” of the BlackBerry — he does not even know how to use email or a computer.  The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee was not even pivotal: the BlackBerry was invented by a Canadian company, Research In Motion.

So this claim is false and absurd, obviously, and it may seem like a distraction from the current debate over the candidates’ economic agendas.

Reporters have a reason to press McCain on his campaign’s latest falsehood, however, because voters have a right to know how often his campaign distorts and lies — on issues large and small — and how often McCain stands by his operatives’ lies (taxes) or abandons them under pressure (like the lipstick ploy).

It seems like the only time McCain is a “maverick” nowadays is when it comes to his relationship with the truth.

Anyway, in a segment on Friday, a caller raised big questions about how Republicans can possibly seize the change mantle, if that means they’d have to clean up their own mess; while another suggested that the public is partly complicit in supporting a failing press.

Below are excerpts for interested readers:

Michael (Carmel Valley): Thank you, Peter. Hello, Ari. I just wanna make a couple quick comments about the Palin-McCain ticket, which I think, in some ways that’s what it’s become….one of the most important comments made during this campaign has gone almost under the radar, and it happens to be Jon Stewart interviewing Mike Huckabee—do you remember this one, where he [suggested] to Mike Huckabee that his position is basically, quote, “Our party is the only party that can clean up the mess made by our party.” And I think that’s the sort of thing we have got to get our arms around.

Ari: I think Michael’s right. I think that is the narrative that the Republicans settled on. But we should be careful here, in this sort of season of discontent, to understand that just as Democrats dislike it when politicians in the party move to the right — out of the perception that they can get votes that way, right or wrong — that worries the left.

Well, there is something positive for Barack Obama here, that after months of “Experience,” [and] “Ready to Lead” and “Country First” from the McCain campaign, they have settled here, in their final hours, on his message of “Change.” Now it’s working — that they’re co-opting part of it — and that Sarah Palin brought, as The New York Times put it, the “stamp of history to the ticket.” That’s not an insignificant thing — apart from ideology and apart from the lies we were discussing earlier.

But it also represents Democrats, for once, defining what is politically palpable and nationally desirable, and the trick for Obama is not to let it be co-opted. But they’re running on change because Obama made change universally desired in this electorate. That is something worth remembering…. they [now] value change over experience in their own politicking.

Pat (Humboldt): Hi Peter B. and Ari. The media will keep lying to us as long as we keep paying them to lie to us. As long as we subscribe to cable, as long as we subscribe to newspapers, they will keep lying to us…

Peter: Well, they’re trying to distract their way to the finish line, and some of it is working, right, Ari?

Ari: Yeah, I think distracting works. I think you’re right that there’s a market here, and if you can get away with it, it’s supported. There are changes–I was on Rachel Maddow’s radio show tonight before this. I think she’s great and I think she’s doing well with a marketable, successful show on television now. And then obviously, I’ll say it out of self-interest but not with any ambivalence, the places that I write for—The Nation, reader-supported since 1865 and not corporate; The Washington Independent, a different model but a non-profit, which allows us to do different things than corporate media. And you can go to those sites and support them any way you can. We appreciate it—it helps.

Alas, ‘The View’ has already aired in much of the country, but as I write this, I have yet to see Sen. John McCain’s appearance. However, thanks to the magic of the Internets, I can have a taste of what appears to be a contentious dialogue between the Arizona senator and the women who host the show. The Page posted this clip, in which Joy Behar and Barbara Walters call McCain out on the well-documented lies in some of his campaign ads. Unfortunately, I can’t embed the clip into this post, but I encourage you to watch it.

For his part, McCain stands by the ads, saying “they are not lies” and falls back on his justification for them because “this is a tough campaign.”

So, to those who say that McCain is “too honorable” to have approved these ads, I guess we know the truth, from the horse’s mouth.