This comical candidate that McCain pulled out of a hat about a week ago hasn’t spoken with voters apart from a few stump speeches, hasn’t met with reporters, hasn’t answered any questions. But some facts are emerging about this "ethics reformer" and opponent of big government. Hardly a word emerges from her mouth that isn't some kind of lie, falsehood or fabrication.
It can't be accidental. It seems almost pathological. Here goes:
- She says she opposed the "bridge to nowhere." Utter lie. It had already been killed in Congress in 2005, before she ran on a platform supporting it in 2006.
- She said "thanks but no thanks" to the appropriation for the bridge to nowhere. Naked lie. She kept the money and used it on other pork.
- She opposes pork. LOL. She hired a lobbyist to seek it in Wasilla and Alaska is the welfare queen of the United States – taking in $2 from the lower 48 for every dollar it sends to Washington.
- Parents of special needs children will have a friend in the White House. Complete falsehood. She cut 60% of the legislative approved appropriation for special education out of the only budget she was responsible for in Alaska.
- She’s a loyal American. I don’t think so. Anyone who has consistently supported the Alaska Independence Party, with it’s avowed aim of seceding from the union, is hardly a loyal American. And her husband was a dues-paying member of AIP for about 7 years.
- She opposes big government. Not at all. Her idea of government is that it's a handy tool she can abuse to punish her personal enemies – threatening town librarians who won’t ban the books she wants banned, firing local law enforcement officers who cross her path, and dismissing state public safety directors who refuse to knuckle under by firing her former brother-in-law, who was engaged in a nasty divorce and custody dispute with her sister.
- She opposes government waste. Complete fabrication. Today’s Washington Post reports she charged Alaskans a daily rate used for official travel for more than 300 nights that she spent at home. (I must say, even I find that hard to believe.) But there you have it: she charged taxpayers $17,000 over 19 months to sleep in her own bed, while also racking up $43,490 for travel for her husband and children, including three nights in a $700 New York hotel.
- The final insult – she’s for family values. But the latest Newsweek reports that Judge John Suddock described the behavior of Palin and her family in disparaging the former brother-in-law as "a form of child abuse" and told the sister to rein the family in.
Let's face it. This is America. Even a young and inexperienced Valley Girl like Palin is entitled to run for the vice presidency. Family divorce proceedings are never anyone's finest hour. And maybe it’s OK for Palin to be literally a breath away from the Oval Office, leaving the US dependent on a sick old man’s 72-year-old heart to keep her out. But for McCain to put a complete and utter mystery up for this office with no vetting is completely bizarre. It's so irresponsible that it's hard to take him seriously when he says he puts his "country first."
Imagine the outcry if any of the documented irregularities above had been leveled at Obama or Biden. The chatter in the media echo chamber would be deafening. But instead we get a collective shrug, while the Washington Post and others turn to personality politics and the manufactured Republican outrage about Obama’s "lipstick on a pig" comment.
Obama may be right. The McCain operation thinks we’re fools. And who knows? Maybe we will be.