“A Blizzard of Lies”

The GOP snow job

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
9/15/08

A couple of months ago, I was talking to a friend in email, and I mentioned that I wanted to devote many of my essays in the home stretch to keeping the candidates honest, pointing out inaccuracies and outright fabrications by both sides in the interest of helping people avoid being simply fooled into making a choice they actually didn’t want. I wasn’t sure how real Obama was, and I was curious as to how McCain would refute the hated policies of Putsch without betraying his party leader.

Two months on, and it’s pretty much pointless to say it will be a non-partisan exercise. Obama is running a generally honest campaign. About the worst thing I have discovered is that he is low-balling the estimates on the budget deficits his tax ideas might cause, and even there, we’re both at the mercy of how the economy does, and in economics, the one statement absolutely and positively guaranteed to produce an incorrect answer is the one that starts, “If things go on as they have...” Obama is being optimistic, but he’s not lying.

The McCain campaign, however, defies belief. They seem to have adopted the philosophy that any lie sold successfully to the public is as good as any truth. Paul Krugman of the New York Times, a man not given to persiflage, referred this week to the McCain campaign’s “blizzard of lies.” His column began, “Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere? These stories have two things in common: they're all claims recently made by the McCain campaign - and they're all out-and-out lies.”

If I was surprised to see language on the opinion page of the Times like that, the following day the editorial side weighed in, and they, too expressed amazement at the range and variety of complete lies coming from the McCain camp. Particularly those that swirled around Sarah Palin, who has falsely been credited for killing the infamous “bridge to nowhere” pork project (she aggressively campaigned for it, opposing it only AFTER Congress killed it, and then took the money anyway), the “put the jet up on E-bay” (where it didn’t sell, and the state wound up taking a loss on the eventual sale – Palin is fond of telling this story as she jets around the country in a 757), the “I understand Russia because Alaska is right next door” absurdity (During the Gibson interview in which she failed to be able to identify the Bush Doctrine, the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, she actually said, “They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.” Going by that logic, the fact that I can see my neighbor’s cherry tree from here makes me an arborist.), and that she was “the new face of feminism,” assuming of course, that feminists want to ban abortion, teach creationism in schools, and remove books from the library.

They even tried to puff up her blank resume on foreign policy by claiming she visited Iraq. That, too, turned out to be a lie. According to the Boston Globe, “Palin made an official visit to see Alaskan troops in Kuwait in July of 2007. There, she made a stop at a border crossing with Iraq, but did not actually visit the country.”

Remember a few months ago Hillary caught a lot of static over her silly claim about ducking sniper fire in Sarajevo? Hey, at least she actually DID visit the fucking country! She didn’t lie about THAT! Oh, wait. Palin was close enough to Iraq to actually SEE Iraq. That makes her an expert on Iraq, just like Little Diomede Island makes her an expert on Russia. (Has anyone checked to see if she ever actually visited that island? I’m betting she hasn’t.)

Speaking of Hillary, Palin’s latest is that Democrats won’t vote for Obama because he didn’t pick a woman as his running mate. Apparently she feels the key to winning the race is tokenism: she’s the token broad, and that outweighs the fact that Obama actually earned his spot as the Democratic candidate. Because Obama didn’t engage in tokenism and use Hillary that way (and at least Hillary would have been qualified for the post, unlike Palin), he can’t win. It leaves me with the same sense of sickened disgust I feel when I hear Clarence “Slappy” Thomas, America’s top undeserving Affirmative Action token, explain that affirmative action only demeans blacks. No, people like Slappy Thomas demean blacks. Everyone else just realizes that black people deserve an equal chance.

McCain himself has been saying whatever it takes to pander. He was against waterboarding before he was for it (and the most horrible irony of his newer position is that, by the admin definition of “torture,” McCain was never tortured). He was against the occupation, and now he’s for it. He sponsored legislation to help the children of immigrants in school. Now he’s against it. McCain opposed privatization of social security, and now he’s for it. He considered the religious right a blight on the American political landscape, but has since accepted the endorsement of the vile John Hagee, and been forced to take a religious creationist whackjob with affiliations with a Dominionist church as his running mate. He now opposes the very immigration bill that he sponsored. He sponsored open air laws about grass-root lobbying, and now opposes them. He was for gay marriage before he was against it.

There is no principled stand he took in the 90s that he doesn’t have an equally principled stand against today. Zero, after all, equals zero. It would probably be easier to find a personal conviction he hasn’t betrayed in his sad, damp lust to be president.

He hired Karl Rove, the man who slimed him in 2000, and Karl has maintained his post as a “journalist” with Faux News, and wrote an article the other day saying McCain didn’t become computer savvy because he was a POW when computers became widespread in the public. McCain was a POW in the late 80s and early 90s?

Even his media supporters are just simply flat out lying. The Wall Street Journal, a former newspaper that is now part of the Murdoch empire, had a piece the other day on earmarks and the false claim that Obama’s requests for earmarks had increased each year and exceeded McCain’s. (Palin’s request for earmarks were the highest percapita in the nation, incidently). The Wall Street Journal concluded, ‘“The only people 'lying' about spending are the Obama campaign. The only explanation for their hysterical attacks is that they're afraid that when John McCain and Sarah Palin are in the White House, Barack Obama's nearly $1 billion in earmark spending will stop dead in its tracks,’ Mr. Rogers said.”

However, the initial story had this closing paragraph: “At a rally today, Sen. McCain again asserted that Sen. Obama has requested nearly a billion in earmarks. In fact, the Illinois senator requested $311 million last year, according to the Associated Press, and none this year. In comparison, Gov. Palin has requested $750 million in her two years as governor – which the AP says is the largest per-capita request in the nation.” That final, exculpatory paragraph was promptly pulled from the WSJ website.

The media were whining that Rove’s machine controlled the daily news cycle with stories as irresistible to reporters as catnip is to a kitten, about how Obama called Palin a pig (he didn’t), and whining that it was out of their hands, and that as long as Rove pumped out stupid vicious absurdities at 9pm each day, all they could do was flutter their hands helplessly and not be able to cover more substantive issues. And then they wonder why Americans hold them in such contempt.

The lies are unending, egregious, a roiling tide of filth and calumny. As a result, McCain and Obama are effectively tied in the polls.

So the real question, what it all boils down to, this year, is one question:

“Are Americans really that fucking stupid?”