Andrew Sullivan is seeing mendacity in the most innocent places, such as Sarah Palin’s line yesterday that she was looking forward to finally meeting Joe Biden because, “I’ve been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in, like, second grade.”
Two things: when Palin was in Second Grade, Biden hadn’t been elected to the Senate. And when she was in third grade, do you really believe she was hearing about speeches by Joe Biden? Who in the national press corps at the time were hearing about Biden’s speeches in 1972?
She just lies. She can’t help herself. She has a serious psychological problem: making stuff up, imagining things happened when they didn’t, saying one thing in one interview and then directly contradicting herself in the next. She makes Stephen Glass look like George Washington. It’s pathological.
The line was clearly a joke, not an anecdote. Lord knows she’d never heard of Biden at that point; she’d probably never heard of the Senate until recently.
Elsewhere, Andrew compiles a list of “The Lies And Lies And Lies Of Sarah Palin.” Most of them are either ridiculously trivial (the speediness of her acceptance of the VP offer), passing on of talking points which weren’t strictly true (polar bears, Alaska’s contribution to the energy supply), rather standard political puffery (the eBay and Bridge to Nowhere stories), or unverifiable (how many gay friends she has). They’re hardly “all documented, bald-faced factually irrefutable lies.”
One could cite a variety of plausible arguments for why Palin would be a worse vice president than Joe Biden. Comparative honestly, however, is not among them.
