McCain/Palin 08: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

I would really like to like Sarah Palin. She's got a story that would make for one of those Hollywood light comedies starring Sandra Bullock and Bill Pulliam. Little girls all over the country are taking notice: this could be the President after next. But each day, I'm growing more disgusted.

Following her fact-challenged acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, the McCain campaign has delighted in her uncanny ability to drive the recently re-branded Crooked Talk Express. She claims she was against the "bridge to nowhere" the iconic symbol of Congressional funding gone awry, when she fought hard to get it, only withdrawing her suppport after it became clear that even Congress couldn't spend money that recklessly.

But it wasn't just a bridge. Governor Palin presides over the state that has the distinction of receiving the most federal pork per resident in the United States: a whopping $554.54 per capita this year. (That's compared to the lousy $25.33 that Governor Sanford got for us or the $14.17 that Arizona--McCain's state--received.) So all of Sarah Palin's promises to make the pigs fly are not just the exaggerations of a candidate trying to spin previous actions: these are calculated, bold lies that she knows her supporters won't check. And even if some media person (say, Charles Gibson) were to expose her lies, they would only say it's the bias of the liberal media, trying to make her look bad. 

That the McCain campaign has decided to take cynical fact-avoidance as its modus operandi is certain when you see this exchange from yesterday's ABC program the view:

BARBARA WALTERS: "She [Governor Sarah Palin] also took some earmarks..."

JOHN MCCAIN: "No, not as governor she didn't. She vetoed - Look, well, the fact is she's a reform governor."
--ABC "The View," Sept. 12, 2008.

Obama favors sex education in kindergarten. Obama wants to enact painful tax increases on the middle class. Obama called Palin a pig. Obama wants to lose the war in Iraq. The lies just keep on coming. But in a week when the United States of America nationalized the two largest financial institutions in the world and Wall Street cheered, you just have to concede that lies work. That's why McCain and Palin tell them.