McCain/Palin Lie Patrol

Your daily dose of untruths and half-truths:

Michael Abramowiz at the Washington Post passes along the right’s newest meme:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin seemed puzzled Thursday when ABC News anchor Charles Gibson asked her whether she agrees with the “Bush doctrine.”

“In what respect, Charlie?” she replied.

Intentionally or not, the Republican vice presidential nominee was on to something. After a brief exchange, Gibson explained that he was referring to the idea — enshrined in a September 2002 White House strategy document — that the United States may act militarily to counter a perceived threat emerging in another country. But that is just one version of a purported Bush doctrine advanced over the past eight years.

Peter D. Feaver, who worked on the Bush national security strategy as a staff member on the National Security Council, said he has counted as many as seven distinct Bush doctrines. They include the president’s second-term “freedom agenda”; the notion that states that harbor terrorists should be treated no differently than terrorists themselves; the willingness to use a “coalition of the willing” if the United Nations does not address threats; and the one Gibson was talking about — the doctrine of preemptive war.

Palin was not “on to something.” She simply didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is, because she had never heard the term before — and this “there are many Bush Doctrines” line is just the lame excuse the right is now putting out to try to hide the fact that Palin had never heard of it.

“Let’s not play games,” Steve Benen writes:

Yes, there have been a variety of foreign policy maxims dubbed the “Bush Doctrine” over the years. If Sarah Palin heard the question and said, “Which one?” I would have gladly accepted that as a perfectly legitimate response. Indeed, if she’d answered the question under the assumption Gibson was asking about a different doctrine, that would have been fine, too. Hell, if Palin could have explained the differences between some of the various concepts that have been given the label, she would have shut up her detractors for a very long while.

But none of that happened. You can watch the video. She said she perceived the Bush Doctrine as the president’s “worldview,” which really doesn’t make any sense at all.

Palin’s spokespeople are on the third version of their Palin foreign travel story. The first version was that Palin visited Germany, Ireland, Kuwait, Iraq, and Canada. But Palin’s “visit” to Ireland Palin’s Ireland “visit” turned out to be a brief refueling stopover. She never left the airport. (Hat tip, John Aravosis.)

Now, the Boston Globe reports that Palin’s “trip” to Iraq — which the McCain campaign had said included a visit to a military outpost and a battle zone inside Iraq — actually was just a brief meet-and-greet with soldiers at a border crossing between Iraq and Kuwait:

Following her selection last month as John McCain’s running mate, aides said Palin had traveled to Ireland, Germany, Kuwait, and Iraq to meet with members of the Alaska National Guard. During that trip she was said to have visited a “military outpost” inside Iraq. The campaign has since repeated that Palin’s foreign travel included an excursion into the Iraq battle zone.

But in response to queries about the details of her trip, campaign aides and National Guard officials in Alaska said by telephone yesterday that she did not venture beyond the Kuwait-Iraq border when she visited Khabari Alawazem Crossing, also known as “K-Crossing,” on July 25, 2007.

Asked to clarify where she traveled in Iraq, Palin’s spokeswoman, Maria Comella, confirmed that “She visited a military outpost on the other side of the Kuwait-Iraq border.”

It was the second such clarification in as many weeks of the itinerary of what Palin has called “the trip of a lifetime.” Earlier, the campaign acknowledged that Palin made only a refueling stop in Ireland.

You know those large audiences McCain and Palin have been attracting at campaign stops? Well, those crowd numbers are based on estimates provided by McCain’s people, but reporters trying to confirm those figures with local authorities are finding that they don’t check out:

Senator John McCain has drawn some of the biggest crowds of his presidential campaign since adding Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to his ticket on Aug. 29. Now officials say they can’t substantiate the figures McCain’s aides are claiming.

McCain aide Kimmie Lipscomb told reporters on Sept. 10 that an outdoor rally in Fairfax City, Virginia, drew 23,000 people, attributing the crowd estimate to a fire marshal.

Fairfax City Fire Marshal Andrew Wilson said his office did not supply that number to the campaign and could not confirm it. Wilson, in an interview, said the fire department does not monitor attendance at outdoor events.

In recent days, journalists attending the rallies have been raising questions about the crowd estimates with the campaign. In a story on Sept. 11 about Palin’s attraction for some Virginia women voters, Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher estimated the crowd to be 8,000, not the 23,000 cited by the campaign.

“The 23,000 figure was substantiated on the ground,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said. “The campaign is willing to stand by the fact that it was our biggest crowd to date.”

“Our biggest crowd to date” — gotta love those weasel words.

The U.S. Secret Service also has denied that it provided crowd number estimates to the McCain campaign:

Until Palin, 44, joined him on the campaign trail, McCain, 72, had limited his political events to smaller town hall meetings and rallies of a few hundred people. His Democratic rival, Barack Obama, an Illinois senator, routinely draws thousands of people to his speeches, a phenomenon McCain has tried to use to his advantage by labeling Obama, 47, a celebrity.

That changed on Aug. 30, at Palin’s first big public appearance after her nomination. The McCain campaign said 10,000 people showed up at the Consol Energy Arena in Washington, Pennsylvania, home of the Washington Wild Things baseball team.

The campaign attributed that estimate, and several that followed, to U.S. Secret Service figures, based on the number of people who passed through magnetometers.

“We didn’t provide any numbers to the campaign,” said Malcolm Wiley, a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service. Wiley said he would not “confirm or dispute” the numbers the McCain campaign has given to reporters.

Next, we move to rhetorical or hypothetical (take your pick) book banning requests. Once again, in her interview with Charlie Gibson, Palin repeated her misleading half-truth that she did not ban any books or desire to ban any books. Well, of course, the issue is that, as mayor of Wasilla, she asked the librarian at the Wasilla Public Library — on three separate occasions — how she would respond if Palin asked her to remove a book from the library. And after the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, said, flat out, she would not comply with such a directive, Palin fired her, only to have to rescind the firing because of a storm of public outrage.

Now Palin says she was just asking a “hypothetical” question that someone in her church had raised, but that is just absurd, as Steve Benen reiterates:

Charlie Gibson asked Sarah Palin yesterday about reports that she sought to ban books from the Wasilla public library. Palin rejected this out of hand: “Never banned a book, never desired to ban a book…. It’s an old wives’ tale.”

There’s ample reason to believe this isn’t true at all. Indeed, while Palin was denying any interest in banning library books, her campaign aides conceded to the Associated Press that Palin approached Wasilla’s head librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, “on three occasions,” about how one might go about banning library books.

The recent defense has been that the question was “rhetorical.” The mayor asked a “rhetorical” question about book banning three times? Please.

Steve has more on this; definitely read the whole thing.

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