Almost immediately after Sarah Palin's acceptance speech, McCain supporters began to spread a false story that due to a TelePrompter malfunction, she had ad libbed significant portions of her speech.
As it turns out, the story of TelePrompter bravery was false (a fact confirmed by the video in this post), but that hasn't stopped the McCain campaign from continuing to spread the strange myth. Here's Sarah Palin earlier tonight, telling a group of Ohioans her false TelePrompter fable:
"In the convention I had you to thank afterwards, because there Ohio was right out in front, in front of me," she said. "And you know, I walked out there on stage and we started the teleprompter going in front of me. Teleprompter got messed up, and I wasn't able to follow it. So, I decided, I'm just going to talk to the people in front me. And it was Ohio."
The WSJ says Palin's story has been "largely debunked," adding that independent observers noted "that any teleprompter issue was minor at most."
Jake Tapper also calls bull, and gets a bizarre statement from the McCain campaign denying that Palin was claiming to have ad libbed her speech.
And after looking through video of her speech, I found five instances where I could read what was on the prompter -- and in all five cases, the prompter was working perfectly. Here's that video:
This isn't about beating up on Sarah Palin. Even though she happened to be the one to tell this particular lie, the point here is that John McCain and his campaign have nothing left to offer but lies.
They are totally out of gas when it comes to real solutions to our economic problems, so instead they spin up false tales both big and small, about issues both silly and serious.
The bottom-line is that you cannot believe a word they say.
If elected, this is how they would govern, with the same lies and deceit of the past eight years creating big new problems for our country without taking care of the problems we already have.
© Jed Lewison