In a Time of Universal Deceit, Telling the Truth is Revolutionary.
Sunday, October 1, 2023

Garden variety liars: Palin and McCain

Updated with the most repugnant lie of all, and yes, it has to do with racism. I did a little research and neither candidate fits the usual psychiatric criteria for either of the two kinds of liars, pathological and compulsive. I was hoping there might be a "shrink the candidates" column in it.* Flatulence is malodorous but isn't necessarily a sign of disease. Sure the lies stink, but their serial lying to adoring acolytes chanting "country first" and booing Obama is plain old self-serving manipulative lying.
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Updated with the most repugnant lie of all, and yes, it has to do with racism. I did a little research and neither candidate fits the usual psychiatric criteria for either of the two kinds of liars, pathological and compulsive. I was hoping there might be a “shrink the candidates” column in it.* Flatulence is malodorous but isn’t necessarily a sign of disease. Sure the lies stink, but their serial lying to adoring acolytes chanting “country first” and booing Obama is plain old self-serving manipulative lying.


Scroll down to addendum for the most regugnant lie of all.

That McCain and Palin lie repeatedly has become abundantly clear to anyone who cares about checking the facts with unbiased sources. Use the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania Fact Check to analyze the words from the lip synced co-presidency candidates, who I might just start calling the Two Tweedles. In case you hadn’t noticed, they are joined both at the lip and at the hip now (see “Republicans Compose a New Way of Campaigning”).

McCain is sounding more and more like Jon Lovitz playing Tommy (“that’s the ticket”) Flanagan on Saturday Night Live as he keeps coming up with ever more outlandish lies to explain who’s at fault for the current financial meltdown. Unless McCain has a new fall guy since I last checked, his latest is as much an absurdity as it is a lie. He says Obama caused it stating “people like Sen. Obama have been too busy gaming the system and haven’t ever done a thing to actually challenge the system. That’s not country first, that’s Obama first.” (Reference)

If there’s one thing worse than the kind of lying that one expects from a criminal trying to avoid conviction or from a kid caught with has hand in the cookie jar, it’s lying about things you are even more guilty of than the person you accuse.

McCain tried to link Obama to two former Fannie Mae CEOs, one of whom was forced to resign as head of the Obama V.P. search committee, and the other who wasn’t even giving Obama advice.

Of Course, McCain’s main economic adviser is Phil Gramm and his campaign advisers are a Who’s Who of lobbyists.

By now those reading this website and others endeavoring to tell the truth about Sarah Palin know that she is a facile prevaricator who lies with aplomb. The never blinking would be president claims to have been a reformer in Alaska while every day we learn about how ethically challenged her public career has been.

This isn’t exactly E=MC2, though for the sake of our country it is important to understand the equation that describes the McCain/Palin slash and burn march to take over the White House because as we learned from Bush, campaign methods do suggest what kind of president one will be.

Lies + hypocrisy = McCain/Palen

Addendum and footnote

The most repugnant lie of all …

can be combined into several facets all closely related: that because he’s black Obama is a lesser being than white Christians; that because he’s black he’s dangerous; that he’s really a Muslim (all of whom we are to believe are terrorists), and that he’s Satan coming as a precursor to the end of days.

Read the main story on Capitol Hill Blue: “America is still a racist nation” and yesterday’s headliner Racism still a big roadblock for Obama.

Here’s the comment I added to that very important article:

On Otherizing Obama

This fits in with Nicholas Kristoff’s OpEd in The New York Times today: “The push to ‘otherize” Obama” LINK.

Here an excerpt:

Here’s a sad monument to the sleaziness of this presidential campaign: Almost one-third of voters “know” that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.

In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process.

A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.

More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it.

Black or Muslim doesn’t make much difference when it comes to these bigots. When it comes to equal opportunity, anyone who isn’t a white Christian is tarred with the same brush… tarred, feathered, and driven out of town on a rail if they had their way.

The utterly disgusting part of this is that the McCain campaign is focusing many of their messages on frightening these people. They don’t have to say he’s an uppity n-word, they just imply it. An example is how they picked the vaguely menacing looking pictures of Obama and Franklin Raines (View here) to use in one of their ads. Look at the pictures carefully. Of the many many they could use there is no doubt these were carefully selected to send a menacing message. Then look at the picture of the vulnerable elderly white woman at the end.

Others have provided the lies and hypocrisy which are elements of the first part of the equation Lies + hypocrisy = McCain/Palin.

Good summaries of the lies are provided in “McCain, Palin defiant in ‘lies’ storm” and “The media call McCain and Palin on their trail of lies” and best of all, you can watch the video of Rachel Maddow on her new show discussing their lying here. With the lies sprouting like mushrooms after a rainstorm, you need to google McCain Palin lies to keep up.

* At least this saves me the effort of doing extra homework to assure my column passes muster with other mental health professionals who want to quibble about whether or not pathological lying and compulsive lying are even legitimate diagnoses. The general consensus is that either type of lying is usually a characteristic of one of several personality disorders. I admit that dissecting politician’s psyches for these columns is one of my enjoyable pastimes and there’s plenty of time left to to engage in, to paraphrase Sarah Palin, playing shrink the candidate.

Palin seems to think her being conversant with foreign policy is a game she can “play” as in her laugh line “stump the candidate”. This demonstrate to me that she thinks winning the vice presidency is like being crowned Miss America, only she gets a crown with real diamonds instead of sequins and can say “off with their heads” and it will mean something.

27 thoughts on “Garden variety liars: Palin and McCain”

  1. From 911 TM to more overt lying…

    …the Republicans have raised the art of the omission, distortion, and misleading mendacity to a fine art. They play the lie like a fine violin. And the people that don’t have time to think, or the inclination to indulge in cranial exercise, dance to the tune.

    After eight years of prevarication, distortion, and slime, the American public is possibly, or even more horrifying to contemplate, likely immune to truth. Sadly.

    The play on emotions, such as was called out by Keith Olbermann, in his https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IeJqeXOTos&feature=related “John McCain Terrorist” video on the eve of the Seventh Anniversary of September 11, said it all. Lillibet

  2. Ole Miss don’t like it:

    Andrew Mullins, special assistant to University Chancellor Robert Khayat, told ABC News that the Ole Miss campus has been transformed to accommodate the candidates and the press. Road blocks are in place on campus and in the community and the debate television set for the candidates has already been constructed. He said the university has spent roughly five and half million dollars getting ready for the debate.

    Mullins also noted that if the Commission on Presidential Debates asks the campus to hold the debate at a later date, he is not sure the university would be able to accommodate them.

    “It’s huge. You cannot just say that you’re not going to do this thing,” Mullins said. “I don’t have any idea whether we do the debate” at a later date. “[We] probably wouldn’t do it.” LINK

  3. Letterman cancellation not nearly as big news as wanting to cancel debate, but still may have a big impact with Dave’s fans.

    This is what he said:

    “In the middle of the taping Dave got word that McCain was, in fact just down the street being interviewed by Katie Couric. Dave even cut over to the live video of the interview, and said, “Hey Senator, can I give you a ride home?”

    Earlier in the show, Dave kept saying, “You don’t suspend your campaign. This doesn’t smell right. This isn’t the way a tested hero behaves.” And he joked: “I think someone’s putting something in his Metamucil.”

    “He can’t run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sara Palin. Where is she?”

    “What are you going to do if you’re elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We’ve got a guy like that now!” from Huffpo

    Gotta hand it to Dave. He’s still got it.

  5. Latest news flash, the McCain campaign wants to postpone the Friday Night debate.

    I say “run what ya brung or forfeit”.

    Next thing you know he’ll want to postpone the election.

  6. Fibber McCain is what The Nation calls him (from the old radio show “Fibber McGee and Molly” for you young ‘uns).

    Fibber McCain and Palley is my new name for the Republican ticket. I didn’t see anyone post it on The Nation article so I added it.

    This is too old for the typical SNL viewer, but a skit based on the show might play well in senior communities in Florida.

    From Wikipedia:

    When McGee tells a bad joke, Molly usually answers with the line “T’ain’t funny, McGee!”

    McGee is never mentioned as having a job, a device later made equally famous by Ozzie Nelson. However, Mayor LaTrivia often offers McGee jobs at City Hall, the jobs usually sounding exciting when the duties are vaguely described, but always ending up being very mundane when the actual job is named. For instance, a job “looking in on the higher-ups at City Hall” turns out to be a window-cleaning job. Another interesting assignment was to be where McGee would need to maintain a disguise to remain deep undercover for days at a time, but as the Wistful Vista Santa Claus.

    McGee, apparently, is very proud of past deeds, sometimes recalls an interesting nickname he picked up over the years. Each one of these nicknames is, as usual with Fibber, a bad pun. When someone told a man named Addison that McGee was a glib talker, McGee became known as “Ad Glib McGee.” Or, when Fibber made expressions with his eyes, he was nicknamed “Eyes-a-muggin’ McGee”

  9. Public lies for all the world to see! HuffPost has an article about the Freddie Mac & the campaign manager lie.

    Freddie Mac Paid McCain Campaign Manager’s Firm Through last Month

    …On Sunday, in an interview with CNBC and The New York Times, Mr. McCain responded to a question about Mr. Davis’s role in the advocacy group through 2005 by saying that his campaign manager “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.“

    Apparently Newsweek got to the truth.

    Newsweek confirms the story:

    Freddie Mac had previously paid an advocacy group run by Davis, called the Homeownership Alliance, $30,000 a month until the end 2005, when that group was dissolved. That relationship was the subject of a New York Times story Monday, which drew angry denunciations from the McCain campaign. McCain and his aides have vehemently objected to suggestions that Davis has ties to Freddie Mac-an especially sensitive issue given that the Republican presidential candidate has blamed “the lobbyists, politicians and bureaucrats” for the mortgage crisis that recently prompted the Bush administration to take over both Freddie Mac and its companion, Fannie Mae, and put it under federal conservatorship.

    Pray tell, How many people watch 60 Minutes?

    YOu know I think McCain picked the perfect running mate because apparently Palin doesn’t have any problem lying either. Salon reports:

    Palin Spread Lies About Mayoral Opponent’s Religion And Marriage

    But when she announced her candidacy for Stein’s seat, vowing to overturn the city’s “old boy” establishment, a different Sarah Palin emerged. “Things got very ugly,” recalled Naomi Tigner, a friend of the Steins. “Sarah became very mean-spirited.”

    The Wasilla mayor’s seat is nonpartisan, and Mayor Stein, a former city planner who had held the post for nine years, ran a businesslike campaign that stressed his experience and competency. But Palin ignited the traditionally low-key race with scorching social issues, injecting “God, guns and abortion into the race — things that had nothing to do with being mayor of a small town,” according to Tigner.

  10. Alaska Republican Senate majority leader Lyda Green (LINK) was highly critical of Palin on Rachel Maddow Show Monday night!

    She already came out with her opinion in Mother Jones (“Top Alaskan GOPer Decries McCain Camp’s Interference in Palin-Troopergate Probe” LINK).

    Republican State Senator Lyda Green, the president of the Alaska Senate, has been no fan of Governor Sarah Palin. After John McCain tapped Palin to be his running mate, Green told the Anchorage Daily News, “She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?”

    For two years, Green feuded with Palin over key policy matters. But in recent days, Green has become even more dismayed with the Palin pick, for she believes the McCain-Palin campaign has undermined the rule of law in the Last Frontier. She says she has watched with outrage as McCain-Palin operatives have flown into her state and interfered with the so-called Troopergate investigation–the official, approved-by-the-legislature inquiry into whether Palin dismissed her public safety commissioner because he refused to fire her ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper who went through a messy divorce with Palin’s sister.

    Please read the rest.

    Hopefully the Lyda Green story having jumped from MJ to RM will lead to more national exposure. She’s courageous for speaking out because if Palin loses she will be number one on her enemy list when she finishes her term as governor.

    The REPUBLICAN head of the Alaska state senate was on Rachel Maddow, she has turned on Palin, AND she represents the Wasilla district.

    Without saying the exact words said she was corrupt and implied she’d be dangerous as V.P. She discussed the Troopergate affair and Todd Palin’s role in governing Alaska, and Palin’s style of governing.

    I assume by tonight the video and – or transcript will be here:

    https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/

    I can’t find this reported in the mainstream yet. I’m surprised it wasn’t on Morning Joe this morning.

  11. Hal, the dominoes are starting to fall. First Fox News tells McCain to stop using their announcer in his ads and now CNN is calling him on his lies. All I can say is FINALLY! Huff Post has posted a link where you can watch it here:

    CNN Calls Out McCain Lie: Obama Does Have A Plan For Financial Crisis

    John McCain keeps on outdoing himself with his lies. Now he’s trying to make the totally false case that Barack Obama doesn’t have a plan for the economic crisis. “Senator Obama,” he says, “has still not offered any plan of any kind.”

    As CNN’s Tom Foreman reports:

    No plan from Obama? No way. To the contrary, Senator Obama has talked at length about reforming Wall Street, getting CEO pay packages under control, instituting new regulations to protect homeowners. In short, what everybody wants: stabilizing the economy.

    But that is just the tip of the iceberg.

    McCain Lies: “I’ve Bought American Literally All My Life”

    And now it turns out that earlier this month he lied to Michigan voters about his car purchases, telling them “I’ve bought American literally all my life” during a September 7 interview with Detroit’s WXYZ-TV. Earlier in the interview, he had told the interviewer “Cindy and I own an automobile that’s American-made” which was about best an extremely misleading statement.

    Let’s face it — the man is just a pathological liar.

    It will be interesting to see how many times McCain lies at the debate.

    And if that is not enough, the Evangelicals are piling on McCain’s lies. The Colorado Independent reports today:

    Evangelical leader smacks McCain for lack of ‘principle’

    Richard Cizik is one of the country’s most powerful and outspoken Christian evangelical leaders. He happens to be a Republican, and he has known the GOP’s presidential nominee for many years. “I thought John McCain was a principled person,” Cizik says. “But John McCain has backed off, not just on climate change but on torture and a sensible tax policy — in other words, he’s not the John McCain of 2000. … He seems to be waffling on issue after issue.

    “It’s not illogical for someone to conclude that John McCain is going to be more like George Bush than John McCain is going to be like John McCain in 2000.”

    Characterizing the GOP’s presidential nominee as an unprincipled waffler is strong stuff from the man who oversees governmental affairs and is the chief lobbyist of the 30-million-member Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Evangelicals. But Cizik — named this year by TIME magazine one of the world’s 100 most influential people — is no stranger to controversies that come from strong convictions.

    In conclusion, all I can say is AMEN!

  12. Hal, it occurs to me if John McCain will say ANYTHING to gain control of our country, how can we EVER trust him to tell the American public the truth?

    This is no longer a political issue. It is an ethical issue.

    I can’t help but keep remembering the Republican discourse about Clinton. Remember the crap about “it depends on what you mean by it is”?

    I know I would have a tough time trusting someone who has lied to me about anything? How can ANYONE ever again trust John McCain to tell the truth after so many lies? I just can’t fathom it.

    If he will lie to get elected, can you imagine what else he would lie about to the American people? How about another war?

    It’s bad enough that GW lied to take us into Iraq at the cost of thousands of brave Americans and $4566 PER SECOND.

    It’s totally disgraceful to even think about.

  13. Hal, how can we expect MSM to ignore deceptive advertising from candidates when they allow deceptive advertising from corporations.

    I will NEVER buy Allstate Insurance because they lie. Their ads are used to scare people with deceptive information.

    They obviously don’t care what is broadcast on their networks as long as they are rolling in dough. Is it a wonder that they are supporting (whether directly or indirectly) McCain?

    All they are about is money and McCain has promised to cut corporate taxes ON TOP OF KEEPING GW’s tax cuts for the wealthy.

    So when some filthy rich personality like Rothschild supports McCain it’s not altruistic, it is TOTALLY self-serving.

  14. I loved what Tom Hanks said on the Emmys last night about the election between John Adams & Thomas Jefferson.

    “The election between Jefferson and Adams was filled with innuendo, lies, bitter partisan press and disinformation. How great we’ve come so far since then.”

    Ain’t it the truth!

    Speaking of false ads, I happened to see one this morning associating Fannie Mae with Obama.

    Then I read this from the New York Times:

    Loan Titans Paid McCain Adviser Nearly $2 Million

    Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

    Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate for president, has recently begun campaigning as a critic of the two companies and the lobbying army that helped them evade greater regulation as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing. He and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, have donors and advisers who are tied to the companies.

    But last week the McCain campaign stepped up a running battle of guilt by association when it began broadcasting commercials trying to link Mr. Obama directly to the government bailout of the mortgage giants this month by charging that he takes advice from Fannie Mae’s former chief executive, Franklin Raines, an assertion both Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign dispute.

    Incensed by the advertisements, several current and former executives of the companies came forward to discuss the role that Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000. Some who came forward were Democrats, but Republicans, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed their descriptions

  15. Let’s NOT stop…

    also on Morning Joe, the latest McCain attack ad was shown, and instead of discussing it as Mika wanted to do, Joe ignored it and changed the subject. So the ad was aired for free.

    I was reading “Uncivil Wars: Political Campaigns in a Media Age” by Thomas A Hollihan (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009) just this morning:

    Many citizens pay no attention to politics. They do not read a daily newspaper, avoid watching the news on television, and seldom seek out news-oriented Internet sites. Such people notice political messages only when the paid political advertisements intrude on the television programs they are watching and thus become impossible to ignore, or when one of their friends or relatives brings up the subject of politics in conversation. Given such a limited exposure to political news and information, it is not surprising that the political attitudes of many Americans are shaped almost exclusively by television spot advertisements or by their friends’ or relatives’ comments and complaints about politics or politicians.

    As for the media airing political ads with lies and distortions, here’s the long FCC rules. I couldn’t even find the word truth in them.

  16. Let’s not stop there, Hal. What about these ads that McCain is running that are nothing but distortions, propaganda and out right lies.

    Why does Main Stream Media run these lies?

    One word: MONEY!

    I still say we need to take these paid political lies out of the equation. It would drop the costs of campaigning and make the election a lot more pleasant.

  17. Lying by the non-answer —

    Yet another kind of lying practiced by both sides, but I think far more frequently by the McCain surrogates, is ignoring or dismissing a question posed by an interviewer and using the time to expound on unrelated talking points or accusing the opposition of something they contend is worse.

    It happens virtually every time the honest answer to the question would prove embarrassing to the candidate.

    Rarely does the interviewer say “you haven’t answered my question”.

    Last hour on Morning Joe Mika was interviewing a McCain spokeswoman and Mika quoted Sunday’s Paul Krugman OpEd about McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal and asked for a response.

    The initial response was a smiling feigned ignorance as to who Paul Krugman was, then she said something like “oh you mean the one next to Maureen Dowd” and then she muttered a dismissive unintelligible comment about the New York Times.

    She went on to totally ignore the question.

    I’d really like to see a red light / green light feature in the corner of the screen for all interviews where the light remains red until the person answers the question. Someone in the control room who is on notice to be nonpartisan would control the light.

  18. I watched SNL last night. You’re correct, it was hysterical. I just hope millions of ignorant Americans watched it also, and start getting the message.

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