By The River

I've been thinking a lot about the false testimony given by members of the Dover (Pa.) Area School Board during the Intelligent Design trial in Harrisburg in 2005, and how it relates to the strategy of lying being employed by Republican presidential nominee John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin to burnish their own records and tarnish that of Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

To refresh your memory, the Dover school board was taken over by religious fundamentalists in the early part of the decade. By the fall of 2003, their control was complete. A year later, they took steps to introduce their conservative religious beliefs into the teaching of high school biology at Dover. Specifically, students were required to listen to a statement read by school officials (science teachers refused, at great risk to their jobs) designed to cast doubt on Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

A group of parents sued, and the ACLU and the Pepper Hamilton law firm in Philadelphia took their case on a pro bono basis. When members of the school board were deposed under oath on Jan. 3, 2005, they spun a web of lies about their deeds and motivations, denying, for example, that they ever talked about creationism at public meetings, in the face of a host of witnesses who said they did. They continued spinning fantasies when the case went to trial in the fall of 2005. They lost utterly, were thrown out of office by Dover citizens (who were stuck with a million dollars in legal fees), and were denounced for their false testimony by Judge John Jones III in his ruling in the case in late 2005.

This was, I think, a case of misguided faith that they did nothing wrong triumphing over clear and easily available facts. The Dover school board members involved in the case confused faith in God with faith in themselves and their own godliness, and they went down to destruction--although the Bush Administration Justice Department has so far not lifted a finger to prosecute them for perjury.

I don't think Palin is stupid enough to believe she never supported the Bridge to Nowhere, or that she really went to Iraq like she said (the latest controversy), or that she didn't try to get her brother-in-law fired as a state trooper because a bitter child custody suit with her sister. I suspect she and McCain have cynically calculated that the voters from the religious right who worship Palin will take her denials on faith. They need these voters to have any chance to win.

McCain's spokesman told Politico today that they turned to the dark side because the press wasn't covering their "nice" campaign earlier in the summer. McCain has decided to win at any cost.

I know the Clinton haters will come crawling out from under their logs to say that he did it first. Yes, he lied about private, consensual sex. He didn't tell personally damaging lies about George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole, his electoral opponents in 1992 and 1996. That's such a big difference it's ludicrous to even spend any time discussing it. I have to laugh when I think about how newspapers ran stories during the Clinton impeachment in 1998 about how to talk to your children about what Clinton did.

Perhaps it's time for a new round of stories about how to explain to your kids that even if McCain and Palin tell blatant lies, it's not okay for them to do it