John McCain appeared on ABC‘s “The View” on Friday and cheerfully asserted that Sarah Palin has never requested any earmarks as governor of Alaska.

That was, of course, completely false. Palin sought $197 million in earmarks this year, the highest per capita figure in the nation. (That was down from $256 million the previous year, the highest per capita figure that year too.)

Whether it was just a false statement or a deliberate lie depends on whether McCain knew that Palin continued to keep Alaska’s earmark-request flag flying high after taking over as governor. Given the central role that claims about earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere have played in selling Palin to the American people, it is hard to see how McCain could have been unaware of the facts. And if he was, that surely constitutes yet another example of gross incompetence on McCain’s part?

On Sunday, campaign spokeswoman Carly Fiorina appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and cheerfully repeated McCain’s lie. This time there can be no doubt whatsoever that it was a deliberate lie. After McCain’s original statement on “The View“, practically every media outlet in the country pointed out that the statement was, in fact, untrue. There is no way anyone authorized to speak for the McCain campaign wasn’t aware of the facts by Sunday morning. Moreover, the McCain campaign had backed down from McCain’s false claim on Friday itself (albeit in typical McCain-campaign-doublespeak):

By day’s end, the McCain campaign backed down from the claim the GOP presidential candidate made on the ABC television show “The View.”

“Sen. McCain was in the throes of a discussion about her record of reforming government, which includes drastic cuts in wasteful spending in the Alaska state budget,” said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. “If he gave viewers a mistaken impression, it certainly wasn’t intentional or without some basis in fact.”

So for Carly Fiorina to flatly repeat McCain’s lie on Sunday is incomprehensible, unless one posits that deliberate lying is now the McCain campaign’s conscious strategy.

What tops even that, though, is the fact that the truth about Governor Palin’s earmark requests is even more outrageous than McCain and Fiorina’s falsehoods and lies. Not only did Ma Palin seek “$4.5 million to upgrade an airport on a Bering Sea island that has a year-round population of less than 100″ but she actually slipped in a $9 million earmark for oil companies.

Can there be any doubt that Sarah Palin is indeed the “earmark queen” Claire McCaskill accused her of being on Sunday?