The XX Factor

Why Does Sarah Palin Get To Lie on the Op-Ed Page?

Sarah Palin has been smart about using her Facebook page to say whatever she wants, skating right past reporters and their pesky follow-up questions. But it’s another thing to read her lies and faulty reasoning on the Washington Post op-ed page, today on climate change . She whips up the hype over the leaked e-mails from climate scientists, asserts that “This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen,” and then gets to santimoniously intone, “I’ve always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics.” Oh yes, that is surely the guiding principle of her creationism. And never mind that in the climate change context, the science is clearly and resoundingly on the side of action to head off C02 emissions, any meaningful version of which Palin opposes.

I’m with Gawker, which does an excellent job of showing how Palin’s essay proceeds from one faulty assertion to the next: What is this hack job of an op-ed doing in the Washington Post ? Palin’s distortions last summer about the death panels she invented derailed the debate over the health care bill for weeks. What is it about Palin’s ex-candidate, ex-governor, tabloid-author status that makes people who should know better act as if her made-up facts deserve to be taken seriously?

Photograph of Sarah Palin by Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images.