McCain and Palin Are Trying to Take Political Lying to the Next Dimension
By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted September 15, 2008.
McCain and Palin reach a new level of campaign dishonesty as they tell lies about their records and their opponent. But will they pay a price?
{Here from Alternet: Other Alternet info. below article by Robert Parry.}
Despite all the chatter about how “historic” Campaign 2008 has been, it is the McCain-Palin ticket that it is truly testing the limits, not of race or gender politics, but whether the United States is ready to enter into a new dimension of political lying.
Until two weeks ago, it would have been hard to believe that any political figure would have had the audacity to step into the national spotlight by telling the bald-faced lies that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has. Yet, many Americans have embraced her enthusiastically and don’t want to hear anything negative about her.
Palin’s most obvious lie is one that she has repeated over and over: “I told Congress, ‘thanks but no thanks’ about that Bridge to Nowhere.” Now, however, anyone who has bothered to fact-check this claim knows that Palin supported the bridge until Congress removed the earmark and then she kept the money to use on other state projects.
Palin also presents herself as a “reformer” who can’t stand earmarks or the lobbyists who arrange such wasteful pork-barrel spending — except that she hired Alaska’s top Washington lobbyists to secure millions of dollars in earmarks for her town, Wasilla, and for her state, including sending off a wish list of nearly $200 million just this year.
With the help of the lobbying firm and her annual treks to Washington, Palin secured a stunning $27 million in earmarked funds for Wasilla, a town then with about 6,000 residents. Some of Palin’s projects were considered such prime examples of Washington pork that they were cited in anti-earmark reports compiled by none other than Sen. John McCain earlier this decade.
When ABC’s news anchor Charles Gibson asked Palin about her past support of earmarks and her backing for the Bridge to Nowhere, Palin simply refused to acknowledge that she had made misleading or false claims about herself.
“It has always been an embarrassment that abuses of the ear form — earmark process has been accepted in Congress,” Palin said. “And that’s what John McCain has fought. And that’s what I joined him in fighting.”
But Palin is not alone in simply denying reality. Her partner, John McCain, has shown his own ability to not blush while lying.
On the ABC-TV show “The View,” McCain was confronted with Palin’s contradictory record of arranging earmarks while selling herself as a reformer. McCain simply ignored the facts and declared, “not as governor she didn’t.”
McCain’s Lies
But McCain now has his own long trail of stunning lies, both about his opponent Barack Obama and McCain’s dubious reputation for clean politics. After presiding over a convention notable for its partisan rancor — including endless mocking of Obama as a “community organizer” — McCain said his presidency would be about eliminating “partisan rancor.”
Earlier in the campaign, McCain approved ads accusing Obama of everything from causing $4 a gallon gasoline (a silly charge) to stiffing wounded U.S. troops in Germany by canceling a visit because he couldn’t bring along cameras (a false accusation).
More recently, McCain and his team have blamed Obama for passing a law that would require sex education for kindergarteners and for calling Palin a “pig” when the Democratic nominee criticized McCain’s economic package by saying it was like “putting lipstick on a pig.”
Though McCain himself had applied the common expression to Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan, Obama’s use of the image was ripped from its context and twisted into a “sexist” attack on Palin.
As for the kindergarten sex-education ad, the McCain campaign had contorted Obama’s support for a program that would teach young school children how to avoid sexual predators into providing them “comprehensive sex education.”
When confronted on “The View” about these two dishonest ads, McCain insisted that “actually they are not lies.” He then went on to argue that his own use of the “lipstick on a pig” remark was different because he was talking about Clinton’s health-care plan.
Barbara Walters, one of the program’s co-hosts, challenged this excuse, noting that Obama was speaking about change, not Palin.
McCain’s response was that Obama “chooses his words very carefully,” suggesting apparently that when McCain has used the phrase he doesn’t. McCain added as his defense that harsh things have been said about him, too, and that “this is a tough campaign.”
At the end of McCain campaign ads — including others that have compared Obama to Paris Hilton and distorted his positions on taxes, health care and energy — the voters hear McCain intoning, “I approved this message.”
Successful Strategy
All of this might not be so troubling to Americans who care about the future of their democracy, except that the smears are working.
The McCain-Palin ticket is surging in the polls behind this strategy of deliberate lies and deceptive rhetoric. Many national polls now put the Republicans ahead in the presidential race and show them quickly closing the gap with Democrats in congressional races.
Not only has the lying worked well in raising fresh doubts about Obama and lifting the spirits of Republican activists, but it’s had a curious impact on the national press corps, which has difficulty standing up to what might be called strategic lying that saturates the media’s capacity for fact-checking and plays on the desire to appear “even-handed.”
For weeks, the national press corps essentially has followed a “plague on both their houses” approach to campaign distortions, even though the McCain campaign was by far the more egregious — and systematic — in its pattern of misrepresentations.
Indeed, it seems that the McCain strategy included preemptive berating of the news media for “bias” as a way to scare journalists away from taking note of how McCain’s strategic lying was reshaping the electoral landscape.
It took the New York Times until Sept. 13 to publish a comprehensive story about McCain’s cynical approach to politics.
The Times story noted that McCain’s “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.”
The Times added that “for all the criticism [of the lies and distortions], the offensive seems to be having an impact. It has been widely credited by strategists in both parties with rejuvenating Mr. McCain’s campaign and putting Mr. Obama on the defensive since it began early this summer.”
Times columnist Bob Herbert made a similar point in a Sept. 13 op-ed, writing: “While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail.”
McCain’s Record
Beyond the studied anti-intellectualism — even anti-realism — now surrounding the McCain-Palin campaign, there is another longer-term question of whether McCain’s current behavior is just a “campaign mode” aberration or whether he ever deserved the favorable depiction as a “maverick” and a “reformer.”
Though McCain has bucked his party on some high-profile issues, such as campaign finance reform and earmarked spending, his actual record reveals him to be a doctrinaire conservative with his own checkered past on ethics.
McCain, in effect, reinvented himself as a “reformer” in the 1990s after he got caught in the late 1980s in a savings-and-loan influence-peddling scheme with Cindy McCain’s business partner, Charles Keating.
Even in recent years while cultivating his reform image, McCain — as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee — has maintained cozy relationships with business lobbyists and, indeed, stocked his campaign staff with many of the insiders he rails against.
Yet, because of his long history of flattering press clippings — he once called the journalists on his “Straight Talk Express” his “base” — McCain seems to always expect gentle treatment, regardless of his actions. That confidence has enabled him to get away with stating the opposite of obvious truths and suffering little consequence.
For instance, when the New York Times published an article on Feb. 21 describing McCain’s relationship with a telecommunication lobbyist, his campaign issued a statement declaring that “John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country [in Congress] with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.”
McCain issued this statement despite the clear public record about his role as one of the so-called “Keating Five,” senators who did favors for savings-and-loan wheeler-dealer Charles Keating.
In 1987, Keating wanted to frustrate oversight from federal banking regulators who were examining his Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. At Keating’s urging, McCain wrote letters, introduced bills and pushed a Keating associate for a job on a banking regulatory board. McCain then joined several other senators in two private meetings with federal banking regulators on Keating’s behalf.
Two years later, Lincoln collapsed, costing the U.S. taxpayers $3.4 billion. Keating eventually went to prison and three other senators from the Keating Five saw their political careers ruined. McCain drew a Senate reprimand for his involvement and later lamented his faulty judgment. “Why didn’t I fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?” he wrote in his 2002 memoir, Worth the Fighting For.
But some people close to the case thought McCain got off too easy — and actually may have been the senator most deeply entwined with Keating. Not only was McCain taking donations from Keating and his business circle, getting free rides on Keating’s corporate jet and enjoying joint vacations in the Bahamas — McCain’s second wife, the beer fortune heiress Cindy Hensley, had invested with Keating in an Arizona shopping mall.
In the years that followed, however, McCain not only got out from under the shadow of the Keating Five scandal but found a silver lining in the cloud, transforming the case into a lessons-learned chapter of his personal narrative.
Nevertheless, years later when the Times article questioned just how ethical the “new” John McCain really was, McCain lashed back with a categorical statement that was categorically untrue, saying he had “never done favors for special interests.”
When one considers how other recent presidential candidates, such as Al Gore in 2000, were treated for perceived misstatements about their personal records, it’s striking how effectively McCain has escaped serious criticism for lying — and how he has sustained his reputation as a supposed “truth-teller.”
So, perhaps, the current pattern of McCain approving dishonest ads and embracing a calculated strategy of false statements about Barack Obama shouldn’t come as a surprise.
McCain now seems to have located a soul-mate in Sarah Palin, who shares McCain’s assuredness in making public statements that are clear-cut lies and then insisting they are absolute truth.
The only remaining question is how well this strategy will work.
-=======================================================
Olbermann: Ayers a guest in McCain’s glass house
In a Special Campaign Comment, Keith Olbermann points out that not only does John McCain have a closer relationship with Rashid Khalidi than Barack Obama does, that relationship means McCain is has a connection to William Ayers as well.
=======================================================
-
-
And a whole lot more from Alternet
-
By Robert S. Eshelman, Tomdispatch.com
Election 2008: A mass defection from the Republican Party may be underway in counties that were once GOP strongholds. Call it the reverse Bradley Effect.
Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace: Many of the promises the candidates make on the stump would have trouble passing muster with the WTO — that’s the whole point of “free trade” deals.
Dara Colwell, AlterNet
Environment: With new solar-powered movie theaters and factories, the solar industry is exploding. But how far can it take us toward a clean energy future?
Vanessa Richmond, The Tyee
Sex and Relationships: Softening up, going down, losing firmness — it seems sex and the economy have more in common than language.
Mark Klempner, AlterNet
Health and Wellness: The Bush administration used a politics of fear to diminish our ability to think critically and to erode our capacity to love.
Niko Karvounis, Health Beat
Health and Wellness: Should patients have the right to sue drug companies for personal injuries from FDA-approved prescription drugs?
Sally Kohn, Movement Vision Lab
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace: Conservatives talk about “starving the beast” of government. But given that government feeds and nurtures us, we’d only be starving ourselves.
Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace: When we want to get serious about a long-term bailout strategy, we’ll start dismantling the American empire and Pentagon programs.
Maria Luisa Tucker, AlterNet
Election 2008: A map illustrating regional personality differences across America is surprisingly similar to the red state/blue state map of the nation.
David Morris, AlterNet
Environment: This happened before, in 1981. But this time the renewable energy industry is in better shape for a fight.
Max Blumenthal, The Daily Beast
Election 2008: How a Minnesota congresswoman became the poster child for the GOP’s election 2008 crack-up.
Mark Ames, The Nation
Media and Technology: Deconstructing the NYT fairy tale of the poor innocent small democracy of Georgia attacked by a cruel Cold War Russian monster.
Kevin Phillips, Huffington Post
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace: Paulson and Bernanke’s “rescue” have only begun to do their full long-term damage.
Kim Moody, Labor Notes
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace: Despite innovations in unionizing through the card check process, a bold initiative waiting in Congress is the big hope.
Richard Girard, Polaris Institute
Water: New buildings are being constructed without water fountains, and existing buildings are decommissioning older fountains.
AlterNet
Reproductive Justice and Gender: Find out how the candidates compare on the 10 most important reproductive justice and gender issues, from abortion to equal pay.
Norman Stockwell, AlterNet
Election 2008: Forty-one years after McCain was shot down in Vietnam, the man who saved his life has died in obscurity.
Hans Johnson, In These Times
With public dissatisfaction at record highs, Democrats are set for another round of pickups.
ZP Heller, Brave New Films
Video: Watch Obama spokesman Bill Burton stand up to FOX’s Megyn Kelly.
Sue Katz, Consenting Adult
PEEK: All this criticism is not sliding off Palin’s silk-covered back.
Michael Bader, AlterNet
A response to Robert Jensen’s recent AlterNet article, “Porn’s Dirty, Dangerous Secret.”
Danny Schechter, AlterNet
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace: Markets are volatile and trending down while banks are still not lending despite frequent projections of massive unemployment and stagflation.
Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Reproductive Justice and Gender: Pragmatism doesn’t mean leaving your core principles at the door.
Danielle Ivory, American News Project
Default: With the help of Voter Action and the NAACP, voters filed a complaint in a Philadelphia federal court.
Phyllis Bennis, Foreign Policy in Focus
War on Iraq: Whatever the U.S.-Iraqi “agreement” ends up looking like, it is unlikely to have much of an effect on the occupation.
AlterNet
Water: See how Obama and McCain compare on eight water issues from privatization to pollution.
Peter Dreier, John Atlas, The Nation
Election 2008: Desperate Republicans are scapegoating the respected community advocacy group for Wall Street’s disastrous lending spree.
CNN
“McCain is going to make sure the wealthy get another incredible tax break while everybody else suffers.”
Amanda Terkel, Think Progress
PEEK: The Senate’s longest-serving Republican may end his career with jail time.
Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Rights and Liberties: A 25-year fight to bring Jon Burge and police who systematically tortured black men to justice makes a critical breakthrough.
Michael Schwartz, Tomdispatch.com
War on Iraq: Iraq’s state of complete disrepair has created a population in steaming discontent.
Garrison Keillor, Tribune Media Services
Election 2008: It’s clear that some Americans are beyond persuasion. Thankfully, it seems that most of us are willing to recognize BS when we see it.
Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Democracy and Elections: How far will an already politicized Justice Department go to assist Republicans win on November 4?
Kari Lydersen, Earth Island Journal
Water: From the mining of raw materials to energy production to the manufacturing process itself, industry guzzles tons of water.
AlterNet
Election 2008: From voter suppression to trust in public elections, a look at the candidates’ positions on 10 important voter issues.
Tim Shipman, The Telegraph (UK)
Election 2008: Senior Republicans believe Barack Obama will have more political power than any president in a generation.
Jed L, Daily Kos
Election 2008: Palin gives a wink and a nod to right-wing extremists, with whom she shares radical views about the reproductive rights of women.
Bono, AlterNet
Health and Wellness: In a recent speech, the pop star makes an impassioned call for Americans to resist the urge to turn inward during our troubled times.
Annabelle Gurwitch, TheNation.com
Election 2008: Incessant cries for help — and money — from people running campaigns are destroying my peace of mind.
Pat Alviso, AlterNet
After all, if my son can buck up and do yet another tour of duty in Iraq, I can face a crowd of Palin supporters.
Stan Cox, AlterNet
Environment: If we scale down economic activity — especially if the rich do — we could all live in a cleaner world.
James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com
AlterNet
DrugReporter: Supporters of California’s Prop 5 argue it would dramatically improve the way non-violent offenders are treated.
Brad Stone, The New York Times
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace: Big Finance’s pursuit of struggling American consumers is one of the overlooked causes of the debt boom and the resulting crisis.
Jim Cirile, Velvet Revolution
Democracy and Elections: Thirteen election integrity experts and activists discuss the e-voting challenges and solutions for 2008.
AlterNet
Media and Technology: A look at how Obama and McCain compare on everything from net neutrality to the digital TV transition.
=
=
FROM THE MOUTHS OF BABES or kids say the darndest things
Tags: Bible humor, children explain the Bible, from the mouths of babes, funny kids comments, humor
-
This was an e-mail I received without known authors or origin. Yet I think we can all have a non political interlude in this nation. The same nation where during the Pledge of Allegiance I would say; … “and to the Republic where witches stand.”
-
Here it is;
-
KIDS WERE ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. THE
FOLLOWING STATEMENTS ABOUT THE BIBLE WERE WRITTEN BY CHILDREN. THEY HAVE NOT
BEEN RETOUCHED OR CORRECTED. INCORRECT SPELLING HAS BEEN LEFT IN.
-
1. IN THE FIRST BOOK OF THE BIBLE, GUINESSIS. GOD GOT TIRED OF
CREATING THE WORLD SO HE TOOK THE SABBATH OFF.
2. ADAM AND EVE WERE CREATED FROM AN APPLE TREE. NOAH’S WIFE WAS
JOAN OF ARK. NOAH BUILT AND ARK AND THE ANIMALS CAME ON IN PEARS.
3 .. LOTS WIFE WAS A PILLAR OF SALT DURING THE DAY, BUT A BALL OF FIRE
DURING THE NIGHT.
4. THE JEWS WERE A PROUD PEOPLE AND THROUGHOUT HISTORY THEY HAD
TROUBLE WITH UNSYMPATHETIC GENITALS.
5. SAMPSON WAS A STRONGMAN WHO LET HIMSELF BE LED ASTRAY BY A JEZEBEL
LIKE DELILAH.
6. SAMSON SLAYED THE PHILISTINES WITH THE AXE OF THE APOSTLES.
7. MOSE S LED THE JEWS TO THE RED SEA WHERE THEY MADE UNLEAVENED BREAD
WHICH IS BREAD WITHOUT ANY INGREDIENTS.
8, THE EGYPTIANS WERE ALL DROWNED IN THE DESSERT. AFTERWARDS, MOSES
WENT UP TO MOUNT CYANIDE TO GET THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
9. THE FIRST COMMANDMENTS WAS WHEN EVE TOLD ADAM TO EAT THE APPLE.
10. THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT IS THOU SHALT NOT ADMIT ADULTER Y.
11. MOSES DIED BEFORE HE EVER REACHED CANADA THEN JOSHUA LED THE
HEBREWS IN THE BATTLE OF GERITOL.
12. THE GREATEST MIRICLE IN THE BIBLE IS WHEN JOSHUA TOLD HIS SON TO
STAND STILL AND HE OBEYED HIM.
13. DAVID WAS A HEBREW KING WHO WAS SKILLED AT PLAYING THE LIAR. HE FOUGHT
THE FINKELSTEINS, A RACE OF PEOPLE WHO LIVED IN BIBLICAL TIMES.
14. SOLOMON, ONE OF DAVIDS SONS, HAD 300 WIVES AND 700 PORCUPINES.
15. WHEN MARY HEARD SHE WAS THE MOTHER OF JESUS, SHE SANG THE MAGNA
CARTA.
16. WHEN THE THREE WISE GUYS FROM THE EAST SIDE ARRIVED THEY FOUND
JESUS IN THE MANAGER.
17. JESUS WAS BORN BECAUSE MARY HAD AN IMMACULATE CONTRAPTION.
18. ST. JOHN THE BLACKSMI TH DUMPED WATER ON HIS HEAD.
19. JESUS ENUNCIATED THE GOLDEN RULE, WHICH SAYS TO DO UNTO OTHERS
BEFORE THEY DO ONE TO YOU. HE ALSO EXPLAINED A MAN DOTH NOT LIVE BY SWEAT
ALONE.
20. IT WAS A MIRICLE WHEN JESUS ROSE FROM THE DEAD AND MANAGED TO GET
THE TOMBSTONE OFF THE ENTRANCE.
21. THE PEOPLE WHO FOLLOWED THE LORD WERE CALLED THE 12 DECIBELS.
22. THE EPISTELS WERE THE WIVES OF THE APOSTLES.
23. ONE OF THE OPPOSSUMS WAS ST. MATTHEW WHO WAS ALSO A TAXIMAN.
24. ST. PAUL CAVORTED TO CHRISTIANITY, HE PREACHED HOLY ACRIMONY WHICH
IS ANOTHER NAME FOR MARRAIGE.
25. CHRISTIANS HAVE ONLY ONE SPOUSE. THIS IS CALLED MONOTONY.
-
-