Shame on McCain

Now that McCain has secured Sarah Palin as his running mate and both are running as ethics champions and reformers, will they start fixing things by denouncing and correcting all the vicious lies and character assassinations that have been spread about Obama? If McCain and Palin truly are ethical people, as they claim, then McCain and Palin should demand that the truth be told, and they themselves should be the ones to do it.

For instance, they both know that Obama is not a Muslim. They should tell the unfortunate people who have heard and also believe this smear that it is not true at all.

Slightly related to this lie, which may be why some people are so confused is the absolute lie that Obama took his oath of office for the U.S. Senate using the Quran instead of the Bible. The fact is that Obama was sworn in using his family Bible. It was Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim sworn into Congress, who used a Quran—the one that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson!

And to continue the theme of lies, if you heard that Barack Obama attended a madrassa as a child growing up in Indonesia you have been lied to. During the time he spent in Indonesia Obama attended a public school that did not focus on religion. On January 22, 2008 CNN went to the school and aired a lengthy report debunking the story.

Shame on McCain, one of McCain’s own ads repeats the false claim that Obama is “the most liberal member of the Senate.” In fact, that ranking comes only from the ultra-Right Wing magazine the National Journal which looked at only some of the Senate votes, not ALL of the Senate votes. A more accurate independent study by political science professors Keith Poole and Jeff Lewis that used every non-unanimous vote cast in the Senate in 2007 to determine relative ideology -- in other words, not a subjective assessment of which votes are "key" -- placed Obama in a tie for the ranking of 10th most liberal senator.

Please, if you are on the fence about who to vote for or you have decided your vote based on these lies, for the sake of Democracy and this country do not take my word as the truth (although it is). Go and do the research yourselves. Electing the president is too important a task to do on faulty information based on lies and political smears. There about 20 more lies (yes, really) but I don’t have room to put them all here.