Weekend edition

By Michael Dobbs





BARBARA WALTERS: "She [Governor Sarah Palin] also took some earmarks..."

JOHN MCCAIN: "No, not as governor she didn't. She vetoed - Look, well, the fact is she's a reform governor."

--ABC "The View," Sept. 12, 2008.

John McCain is trying to claim that black is white when he argues that his running mate, Sarah Palin, has not accepted earmarks as Governor of Alaska. While it is true that she has sought fewer earmarks than her predecessor, Governor Frank Murkowski, Alaska still leads the nation in terms of per capita spending on earmarks, according to Citizens Against Government Waste.





The Facts

According to the Anchorage Daily News, Palin sought $256 million in earmarks during her first year in office. This year, her office has sought the assistance of the Alaska Congressional delegation in landing $197 million in federal earmarks.

A comprehensive list of the governor's latest earmark requests is available at the website of Alaska senator Ted Stevens with a covering letter from Palin's office. The requests range from $71 million for the "Rural Alaska Sanitation Initiative" to $3.2 million for "Sea Lion Biological Research to $7.4 million for "Rural Airport Lighting."

While we are talking about Palin, here is a quick run-down of factual errors in her first media interview as vice-presidential nominee, with Charles Gibson of ABC News:

"Show me where I have ever said that there's absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any affect, or no affect, on climate change."

Palin may not have said that human activities have had no impact whatsoever on climate change, but she has certainly depicted that impact as minimal in the past. Here is what she said in an interview with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner on December 4, 2007: "I'm not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity."

Her claim that "many vice-presidents" had never met a foreign head of state before becoming president (after conceding to Gibson that she has never met a foreign head of state.)

I would appreciate some help from readers on this one. The last seven vice-presidents (Dick Cheney, Al Gore, Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush, Walter Mondale, Nelson Rockefeller, and Gerald Ford) had all met foreign heads of state prior to taking office. The 39th vice-president, Spiro Agnew, had been governor of Maryland for just two years when Richard Nixon picked him to be his running mate in 1968. Does anybody know whether Agnew had met a foreign head of state prior to assuming office as vice-president? Agnew's immediate predecessors, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon, were all well-known figures prior to becoming vice president.

Her claim that Russia invaded a "smaller, democratic country [Georgia] unprovoked."

The Russian invasion of Georgia, beginning on August 7, may have been "disproportionate," as the Bush administration has argued, but it was hardly "unprovoked." Reports from Georgia and South Ossetia suggest that the Russians were responding to a Georgian attack on Tskhinvali, capital of the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia, which has been under Russian protection since 1991.

Some readers have complained that I have been soft on the Democrats over the last week, while awarding a string of Pinocchios to the McCain campaign. I would like to think that this simply reflects the current state of the campaign: the McCainites have been on the offensive over the last week, tearing into Obama with a series of questionable TV ads. If you think it reflects bias on my part, there is a simple remedy: send in specific examples of Pinocchio-esque statements by Obama and the Dems, and I will check them out.

The Pinocchio Test

I will give Governor Palin a pass this week, to mark her inaugural media outing. Four Pinocchios for McCain for his clumsy attempt to rewrite history.

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