It's time for media pundits looking for talking points about the presidential race to stop putting Trump surrogates like Rudy Giuliani on the air.
They are using the spread-lies offense popularized in this election year by Donald Trump himself. And Giuliani, like Trump and some others, ignore the truth so often that they appear - plainly - unhinged.
As for the pundits and the regular joes and janes of journalism, Trump and his surrogates - especially the myriad of surrogates - are spewing the red-herring falsehoods faster than fact-checkers can swat them down.
Donald Trump was on camera for the Commander-in-Chief forum for roughly 30 minutes Wednesday night.
By Friday morning, Politifact had labeled 173 of his statements there as mostly false - many as "pants on fire."
Multiply that by the dozen or so of Trump's most regularly quoted surrogates in their several-a-day five-, 10- or 15-minute media sittings on two or three shows a day, and there's a lot of lying going on.
But most pundits aren't very dogged or demanding. And the surrogates keep being interviewed even when everyone knows the things they are saying have been debunked. They just rotate from one show to the next and repeat their spin again.
It's clear that Trump is from the Hitler school of lying: Lie big, lie often and never back down.
As Salon magazine pointed out this week, by many accounts it was Adolf Hitler who coined the term "Big Lie." In his 1925 tract, "Mein Kampf," he wrote that "the broad masses" are more likely to "fall victims to the big lie than the small lie," because "It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."
Has Hillary Clinton made statements that were incomplete or misleading - downright false or at best evolving?
Clearly. But she gets punished for them. Over and over.
Trump, on the other hand, gets a pass. How many times have you heard: It's just Trump being Trump?
Enough with the double standard.
He's not only an incurable liar, he's a clear and present danger to this country. And so are the surrogates who speak for him.