Keller @ Large: Honesty, Straight Talk No Longer Matter?

BOSTON (CBS) - It appears to be the absolute minimum we demand of our elected officials - just tell me the truth.

Lying to the voters has always been a political offense right up there with flip-flopping and getting caught with your hand in the till or your arm around the intern. Folks just don't like it when you lie to their faces.

Jimmy Carter won the presidency 40 years ago with the promise that "I will never lie to you."

When the alleged weapons of mass destruction that led us into Iraq turned up missing, President George W. Bush was scorched with the claim that "Bush lied, people died."

And foremost among the grievances held by critics of President Obama is the complaint that he lies to us, with perhaps the most famous example being his promise that under Obamacare, "If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor," a claim he knew to be false.

But all of a sudden, for many of those same Obama critics, it seems that honesty and straight talk no longer matter.

Let's be polite and avoid calling them lies, but Donald Trump's remarks Tuesday night were riddled with falsehoods, misstatements and inaccuracies.

The Pulitzer-Prize winning fact-checking website Politifact has found 77% of Trump's campaign statements to be mostly false, false or a category they call "pants on fire." That is far and away the worst record in the field, nearly triple the rate of Obama and Hillary Clinton.

What has changed to remove the juice from what used to be the third rail of American politics? I don't know. But we're about to find out if a major party is prepared to abandon the notion that facts and truth have value.