The Fundamentals Of McCain-Palin Lies Are Strong

People are really getting into the swing of chronicling the lies of the McCain-Palin ticket. Practice makes perfect, of course, and the team is giving us the equivalent of summer two-a-days.

Last night Sarah Palin retold a debunked lie about the TelePrompTer breaking during her RNC convention speech, when there is photographic and eyewitness evidence to the contrary.

Palin and McCain continue to tell the completely discredited story about Sarah saying "thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge To Nowhere, and McCain compounded it yesterday by claiming that Palin vetoed earmarks as Governor of Alaska, which you can't do.

But now we have the great Magilla Gorilla, the one that should get the "serial liar" meme cruising to the top of the charts.

Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."

I think he's talking about spectrum policy which led to things like the Blackberry. The thing is that telecommunications is actually pretty poor in the United States. We're behind much of the industrialized world in broadband penetration and overall cellular signal strength. Also there's the little matter that Research in Motion, actual creators of the Blackberry, are in Canada.

I guess McCain is trying to disavow Holtz-Eakin's comment as we speak. But there's no reason to be so generous. Al Gore never claimed he invented the Internet yet the label became a punchline for the entire campaign. McCain's top economic adviser taking credit for a range of telecom innovations should be met the same way.

Also, do you really want to tie yourself that close to the hated telecom industry?

UPDATE: Obama campaign comments:

"If John McCain hadn't said that 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong' on the day of one of our nation's worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

Love them coming back to hammering the "fundamentals" theme.

UPDATE II: Documentary evidence!