HE'S AGAINST IT AT THE VERY SAME TIME HE'S FOR IT.

Adam Serwer noticed one of the more shameless of John McCain's deceptions: pretending that when Barack Obama said, "I will slow our development of Future Combat Systems," he actually said "future combat systems," lowercase, meaning all defense spending, rather than the particular, highly controversial Army modernization contract called "Future Combat Systems."

And as both Adam and Steve Benen point out, McCain knows exactly what Obama was talking about because he himself had been a sharp critic of Future Combat Systems. But it's not just, as Steve puts it, that he was against it before he was for it. In fact, here's what McCain's campaign submitted, in writing, to the Washington Post in July in answer to a request for some details about McCain's promise to balance the federal budget:

-- Balance the budget requires slowing outlay growth to 2.4 percent. The roughly $470 billion dollars (by 2013) in slower spending growth come from reduced deployments abroad ($150 billion; consistent with success in Iraq/Afghanistan that permits deployments to be cut by half -- hopefully more), slower discretionary spending in non-defense and Pentagon procurements ($160 billion; there are lots of procurements -- airborne laser, Globemaster, Future Combat System -- that should be ended and the entire Pentagon budget should be scrubbed) and reductions in mandatory spending ($160 billion) from a mix of excessive agricultural and ethanol subsidies, slower health care cost growth, Medicaid savings from the expansion of private insurance, and other reforms.

That's not 2006, that's two months ago. And it's in a specific budget plan.

It's nice to realize that after eight years, I'm still capable of outrage. The "Bridge to Nowhere" lie (which, by the way, TAPPED readers were the first to know about) requires some nerve, but this takes a level of deliberate distortion worthy of the run-up to Iraq war.

-- Mark Schmitt.