Joe Biden, meanwhile, produced a blizzard of misstatements, distortions and outright lies.
The most irritating and most seriously misleading involved the relative cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three times, with great earnestness and passion, he cited a mysterious statistic claiming that we spend more every three weeks in Iraq than we have invested in the Afghan War for its duration.
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Sarah Palin was right, however, not to call him on it – and to lose the audience in a duel over statistics. But moderator Gwen Ifill (who otherwise did a fair and capable job, it seems to me) should have at least asked Biden for the source of his startling claim.
In any event, he now owes an apology to Governor Palin and to the American people. If he gets away with a distortion of this magnitude, it will provide powerful indication of the ongoing abdication of responsibility and fairness by mainstream media.