Busting the Palin Bubble

It was fun ride, to be sure, but the Sarah Palin bubble of excitement that came with her unexpected (by anybody) nomination for the Republican vice-presidential slot appears to be bursting right before our eyes.

Palin has been on the stump for a good couple weeks now, and has yet to give a new speech.  She continues to lie about the Bridge to Nowhere, she continues to lie about her opposition to earmarks, she continues to lie about being a fiscally responsible governor/mayor.  Worse, she continues to make these lies after they have been universally debunked.  However, Palin, John McCain and the rest of the GOP machine have apparently bought into the time-tested truth espoused by Vladimir Lenin - "A lie told often enough becomes truth."

The GOP has borrowed from Lenin's playbook before, leaking the "Obama is a muslim" or "Obama is not a citizen" or similar falsehoods through their proxies, and then disavowing responsibility while coyly responding "That's for Senator Obama to address," thereby tacitly re-asking the question and giving it an air of authenticity.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a campaign for any office at any level delve to the depths of the McCain camp.  And I am very troubled.  I have always had a high opinion of John McCain.  I believe his record of running against the Beltway Insiders is, by and large, pretty admirable.  Sure he's had his failings - even significant ones (i.e. the Keating Five), but I believed he learned from that and become a better senator because of it.  I disagreed with McCain during this campaign on the important issues - the economy, taxes, health care.  I disagree with his assessment of the war in Iraq, with the "success" of the surge (which I still consider dubious at best), and his non-strategy for exit.

But now, McCain has turned his campaign over to a group of hacks who, in any other election, would be salivating at the chance to light up McCain for being too liberal, too much of an insider, or just plain too old.  They, in turn, have taken the campaign into an area that even Karl Rove has decried as beyond the pale.  That's something.  When even the devil himself says you've crossed the line, what do you do?

Apparently, if you are John McCain, you go on "The View" and expose the fact that you have no idea what your campaign is saying or doing.  And now I don't know what to think of John McCain.  Either he has, as one Obama staffer said, decided he'd rather lose his integrity than lose an election, or he is now exposed for the weak, bumbling old man being led by the nose that I sort of thought he was at the outset.

In either case, the magnitude of his and Palin's lies are beginning to unravel the whole aura of excitement and remove their stolen mantra of "change."  Worse for McCain, Palin's handlers won't let her talk to the media until the media is nice to her (which is clear evidence of her ability to lead), won't let her cooperate with the "Troopergate" prove in Alaska (just like a real reformer), won't release her tax records, and won't let her go off script, even if that script has grown tired and has been rejected as an outright lie.

McCain should have picked Mitt Romney.  There would have been a short run of ads showing Romney and McCain tearing each other up at debates and on the stump, but that would have passed and things would have settled down, allowing McCain-Romney to run on their records and issues.  They would have posed a formidable challenge to Obama-Biden.  But McCain-Palin is quickly turning into a punchline the magnitude of which I don't recall having ever seen.