TO UPDATE P.T. Barnum’s famous dictum: You can keep fooling most of the people all of the time. The Republicans running the McCain presidential campaign — evidently with approval of John McCain himself — are back in the business of filling American minds with anything but the truth.

McCain’s effort to overcome the heavy burden of the Bush-Cheney record and retain the White House for Republicans exploits voters’ worries about $4 gasoline and $5 heating oil.

As you must have noted on TV screens and newspapers, McCain’s pitch is that part of the solution of America’s energy woes lies under the sea bottom offshore. He wants to drill our way back to the American-dream days of cheap gas — rolling back drilling bans aimed at saving what’s left of our coastlines. One McCain TV spot baldly blames Sen. Barack Obama and his Democrats, who oppose offshore drilling, for the energy crisis. Public-opinion polls find that a scary majority of voters are buying into the scam. The truth is that it would take 20 years of drilling and pumping before offshore oil could play any role at all in world markets, let alone affect the price of oil.

Please recall the swift-boating of John Kerry in the 2004 election. Karl Rove, the engineer of George Bush’s re-election campaign, undercut Kerry’s stature as a war hero with the help of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The operation used national press conferences, books and television commercials to peddle a tall tale of how the Democratic nominee John Kerry lied to get a decoration for bravery and two of his three purple hearts. The attack worked deadly damage when voters bought in.

There’s a saying in Texas that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but an angle. Rove’s angle was audacious, converting swift boat from a naval-combat vessel into a verb. To swift-boat means to mobilize big money to buy national television commercials in an effort to game an election.

The successful 2004 operation was paid for by billionaire Republicans whom I call the Oily-Garchs, who liked things the way they were under President Bush and paid big money to keep Republicans in the White House.

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, a well-known corporate raider, contributed $3 million to bankroll the mudslinging. Houston real-estate developer Bob J. Perry put in at least $100,000. And oil and gas billionaire Aubrey Kerr McClendon donated a quarter of a million dollars to the swift-boating of Kerry. McClendon is co-founder of Chesapeake Energy, the largest American developer of natural-gas fields, now drilling his way to a natural-gas fortune in the heart of the Fort Worth area. He is running a major media campaign on the air and on cable, bankrolling well-known actors and local TV news personalities to convince Texans that drilling and laying pipe to uglify their communities and back yards is okay and perfectly safe.

St. Louis billionaire Sam Fox tossed in another $50,000 to the 2004 swift-boat operation. The opening shot was a major news conference at Washington’s National Press Club, plus a book (Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry) that rolled off the presses of Regnery Publishing, a perennial peddler of right-wing literature. For his dollars, Bush named Fox to be American ambassador to Belgium in a 2006 recess appointment to bypass the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on which Kerry serves.

As for Pickens, he promised to pay $1 million to anyone who could disprove the Swift Boat Veterans’ allegations but then refused to fork over when a group of veterans who served under Kerry, including his commanding officer at the time, called Pickens’s bluff, took up his challenge, and refuted the multimillion-dollar humbuggery.

Swift-boating has become a generic term of art in the peddling of lies to steal elections and power. All swift-boating requires under loophole-riddled campaign regulations is big money, buying into electronic media that have grown addicted to the profits of selling political air time and have no interest in fact-checking.

To no one’s surprise, swift-boating is alive and well in the 2008 campaign, doing early, serious damage to the Obama effort among those with the power of the vote but without the curiosity or aptitude to question what hired TV tells them. The temptation of the presidency compromises Sen. John McCain, who prided himself as an exponent of “straight talk” and political honesty, into selling his soul to a lately-recruited PR team, composed of disciples of Karl Rove.

The first score of McCain supporters was to plant deadly gossip in the rumor mills that Obama was a secret Muslim by stressing his middle name Hussein. Their second job was to raise questions about the patriotism and loyalty of Obama’s wife, Michelle. Now comes the oil-drilling scam, bought and paid for by GOP Oily-Garchs.

In 2000, a close election plus the compromised Florida vote count blessed by five Republican Supreme Court justices sullied American presidential politics. Then came the swift-boating of 2004. There’s far more at stake in 2008 — namely, whether a third gamed election will again undermine America and its reputation as the world pitchman of democracy.

Jerry Landay, an occasional contributor, is a former CBS News correspondent in Washington and elsewhere.