We've all heard a lot about how governor of Alaska Sarah Palin said, "Thanks but no thanks" to a congressional earmark set aside to help Alaskans build a "bridge to nowhere." I heard her speak these words at the Republican convention and I assumed she was using hyperbole - employing the euphemism "bridge to nowhere" to refer generally to her so-called record of reform and of opposing wasteful government spending. We've now learned that Palin was actually in favor of this bridge before she opposed it . She admitted as much in her interview with Charles Gibson last week. She only decided that she was opposed to once it became clear that Alaskans would have to pay for it themselves.

What baffles me about this is not that she lied. While this particular lie is somewhat more egregious than many of the lies we're used to, distortions of the truth are to be expected during a presidential campaign; it's par for the course. What baffles me is that, even in her admission that she once supported this project, she continues to refer to it as a "bridge to nowhere." And, in all my searching, I haven't been able to find what two places this bridge was actually supposed to connect. I mean, it had to have gone somewhere. On the other hand, if you live in Alaska you're already pretty much in the middle of nowhere anyway. Inasmuch as this is the case, every bridge in Alaska leads from nowhere to nowhere. But, if we accept, for the moment, the claim that everywhere is somewhere, it is more reasonable to assume that the bridge in question actually would have connected somewhere with somewhere else. Now, if the Republicans believed the American people have any intelligence, they would publicize this. The story would change to: ok, she supported it, but the bridge actually did go somewhere. Somebody in Alaska had wanted this bridge to be built. Even if it was only a small family of lumberjacks who wanted a quick route to their local Denny's - at least there would be some logic behind it. But, the sad truth is that the Republic party has so little respect for the ordinary citizen's powers of reasoning that they believe we will simply accept both the fact that Sarah Palin had supported a completely illogical project and, at the same time, that she is a reformer. They have apparently made the calculation that it would be more damaging for Sarah Palin to have anything on her record that could allow one to label her a 'liberal' than to have something in her record that would allow us to label her a complete moron.