Lies, Lies, Lies, Yeah!

I haven't been ignoring presidential election, I only with I were. I haven't seen this quantified, but the McCain effort seems like the stupidest campaign for president ever. This fabrication about Palin's turning down the "Bridge to Nowhere" is absolutely ridiculous. Think Progress is keeping track of how many times Palin, McCain, or their campaign repeats the untruth, and as of this writing, it's up to 25 (with Palin repeating it twice more on the campaign trail on Tuesday. This is after the claim has been widely refuted, even by such unlikely sources as the Wall Street Journal and Fox News (FOX NEWS!!!). In further debunking the story, Josh Marshall spelled out a timetable of the events, and it turns out that the project was canceled before Palin ran for governor, so instead of telling Congress "thanks but no thanks," she was still supporting a project that was no longer on the table!

And this doesn't even get into the whole pig controversy. You can read about it here if you don't already know what I'm talking about, but trust me, you don't want the aggravation. Once again, Josh Marshall has a useful list of responses in the press. Many people are calling the McCain camp on the ridiculousness of their claims, but the fact that they're not laughed out of the public sphere entirely means that we've got far too much patience and tolerance for nonsense that's driving the news cycle.

This may actually amount to little more than more nonsense, but I'm a bit surprised that the candidate's daughter, Meghan McCain, hasn't been called out more on her Tuesday morning Today Show appearance where she claimed: "No one knows what war is like other than my family. Period." Sure, I'm prepared to accept that she misspoke, but that statement perfectly encapsulates the McCain campaign's condescension and hubris, and--well, I guess that explains why everyone's letting it slide.