So I was abed this morning listening to NPR and on comes Mara Liasson with a report about the women's vote. Typical silly evenhandedness, and then she plays a snippet from a McCain-Palin radio commercial that sums up the whole problem, really.

The commercial is about the "sexist" attacks on Palin. The script is read of course in a woman's voice, and she conveys just the right tone of anger and contempt for the sneering hypocritical liberal elite misogynists. They tried A, and B, and C, the woman says. And then, when that didn't work, "they called her a liar." She brands this "despicable."

Okay. I spent yesterday afternoon fretting that Obama's message was too muddled, not pointed enough. Almost everyone I know thinks this. Maybe we're right. Or maybe we're just compulsive fretters, because that's what liberals tend to be based on experience.

So maybe the Obama team is flailing. But now I hear this ad and I think, how do you fight an opponent that not only lies, but then tells lies about the lies?

Palin is a liar. Of this there's no question. She supported the bridge to nowhere. She asked for earmarks as governor – and not just one or two, but $453 million worth. She still goes around the country saying the exact opposite of both of these things. To adoring supporters, natch, who care nothing about what the truth of the matter is, only that she's sticking it to the liberal-elite man.

Eugene Robinson summed this up nicely yesterday in his Wash Post column. Palin, he explained, did sort of 'fess up about the bridge in her Charlie Gibson interview. But a few days later, she was back out on the trail saying the same thing.

Robinson:

What kind of person tells a self-aggrandizing lie, gets called on it, admits publicly that the truth is not at all what she originally claimed -- and then goes out and starts telling the original lie again without changing a word?

Yesterday, John McCain talked about the need for reform on Wall Street, vowing that his administration will crack down on the shysters and the greedhogs. Sure. Virtually every chance he's had, he's supporting lifting regulations. Today the Wash Post has the goods and places them on the front page. McCain wants to "tap into" populist anger, writes the paper:

But his past support of congressional deregulation efforts and his arguments against "government interference" in the free market by federal, state and local officials have given Sen. Barack Obama an opening to press the advantage Democrats traditionally have in times of economic trouble.

And, today, I can guarantee you, McCain spokespeople and spinners will tell reporters and cable TV hosts that this obviously true documented record is nonsense and McCain has always been an opponent of such excess.

Again, in both cases, these aren't just lies. They're lies about lies. That's a really different thing. In life, a typical person lies. If they get caught – hopefully, they tender an apology; at the very least they stop telling the lie. But here we have a case where the liars not only don't do either of those things. They just keep on lying.

But wait, there's more! Because it isn't only that they lie and then lie about the lies. They follow that by playing the victim, claiming that the allegation from the other people that they're lying is nonsense, or a sign that they're part of the Washington establishment, or "despicable."

Imagine this happening in your own life. You knew your spouse was cheating, and she or he kept on denying it and called you despicable. Imagine that in a court of law, a plaintiff or defendant's attorney could lie, get caught, lie again and then get at least some members of the jury to believe that the allegations that he lied were just an elitist plot. That in business, one party could break a contract, lie about it, lie about having lied about it, charge that the other party's willingness to stand by the original terms of the contract showed only that the other party was weak and inflexible -- and still come out of the deal smelling sweet.

Other campaigns have lied, and yes, Democratic ones as well as Republican. But none I've ever covered has lied like this one and told lies about the lies and then gone and played the victim to its base voters and then, as a parting shot, shut off all serious press inquiries so that it didn't really have to answer any difficult questions about its lies. John McCain, of "straight talk" fame, hasn't spoken with the reporters on his plane in more than a month.

So what are the Obama people supposed to do in the face of this? I honestly don't know. You can try to persuade a few figures of authority with some bipartisan credential to step forward and call lies lies, but most such people will be chary of doing that. Or maybe you can get down in the gutter. It's certainly what they deserve.

But you can't have an argument with people who play according to these rules. They enforce no code of decency upon themselves, and no one exists to enforce it. The "objective" media? Stop joking. They're powerless to stop it; all they really do, as NPR did this morning, is give more air time to the victim-playing about the lies about the lies. We're down the rabbit hole. If these people win, we'll be in a worse place than that.