Palin's latest deception on Fox News--and it's a doozy of grand proportions, executed with an assist from her resident Fox sycophant Greta Van Susteren--is that she was "banned" from bringing up both Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright by the "elitists" and the "brainiacs in the GOP machine" running John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.
That's a whopper. But of course Van Susteren and the rest of the mainstream media who have reported on Palin's comments let her assertion go by unchallenged.
In fact--as was widely reported during the first week in October of 2008--Palin made vicious remarks about Obama and his relationship with Ayers at a campaign event in Engelwood, Colorado. There, she uttered one of the signature slogans of her ill-fated candidacy when she charged Obama with "pallin' around with terrorists" and asserted that Obama wasn't "a man who sees America like you and I see America."
It was a demagogic allegation of the worst sort, one that created sound bites played widely by news stations across the country. And, as I learned during research for my book, The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power, the Ayers attack was in fact approved by McCain senior advisors trying to reverse Palin's descending trajectory with the American electorate in the aftermath of her disastrous and widely mocked interview with Katie Couric a few weeks earlier in the campaign.
It was a media debacle so indelibly scorched into the American psyche that Palin has never recovered from it. Ever. Her popularity with the American electorate has been in a downward spiral ever since.
Palin did rant during the campaign about Ayers and Obama. And she has continued to hurl venom and invective at Obama ever since, with a fervor that borders on the obsessive.
So she lies again. What a surprise.
And the interesting thing about this one is that neither John McCain nor his campaign staff is going to correct Palin about the Bill Ayers thing and take responsibility for sending her out with those talking points.
They were smart enough to realize how damaging they were, Palin is not. Even today.
In her weekend tirade on Fox, Palin asserted that McCain's advisors were "afraid that the media would eat us alive if we brought up these things." Afraid? She did bring them up--and the response, not only from the media, but from Americans across the country was universally condemnatory. It marked a critical juncture in the campaign.
So while Palin goes around ranting that the McCain campaign "banned" her from talking about both he and Jeremiah Wright, they look reasonable, and she, well she looks crazy.
