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The Orwell Award

Just as the McCain campaign's vaunted "Truth Squad call was full of half-truths and statements that weren't true at all," its new "Fact Check" ad is made up of glaring factual errors.

The attacks on Palin that FactCheck.org deemed "completely false" and "misleading" didn't come from Obama, as the McCain ad implies, but from "dubious Internet postings and mass e-mail messages."

And that Wall Street Journal report about Obama "airdropp[ing] a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers into" Alaska to dig up dirt on Palin that the ad cites? Why, that "report" comes from an anonymously sourced blog post by rightwing hack John Fund that appeared on the WSJ opinion page's web site--a report, by the way, that a Democratic spokesman has deemed a "flat-out absolute fabrication. We have sent absolutely zero people."

But the "Fact Check" ad is correct that Sarah Palin hails from Alaska. At least, I think that's right. Given all the other errors, I'm now starting to wonder.

--Jason Zengerle