Charges have been flying back and forth between the Romney and Obama camps and their partisans, each charging the other with lying, while the most anyone might admit is to a “slight” exaggeration.  So how are we to tell who is “merely” exaggerating for political effect and who is the bald-faced liar?

That’s easy.  My candidate exaggerates just a little; yours is a bald-faced liar.

An exaggeration, perhaps?  From what I’ve heard and seen, not at all.

Romney denies that he said what he said, and his campaign calls it political maneuvering. Romney’s lying. On the other hand, Obama keeps declaring that he’s only going to tax the wealthy, when the specifics of both Obamacare tax increases and his own proposals will definitely have a significant impact on a significant share of the middle class, since some of those taxes kick in at incomes above $100,000, and a family making $100,000 may be “wealthy” in Plano, Texas, or Richfield, Utah, but that’s barely mid-middle class in New York, San Francisco, Honolulu and most of Hawaii, Los Angeles, the Washington, D.C., area, and a number of other places across the United States, totalling tens of millions of Americans. Now, none of those directly affected by his tax plans are in poverty, but to call them wealthy is not only inaccurate, but an out-and-out lie.  I could go on and attack both sides with more specifics, but that’s not the point.

Now, I could say “a pox on both your houses,” because both candidates are guilty of lying, and the only question is which one is the greater liar.  Unhappily, that’s really almost secondary to another question.

I’ve heard die-hard Republicans claim that Obama will destroy religious freedom, annihilate the free-enterprise system, gut our national defense, destroy American womanhood, make abortion free and legal at any time in a pregnancy, and, oh, yes, increase taxes on everyone. They’re right about the last one, because, regardless of Romney’s rhetoric, eventually taxes will have to increase no matter who is President.

Die-hard Democrats aren’t much better, claiming that Romney will create a nation ruled by the ultra-wealthy with wages and incomes falling for everyone else, that he’ll outsource as many jobs as possible to China to keep wages and costs low in the USA to profit the few and the wealthy, a charge not helped at all by David Siegel and the Koch brothers, raise healthcare costs for everyone, but especially to the poor and elderly to the point where few of them will be able to afford medical care, totally destroy a woman’s right to choose by making her carry any pregnancy to term, even if she was raped or the pregnancy will kill her, and, of course, cut taxes on the wealthy while eliminating most deductions to raise taxes on the middle class.

There are grains of truth in both sets of charges, and sometimes even more than that, but this campaign of either lies or reckless exaggeration – take your pick – is more than likely to leave a residue of anger and bitterness that will make actual solutions even more difficult than they’ve been in the past – and we know how few solutions have been considered in Congress, let alone enacted.  No matter who wins the Presidency, it’s highly unlikely that either political party is going to have a sufficient majority in both the House and the Senate to push through its agenda… or anything close.

That means, as I’ve said before, solutions will require compromise, but who will be willing to compromise after all the lies and scorched earth rhetoric?

Unless things change, this election may be the political equivalent for the winner of “the operation was successful… and the patient died”… the patient being the American semi-bipartisan representative democratic experiment created by the Founding Fathers.