McCain, Palin defiant in 'lies' storm (AFP)

[jefferson_dem]

McCain, Palin defiant in 'lies' storm
1 hour ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin stand accused Monday of trying to "lie" their way into the White House with discredited claims and advertising -- and it's not just outgunned Democrats crying foul.

Non-partisan fact-check operations, newspapers and opinion columnists are also charging McCain, once a darling of the press, of cloaking the election in sleaze and unfairly smearing Democrat Barack Obama.

With the United States locked in two foreign wars, punished by its thirst for Middle Eastern oil and with the economy plummeting, the race was consumed for two days last week by McCain camp claims Obama called Palin a "pig."

US election campaigns and hardball advertising always push the limits of truth and often amount to outright distortion -- the Obama camp has not hesitated to blur McCain's record too.

Campaigns and experts usually steer clear of blatantly accusing a candidate of lying, but the term is being bandied about following McCain's latest hard-hitting assault on Obama's character and defense of Palin's record.

Last week, the McCain campaign accused Obama of wanting to teach sex education in kindergarten. In reality, the bill he voted for as an Illinois lawmaker mandated warnings for young children about sexual predators.

Palin was accused of saying she visited Alaskan troops in Iraq when it emerged her trip was to an Iraq/Kuwaiti border post.

She is also taking heat for repeatedly saying she blocked a notorious multi-million dollar project to build a bridge to a sparsely-inhabited island in her state which she initially backed and of not fully returning all the federal dollars doled out for it.

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http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hjO6YPkd2LcstrGwzE3p9bRY7k0g

[WePurrsevere]

1. That's the problem with LYING, once you've done so you have to

continue to LIE and LIE and LIE and tell bigger and BIGGER LIES to cover your LYING butt.

[krkaufman]

3. So why is the media not covering the lies in the same way they covered Hillary's Bosnia sniper fire

... exaggerations? Hillary was pilloried for her 3 or 4 exaggerations, but Palin isn't experiencing a similar "pattern of embellishments" and "resume padding" narrative.

[WePurrsevere]

5. As you probably already know,

The reason of course is that we're not dealing with old fashioned "journalistic integrity" anymore. The truth has a Liberal bias but the media isn't Liberal... it's corporate and corporate is mostly "conservative". Sadly most of the the MSM is owned by corporations and those corporations are owned/run by people who are mostly Republicans, whose soul purpose is to make money... not small money from selling real news/ads... but BIG money for their main corporations like GE, etc.

Here's what Gore Vidal said about Corp Media at the very end of the clip around 1 1/2 yrs ago or so (bolding mine... I think he nailed it with this comment especially)...

When our media does not want to make money out of news, corruption is complete. You would think that that was something totally against nature, you don't want to sell papers, you don't want to sell washing machines or whatever you're selling on television. You don't want to go against what the owners of the country want and they don't want bad news of this sort and the don't want people to really know about these things."

[krkaufman]

7. Yeah, and when it's not corporate influence, I think the media personalities are ....

.... just cowed by the "liberal media bias" claim, and are quick to bend over backwards to overcompensate, either following some Right Wing echo machine meme or failing to hold Right Wingers to account.

[Democat]

2. Palin is a woman, please stop telling the truth about her!

That's sexist!

[anonymous171]

4. I WISH Obama was smearing McCain the same way.

The press loves to claim that they both are doing it, when in fact it isn't true at all.

[Douglas Carpenter]

6. KICK AND RECOMMENDED ---

[Alter Ego]

8. The gloves have officially come off--they're using the word "lie".