Sarah, Sarah, Lipstick and Earmarks and LIES
With due apologies to Starship, who probably don’t appreciate my filching of their song for my purposes.
The McCavein campaign isn’t even trying anymore.
They obviously consider the Gopper base to be so stupid that they feel quite comfortable in feeding them lie after lie, no matter how easily the lie is debunked.
We have shown you over the last few days that Sarahpoleon has never, in her entire career, been against earmarks; she’s greedily gone after any earmarks she could get, and even hired lobbyists to keep the earmark money flowing. In an effort to try to blunt the stream of truth coming out on her TRUE appetite for earmarks, she has hinted that she took a much harder position on earmarks as of late.
How “late” is late? Apparently Sarahpoleon must be referring to some FUTURE version of herself when she talks about being a champion against earmarks, because in 2008 she’s been all over them.
On the trail, Palin never actually claims that she hasn’t asked for earmarks. But she definitely leaves the impression that she’s every bit as passionate a fighter against the practice as McCain is, and certainly more so than Barack Obama, who didn’t endorse a moratorium on earmarks until this year. “I championed earmark reform, also, to help Congress stop wasting money on those things that do not serve the public interest,” Palin said this morning at a campaign rally in Fairfax, Virginia. “We reformed the abuses of earmarks in our state, and it was while our opponent was requesting a billion dollars in earmarks as a senatorial privilege. What I was doing was vetoing half a billion as an executive responsibility.”
That speech touched off some unusually outraged media coverage, which noted that Palin had, in fact, asked Congress for nearly $200 million in federal earmarks just this year. Could it be? Where’s the evidence?
Fortunately, if you’re curious, you can look them all up, thanks to the Web site of Alaska’s earmark king, Sen. Ted Stevens — who was thoughtful enough to list all of the earmark requests he got and who asked for them. Sure enough, Palin’s office submitted 31 requests, totalling approximately $197 million. You can read the list here.
In 2008, Alaska got more earmarked federal funding per person than any other state.:
Arizona, the second fastest growing state in the nation, will receive just $18.70 per capita in federal earmarks this fiscal year. By comparison, Alaska – with roughly a tenth of Arizona’s population – is set to receive $506.34 per capita, the highest in the nation, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group which tracks earmarks. The state of Alaska receives about three times as much as Arizona receives in actual dollars, $346 million to $119 million. [USA Today, 3/22/08 ]
The response by the McCain campaign is classic disinformation:
In a memo e-mailed to reporters this afternoon, the McCain campaign said Palin’s requests were a significant reduction from the record of the previous Alaska governor, Republican Frank Murkowski, whom Palin unseated in 2006. Murkowski’s final request asked for $350 million in earmarks, according to the campaign.
Meanwhile, McCain’s claim that Obama earmarked $1 billion in pork was also false:
In fact, the Illinois senator requested $311 million last year, according to the Associated Press, and none this year. In comparison, Gov. Palin has requested $750 million in her two years as governor — which the AP says is the largest per-capita request in the nation.” [Wall Street Journal, 9/9/08]
The trick is to lie so often that the Obama campaign and, occasionally, the media, fill the news hole with debunking.
Works every time.
I suppose we should be thankful that Sarahpoleon is the Governor of a sparsely populated place like Alaska. Can you imagine what kind of hole she’d have blown in the national debt if she’d been at the head of some place with a population?
One thing is for certain-she DEFINITELY fits the modern-day, wingtard version of a “conservative.” She’s the biggest welfare queen in the world, and all the while she talks about how tightfisted she is. As we’ve seen, she’s only tightfisted when it comes to helping out those who have no hope.
If she were to manage to get herself into the Presidency, NONE OF US would have any hope. Between her manic spending and her appetite for a war with Russia, if she didn’t get you killed, she’d starve you to death.
Tags: 2008 election, earmarks, lies, mccain, palin
September 12th, 2008 at 8:32 am
There are many things for which Sarah Palin takes a stand that I flatly disagree with. However, one of the things that bugs the hell out of me is this notion of executive experience. In the end of your post you wrote of the “sparsely populated place like Alaska”. A reference to the population involved needs to be tacked on to every claim of executive experience. And not only the population, but the density of that population. The problems of the people in Alaska are VERY different from the problems faced by those in our heavily populated, urban areas. Is this, by itself, enough to render her incompetent at the wheel? Probably not. It does render this executive experience claim rather baseless.
September 12th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Jeff, your theory, to put it as politely as I can, could not be more wrong. If I take your theory at face value, then I can assume that her stint as Mayor of Wassilla left her well prepared to run New York City. Now, of course the problems the 8,000 people of Wasilla will be different than NYC. But the SCOPE and the MAGNITUDE of running NYC absolutely would render her, or any other Mayor of a city of 8,000 people, absolutely unprepared for the task.
When we talk about the Presidency, we have to add things like foreign affairs, nationwide environmental policy that cuts across every type of climate on Earth, vastly different minority communities and the situations that this would entail. The Governor of California, or New York, or (in theory) Texas would be much more apt to be able to understand the national situation than someone who has served less than 2 years as Alaska’s Governor and not got a damn thing done in that timeframe.
And FWIW, you completely missed the point being made by the Alaska observation.