At the start of the general election campaign, it looks like John McCain gave the Straight Talk express a Dishonorable Discharge. Everywhere you look, people are talking about how the McCain campaign has spread massive quantities of lies on the campaign trail. Even ads that the McCain campaign has made that claim to be fact-checks turn out themselves to need fact checking.
According to an article by Michael Cooper and Jim Rutenberg in today’s New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/politics/13mccain.html :
A McCain advertisement called “Fact Check” was itself found to be “less than honest” by FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan group. The group complained that the McCain campaign had cited its work debunking various Internet rumors about Ms. Palin and implied in the advertisement that the rumors had originated with Mr. Obama [They didn’t].
In an interview Friday on the NY1 cable news channel, a McCain supporter, Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, called “ridiculous” the implication that Mr. Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment was a reference to Ms. Palin, whom he also defended as coming under unfair attack.
“The last month, for sure,” said Don Sipple, a Republican advertising strategist, “I think the predominance of liberty taken with truth and the facts has been more McCain than Obama.”
Indeed, in recent days, Mr. McCain has been increasingly called out by news organizations, editorial boards and independent analysts like FactCheck.org. The group, which does not judge whether one candidate is more misleading than another, has cried foul on Mr. McCain more than twice as often since the start of the political conventions as it has on Mr. Obama.
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The article also points out how McCain was confronted by Joy Behar on the Barbara Walters ABC show called “The View” about two specific pieces the McCain campaign are putting out are complete lies.
This latest article by the Times comes on the heels of Paul Krugman’s article of two days ago titled “Blizzard of Lies http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/opinion/12krugman.html
How do you know when McCain or Palin are lying? Their lips are moving.
In the last 40 years, Presidential elections seem to come down to whether the public will allow the Republican candidate to lie themselves into the White House. We had lying about John Kerry’s service in 2004, lying about pretty much everything about Al Gore in 2000, the dishonest Willie Horton ad in 1988 gave George H. W. Bush the Presidency, etc.
Here are some of the top campaign lies by McCain and evidence to the contrary:
1. McCain lie - Obama plans to give sex education to kindergarteners.
Fact: Obama wants kindergarteners and other kids to know how to deal with attempts of inappropriate touching by sexual predators.
2. McCain lie – Obama plans to increase taxes on working families.
Fact: The non partisan Tax Policy Center says that four fifths of the population, which is those of us making less than $200,000 per year, would get a bigger tax cut from Obama than McCain.
3. McCain lie – Obama is making nasty attacks on Palin.
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