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18 Sep 2008 10:16 am

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XI: Asking The Girls, Ctd.

Okay, let's run through this again. Here's the official tick-tock of the Palin announcement from the McCain campaign back in August:

"At approximately 11:00 a.m. Thursday August 28, 2008, John McCain formally invited Governor Sarah Palin to join the Republican ticket as the vice presidential nominee on the deck of the McCain family home.

"Later that morning, John McCain departed for Phoenix and Governor Palin departed with staff to Flagstaff, Arizona. Governor Palin, Kris Perry, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter proceeded to the Manchester Inn and Conference Center in Middletown, Ohio. They were checked into the hotel as the Upton Family. While there, Governor Palin's children, who had been told they were going to Ohio to celebrate their parents' wedding anniversary, were told for the first time that their mother would be a nominee for Vice President of the United States of America.

Here is Palin's latest version of the story to Hannity last night in context:

PALIN: Well, I found out about the actual selection just a couple days before you guys all did. Getting that nod was quite an experience, of course, because I knew that Senator McCain and his team had been doing a heck of a lot of research and vetting of many names.

But according to the McCain campaign, it was not "a couple days" between her being asked and our finding out. It was one day. She was asked 11 am on Thursday and the pick became public Friday morning: one day. Moreover, Todd Palin insisted in an earlier interview that during that one day between the nod and the announcement, the girls were kept totally in the dark:

So this was Thursday morning. I wake them up at 5:00 o'clock in the morning, and I said, OK, hey, we're going on a surprise trip to celebrate your mom and I's anniversary, 20th anniversary. So give me your cell phones. Well, why do you want my cell phone? Because I know you're going to call people, and you might call mom and ask what's going on. So I said, Give me your cell phones. If there's any questions -- whoever wants to ask questions is going to stay at Grandma's house, so who's going?

So they gave me all their cell phones. And so later that day, Sarah called me -- or that morning, Sarah called me and then we were on a plane south.

Look: Palin can't have taken the "two days" between McCain's offer and the announcement to get the girls to vote on the question because a) it was one day, not two and b) because her husband and the McCain campaogn have already told us they were kept totally in the dark in the period after their mother had accepted McCain's offer. There was no time for them to vote and no vote could have been offered. My generous supposition that this conversation might have taken place as  hypothetical at some point much earlier turns out to be incorrect.

I know this is trivial, but the point is that there is a very powerful pattern here of Sarah Palin's difficulty with telling the truth. Here we have some clear facts and chronology about events in the public record that happened only a couple of weeks ago and Sarah Palin's stories are hopelessly contradictory. This is a pattern. She seems to have imagined a conversation that could not have taken place.

And the other weird detail, of course, is her dismissal of Track's views because he would be in Iraq "doing his thing." In fact, an active duty soldier would have plenty of reason to be consulted about the possibility of his mother becoming vice-president. It could compromise his ability to blend in, require possible extra security protection, and perhaps jeopardize his chance to be in combat. Think Prince Harry or McCain's sons whom he wisely keeps very much in the background.

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