Polls show Mitt Romney lost badly to President Obama in the Battle of Conventions. Obama appears to have gained ground during the GOP convention and to have widened his lead over Romney during the Democratic convention.

So what does Romney do? He doubles down on culture war lies, implying over the weekend that Obama plans to remove the word “God” from the nation’s coins. Call it coining lies. I have to ask once again, should Romney somehow manage to win, why would anyone grant his victory legitimacy? It would be based completely upon a foundation of lies that the denial of voting rights to millions of Americans. The NCAA would give the death penalty to a college football team that cheated to this degree.

So it’s down to God and Man on the Campaign Trail, to twist up the title of William F. Buckley’s 1951 book. In the book, Buckley accused Princeton of indoctrinating students with liberal ideology. Now Romney, Paul Ryan and the idolatrous brigade are trying to indoctrinate American voters with preposterous lies regarding the faith of their Democratic opponents. The Republicans have become precisely what the Founders warned us about.

For the moment, though, let’s focus upon another Romney/Ryan lie, on an issue David Frum called “the H-bomb of the 2012 campaign.” That issue is Medicaid and the devastating consequences on America’s elderly of the Romney/Ryan plan to dramatically reduce benefits and turn it into a dangerous block-grant program.

It was Bill Clinton last week who put the lie to the Romney/Ryan claim that nothing in their proposals for Medicare or Medicaid would harm seniors. Clinton said:

They also want to block-grant Medicaid, and cut it by a third over the coming 10 years. Of course, that’s going to really hurt a lot of poor kids. But that’s not all. Lot of folks don’t know it, but nearly two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for Medicare seniors who are eligible for Medicaid…

…It’s going to end Medicare as we know it. And a lot of that money is also spent to help people with disabilities, including — (cheers, applause) — a lot of middle-class families whose kids have Down’s syndrome or autism or other severe conditions. (Applause.) And honestly, let’s think about it, if that happens, I don’t know what those families are going to do.

Now, the lie that the Obama Administration wants to gut Medicare benefits is no more believable than the lie that Obama wants to take the word “God” from our coins. Still, Romney/Ryan persist to deliver it. Such a strategy of deceit reveal them both as men of no character, men who should be disqualified for the offices they seek.

As fact-checkers have pointed out, Clinton was correct in his prepared remarks (which he garbled slightly above), in which said that two-thirds of Medicaid goes to seniors and to people with disabilities. I checked this with the facts and figures from my own state, Texas, and it holds true here as it does around the country. Sixty-percent of Medicaid benefits here go to seniors and people with disabilities.

We can look at it another way. Medicaid pays for 70 percent of all nursing home care.

Lies are nothing new to politics. But the Romney/Ryan campaign has taken the Big Lie to a whole other level. They cannot beat the real President Obama so they invent one no more real than the Obama in Clint Eastwood’s empty chair. They cannot win with their devastating economic policies, so they lie about them. Should they manage to eke out a victory, they will have earned a mandate for nothing – nothing but the efficacy of the lie in American politics.

If I may wax theological for a moment, in just about every religious tradition the transcendent being or possibility of enlightenment is identified with Truth – with Universal Truth so powerful it cannot be fully comprehended. So I ask this question: By their sacrifice of Truth, is it not Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan who are eliminating God from our shared lives?