There was no singing about Iran today when John McCain went on The View to face the primarily female crowd. The choice of Sarah Palin didn't help much either and despite having a friend in Elisabeth Hasselbeck as a co-host, he got grilled on an assortment of issues. Mentioning his wish to overturn Roe v Wade elicited a round of boos from the crowd. Whoopi then took his "strict constitutionalist" line to a logical conclusion and wondered out loud what would stop the court from overturning amendments that abolished slavery. Then to top it all off, he blatantly lied that he's never flip-flopped on an issue and challenged anyone to refute that.
Well ThinkProgress was ready to hit that bullshit right out of the park:
The flip-flop document notes that McCain has changed his position even on the four areas he cited — spending, climate change, the war in Iraq, and torture of prisoners:
SPENDING: The McCain campaign has said that it will balance the budget by the end of McCain’s first time. But chief economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said McCain would balance the budget by the end of his second term.
CLIMATE CHANGE: In 1999, McCain opposed lifting the ban on offshore drilling, saying that it was just the “special interests in Washington” that advocated it. In 2008, McCain announced that “there are areas off our coasts that should be open to exploration and exploitation.”
IRAQ CONDUCT: He said in 2004 that Donald Rumsfeld was doing “a fine job” and was “an honorable man.” But by 2008, McCain was arguing that he was “the only one that said Rumsfeld had to go.”
TORTURE: In 2005, McCain pushed President Bush to sign a bill that would prohibit “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone in U.S. government custody. But in 2008, McCain voted against the Intelligence Authorization Bill, which requires the intelligence community to abide by the same standards as articulated in the Army Field Manual and bans waterboarding.
See our full document here. Steve Benen has compiled another flip-flop list here.
See the thing is, McCain thinks he can just absolve himself of everything he's ever said up until the moment he goes on The View, or at one of his town hall events and without a doubt at the upcoming debates. He'll lie about anything and do so with one of those fake smiles on his face. To him it is all about putting out a narrative, regardless of the facts. That is why we on the left (center and right are free to do so as well) must combat his lying from one moment to the next. With that litany of lies, we can craft it into a narrative of our own, one of truth and honest to goodness muckraking that exposes the campaign McCain has run and ultimately the type of President he would become.
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