And, as usual, John McCain lied like a lipsticked pig. From ThinkProgress:
McCain’s claim that Palin never accepted earmarks as the governor of Alaska is divorced from reality. In fact, she actively sought them:
– Though Palin did reduce Alaska’s earmark requests, “in her two years in office, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation.”
– In March 2008, Palin wrote an op-ed in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, saying that her “role at the federal level is simply to submit the most well-conceived earmark requests we can” and that her reduction of requests was a response “to the changing circumstances in Congress.”
– In February 2008, Palin’s office sent Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) “a 70-page memo outlining almost $200 million worth of new funding requests for the state.”
– In her most recent earmark requests, “Palin requested millions of federal dollars for everything from improving recreational halibut fishing to studying the mating habits of crabs and the DNA of harbor seals.”
As ThinkProgress has noted, Palin has requested earmarks of the very type that McCain routinely mocks while on the campaign trail. As Walters pointed out, Palin was also a big fan of congressional pork as the Mayor of Wasilla, even hiring a lobbyist to help secure them.
I will be honest, I sometimes can't even keep up with all the lies that John McCain has told throughout this campaign. It is just an endless one lie after another. The Washington Post lists even more details of Palin's requests for federal earmarks to Alaska.
The McCain lies continue on.
Update: I've been thinking about this story of Senator John McCain's lies on The View. The big question is why did McCain even accept the guest spot on The View, when he knew he was going to continue regurgitating the same lies to some very smart women? When McCain probably knew he was going to get slammed for it? Or did the McCain campaign felt that Johnny Boy was going to get some softball questions thrown at him? Now I know that the McCain campaign had probably thought that McCain's appearance on The View would solicit disillusioned female Hillary voters to support McCain, but looking at McCain's performance on The View, looking at how the female hosts grilled McCain over his lies, it appears to me that McCain may have even lost the anti-Hillary vote--regardless of his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Then there was this little detail from the New York Times:
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.
A McCain spokesman, Brian Rogers, said the campaign had evidence for all its claims. “We stand fully by everything that’s in our ads,” Mr. Rogers said, “and everything that we’ve been saying we provide detailed backup for — everything. And if you and the Obama campaign want to disagree, that’s your call.”
Even as the media has been calling out McCain's lies, the McCain campaign continues this arrogant stance that they are not lying--even when each of their falsehoods have been exposed. It is like the McCain campaign doesn't care about the facts, and is associating such facts as negative attacks from the Obama campaign and Obama surrogates. What's more, the way Rogers stated that "everything that we've been saying we provide detailed backup for--everything," shows that the McCain campaign is trying to state their lies as facts, hoping to tie the real facts as contradictions presented by the Obama campaign. In other words, we have our facts, Obama has their facts, and it is your call. It is breathtaking in its simplicity, and its audacity.
And it is a risky strategy. Going back to the NY Times article:
Mr. McCain came into the race promoting himself as a truth teller and has long publicly deplored the kinds of negative tactics that helped sink his candidacy in the Republican primaries in 2000. But his strategy now reflects a calculation advisers made this summer — over the strenuous objections of some longtime hands who helped him build his “Straight Talk” image — to shift the campaign more toward disqualifying Mr. Obama in the eyes of voters.
“I think the McCain folks realize if they can get this thing down in the mud, drag Obama into the mud, that’s where they have the best advantage to win,” said Matthew Dowd, who worked with many top McCain campaign advisers when he was President Bush’s chief strategist in the 2004 campaign, but who has since had a falling out with the White House. “If they stay up at 10,000 feet, they don’t.”
[....]
[Republican advertising strategist Don Sipple] voiced concern that Mr. McCain’s approach could backfire. “Any campaign that is taking liberty with the truth and does it in a serial manner will end up paying for it in the end,” he said. “But it’s very unbecoming to a political figure like John McCain whose flag was planted long ago in ground that was about ‘straight talk’ and integrity.”
The McCain campaign strategy has been to go deep into the mud, attacking the Obama campaign with lies, slander, dishonesty, character assassinations, and throwing as much mud and slime as they could to bring Obama down. But Karl Rove's strategy of McCain going negative against Obama has started way too eary--potentially damaging McCain's "Straight Talk Express" image to American voters. Rove should have waited on the McCain campaign's mudslinging until two weeks or so before the election, when American voters would not be able to fully realize the lies the McCain campaign told them in the short time period before the election, before such lies could be exposed. Instead, the Rovians start this McCain mudslinging two months before Election Day, giving Obama, the media, and the liberal blogosphere, plenty of time to expose McCain's lies, to show the dishonesty of John McCain in consistently telling these lies. Two months of exposed McCain lying may be enough time for John McCain to destroy his reputation. Of course, the Rovians may know that John McCain can't really run on the issues, since the McCain political agenda is a continuation of the Bush political agenda. The Rovians know that almost three-quarters of the American public feel that the country is on the wrong track, and almost 60 percent of Americans disapprove of George W. Bush's job performance. So John McCain can't really run on the issues--Barack Obama would destroy him. Instead, John McCain makes a deal with the devil in embarking on this risky strategy, hoping that enough Americans will tune out on the lies, and vote for McCain out of fear, out of racism, out of Sarah Palin, or whatever other slime that John McCain can dredge up.
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