Alaskans unhappy with Palin bridge lie

Some of the folks in Ketchikan, Alaska — the city that the now infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” was to connect to Gravina Island — are not happy with Sarah Palin’s frequent lies about the issue. Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein told Reuters that Palin is playing political games with the bridge:

“People are learning that she pandered to us by saying, I’m for this’ … and then when she found it was politically advantageous for her nationally, abruptly she starts using the very term that she said was insulting,” Weinstein said.

During her 2006 campaign for governor, Palin was an enthusiastic supporter of the bridge project and praised the Alaskan congressional delegation for securing federal funds for it. Mike Elerding, Palin’s campaign coordinator in Ketchikan, even told Reuters that she said she was offended at the moniker “Bridge to Nowhere.”

While she now claims that she turned down the money for the bridge and told Congress that if Alaska wanted a bridge they would pay for it themselves, the statement she made when canceling the project said that the reason it was canceled was because Congress had “little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island.” Yet another Republican official in Alaska blasted that kind of double talk:

Former state House Speaker Gail Phillips, a Republican who represented the Kenai Peninsula city of Homer, is also critical about Palin’s reversal on the bridge issue.

“You don’t tell a group of Alaskans you support something and then go to someplace else and say you oppose it,” said Phillips, who supported Palin’s opponent, Democrat Tony Knowles, in the 2006 gubernatorial race.

Palin’s statement about the cancellation of the project even said that public opposition was based on “inaccurate portrayals” of the project. Now she has not only joined the chorus in offering those portrayals, she’s decided to lie and claim that she told Congress she didn’t want the money she enthusiastically pursued before. Sounds like the perfect bridge to park the “Straight Talk Express.”