Andrew Halcro later remembered that he and Palin once compared notes about their many encounters, and she said, “Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, Does any of this really matter?”

the same classic pattern of categorically denying things that are categorically and patently and verifiably true. This is not, as this blog noted in the campaign, the typical political lie, the Clintonian parsing of truth or lying when the truth cannot easily be discovered. It is the statement that it is night when it is clearly, by universal aggreement, three o’clock in the afternoon.