"Exaggerator" label stuck to Gore but not McCain

I read these blog posts several days ago, but I find myself thinking about it a lot and it's actualy making me quite anxious. On my favorite blog, Hullabaloo, there have been several posts about John McCain's tendency to exaggerate or change his past (as in altering a story he had told many times about giving the names of the Green Bay Packers as members of his squadron while being interrogated by the Vietnamese, but then recently saying that he used the Pittsburgh Steelers, apparently because he was pandering to Pennsylvania voters). They give several more examples: he says he created the FTC Do-Not-Call registry though he didn't; at Rick Warren's Forum he said that civil rights leader John Lewis would be a close advisor, but they have no relationship; he recently told a story about a POW camp guard drawing a cross in the sand that is suspiciously simiar to a story in Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago (and was mentioned a number of times following Solzhenitsyn's recent death), though the story is not a part of earlier, often detailed, descriptions of his POW experience.

In one post, they explicitly compare the way the press is dealing with McCain now and how the same situation was dealt with when Gore ran in 2000. In the latter case, remarks by Gore were persistently repeated by and commented upon in the media, supporting the narrative that Gore was a liar, but in every case, his supposed remarks were taken out of context or just flatly misrepresented. All the examples (see below) are grossly unfair and inaccurate, as explained in the Washington Post article by Robert Parry (link above).

Here's an excerpt from one of blog posts, dated 8/15/08:

That didn't matter in 2000. Al Gore said he invented the Internet and that he found Love Canal and that he and Tipper were the inspiration for Love Story. That's what happened and there was no shaking anyone in the media off of that, and they were going to use those and other nuggets to build a story about Gore's serial exaggerations, and make that character issue far more important than any policy or point of difference between him and George W. Bush.
[ . . . ]
If there was an even spread from the media of damaging stories or unfavorable narratives on both sides of the political divide that'd be one thing. But the idea of John McCain as a serial exaggerator in the way that they painted Al Gore would be unthinkable, despite the fact that the evidence is the same, and actually even more so in the case of McCain. So we get media types arguing that infidelity like that of John Edwards disqualifies someone for higher political office without applying that to McCain or indeed several of the GOP field this year. We get them defending Republican military veterans from attacks they deem scurrilous and baseless yet not Democrats of the same rank. We get the same paint-by-numbers narratives of Democrats as weak and feminine and Republicans as strong and patriarchal year after year no matter who the candidate, no matter what the policy, no matter what.