Factcheck.org has had numerous articles criticizing John McCain’s dishonest ads, and has also defended McCain and Palin at times. Today we have the strange situation where they have issued a new post criticizing McCain for running a dishonest ad which distorts findings from Factcheck.org.
This center around a recent post which debunks some of the claims about Sarah Palin being circulated by email which go well beyond the actual criticism of Palin from legitimate sources. They call this “less than honest.”
With its latest ad, released Sept. 10, the McCain-Palin campaign has altered our message in a fashion we consider less than honest. The ad strives to convey the message that FactCheck.org said “completely false” attacks on Gov. Sarah Palin had come from Sen. Barack Obama. We said no such thing. We have yet to dispute any claim from the Obama campaign about Palin.
They call the ad “Fact Check.” It says “the attacks on Gov. Palin have been called ‘completely false’ … ‘misleading.’ ” On screen is a still photo of a grim-faced Obama. Our words are accurately quoted, but they had nothing to do with Obama.
Our article, posted two days earlier, debunked a number of false or misleading claims that have circulated in chain e-mails and Internet postings regarding Palin. There is no evidence that the Obama campaign is behind any of the wild accusations that we critiqued. There is no more basis for attributing these viral attacks to the Obama campaign than there is for blaming the McCain campaign for chain e-mail attacks falsely claiming that Obama is a Muslim, or a “racist,” or that he is proposing to tax water. The anti-Palin messages, like the anti-Obama messages, have every appearance of being home-grown.
The McCain campaign had an opportunity in which they could have been honest by citing the Factcheck article to debunk some of the untrue claims about Palin. Instead they overplayed their hand, and displayed their dishonesty, in misrepresenting what Factcheck said and attempting to turn it into an attack on Obama. The article also debunks additional false claims from the McCain campaign made in the ad.
