McCain, Palin, and truthfulness

Manjughosha must be smiling on me today, because my writing’s going well despite extreme tiredness induced by an almost-two-year-old wanting milk at 4:30AM. Anyway, that leaves time before dinner for a quick McCain/Palin round-up.

Paul Krugman has a sterling piece today in the Times called “Blizzard of Lies,” detailing some of the many deceptions the the shameless McCain team is employing:

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”

Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.

So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.

Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.

This video covers some of the same ground:

Meanwhile, on Maine television McCain says of Sarah Palin, “She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.” Ouch! Really? Not one single person knows more about energy in the whole United States than Sarah Palin?

Worse, McCain touts this improbably factoid as part of her national security credentials:

Reporter: “Well, you say you’re sure she has the experience but again I’m just asking for an example – what experience does she have in the field of national security?”

McCain: “Sure. Energy. She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America. She is the Governor of a state where 20% of our energy supply comes from there and we all know that energy is a critical and vital national security issue. We’ve got to stop sending 700 billion dollars of American money to countries that don’t like us very much. She’s very well versed on that issue and she, uh, also represents is a Governor of a state that is right next to Russia and ah, ah, she really understands Russia and their newly aggressive behavior in the world which is also something that we have to be very concerned about.”

Watch the video here to note those and other evasions.

Note that he described the pipeline as one of her major achievements (“she was responsible for a $40 billion pipeline…”)

However according to the New York Times…

…although it is the centerpiece of Ms. Palin ’s relatively brief record as governor, the pipeline might never be built, and under a worst-case scenario, the state could lose up to $500 million it committed to defray regulatory and other costs

Then there’s (and Krugman mentioned) Palin’s saying “no” to the Bridge to Nowhere:

Newspaper column by Gov. Sarah Palin, published March 5, 2008

I feel compelled to respond to your gross mischaracterization (March 2, “Earful of Earmarks”) of my position on congressional earmarks.

I am not among those who have said “earmarks are nothing more than pork projects being shoveled home by an overeager congressional delegation.” I recognize that Congress, which exercises the power of the purse, has the constitutional responsibility to put its mark on the federal budget, including adding funds that the president has not proposed.

Accordingly, my administration has recommended funding for specific projects and programs…

But wait, there’s more:

ABC News’ Lisa Chinn reports: During her interview with ABC News’ Charlie Gibson Thursday Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin attempted to deflect a question about the fact she has never met a foreign head of state by saying that “many” other vice presidential nominees in history hadn’t met a head of state either.

However Palin was mistaken, at least where recent history is concerned.

Every vice president over the last 30 years had met a foreign head of state before being elected.

Well, that one’s not exactly a lie, just an example of “truth” being made up on the spot.

McCain’s team brazenly misconstrued a comment by Obama about the falsity of McCain’s claim to be a change agent, when Obama said that you can put lipstick on a pig but it’ll still be a pig. This was taken, quite absurdly, since he wasn’t even talking about her, to mean that Obama was comparing Palin to a pig. This false thin-skinnedness is revealed to be nothing but hypocrisy when you consider that McCain compared Hillary Clinton’s health policy to be, yes, “a pig in lipstick.”

Check it out: