McCain & Palin Receiving Scrutiny for Torrent of Lies

At the start of the general election campaign, it looks like John McCain gave the Straight Talk express a Dishonorable Discharge. Everywhere you look, people are talking about how the McCain campaign has spread massive quantities of lies on the campaign trail. Even ads that the McCain campaign has made that claim to be fact-checks turn out themselves to need fact checking.

According to an article by Michael Cooper and Jim Rutenberg in today's New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/politics/13mccain.html :

A McCain advertisement called "Fact Check" was itself found to be "less than honest" by FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan group. The group complained that the McCain campaign had cited its work debunking various Internet rumors about Ms. Palin and implied in the advertisement that the rumors had originated with Mr. Obama [They didn't].

In an interview Friday on the NY1 cable news channel, a McCain supporter, Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, called "ridiculous" the implication that Mr. Obama's "lipstick on a pig" comment was a reference to Ms. Palin, whom he also defended as coming under unfair attack.

"The last month, for sure," said Don Sipple, a Republican advertising strategist, "I think the predominance of liberty taken with truth and the facts has been more McCain than Obama."

Indeed, in recent days, Mr. McCain has been increasingly called out by news organizations, editorial boards and independent analysts like FactCheck.org. The group, which does not judge whether one candidate is more misleading than another, has cried foul on Mr. McCain more than twice as often since the start of the political conventions as it has on Mr. Obama.

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The article also points out how McCain was confronted by Joy Behar on the Barbara Walters ABC show called "The View" about two specific pieces the McCain campaign are putting out are complete lies.

This latest article by the Times comes on the heels of Paul Krugman's article of two days ago titled "Blizzard of Lies http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/opinion/12krugman.html

How do you know when McCain or Palin are lying? Their lips are moving.

In the last 40 years, Presidential elections seem to come down to whether the public will allow the Republican candidate to lie themselves into the White House. We had lying about John Kerry's service in 2004, lying about pretty much everything about Al Gore in 2000, the dishonest Willie Horton ad in 1988 gave George H. W. Bush the Presidency, etc.

Here are some of the top campaign lies by McCain and evidence to the contrary:

1. McCain lie - Obama plans to give sex education to kindergarteners.
Fact: Obama wants kindergarteners and other kids to know how to deal with attempts of inappropriate touching by sexual predators.

2. McCain lie – Obama plans to increase taxes on working families. Fact: The non partisan Tax Policy Center says that four fifths of the population, which is those of us making less than $200,000 per year, would get a bigger tax cut from Obama than McCain.

3. McCain lie – Obama is making nasty attacks on Palin.
Fact: Obama never said any of the things the McCain campaign alleges he did. Here is the backup from Factcheck.org http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/mccain-palin_distorts_our_finding.html

I've only included a top three list. Alternet has a top 20 list of McCain and Palin lies that should be seen. It is located at http://www.alternet.org/story/98502/mccain_and_palin's_top_20_lies,_myths_and_flip-flops_/ . If McCain and Palin keep things going like they are now, Alternet may have to increase that to a top 50 list before long.

To be sure, the Obama campaign has to get after these lies by McCain. As good as Factcheck.org is and as good as articles by the New York Times and accompanying graphics like this one  http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/09/13/us/politics/13mccain_graphic.ready.html are, Obama has to go out and make the case that McCain is out there pushing falsehoods and he has to do that without getting off message and forgetting to bring up the things he intends to do to solve our economic and foreign policy problems.

By the way, Sarah Palin has jumped on board with the McCain campaign's deceitfulness and distortions. As her recent interview made painfully clear, Palin lied in her acceptance speech about opposing the Bridge to Nowhere. She was an enthusiastic supporter of the $400 million dollar wasteful project for a long time until unfavorable scrutiny was placed on it. Even then she tried to hold on to the project until it became politically untenable. Even THEN, however, she did not have Alaska return the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Federal Government had given the state to start construction.

Palin also lied in her assertions that Alaska supplies 20% of the country's energy needs. Factcheck.org indicates here  http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/energetically_wrong.html that Alaska supplies about 3.5% or 2.4% depending on which measurement you use. One would expect the Governor of Alaska to know this and thus know that what she was saying was a bald-faced lie.

Here are some videos that show exactly what McCain has become:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioy90nF2anI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c

these videos show a man who has sold out completely and has no values or integrity left other than saying and doing whatever it takes to get elected. The joke is that McCain and Palin are trying to portray themselves as Mavericks who will also bring change to Washington. McCain and Palin embody the worst of everything that comes to mind when you think about Washington. You cannot trust anything that John McCain or Sarah Palin say. Their words mean nothing other than what they think will sound good at that moment. My guess is that the McCain campaign is betting that with only about 50 days left until Election Day, they can get away with enough of this to fool the public into voting for them. I think, with a little help from Obama and the press, they will be proven wrong.

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