Just checking Google News this morning on headlines, and it is clear that the meme that the McCain is blatantly lying at every opportunity has taken hold. Here is a small sampling of headlines from around the US: McCain Lies His Way Into The White House, McCain: Liar Who Won’t Correct, McCaskill Hits McCain on Lies, The Big Lie Strategy. One of the better pieces was this Op/Ed in the New York Times by Paul Krugman: Blizzard of Lies.
But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the
blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s
lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to
realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain
campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet
connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions
over and over again.
Given the tremendous interest in the US presidential campaign in Germany, I really expected that the egregious lying by the McCain campaign would be picked up by the German media. So far, there hasn’t been much reporting on the issue. Torsten Krauel expresses some Schadenfreude that the Obama campaign has been pushed back on its heels by McCain’e dishonest tactics: Der eisige Hauch der Niederlage. Only Dagmar Herzog, writing in the Tageszeitung, hits squarely on the topic with her piece Lügen statt Wahrheit (Lies instead of Truth). Herzog writes about the dishonest campaign ads of the McCain campaign, but she also mentions an even more serious issue: the efforts by the Republican Party to suppress voter participation in the election:
Hinter den Kulissen sind weit kompliziertere Prozesse im Gang, und
schon seit längerer Zeit. Alles deutet darauf hin, dass gerade ärmere –
und oftmals afroamerikanische – Wähler unsicher sind, ob ihre Stimme am
Wahltag überhaupt gezählt wird. Aus mehrfachem Grund: (Behind the scenes some very complicated processes have been set in motion for some time. Everything indicates that especially poor voters – usually African-Americans – are unsure whether their votes will even be counted on election day. And with good reason.)
Hopefully, Herzog’s piece is just the beginning of more critical reporting on the McCain campaign in Germany. I should also point out that Marc Pitzke has been doing a very good job reporting for Der Spiegel from New York. His review of Sarah Palin’s first televised interview was spot-on in its analysis.
