Maybe it was the rape kits that pushed me over the edge. Ezra Klein explains:

Eight years ago, the Alaskan Legislature had to pass a bill that banned towns from charging rape victims for the kits used to prove the crime and capture the perpetrator. These kits cost between $300 and $1,200 a piece, and are an essential portion of the investigation. There was only one town in the state doing this: Wasilla, where Sarah Palin was mayor. This was the same town that received tens of millions of dollars in pork, and had the money to hire a high-priced lobbying firm to bring in yet more. Shame Ted Stevens couldn’t appropriate some money so rape victims weren’t hit with a $1,000 bill.

The question has come up repeatedly in this campaign season of depressingly typical he-said-she-said news stories — with increasing frequency since John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.

In an ideal world, as Dylan Matthews points out, “When Sarah Palin claimed she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, the AP headline would be ‘Palin Repeats Lie about Infamous Bridge’.”

In the real world, even a Washington Post story that’s ostensibly about campaign lies has to resort to wishy-washy phrasing:

Palin and John McCain, the GOP presidential nominee, have been more aggressive in recent days in repeating what their opponents say are outright lies. Almost every day, for instance, McCain says rival Barack Obama would raise everyone’s taxes, even though the Democrat’s tax plan exempts families that earn less than $250,000. (emphasis added)

Notice how the story won’t call McCain a liar — it’s McCain’s “opponents” who say he lies. But in the very next sentence, the Post reporter accurately describes one of McCain’s lies. The facts aren’t in dispute: Obama has a detailed tax plan, and McCain has repeatedly falsely described that plan. He has lied about it. So why can’t the story just come out and say so?

The reticence to call a lie a lie is perhaps the most pernicious example of how modern journalism’s objectivity fetish has been taken to such extremes that it’s become meaningless.

Objectivity is no longer (if it ever was) a means to reporting the truth. It has become an end in itself. If the facts can be interpreted to reflect negatively on a subject (at least if that subject is a Republican or allegedly conservative candidate for office), then they must be avoided. Indeed, this twisted notion of objectivity has turned facts into mere subjective interpretations.

But facts are facts. The interpretation comes after. And journalists should not worry about how the facts will be interpreted.

For example, simply pointing out that someone is lying is descriptive, not normative.

“John McCain lied about Barack Obama and sex education” is a statement of fact. It does not render judgment on McCain — it merely points out that what he said about Obama was intentionally false.

Now, it’s true that in American culture in general and presidential politics specifically, people generally don’t think highly of liars. But that’s reason for John McCain to stop lying — not for the media to stop pointing out when he lies.

If the facts reflect poorly on a subject in the culture’s eyes, that’s the subject’s business — not the media’s. (The whole point of objectivity was that the media shouldn’t be in the reflection business!)

The good news is, there’s been so much outrage in certain quarters about the media’s fear of lie-detection that maybe things will change. And if a new AP story on McCain’s lies doesn’t quite reach Dylan Matthews’ ideal — the still-too-tentative headline: “Analysis: McCain’s claims skirt facts, test voters” — at least it’s a start.

I get that. But I also agree with Andrew Sullivan about what’s at stake in this election.

We need to think about: Who best can win the war on terror? Who best can extricate us from Iraq? Who best can handle Pakistan? Who best can manage the financial meltdown? Who best will rid us of addiction to foreign oil? Who best can unite the country? Who best can tackle the enormous debt the Bush-Cheney years have landed us with? Who best can restore America’s core abhorrence of torture?

Now watch these videos.

In this campaign, Obama is trying to lead a national discussion about Sullivan’s questions. A public, serious discussion. Four years ago, John Kerry did the same. Four years before that, Al Gore did the same.

You may disagree with their answers, but at least they had the integrity and gumption to first think deeply about the questions and then honestly explain their answers to the American people.

John McCain, Sarah Palin, their party, and their party’s operatives are doing everything humanly possible to avoid this discussion altogether. Four years ago, George W. Bush did the same. Four years before that, ditto.

What does that say about John McCain and his party?

There’s been a ton of response to the debate around the blogosphere. Andrew Sullivan has roundups here and here, and a good post of his own. James Fallows weighs in from China with an important post that includes an excerpt from his 1996 article, “Why Americans Hate the Media”:

When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them—through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public’s representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about.

In the same vein, anyone interested in this topic should read Matthew Yglesias’ December Washington Monthly piece on how NBC’s Tim Russert is the driving force behind this kind of political coverage.

The one good thing about the debate is that it was such a monumental debacle — even Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s TV critic, called it “shoddy” and “despicable,” — that the backlash might finally be strong enough to keep this conversation going and (one can dream) eventually spark some changes.

Furthermore, the near-total focus on these sorts of things to the exclusion of policy shows the general shallowness of newspaper political journalism, especially campaign journalism. There are many reasons for this, starting with objectivity conventions, which give reporters little reason to read white papers, policy proposals, scholarly books, etc. Whereas writers for New Republic, Atlantic, Slate et. al. are a) not bound by “objectivity” strictures and b) well-versed in policy.

Sure, there are some campaign moments that do give insight into a candidate’s policy considerations or say something genuinely noteworthy about their personality. Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Obama that perfectly dovetail with Republican attacks betray her willingness to put personal ambition ahead of the party. Obama’s devotion to progressive policy goals looks suspect when he attacks Clinton’s health care proposal via mailers that follow the same script as Republican mailers that played a major role in defeating the Clintons’ ’90s health-care reform. John McCain’s ignorance about any any number of issues portends a certain kind of detached presidency.

But for the most part, the nature of political coverage in newspapers, mainstream newsmagazines, and TV news makes the whole discussion about “media bias” in the context of the Democratic race essentially meaningless.

Anyway, since I’ll probably never get around to writing that full post, I wanted to point out two must-read pieces that do a great job of puncturing the bubble in which this political coverage takes place.

First, Ezra Klein gets at the essential silliness of the “controversy” over Obama’s recent remarks on why working-class voters might not vote for him or Democrats — remarks that, while poorly phrased, were squarely in the mainstream of Democratic discussion:

But let’s be clear: It’s not damaging because we think it foretells him doing something harmful to the country. It’s not damaging because it suggests his policy agenda is poorly conceived, or his priorities are awry. If you think of policy and politics as two circles in a Venn diagram, this is damage that only exists in the politics circle, and doesn’t even come close to the area of intersection. We reporters have to cover it, of course, because it’s Really Important, and matters more than the housing plans of all the candidates put together. But it matters in a completely self-referential way, it matters only because it matters, not because it means anything about Obama, or illuminates anything about his potential presidency. It’s a hollow scandal. …

I love the Venn diagram image. It perfectly captures why these sorts of flareups are pointless. No wonder so many people tune out politics and political news.

The second great piece is a Slate essay by Troy Patterson about the dismal state of political satire and how it reflects the shallowness of mainstream political coverage. Patterson quotes University of Iowa professor Russell L. Peterson’s new book, Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke, to describe how late-night jokes

“rarely transcend the level of pure ad hominem mockery.” They’re personality jokes and, as such, of a piece with character-based journalistic narratives that “treat newsmakers not as the subjects of newscasts but as the news’ cast.”

Patterson also nicely calls out Saturday Night Live on its satire-free political satire:

Rumors of SNL’s rebirth have been greatly exaggerated. … SNL has twice devoted sketches to the idea that debate moderators, as members of an Obama-besotted media, have given the Illinois senator an easy go of it in his one-on-one debates with Hillary Clinton. But the only jokes were in the impersonations (Amy Poehler’s schoolmarm nodding as Hillary, Fred Armisen’s catching Obama’s professor-preacher cadence) and in the hyperbole (CNN’s Soledad O’Brien so hot and bothered that she fans herself). The joke never develops beyond its premise. We all already know that the media is in the tank for Obama because we read it in the papers. SNL might have tried to turn these sketches into jokes about why this is the case — Is it about race? Celebrity? The hunger for a new narrative? — or it could have wondered about the relationship between this adoration and Obama’s oft-reported aloofness from reporters. It did not.

Likewise, Tina Fey’s editorial in support of Hillary as a guest on “Weekend Update” was not a political statement. She might have cut at the press or at Obama. What she did, instead, was to identify herself and her candidates as “bitches.” I can’t dispute Fey’s point that “bitches get stuff done,” but I will argue that the entire joke falls apart without the frisson of that word — a shock tactic that Sarah Silverman must have outgrown before her first period.

This is why the the stories saying “OMG SNL is totally sticking it to the media for sucking up to Obama!!!” were so annoying. Policy-ignorant, image-obsessed political reporters were praising a policy-ignorant, image-obsessed satirical show for calling them out on — what exactly? Focusing on one candidate’s image over the other’s? Not ignoring both candidates’ policy positions enough? Spending too much time on one candidate’s meaningless campaign minutiae? Talk about the blind (and unfunny) leading the blind (and even less funny).

It all pretty much makes my brain hurt.

Whether it’s because this campaign is a tight race for the first time in a while or something else, the byzantine ins and outs of the American election system have never been clearer and more frustrating than they are in 2008.

We’ve seen the two parties ridiculously kowtowing to Iowa and New Hampshire by stripping Florida and Michigan of delegates for leap-frogging those early states’ votes (and Hillary Clinton’s equally ridiculous, retroactive attempt to claim those delegates despite having already agreed to said kowtowing). And Barack Obama getting more delegates in Nevada than Clinton despite getting a smaller share of the vote. And the odd prevalence of caucuses. And Louisiana’s weird rules negating Mike Huckabee’s win on Saturday. And Texas’ upcoming primary/caucus hybrid. And the inexplicable “superdelegates.” And news of 49,500 ballots in Los Angeles County that can’t be counted because they were too confusing and were marked incorrectly. (This is all separate from the GOP’s usual obsession with voter ID laws, “voter fraud,” and other attempts to generally suppress voting.)

And then Washington state’s GOP chair unilaterally stopped Saturday’s vote count and declared John McCain the winner — despite 13 percent, or about 1,500 votes, left to be counted and fewer than 300 votes separating McCain and Huckabee. He has since grudgingly continued the count, but it’s not an effort I’d trust if I were a candidate.

This Washington state business seems to be more a function of one man’s (or one party’s) shenanigans rather than part of the systemic weirdness. But this video (courtesy of Talkingpointsmemo) of Huckabee comparing the aborted counting to a Soviet “election,” makes clear that this episode is emblematic of how messed up our election system has seemed since the 2000 Florida debacle.

There may not be brazenly antidemocratic, well-connected party bosses in every state. But the confusing electoral process behind which the Washington GOP boss thought he could hide is widespread. Here’s how the Seattle Times describes the Washington caucus (as flagged by TPM’s Paul Kiel):

Due to the way Republicans select their delegates, the results could bear little resemblance to the presidential preferences of the 40 Washington state delegates ultimately sent to the GOP national convention in September.”Nobody won or lost anything on Saturday,” said Vance, now a public affairs consultant and McCain supporter. “But every other state had been able to report a ‘winner,’ so there was expected there would be a ‘winner’ in Washington state.”

Here, the number of delegates elected at precinct caucuses means very little in terms of which candidate will ultimately get the most delegates heading into the national convention, he said. Delegates are “unbound free agents,” who are not required to vote for one candidate over another. They can tell people whom they’re supporting, but they can also change their minds, Vance said. Also, the roughly 16,700 delegates elected at Saturday’s precinct caucuses will be winnowed down at legislative district caucuses and county conventions. Those remaining will go to the state convention, where only 18 of them will be chosen — two from each of the state’s nine Congressional districts — to go on to the national convention.

This is absurd. All the caucuses are absurd. The national and state parties and the cronies who run and staff them are doing nothing less than hijacking the Democratic process.

According to this Slate column, all of the above (excepting the Washington vote stoppage, but including the Washington caucus rules) is legal. The political parties can make their own rules for the nominating process (short of some egregious exceptions involving race). But that doesn’t make the parties’ actions right. They’re certainly violating the spirit of “one person, one vote.”

I don’t expect the candidates to grapple with the election system when they’re in the middle of it (except for Hillary Clinton, who has managed the feat of embracing the silencing of Florida and Michigan voters and then acting like she won real races in those states, while simultaneously bad-mouthing contests she views as undemocratic or sexist simply because voters didn’t pick her or were, um, black).

But it would be nice — especially if Barack “Change, Not Danger, Is My Middle Name” Obama or John “I’m A Straight Talker ‘Cause The Press Says So” McCain ultimately wins — if our next president embraced serious election reform as an important step in that fabled and perpetually promised healing of America.

But with the “lyrics” consisting of sung-chanted portions of an actual Obama speech, and with the participants not once winking (see: Scarlett “Yeah, I Made a Tom Waits Covers Album” Johansson singing at a sibilant-dulling mic screen), the video basically is a cross between “Voices That Care” and the brilliant Ali G sketch where he beatboxes to a nuclear protester’s embarrassingly dreadful protest song.

Observe:

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Still, none of them holds a candle to the best celebrity song of all time: Rockers to Help Explain Whitewater.