Sarah Palin contradicts McCain’s Pakistan position while ordering some cheese steaks.

It's easy to tell when McCain is lying. It's usually when his lips are moving.

Here he is confronted over comments he made to Obama:

During Friday’s debate, Obama criticized the Bush administration for sending billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan without ridding the border region of terrorists.

McCain fired back hard, arguing that newly elected Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari has had his “hands full” and suggesting that Obama’s tough talk was naïve.

“You don’t say that out loud,” McCain said. “If you have to do things, you have to do things, and you work with the Pakistani government.”

He is then shown a video of Palin making the exact same claim that the US should enter Pakistan from Afghanistan if necessary.

McCain then claims that Palin shares his view and then pretends that she has been caught out by a young man in a bar and that this does not represent her true position.

The only problem with this argument is that Palin gave the exact same answer during her first TV interview with Charlie Gibson:

Gibson then asks her if the US have the right to cross the Afghanistan border into Pakistan to pursue terrorists without the permission of the Pakistan government. It's about as obvious a trap as he could possibly lay for anyone who has paid a moment's notice to this election. Does she agree with McCain or Obama? She put forward what Gibson described as "a blizzard of words" in an attempt to avoid answering, but eventually concluded that America has to do "whatever it takes", which put her on the side of Obama rather than McCain.

McCain must know this because it is unthinkable that he didn't watch her first ever TV interview. What's astonishing is that she is still publicly stating this, either because she hasn't been told by the McCain team to stop saying it, or she is too stupid to remember what the McCain position is.

And it's interesting to hear McCain now pretend that his objection is about Obama saying out loud what he would do regarding bin Laden. Apparently, it's simply naive to let an enemy know what you would do in advance.

Times Online, January 26, 2006:

[McCain] would make clear to the American people that military action against Iran is an option. Bombing? He nods. . . . .. Military action must always be the last option, but he warns: "There is only one scenario worse than military action in Iran and that is a nuclear-armed Iran."

Jackson Diehl, The Washington Post, January 29, 2006:

The debate on Iran is drifting toward the ugly question that the Bush administration would most like to avoid. That is: Is it preferable for the United States to live with the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran, or with those of a unilateral American military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities?

President Bush has never answered that question; instead, he and his State Department have repeatedly called an Iranian bomb "intolerable" while building a diplomatic coalition that won't tolerate a military solution. But two of our more principled senators, Republican John McCain and Democrat Joe Lieberman, have this month faced the Iranian Choice -- and both endorsed military action. McCain was most direct: "There is only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option," he said on "Face the Nation." "That is a nuclear-armed Iran."

So, it's okay to threaten other Muslim nations with attack, just don't do it to the one which actually houses bin Laden. Because that's being naive.

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.

Tags: McCain, Palin, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Stephanopoulos