A choice of lying politicians? The McCain and Obama acceptance speeches...

... as parsed by Factcheck.org, show that nobody has the monopoly on distortion in this election.

Of Senator John McCain's acceptance speech, Factcheck found six major whoppers, including this one:

McCain claimed that Obama’s health care plan would "force small businesses to cut jobs" and would put "a bureaucrat ... between you and your doctor." In fact, the plan exempts small businesses, and those who have insurance now could keep the coverage they have.

In Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech, Factcheck unearthed seven bigtime distortions, including this one:

Obama noted that McCain’s health care plan would "tax people’s benefits" but didn’t say that it also would provide up to a $5,000 tax credit for families.

Why is this comparison so important?

Because partisans of both sides love to run to Factcheck to bad-mouth their opponents, which is also essential used as a backhanded way of implying that their candidate is different.

For example, pandora at Delawareliberal recently chortled over Factcheck supposedly spanking the McCain-Palin team for their distortions, while completely ignoring a contemporary Factcheck report that Obama-Biden consciously distorts McCain's stand on education policy in its latest set of commercials.

The whole point of Factcheck's existence is to hold all politicians on the national stage accountable for their misstatements, distortions, and outright lies.

When you use the page only to highlight your opponent's failings, while glossing over the fact that your own candidate has been nailed just often, just as badly for the same practices, that's not change...

That's politics as usual.

And from the John McCain-Sarah Palin and Barack Obama-Joe Biden teams that all we're getting this year.