Show of hands: who doesn't the "scandal" over Pastor Wright amusing?

Punishing Barack Obama for his association with a firebrand preacher is hilarious considering the strange bedfellows in John McCain and Hillary Clinton's respective circle of friends. McCain is a charter member of the Keating Five, the senators who conspired to block investigations into the savings and loan scandals of the '80s and '90s, and Hillary Clinton has known cocaine smugglers and pimps visiting her in the White House. We get it; politicians have unfortunate tastes in associates, especially these three. So let's focus on personality defects the candidates, not their hangers-on, have.

I was corresponding this week with a reader who finds Obama little more than a smooth-talking hypocrite, but looked upon Hillary with rose-colored glasses. "The woman has her negatives," he wrote, "but she is by far the most intelligent individual I have ever had a chance to vote for." When I brought up recent investigations into campaign claims, he deflected the lies as exaggeration.

Read the following links and ask yourself what's worse - a pattern of duplicity telegraphed by a presidential candidate or a preacher rattling off a bunch of anti-establishment rhetoric a lot of Americans probably believe in secret?

• Clinton Lie Kills Her Credibility on Trade Policy: Hillary's statements saying she did not support NAFTA is disproven by over 11,000 pages of Clinton White House documents released last week. She was, in fact, an ardent supporter of the policy;
  
• Lies, Damn Lies, and Mispeakings: Hillary's heroic tale of facing fire in Bosnia turns out to be a bunch of horseshit;
  
• Hillary's Other Fabrication: Hillary tries to insert daughter Chelsea into the 9/11 mythos only to have the story destroyed by Chelsea herself; and
  
• Hillary's Lies: Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia: Half of Africa is laid to waste with more revisionist history from the Clinton camp.

This is just from a casual browsing of news articles about Hillary Clinton in the course of one morning. Each lie strikes to the heart of what makes her such a distasteful and loathsome individual. She manipulates tragedy for her own benefit, inserts herself into falsified incidents to bolster credibility, and outright lies about what little policy experience she has to look like her "co-president" monicker isn't an illusion.

She's a repulsive pathological liar, and unlike Obama's scandal where someone else said something controversial and the blowback landed on him, this stuff came from either her or someone sanctioned by her campaign. I know Americans have a short memory over this nonsense, but come on, people.