From NYTimes.com: Blizzard of Lies
Op-Ed Columnist Paul Krugman writes:
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.
…
Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.
So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.
The outright lies are what I find so disturbing about the McCain campaign. Do I fault Palin as governor for taking the money for her state? No. That’s what governors do, try to get as many state projects funded as possible.
I just think it’s wrong for her to come out and claim that she’s a reformer by repeating something that is false over and over. It’s almost like if you say something that’s a lie enough times it somehow becomes true.
The lying has a deeper impact, causing the public to become more and more cynical about politics. The only way to change things in this country for the better is to get more people with newer and better ideas to serve the country.
