Courtesy of Bill Maher

“Ready to Lie on Day One”

Now that would be an honest campaign slogan for John McCain. Check out the ad Bill Maher put together:

The “Crooked Talk” Express

Steve Chapman calls out McCain’s lies over at Reason:

Now politicians are not saints, and campaigns are not conducted under oath. We all expect a certain amount of deceit from people running for office, in the form of fudging, distortion, exaggeration, and omission. But the McCain campaign’s approach, as this episode illustrates, is of an entirely different scale and character. It is to normal political attacks what Hurricane Ike is to a drive-through car wash.

Take Palin’s claim to have opposed the Bridge to Nowhere. Long after it was exposed as false, she kept making it. The assumption behind the McCain strategy is that truth is irrelevant.

Last week, he released a TV spot on education studded with falsehoods. It quoted The Chicago Tribune calling Obama a “staunch defender of the existing public school monopoly.” But the Tribune didn’t say it. I did, in a signed column in the Tribune, which praised McCain’s support for school vouchers for low-income families.

The ad couldn’t be bothered explaining why Obama is wrong about vouchers. Instead, it said his “one accomplishment” was a bill mandating sex education for kindergarteners. “Learning about sex before learning to read?” asked the narrator, implying that 5-year-olds would be taught the proper use of condoms before being taught their ABCs. Which, as it happens, is not true.

Dissembler

John McCain, dissembler:

There is a good reason why John McCain’s campaign is having some trouble with truthiness these days.

McCain’s claim to be a “maverick” rests on the liberal positions he took during the days when he openly fought with Republican leaders and the party’s conservative base.

Because he cannot very well motivate Republicans by reminding them of the times he and they have quarreled, he has to distract and dissemble.

“Dishonest and Dishonorable”

Brad DeLong exposes more of McCain’s lies:

The McCain campaign says:

JohnMcCain.com – McCain-Palin 2008: Setting the Record Straight: Covering Those With Pre-Existing Conditions

MYTH: Some Claim That Under John McCain’s Plan, Those With Pre-Existing Conditions Would Be Denied Insurance.

FACT 1: John McCain Supported The Health Insurance Portability And Accountability Act In 1996 That Took The Important Step Of Providing Some Protection Against Exclusion Of Pre-Existing Conditions.

FACT 2: Nothing In John McCain’s Plan Changes The Fact That If You Are Employed And Insured You Will Build Protection Against The Cost Of Any Pre-Existing Condition.

FACT 3: As President, John McCain Would Work With Governors To Find The Solutions Necessary To Ensure Those With Pre-Existing Conditions Are Able To Easily Access Care.

The purpose of the McCain program is to convince employers to dump employer-sponsored coverage and so thicken the higher-copay, less-generous individual insurance market where insurers make their money by excluding those with pre-existing condition.

Fact 1 is simply irrelevant–that was twelve years ago, and that was a very different John McCain from today’s obsequious servant of Republican party prejudices. It is dishonorable for McCain to claim today that he is the same man he was then. Fact 2 is dishonest–if your employer doesn’t dump employer-sponsored coverage, then you are indeed covered. But the point of the plan is to get employers to dump employer-sponsored coverage. And fact 3 is dishonest as well: hope is not a plan.

A List

Drinking Liberally in New Milford summarizes SOME of McCain’s lies thus far:

If McCain’s lips are moving… He is lying:

The problem is that in an era where things can easily be verified, “I don’t remember” is sometimes passable and “I never said that” or “I never did that” is unacceptable and easily verifiable. 

• We know that he lied about not writing letters to the FCC to benefit one of his campaign contributors;
• We know that he lied when he said that he never asked for nor received a single earmark;
• We know that he lied about privatizing Social Security;
• During the primaries, he lied about his potential running mate, Romney on more than one occasion;
• Over the past week, he lied about Obama and visiting the troops. In fact, his new ad on this is also a lie.
• He lied this week (again) about not using the word “timetable”;
• He lied about his admission that he is the damn fool when it comes to the economy;
• His campaign lied about oil spills after Hurricane Katrina;
• He lied about his voting record when questioned by a veteran about it;
• He recently lied to either a child or to conservative bloggers about immigration;
• He lied about his POW experience (i.e., Pittsburgh Steelers vs. Green Bay Packers), and while this isn’t as big a deal to me, it should be raised if stupid petty nonsense about Obama gets raised.
• Of course his wife Cindy lied about her recipes for cookies when she stole them from Family Circle magazine. Of course, stealing is something that she knows well, as she also stole painkillers from a veteran’s charity that she was in charge of.
• He lied recently to FoxNews about a Town Hall event they were working together on;
• He lied about decreasing oil prices being because Bush lifted the offshore drilling ban;
• He has lied about Obama’s and Clinton’s health care proposals;
• He lied about his position on Bosnia and Kosovo in trying to prove his credentials;
• He lied about Clinton and Obama’s comments regarding renegotiating NAFTA;
• He lied about his opting into public financing when it was convenient for him to opt back out;
• He lied a few months back about Iran-Contra.
• He lied about his involvement (not sexual but political) with Iseman and her firm.

And that is just off the top of my head and a quick search.So let’s start calling him what he is. A full on liar. Not only “forgetful”, not only “misinterpreted”, not only “misquoted”, not only mean-spirited and stretching the truth.

“Continuing Assault on the Truth”

Radley Balko comes through again with some more coverage of McCain’s lies and a little fact checking to top it off:

Steve Chapman’s column this morning nails the John McCain campaign’s assault on truth and voter intelligence (an already easy target) of late.

In that vein, Mickey Kaus reported Friday that McCain’s campaign is now running a Spanish-language ad attacking Barack Obama for failing to support McCain’s comprehensive immigration bill.  It’s yet another McCain ad chock-full of egregious distortions.  What the ad doesn’t mention:

• Obama (like McCain) voted twice to end Senate filibusters on that bill.

• Both filibusters were led by the Republicans, not Obama or the Democrats.

• McCain himself said in the primaries that if the same bill were to come up for a vote in the Senate today, he would no longer vote for it.

In fact, it’s pretty difficult to discern anything truthful about the ad at all.

A Modest Proposal: Truth in Campaign Advertising

Why are product advertisments required to be true, but political advertisements can be outright lies? It’s a valid question, asked by Jeffry Zeldman:

It is illegal to make false claims in a TV or radio commercial unless you are running for political office.

If you’re selling toothpaste, your claims must be vetted by legal and medical professionals. But not if you’re selling a candidate.

If you’re selling a candidate, not only can you lie about his record, but more to the point, you can lie about his opponent.

These lies are seen and heard by millions, not only when they run as paid advertisements, but also when they are run again for free on 24-hour news networks hungry for controversy. And after they are run for free, they become talking points in an “unbiased” conversation that pretends there are two sides to every story, even when one side is lies. Two words: Swift Boat.

Lies, and a candidate’s embarrassing efforts to brush them aside, fill the news cycle and constitute the national discourse. And this terrifying and morally indefensible rupture from reality persists even when the country is on its knees.

If networks refuse to accept cigarette advertising, how can they readily approve dishonest political advertising? Cigarettes kill individuals, but lying political ads hurt the whole country. No democracy can afford this, let alone when the country is at war, and under existential threat from terrorists, and in economic free fall.

The Bridge to Nowhere

This is getting ridiculous! “At a campaign stop in Golden, CO today, Gov. Sarah Palin repeated — for the tenth time — her thoroughly debunked claim that she said “thanks, but no thanks” to Congress for federal funding for the Bridge to Nowhere.” More analysis, and a tally of all the times Palin has repeated this particular lie, can be found here.

Lying About the Teleprompter

McCain and Palin must think the American people are really stupid. Why else would they keep spreading these stupid lies?

At a fundraiser in Canton, Ohio, this evening, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had an interesting description of her speech to the Republican convention.

“There Ohio was right out in front, right in front of me,” Palin said. “The teleprompter got messed up, I couldn’t follow it, and I just decided I’d just talk to the people in front of me. It was Ohio.”

This struck many of us — who, as she spoke, followed along with her prepared remarks, and noted how closely she stuck to the script — as an unusual claim. (Especially those of my colleagues on the convention floor at the time, reading along on the prompter with her, noticing her excellent and disciplined delivery, how she punched words that were underlined and paused where it said “pause,” noting that “nuclear” was spelled out for her phonetically.)

[via ABC News Blog]

The “Blizzard of Lies”

Krugman, in a doozy of a column in the New York Times:

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.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.