September 12, 2008
Political Science Department
Truth is the First Casualty of Politics: Sarah Palin Edition
There's been a list going around of books that Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin tried to have banned. The list is a lie.
Then there's the photo of her wearing an American flag bikini and holding a rifle, or the one of her in a short skirt and high heels, or the nude photo of her that appeared in a Chinese newspaper. All fakes.
There's also the "lizards of Satan" quotes from her that circulated around the internet. Also fake.
Then there's the story that John McCain and Sarah Palin have both sought to have rape victims charged for the cost of the "rape kit" that police use to gather evidence. To pick a concrete example, here's Jed Lewison's description of what McCain did:
In 1994, John McCain voted against legislation -- pushed through Congress by Joe Biden -- that helped put an end to the practice of charging rape victims for sexual assault exams.
Well, sort of. Section 2005 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (H.R. 3335) conditions financial grants to the states on them not charging rape victims for the exams, and McCain really did vote against the bill. However, section 2005 is only 300 words out of the entire 150,000-word bill. With 500 times more stuff in the rest of the bill than in Section 2005, it seems absurd to imply that McCain was specifically voting against that section. It's another example of the lie-that-is-not-technically-a-lie that is so common during the political season.
Now consider the accusation against Sarah Palin:
Eight years ago, the Alaskan Legislature had to pass a bill that banned towns from charging rape victims for the kits used to prove the crime and capture the perpetrator. These kits cost between $300 and $1,200 a piece, and are an essential portion of the investigation. There was only one town in the state doing this: Wasilla, where Sarah Palin was mayor.
I followed the links and poked around, and the story seems pretty solid. Former Alaska Governor Tony Knowles is quoted as saying, "There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla." It seems like a smoking gun.
I don't believe a word of it.
On its own, the story appears moderately credible, but given the parade of lies that came before it, I see no reason to believe this is anything other than another lie.
Maybe it's not, but until the story has been thoroughly investigated, can you blame me for being skeptical?
5 Comments
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The truth about the book-banning incidents (plural) are quite bad enough, thank you very much.
If I say I only want to "hypothetically" harm you, shouldn't you still be just a little bit nervous? Just a bit?
http://snipr.com/3pmyi
It's worrisome, if it's the truth.
The point I was trying to make (and in retrospect should have stated explicitly) was that partisan hacks have been spreading so many lies and carefully-spun bits of BS about Sarah Palin---almost from the moment her name was announced---that if real problems turn up, how will we know they are real?
Remember, the real victims of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" are the townspeople whose sheep are lost because they didn't recognize his truthful warnings because of the lies he had told before.
I agree with you Mark. I'm an independant voter and one of the MOST frustrating things is weeding through all the partisan crap from both sides. BOTH major parties are guilty of doing the same thing.
I'm just glad there are some non-partisan sites that weed through the BS and give ya the truth. Without that help, I'd be on the internet 24/7 trying to figure out truth from fiction!
Yeah, it's both sides. The only reason I wrote about Palin is that she's the New Thing and eneryone's talking about her. I could just have easily written about Obama sworn in on the Quran, Obama not a natural-born citizen, Obama not visiting U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan...
What sites do you recommend?
I prefer factcheck.org as my source for non-partisan, non-profit, political information. They rip apart both sides pretty good and I appreciate that.
This year they did have to do a correction on a Palin post...but it didn't take them long to do it and they immediately sent all subscribers another email regarding the corrected information.