Who Misquotes the Watchmen?

FactCheck: Not keen on McCain trying to pin his campaign badges on their research.

The impartial and well-regarded FactCheck.org project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center has a great reputation for debunking lies on the campaign trail. So it's a sad day when they have to ask the election campaign of Senator John McCain to stop telling big fat fibs about their research for purely political ends.

On Sept. 8, the center put out a paper called "Sliming Palin," which was a rebuttal of the some of the wilder Internet-based claims about Alaskan governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. The McCain campaign then launched a TV spot claiming that all that anonymous, unsourced stuff from teh interwebs (home of Nigerian banking letters and herbal viagra ads) came directly from the camp of Sen. Barack Obama

So now the center has put out a press release called "McCain-Palin Distorts Our Finding," pointing out that "Our words are accurately quoted, but they had nothing to do with Obama." The press release also notes the ad "twists a quote" from the Wall Street Journal to (and this with no seeming sense of irony) misleadingly turn it into an accusation that Obama is trying to get "dirt" on Palin.

Since then, the project has put out three of its fact-checking briefings: One accusing an Obama ad of "misleading claims about McCain and education spending," one saying a different McCain campaign ad "distorts quotes," and one noting that a Palin statement about Alaskan energy was "simply untrue."