Palin Polishes Her Skills as a Liar

Sarah Palin may be as ignorant of foreign policy as a malamute pissing on a Wasilla telephone pole, but she knows how to snarl and snap and lie–for which in Alaska she has earned a reputation as a first-class practitioner of prevarications and back stabbings.

Along with other Republican pit bulls with and without lipstick Palin Saturday accused Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

She said it twice about Obama’s knowing a founder of the Weather Underground who led that organization when Obama was eight years old in Hawaii. Obama, it seems, lives in the same Chicago neighborhood, served on a charity board with the alleged terrorist, now a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago who long before Obama was old enough to vote became an ordinary liberal.

So far Palin has lied to Americans with a wink-wink and leer about the Bridge to Nowhere, which she hustled for but now says she stopped. She never mentions that as Alaska’s governor she has the state now building the Road to Nowhere, which will stop where the Bridge to Nowhere would start. It’s an old political ploy in Alaska, my home state, to build a road to where a bridge must be built and then say, see, we need a bridge or otherwise the road is a waste. She implied she sold a governmental jet on E-Bay; she didn’t, she gave it away to a campaign supporter. She said she welcomed a legislative investigation into whether she canned the head of Alaska’s State Troopers for not firing her hated ex-brother-in-law; she refuses to testify in that investigation and has ordered her staff and her husband, a yokel known in Alaska as “First Dude,” not to testify. The list goes on.

Palin’s Republican handlers, headed by one of Carl Rove’s chief henchmen, know that a giant smear campaign has started against Obama, thanks to the rich reactionaries who fuel the Republican Party’s private efforts to win and stay in office and damn the truth or anything like the truth. Palin is their resident Barbie Doll to wrap around the big lie. Soon she’ll be yowling that Obama is Beelzebub and Satan’s Mother.

Well, her handlers have finally found one thing she’s good at: Slander.

And what about that guy she’s allowing to run with her, John McBush, the self-anointed hero and self-baptized truth teller? Will he snap her garters and tell her to stop fibbing about Obama?

Damned unlikely. It’s plain he will do anything–anything at all–to be president of the United States and finally outrank his daddy, the admiral, including choosing a nincompoop like Palin to run for vice president on the Know Nothing ticket.

That choice alone and her obvious incompetence at anything except ruining reputations speaks to how we must overhaul the way we elect presidents and vice presidents. McBush and Palin are beginning to make Caligula look like a statesman.