A word too far

Sarah Palin lies. I don't think she's a pathological liar, I don't think she's delusional, as Andrew Sullivan and others have put it. But she's the kind of person who will say whatever it takes to win people over in the moment (e.g., she said thanks but no thanks to the bridge to nowhere, her daughter took a vote on whether she should become VP, etc.). I know a few people like this, and in politics, Bill Clinton is another of them.

That said, Andrew Sullivan is once again taking his crusade to uncover her lies a step too far.

A reader writes:

"Everybody in the family played Scrabble and took great pride in hoarding Ks and Qs and slapping them down in long, fancy words on triple-letter scores." -- Going Rogue, p. 12.

Any good Scrabble player knows it's impossible to "hoard" Ks or Qs, as there is only one of each in a set of tiles. As a fellow Scrabble player said, "Perhaps she was thinking she was playing Poker, where hoarding Kings and Queens might be beneficial?"

Or perhaps she made this up like everything else.

Or perhaps she's talking about what her family generally does when it plays the game, and not talking about what they do in any given instance of playing the game. She might be saying that, in general, they hoard valuable letters such as Ks and Qs.

This witchhunt mentality is only going to make people resist the notion that Sarah Palin does indeed lie sometimes.