The Republican war on truth threatens the future of America
By: Courtney Haden
... The lie now revealed, a politician would ordinarily apologize or at least fabricate a plausible pretext for misunderstanding. Mrs. Palin did quite another thing. She chose to repeat the lie. And repeat it. And repeat it. Having backtracked a bit on her bridge claim under examination by Charles Gibson on ABC News, she returned to the hustings with her “thanks but no thanks” spiel intact, reciting it by rote nine more times at public speeches between her nomination and press time Tuesday morning. What’s more, according to ThinkProgress, campaign ads, surrogates and McCain himself have uttered the same blarney at least 34 times so far.
Serial prevarication has become the order of the day for the honorable senator as well. McCain, extolling the virtue of his veep, declared that Palin had never requested earmarks for Alaska, when in fact she’d asked for 52 earmarks totaling $256 million last year and 31 for $197 million this year. Then he claimed Palin had vetoed earmarks totaling $500 million, when actually the governor has no power to do any such thing.
McCain has given his approval to one TV ad after another misrepresenting or falsifying the remarks of his opponent. One ad claims Obama’s pushed to raise taxes on everybody, another that he voted against funding troops; still another took quotations out of context to paint the Obama campaign as sexist. Each of these ads has been debunked by impartial fact-checking organizations, but still the lies, approved by the candidate, keep on comin’.
It is as though the McCain’s camp has decided to jettison accountability and integrity in favor of saying anything they think will garner votes. Online, the campaign’s mendacity is succinctly, if indelicately, summed up in what is called Atrios’s Law, after the blogger who coined it: “Even the Republicans all know it’s full of shit, but they don’t care! It pisses off liberals, and that’s all they really care about.”...
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