“Thanks, but no thanks.” Gov. Sarah Palin is still saying it on the stump. She said it over the weekend while campaigning in Nevada.
How did Nevada newspapers report it?
Palin also repeated the line that she told Congress “thanks but no thanks,” for the so-called “Bridge to Nowhere,” a federally funded project in Alaska that came to symbolize pork projects McCain has long criticized.
Palin initially supported the bridge, and her claim that she killed the project has been largely discredited by the media and nonpartisan groups.
In the face of growing criticism, Palin refused to drop a line from her stump speech that brags about her canceling the nation’s most infamous example of runaway earmark spending, the “Bridge to Nowhere.”
“I told Congress thanks but no thanks on the bridge to nowhere, that if our state wanted to build that bridge, we would build it ourselves,” Palin told the crowd.
According to the non-partisan PolitiFact.com, Palin campaigned for governor on a platform that supported building the bridge between two small communities in Alaska.
She only canceled the project after Congress stopped the funding in the wake of the project becoming a
national symbol of wasteful spending.
The Nevada Appeal:
She also repeated two of her most popular lines, about how she turned down federal earmarks for the “bridge to nowhere” and put the state-owned jet on eBay. By the time Palin canceled the bridge between Ketchikan, Alaska, and its island airport, Congress had long since decided not to pay for it. And the plane failed to sell on eBay; a broker later sold it at a loss.
“Line.” A mere “n” away from “lie…”
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.