How Do You Know When Sarah Palin is Lying?

Of the many endearing traits of Sarah Palin that have been revealed to us in the two months she's been in the public eye, none is less attractive than her penchant for lying. And I'm not just talking about little white lies. I'm talking about the kind of whoppers that deserve a whole bar of soap.

What's most unnerving is how good she is at it; the kind of good that says "red" is "yellow"so convincingly that people actually believe it. She's sure got a lot of Republicans fooled. They not only listen to her lies. They repeat them as though they came straight from the mouth of God.

Her biggest whopper was when she was confronted with this:

For the reasons explained in section IV of this report, I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 2952.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act. Alaska Statute 2952.110(a) provides

“The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.”

to which she responded with this:

"Well, I'm very very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing, any hint of any kind of unethical activity there. Very pleased to be cleared of any of that."

Then, confronted with the evidence of her excessive expenditures on clothing and accessories to the tune of 150,000 which broke down like this:

According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.

The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.

The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August."

she responds with this:

"It's kind of painful to be criticized for something when all the facts are not out there and are not reported," said Palin, saying the clothes are not worth $150,000 and were bought for the Republican National Convention.

She's also been telling some whoppers about Obama. True, they come mostly from her Republican handlers. But she says them with such relish that you know she's speaking from her heart.

There's the one about Obama being a Marxist (which was convincing enough that a dim-witted local TV reporter fed it back to Biden who was so astonished that he could only say: "Are you kidding?"). And, of course, the one she's been repeating over and over and over again: "He's paling around with terrorists!" (notice the plural). Even McCain found that whopper to be over the top. "Well, you know. Sometimes things get exaggerated in a campaign."

Politicians, we're told, do this kind of thing. They lie. But this is the big leagues; humongous, hit em out of the ballpark lies; all told with such a straight face that some commentators have wondered if she isn't pathological.

The richest part of all this is to hear lying Sarah Palin say that Obama can't be trusted. Not her. Obama. He can't be trusted.

Which for some reason brings to mind that old lawyer joke:



How do you know when Sarah Palin is lying?

Her lips are moving.

Sarah Palin: The Great White Hope

One of the most powerful productions of the late '60s was a play written by Howard Sackler (later made into a film) which fictionalized the drama surrounding the first black heavy weight boxing champion, Jack Johnson. At the heart of the drama was the inability of many in America to accept the prospect of a black champion, either in boxing or any other field.

We like to believe that we've moved beyond this. And in many ways we have. But scratch the surface of what remains a thin veneer of racial civility and this darker side of the American psyche is ready to re assert itself.

Sarah Palin's appearance at the Republican National Convention was a stunning moment in American political history for any number of different reasons. Most stunning to me was the reaction of the predominantly white middle to upper middle class convention crowd. You would have thought that they were Catholics greeting the pope or Dead Heads surging the stage at a Grateful Dead concert. And this for a woman who very few in that crowd knew anything about other than that she was a working mother from a small town whose values harked back to the era when white privilege was the predominant paradigm. The surface had been scratched; the veneer peeled away.

This hasn't been explored much in the national press. For good reason. It would be hard to substantiate given the reluctance of many white Americans to acknowledge racial prejudice.What makes this even more difficult to pin down is the fact that what is on display here is not the same kind of blatant racism that Jack Johnson encountered. Rather it has more to do with the threat that diversity poses to many white Americans, blue collar for the most part, but not exclusively so.

Much is made of Sarah Palin's small town values and "aw shucks" demeanor. What isn't said is how that contrasts with the savvy cosmopolitanism and multi-culturalism represented in the biography of Barak Obama. He is the face of the new America where race and ethnicity matter, but not as the great barriers they once were. In a growing number of social circles, in fact, diversity is celebrated.

Obama's popularity among younger university- educated voters underscores the contrast. To them he represents not just the future, but their own reality in a way that the 72 year old McCain (who keeps bringing up that war that this generation is sick and tired of hearing about), and lily white Sarah Palin (have you ever seen any people of color in any of her photos?) cannot.

Sarah Palin and, in different ways, John McCain, are the great white hopes. The question that needs to be asked is whether this represents America's best hope. Given our growing diversity and need to engage a global economy, I think not.