So you guys REALLY let Simon have it for declining to rake the Bristol Palin muck the other day. Congratulations, you set a Deceiver commenting record.

Now can we talk about her policies?

As Radley Balko at Reason magazine points out, the McCain campaign might have done better in vetting their candidate before trotting her out as a hero against government waste.

The Washington Independent has unearthed a document that shows Sarah Palin boasting about $3.5-million in federal earmarks she secured as mayor of Wasilla, her little Alaskan town of 9,000. The millions were granted for airport repaving, water treatment, and sidewalks.

McCain has made fighting pork-barrel spending a campaign tenet, and there’s a certain irony that he once criticized earmarks requested by Palin herself: $500,000 for a public-transportation project in Wasilla in 2001. Even though if you live in rural Alaska, you definitely have a car.

But now that she is his running mate, he is recasting her pursuit of earmarks as something she was loathe to do:

Taylor Griffin, a McCain campaign spokesman, said that when Palin became mayor in 1996, “she faced a system that was broken. Small towns like Wasilla in Alaska depended on earmarks to take care of basic needs. . . . That was something that Gov. Palin was alarmed about and was one of the formative experiences that led her toward the reform-oriented stance that she has taken as her career has progressed.”

And what exactly did Palin write in the document I mentioned above?

Would someone who wasn’t zealously going after government money give themselves a pat on the back with three exclamation points?

Bonus: Jon Stewart did a related video Deceiver post. Have a watch:

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