In his blog post McCain: Liar Who Won’t Correct in the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan talks about how terrible it is that John McCain is lying very explicitly in the media and seemingly getting away with it. I actually agree with his position here. I have long felt that politics is too much of a popularity contest where people just say what they want in order to get ahead and be regarded with favor by others. This seems to be what McCain is doing. He is lying about his vice president candidate’s record of the past in order for people to recognize his vice president candidate as better than she really is. He knows that people will not look favorably at all upon her for supporting a project that just seemed to be a total waste of money. However, since she is his candidate, he will just outright lie about it, regardless of the fact that she did actually support the Bridge to Nowhere project until it was stopped by Congress. He could be so openly lying about this when most people who have looked into Sarah Palin know this is not true because he is hoping that the people who have not looked into her see what he is saying and take it at face value.
Andrew Sullivan does seem to go too far with his claim that McCain is telling many lies. It is a universally agreed upon truth that politicians are all around big liars. His claim would be that McCain is one of the biggest liars. I have heard from news reports and friends that he has been lying quite a bit, but it seems his lies are just easier to see through than the other politicians. He is being a bit sloppy, but there are many presidents who have said one thing while running for president and never come through on their word or even attempted to. They were just saying what people wanted to hear to get them elected. Chief among this is just about any president’s claim that they will lower taxes or that they will uphold the people’s best interests. They more so tend to represent their party’s best interests. So he is slipping on his lies. It is no surprise that he is obviously lying. It would seem that Palin is making it really hard for him to keep a good image up for his candidacy by messing up in interviews and her beliefs seemingly not lining up with his. She appears to know very little about our foreign policy, as can be seen by her not knowing anything about the policy that Bush passed soon after getting into office where we can preemptively attack another nation if we believe they are going to attack us. It is really hard to cover up that sort of thing and make it look good.
Overall, it would appear that Palin is still new at the politician game. She has not been scrutinized so much in the past, so she has probably not made much effort to really appear to be great. However, now she is being looked over by just about everyone in the nation, and they are seeing all of her flaws that she never bothered to cover up. McCain is trying his best, but he definitely has quite the job ahead of him while trying to do so. He would even go so far as to noticeably lie like this, which one would think is a very bad thing to do. However, maybe he has a few tricks up his sleeve that he has yet to pull out in choosing Palin as his candidate. We will have to wait and see. If Andrew Sullivan could stop picking at every little thing wrong with her and try seeing some positive things about her, she might not appear to be so bad a candidate in his blog posts.
Citation
1) Sullivan, Andrew. “McCain: Liar Who Won’t Correct.” The Daily Dish. 13 Sept. 2008.
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