Well, that's it. It's all over: the election, human existence, everything. It turns out that a preposterous new McCain campaign ad, which attacks Barack Obama for attacking Sarah Palin, also manages to tell a lie about an article published on a website that only exists in the first place to point out when the campaigns are telling lies, thereby creating a fatal wormhole in the space-time continuum that will shortly suck all physical matter into its gaping maw. The ad suggests that the non-partisan service Factcheck.org, at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, has dismissed Obama's attacks on Palin as "absolutely false" and "misleading". But guess what, irony enthusiasts: that claim itself is absolutely false and misleading! Factcheck.org was talking about crazy rumours put about by so-called online internet bloggers, not criticisms levelled by Obama at all. (Perspicacious lie-spotters may also have noticed that yesterday's McCain attack ad used footage of the CBS news anchor Katie Couric apparently agreeing that criticisms of Sarah Palin had been deeply sexist; in fact, she was talking about Hillary Clinton, and the ad has since been removed from YouTube at CBS's request. You remember Hillary Clinton -- she's the one about whom a McCain supporter once asked him "How do we beat the bitch?", causing the crusading progressive feminist John McCain to chuckle and declare "that's an excellent question.")