Democratic Party National Chairman Tim Kaine’s insulting, damaging and dumb performance before the media in the days leading to the election warrant a brief revival of a monthly award regularly handed out on Ethics Alarms’ predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard. It is the David Manning Trivial Liar Award, and since I handed the last one out here almost exactly a year ago, I may have to make it a yearly tradition. As I wrote on November 3, 2009, shortly after this blog debuted,

“The David Manning Trivial Liar” highlights the public lies nobody could possibly believe. It was named for Sony’s “defense” when it was revealed that the movie critic, “David Manning,”  whom they advertised as raving about lousy Sony films like “The Animal” (Starring Rob Schneider as a guy who accidentally has animal DNA grafted…oh, never mind…), was a fake invented by their marketing division. Sony said, in essence, that it was no big deal because everyone knows those critical raves in movie ads are mostly lies anyway. I didn’t carry the feature over to Ethics Alarms, because the kind of transparent, shameless, “I’m going to say this anyway even though it will have America rolling its eyes” lie the feature was designed to condemn didn’t come around every month.”

It sure came around this month. Continue reading →