One by the one the pillars are falling.
Sarah Palin's stories are being proven b.s., over and over. At some point we have to wonder: do ANY of them hold up to the slightest scrutiny?
Short answer: nope.
When John McCain chose Sarah Palin to be the Shiny New Thing that gave life to his failing campaign, part of the narrative we were force-fed ad infinitum is that Palin sold the state plane on eBay.
Of course, this was supposed to show what a plucky, loveable, little cost-cutting housewife she was -- a real dose of common sense, taking it to those tax-and-spending fellow Republicans, with such an innovative idea. Selling it on eBay -- what a fresh and original idea from this fresh and original politician!
True?
Um, not so much.
(more below...)
Courtesy of the HuffPo's Sam Stein:
"That luxury jet that came with the office... I put it on eBay!"
It's one of Sarah Palin's favorite lines on the campaign trail, repeated with such frequency that it has already become a catchphrase of the general election. As Governor of Alaska, she rid the state of an unnecessary jet using a creative and cost-effective online measure.
What is left unmentioned is that Palin didn't come up with the idea to sell the plane using eBay in the first place. Moreover, because of the unique purchasing terms of the aircraft -- which required the state to make payments amounting to $20,000 per month even if the jet wasn't in use -- the decision not to hire a broker to help sell the property appears in hindsight to have been a costly mistake.
Before the Alaska Republican took office, it was something of a standard operating procedure for the state to try to sell such big-ticket items using the online auction site. Officials had been doing it since at least 2003, three years before Palin became governor.
"It was the practice of the state to dispose of items such as this via eBay prior to listing the jet," Vern Jones, Alaska's Chief Procurement Officer, acknowledged on Tuesday.
Despite being a normal state procedure and, in the end, a costly one, Palin has highlighted her decision to put Alaska's luxury jet on eBay in every speech she has given since being chosen as McCain's vice president. It is a significantly abridged version of what happened.
By the time she was elected, there were many state items being offered on eBay. As the Anchorage Daily News reported on December 13, 2006, nine days after Palin took office and the day she announced the jet posting, the state was "auctioning 38 items on the site, including three aircraft -- two Super Cubs and a Cessna... Other items for sale included two sets of used helicopter floats ($300) and King Air exhaust stacks ($500)."
There's more in Sam Stein's story about how selling the plane that way was actually a dumb thing to do, cost-wise. And that it didn't actually sell, for all of McCain's lies about it, as Meteor Blades' diary last week explained.
But that's another dimension of b.s.
Here's the newest b.s. dimension, as stated above:
The idea to sell state things on eBay wasn't even hers. It was a standard operating procedure in Alaska.
We're being sold the idea that Palin had some fresh, new, down-to-Earth approach to governing. Sell it on eBay! ? Why, that's just what any plucky, pragmatic housewife would do!! What a breath of fresh air!!
It's a big lie. It's a story we're being sold.
The point is that NONE of Palin's "narrative" (oh, how Republicans love that word!) is holding up to the most basic examination. Oh, I suppose we can spot her the fact that she is, indeed from Alaska, but beyond that it's been a whole truckload of malarkey from the get-go.
This idiotic grab for political glory with the plane / eBay myth isn't quite as bad as the "bridge to Nowhere" lie, I'd say. It has some marginal relation to the facts. The plane was put up for sale on eBay.
But again, it's the manufactured story that comes with it -- Sarah Palin as someone with fresh ideas, common sense, and a hankering to save the taxpayers money -- that is wholly false. Pure nonsense, pure branding, as false as the b.s. the Republicans sold this country about George W. Bush being some kind of cowboy with a "ranch" (later shown to be bought FOR the Bush campaign, as a prop, to make lazy / complicit journalists paint Bush as exactly that -- a cowboy).
John McCain has shown how shameless he is in the course of this campaign again and again. Like Bush, he tries to brand himself with high-sound concepts and appealing narratives (ugh), while proving to be exactly the opposite. It takes a cynic of sociopathic dimensions to keep up such a game, for so many years, so shamelessly.
And in McCain's choice of Palin we have double-extra-plus confirmation that McCain is a deeply cynical, nasty, calculating, dishonest politician. Though he told the truth about one thing: Palin IS his soulmate. Just McCain, like Bush, Palin is an unusually good and shameless LIAR with a sense of how to play the crowd, including the lazy / complicit media stooges.
This is the person that John McCain chose to succeed him in office, in the world he loves to paint as so dire and dangerous. This P.R. hound, this lightweight, this shameless, serial liar, Sarah Palin, a.k.a. George W. Bush in a dress.
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[UPDATE: Edited for clarity, after useful feedback in comments. Thanks.
2nd UPDATE: edited title, too. My fault for burying the lede initially.]