Like George W. Bush, McCain and Palin have to lie. Because if they told the truth about their policies, they'd lose the election.
By Alan Wolfe
Eight years after the travesty of the 2000 election, in which the media were prone to emphasize Al Gore's exaggerations while letting George W. Bush off the hook, Republican politicians finally are being called out on their dishonesty. "The biggest liar in modern political history," writes Michael Tomasky, the editor of the Guardian America, about John McCain. There are indeed so many lies associated with the Republican campaign that one can pick and choose at random. My favorites are the efforts by the McCain campaign to portray Obama as being in favor of teaching sex education to 5-year-olds and the Spanish language ad accusing him of opposing immigration reform. Your favorites might include McCain's claim that Obama will raise taxes on the middle class or his statement to the women of "The View" that Sarah Palin never requested earmarks.
McCain's propensity to lie has become what political junkies call a meme, an idea or behavior that runs, seemingly unstoppably, from one media outlet to another. Some bloggers offer daily counts of how many falsehoods McCain tells while others wonder why the Democrats do not respond in turn. Even the mainstream press has gotten into the act. One of the pleasures of the 2008 campaign -- I admit they have been few and far between -- is watching all those who once admired John McCain for his truthfulness realize the true depths of his moral depravity. When McCain is linked to Palin, moreover, as he so frequently wants to be, lying experiences something of a multiplier effect. These candidates lie so much that they have taken to lying about their own lies.
Before we get carried away with enthusiasm about all this, though, we should keep two things in mind. One is that we are so quick to label McCain a liar that we tend to forget how much, and with what horrendous consequences, George W. Bush possessed the same character flaw. The other is that Republicans lie so frequently, not because the party just happened to settle upon one serial liar after another to run for high office, but because the form of conservatism to which they all adhere demands that if they are to win they have no choice but to lie.
In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush, then something of a political unknown, claimed to be a compassionate conservative and promised the country a "humble" foreign policy. Lies both. Compassionate conservatism was a brilliant campaign slogan, an attempt by Bush to persuade independent voters that he was not a raving madman like Newt Gingrich, who had urged, in true Dickensian fashion, the building of orphanages to solve the welfare problem. Long before the public had ever heard of Rick Warren, Karl Rove understood that the evangelical base of the Republican Party wanted language more uplifting than traditional Republican red meat, and the idea that conservatives were in fact more compassionate than bureaucratic liberals provided it. In actuality, as we now know, Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, the most compassionate program ever adopted in this country, and was simply waiting for the right opportunity to do so.
more:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/09/18/lies/
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