Hillary’s a liar; Obama’s the Messiah.

That is, at least, one of the message templates the media are using to baste the tough, aging, mold-growing political turkey that has become the contest for the presidency.

Actually, both are liars, and neither seems to have the “experience” not to get caught. That is particularly distressing in the case of Mrs. Clinton, who has piled up so many lifetime achievement canards that the older among us have forgotten more of them than the younger have ever heard.

While liar is a descriptor that should be used sparingly in the political context, lest it snare the mere fabricating, dissembling, parsing and only moderately deceptive of the elected class (meaning all), messiah is a word that should never be used in modern political context, since it cannot seriously be applied in any but ironic and satiric expression.

While the wonderful CBS file footage of Mrs. Clinton’s corkscrew-landing, sniper-fire-dodging, grenade-throwing, waif-kissing and otherwise excellent adventure to Bosnia has provided glee to those who despise the brazen hussy, that is but a trifle of pathological prevarication compared to Obama’s latest.

Obama’s big new lie is significant and should have consequences.

Since January, it has been generally understood that some anti-war liberals intended to make a John McCain comment about Iraq into a leftist mantra. Obama has subsequently made it a campaign staple.

At a New Hampshire campaign appearance in January, McCain was asked about a statement by President Bush that the U.S. might stay in Iraq for fifty years.

Here’s McCain’s response: “Maybe a hundred. Make it one hundred. We’ve been in South Korea, we’ve been in Japan for sixty years. We’ve been in South Korea for fifty years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. Then it’s fine with me. I would hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.”

That’s typical McCain, rambling, off-the-cuff, inartful, just saying what he thinks, but clear enough to anyone with half a brain or half a care regarding global security. The minute he mentioned South Korea and Japan, it was nothing but crude exploitation to say that he meant prolonged war. He meant prolonged protective presence, which is where the argument should center if there is to be legitimate argument.

That McCain might have been better off to cite the consequences of our abandonment of Afghanistan following Soviet withdrawal in 1989 is wishful thinking, other than to recall for those with flawed attention spans one of our foreign policy failures that did, in substantial part, lead to present circumstances.

Nevertheless, to Obama’s lying eyes, McCain’s statement is the moral equivalent (a tactic he uses on many fronts) of supporting a 100-year war in Iraq, repeated over and over and over, with differing phraseology, despite numerous statements to the contrary by McCain and caustic commentators, including columnist Charles Krauthammer, who, it should not be forgotten, is a trained psychiatrist, somewhat helpful in interpreting the thicket of lies.

Were McCain more of an orator, his responses to Obama’s lies would have already drawn blood. They haven’t yet, only because in the land of the politically blind (Obama”s fainting, fawning minions), the one-eyed liar is king. Worry not, though, this is still just the preliminary bout.

Unlike Clinton and Obama, we are hard-wired not to lie. That is why we are duty-bound to point out that Obama is not a Muslim, although 10% of voters in most polls believe he is. Is it Hammurabi justice when political liars are beset by lies against them? A lie for a lie, so to speak.