Monday, September 08, 2008

John & Sarah a Bridge To Nowhere - Updated

John McCain and Sarah Palin are liars. Of course the MSM will twist over backwards to avoid calling them liars, but that is exactly what they are.

Another reason that John and Sarah are just a Bridge to Nowhere.

Campaigns make dubious claims over the course of seeking office. It’s true, this happens; the campaign latches onto a piece of information that may be dubious, or stretches the facts. Usually the campaign doesn't straight out lie, because the campaign wants to have wiggle room of deniability. The McCain campaign however prefers to repeat dubious claims, even after they've been proven false. Sarah Palin came out making statements that she knew were not true, so in other words she started out her campaign with a lie.

McCain's handlers believe that voters won't either hear the truth or care what the truth is till it doesn't matter anymore. Take for example this morning; McCain's team unveiled a new TV ad, characterizing John McCain and Sarah Palin as two mavericks, "The original mavericks. He fights pork barrel spending; she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere."To support the claim that Palin "stopped" the Bridge to Nowhere instead of running on a pledge to build it, the ad cites an article from December in the Anchorage Daily News. Yet if you actually look at the article, you will see that the Daily News piece doesn't support the claim. The article says nothing about Palin “stopping” the bridge.

In reality Sarah Palin supported the bridge project, and campaigned on a pledge to build it, and when the bridge was scrapped, it was not by Ms. Palin, but by an embarrassed Congress. And even though the bridge project was scrapped, Palin still took the money and spent it on other Alaskan transportation projects. Unless the McCain campaign is prepared to change the meaning of the word "stopped," the ad's claim is obviously not true.It's not just this particular ad though. McCain and Palin have repeated the same claim, over and over again, in a variety of settings, after it was exposed as a lie.As Hilzoy explained over the weekend in the Washington Monthly, after Palin once again claimed to have rejected the Bridge to Nowhere, "She is not just telling lies; she's telling lies that have been exposed as lies, and that have gotten a lot of attention. Assuming she does not actually want to lose, she must assume that her audience either doesn't know that she's lying, or doesn't care.

In either case, it's deeply cynical, and deeply insulting. I just hope she isn't right."I concur!

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