[Anyone] Tired of the lies? I sure am:

[totem at laplaza.org]

Blizzard of Lies
Thursday 11 September 2008
»
by: Paul Krugman, The New York Times


According to Paul Krugman, the McCain-Palin campaign is built on a "blizzard of lies."
    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.

    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.

    Or take the story of Mr. Obama's alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported 
legislation calling for "age and developmentally appropriate education"; in the case of young 
children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.

    And then there's the claim that Mr. Obama's use of the ordinary metaphor "putting lipstick on a 
pig" was a sexist smear, and on and on.

    Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they're probably counting 
on the common practice in the news media of being "balanced" at all costs. You know how it goes: If 
a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn't say that he's wrong, it reports that 
"some Democrats say" that he's wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial 
misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

    They're probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the 
story being "McCain campaign lies," it becomes "Obama on defensive in face of attacks."

    Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign's lies? I mean, politics ain't beanbag, 
and all that.

    One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real 
issues - on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the 
last eight years.

    But there's another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells 
you a lot about how he or she would govern.

    I'm not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, 
that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. 
The contrast between the Bush political team's ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by 
the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior 
Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

    I'm talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the 
administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign 
provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were 
being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the 
war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

    And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes 
Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team 
would run the country?

    What it says, I'd argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin 
administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin 
are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.