They're also wagging fingers at Obama

It's been two weeks since I praised journalists and a couple of fact-check outfits for exposing John McCain's lies about Barack Obama.

Maybe Obama thought the media had given him a free pass. Not so.

Now some of the same mainstream media outlets and websites have called out the Illinois senator for his own series of dispiriting distortions.

In recent days, Obama unfairly charged that McCain seethes with intolerance for immigrants, wants to leave the nation's healthcare systems dangerously unregulated and can't wait to throw old folks' Social Security savings wholesale into the volatile stock market.

Several outlets have helped take apart the anti-McCain attacks, with one of the most thorough and scathing reports delivered Monday by Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus. After flaying McCain last week for his disingenuous advertising, Marcus said Obama was guilty of descending "to similarly scurrilous tactics on the stump and on the air."

In the New York Times, Michael Falcone knocked down one of the attacks on McCain and wrote: "By making questionable assertions . . . Mr. Obama opens himself to the same criticism that Mr. McCain has faced about the truthfulness of his attacks."

The Times has criticized several Obama claims that the paper found unfair or untrue. No small irony there, since the McCain camp spent a couple of days this week having a hissy fit about the newspaper when it dared write critically about McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis.

With the campaign entering its final frenetic weeks, tactics are shifting almost by the hour. It was just days ago that McCain was taking the brunt of the media scorn for a series of distortions. The Arizona senator alleged, among other things, that Obama had called Sarah Palin a "pig," wanted to put kindergartners in comprehensive sex education classes and would raise income taxes on all Americans.

Multiple news outlets found those claims untrue. Obama, for example, has long proposed lowering taxes on anyone making under $250,000 a year.

PolitiFact, operated by Congressional Quarterly and the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, has examined 119 claims by McCain and found 53 of them seriously suspect -- categorizing them as "barely true," "false" or "pants on fire," PolitiFact's designation for the most egregious untruths. Obama was found to be out of line less often -- with 34 of 122 assertions landing in those undesirable categories.