mainstream media
“The Oft-Defeated” may be the stake Sarah drove into her own heart
July 17, 2011
No, I haven’t seen it, and now that I’m not going to use a viewing in Phoenix as the kickoff to the e-single that would have been Sarah Palin’s Arizona, I don’t intend to.
But it’s the same as reading Bristol’s “book,” or Levi’s upcoming “book”: I don’t have to view or read to know how appalling these products are.
Many years ago, when I contacted the late William Safire to try to arrange an interview about his impressions of Teddy Kennedy, he courteously declined, saying, “I don’t kick ‘em when they’re down.”
I’d feel the same way about Sarah, Bristol and Levi–The Unholy Trinity–except that they refuse to admit that they’re down yet, and mass media, as personified most recently by the revolting Jay Leno, keep them propped up, trying to squeeze the last dollar out of pretending to take them seriously, even as these unholy three try to squeeze the last dollar out of their Wasilla Hillbilly act.
See Leno disgracing himself here, and also enjoy Gryphen’s commentary. For once, the squalid Don Rickles was in his element.
Talk about marriages made in hell.
We can, however, cut the kids some slack. After all, Bristol learned only from her mother (certainly never at school,) and Levi (who still doesn’t have a high school degree) woke up one day to find he’d won the Impregnation Lottery, and why shouldn’t he try to make an easy buck, since he has no skills that would enable him to earn an honest one?
But Sarah is different.
In THE ROGUE, I write about Sarah’s close association with a Christian Dominionist leader named C. Peter Wagner, who founded an organization called Global Harvest Ministries.
Wagner’s goal–and the goal of Sarah Palin–is to end the separation of church and state in America, and to turn our country into a Christian Dominionist theocracy.
Before Global Harvest Ministries, Wagner co-founded, with Ted Haggard–later disgraced when it was learned he’d used crystal meth during homosexual trysts–an outfit called
the World Prayer Center, in Colorado Springs, CO.
As I write in THE ROGUE:
The center has been described in Charisma magazine as “a spiritual version of the Pentagon”—the command center for Wagner’s worldwide campaign against demons.
Trust me, you’ve never heard lunacy like this.
I lay it all out in THE ROGUE, but I can offer one brief excerpt here:
Members of Wagner’s Third Wave/New Apostolic Reformation are convinced that their prayers can literally destroy individuals whom they’ve identified as demonic. Among those for whose deaths they claim credit are Mother Teresa and Princess Diana.
Wagner taught his followers that a female mega-demon whom he called…“The Great Harlot of Mystery Babylon” lurked near the summit of Mount Everest…One of Wagner’s leading apostles in Mexico was a woman named Ana Mendez, a former witch in a Haitian voodoo cult…she led a team of twenty-six intercessors to Mount Everest in an assault she called, “Operation Ice Castle.” She and her elite force launched highly targeted intercessory prayers directly at the Great Harlot…Apparently, the prayers found their mark, killing the Harlot Queen.
This is the stuff Sarah believes and acts upon. But you won’t see it in the new movie about her.
Even so, the new movie is so awful as to be laughed off the screen by professional reviewers of all political persuasions.
See this from Politico (not exactly a left-wing site.)
Sarah encouraged this poor sap Bannon to spend his millions in an attempt to save her from her own banality, ugliness, and freaky Christian Dominionism.
That he fell flat on his face has now become painfully apparent.
Not that there was any way he could have succeeded.
After all, when your subject is a sow’s ear (aka “The Great Harlot of Wasilla”), it’s tough to make a silk purse.
Sarah would have been better off keeping her distance from this farce. But by showing up in Iowa for its very first public showing, she tied her future to its credibility and its success.
As is now evident, it has neither.
Hoping for even more silk for her purse, she’s managed only to drive a stake–if not through her heart–at least through her own sow’s ear.
Yet one more defeat for “The Oft-Defeated.”
Posted in 2012, evangelical, Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, The Rogue | 
Tags: ana mendez, arizona, babylon, bannon, Bristol Palin, c. peter wagner, charisma magazine, christianity, colorado springs, dominionist, global harvest ministries, great harlot, haitian voodoo, harlot queen, intercessory prayer, iowa, jay leno, Levi Johnston, mother teresa, mount everest, new apostolic reformation, operation ice castle, princess diana, ted haggard, ted kennedy, the undefeated, third wave, william safire, witchcraft, world prayer center | 
80 Comments »
The Problem Sarah Can’t Solve: Sarah Palin
July 16, 2011
She speaks with forked tongue.
And she can’t keep herself from stepping on both forks.
Consider just recently:
–her comments after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was almost assassinated in Arizona.
–her idiotic bus tour, which culminated in her astonishingly ignorant remarks about Paul Revere.
–her insistence that she had been right about Paul Revere: yes, really, he was shooting his gun and ringing his bell to warn the British that the Americans were coming!
–her embarrassing cancellation of the rest of the bus tour.
–her insistence that she had not cancelled the bus tour.
–her cancellation of her trip to Sudan because of nonexistent “jury duty.”
–her support for the hugely embarrassing movie about herself. “The Undefeated” could be the worst movie ever made about a politician, which is fitting, because she could be the worst political figure ever to etch her way into the national consciousness. Only fitting that it was made by a guy who made his money at Goldman Sachs, ripping off real Americans while he enriched himself. And they have the gall to call themselves populists!
The list could go on, and Sarah herself will assure that it does.
It also goes way back in time. Trust me, Sarah’s history of stepping all over her forked tongue all her life is documented in THE ROGUE.
I’ll never forget the first time I heard her voice. I was considering a new book about Alaska, a sequel to GOING TO EXTREMES. I heard that Alaska had a woman governor. That intrigued me. I googled her. Then I youtubed her. Fifteen seconds after first hearing her voice, I knew she wasn’t somebody I wanted to write about.
Then McCain chose her as his running mate. Which meant that this blithering idiot came close to holding a national office that could have been the Presidency.
And so I felt I had to write about her.
I still tremble when I think about that. Do any of you realize how close we came to the destruction of the United States of America, and its replacement by the Christian States of America? For those of you who believe in him, thank God for Barack Obama. May we never have to learn what he saved us from.
Every day for the rest of our lives every one of us should let John McCain know what a traitor he was to the country he once served so bravely.
Meanwhile, Sarah lives on as a national political figure, enabled by the very mainstream media that ridicules her.
Breathlessly, the Beltway Bunch awaits her decision…
Sarah has already laughed all the way to the bank.
Now she may swoop in again and try to steal our country and present it to her cult–the Christian Dominionists, whose top priority is to destroy separation of church and state.
Sarah tried that in Wasilla. It didn’t work. That doesn’t mean she’s not planning to try it again, on a much larger scale.
With every word her forked tongue allows her to utter, she tries to play down her ties to Evangelistic Extremism, but in her heart she knows they’re right.
Actually, God is getting the last laugh here.
Because with every word she utters in live time (and this excludes her ghost-written Facebook posts), she trips all over the tongue God gave her but forgot to tell her how to use.
In THE ROGUE, I write about my visit to John Stein, the man Sarah unseated as mayor of Wasilla in 1996.
You can read about Stein’s integrity and honesty and self-effacing sense of humor in the book, but I’ll include this brief exchange with him here to give you a sense:
“My question about Sarah,” he says, “is if God wants her to be president, why didn’t God equip her with education enough to have at least basic knowledge of geography, science and social systems?”
“You mean so she wouldn’t say she could see Russia from her house?”
“She never said that,” he says, smiling. “She said she could see rush hour.”
Posted in 2012, Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, Obama, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, The Rogue, Wasilla | Tags: forked tongue, gabrielle giffords, ignorance, john mccain, john stein, paul revere, serpents | 84 Comments »
Meet the new Sarah Palin: Nikki Haley of South Carolina
July 3, 2011
As Sarah’s free-fall into political irrelevance accelerates, Bachmann has already replaced her as the right-wing Republican woman who might matter in 2012. But it’s Nikki Haley (pictured with Sarah above) who threatens to erase all memories of the Wasilla Weirdo.
[By the way, thanks to commenters and others who worry that nobody will care about THE ROGUE when it is published on September 20. Worry not. My publisher, Crown, is not concerned. In fact, the people at Crown are wildly excited about the book's prospects, and growing more so every day. THE ROGUE contains enough startling new revelations--as well as my first-person account of what it was like to live next to Sarah last summer--to assure the sort of national interest that previous books about Sarah did not achieve. Major national media attention is already guaranteed, although I'm not permitted yet to get specific.]
But think longer term: Bachmann will burn out this year and next because she’s just as dopey and as enslaved to Dominionist Christianty as is Sarah.
Obama should be so lucky as to have Bachmann as his 2012 opponent. (No, he couldn’t possibly be so lucky as to have Sarah to wipe up the floor with next year: if he did, he might win all fifty states.)
No matter who it is, he’ll be reelected. Yes, you heard it here first. No matter how short the odds, bet Obama in 2012.
Current odds from Ladbrokes in the UK:
Barack Obama
1/2
Mitt Romney
5/1
Tim Pawlenty
12/1
Rick Perry
14/1
Jon Huntsman
20/1
Michele Bachmann
20/1
Sarah Palin
33/1
Rudy Giuliani
50/1
Herman Cain
50/1
Ron Paul
66/1
Newt Gingrich
66/1
Rick Santorum
150/1
Gary Johnson
150/1
Thaddeus McCotter
150/1
If you bet $1,000 on Obama to be reelected, you’d receive $1,500 the day after election day, 2012.
That’s a fifty percent return on your money in sixteen months.
I personally, of course, do not endorse wagering in any form.
Nonetheless, you might be interested in Ladbrokes’ take on the GOP nomination:
Mitt Romney
11/8
Tim Pawlenty
4/1
Rick Perry
5/1
Michele Bachmann
7/1
Jon Huntsman
10/1
Sarah Palin
14/1
Rudy Giuliani
25/1
Herman Cain
25/1
Newt Gingrich
33/1
Ron Paul
40/1
Rick Santorum
66/1
Gary Johnson
66/1
Thaddeus McCotter
66/1
Rick Perry, who hasn’t even said he’ll run, is 5/1, while Sarah, slipping fast, is 14/1 for the nomination.
But let’s look beyond the easy money Ladbrokes is putting on the table. Let’s look to 2016, by which time Sarah will be only that bad taste you might burp up if you ate too much pizza last night.
The GOP/Tea Party/hot chick meme will still be out there. There will be no incumbent President.
Beware Nikki Haley of South Carolina. The New York Times has just anointed her as the future of the Tea Party here.
And the Haley piece was written by Kim Severson, formerly of the Anchorage Daily News.
So she knows how this stuff can happen.
HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY TO ALL WHO READ THIS BLOG AND COMMENT ON IT, AND ALSO TO ALL OF OUR TROOPS SERVING OUR NATION, BOTH HERE AND ABROAD, AND ESPECIALLY TO THOSE WOMEN AND MEN WHOSE LIVES ARE IN DANGER AS THEY SERVE IN WAR ZONES.
It’s not only Sarah Palin who cares about you.
Bachmann Steals Sarah’s Thunder: Sarah Quits Again & Lets Her Take It
June 27, 2011
It’s tough to catch lightning in a bottle.
Equally tough to recapture the sound of thunder once someone else has spirited it away.
Sarah Palin’s endless, erratic dithering about her 2012 intentions has created a vacuum on the evangelical right that Michelle Bachmann has been quick to fill.
Who was all over the Sunday talk shows today? Bachmann. Suddenly, the press is all about her.
Just look at this.
Through her fear of engagement with America’s opinion-makers, and movers and shakers, Sarah has painted herself into a corner at which fewer and fewer people even bother to glance.
Bachmann has effortlessly slid into the groove that Sarah once occupied.
Suddenly, it’s Bachmann who is the “serious” female candidate for the GOP nomination.
Suddenly–or not so suddenly–Sarah has been shoved to the sidelines, from which her shrill cries can barely be heard.
I start the last chapter of THE ROGUE by writing:
The time has come to strike the tent.
That may seem like a strange thing to say in the last chapter of a book about the star performer of the circus. But no matter how much my book sales might benefit from a Palin presidential campaign in 2012, I sincerely hope that the whole extravaganza, which has been unblushingly underwritten by a mainstream media willing to gamble the nation’a future in exchange for the cheap thrill of watching a clown in high heels on a flying trapeze, is nearing the end of its run.
Someone who knows Sarah better than I do told me recently that the only thing that would propel her into the 2012 race would be a credible Michelle Bachmann candidacy. Because Sarah couldn’t bear to yield the limelight to another woman.
Yet it’s happened. I’d always thought Sarah would run for president because to not do so would destroy her credibility even among the cretins who would have supported her.
But she just didn’t have the guts, or the commitment, to do so. She’s always been a phony and a bully.
Because of John McCain’s desperate and deeply unpatriotic inanity, she got in over her head in 2008.
She’s been treading water ever since. Now she’s about to sink out of sight.
To switch the metaphor back to the circus, she’s skulked away from the center ring, conceding it to Bachmann without a fight.
A venal, lying, avaricious quitter she always was, and a venal, lying and avaricious quitter she’ll always be.
Goodbye, Sarah, “The Oft-Defeated.” We knew ye all too well.
Posted in 2012, evangelical, Fox, mainstream media, michelle bachmann, right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, The Rogue | Tags: 2012 gop candidates, bachmann, cowardice, fear, instability, john mccain, quitting | 95 Comments »
Increasingly Desperate, Sarah Palin Supporters Pin Hopes on New Movie
June 19, 2011
As they see even what used to be her base losing interest in Sarah as Queen Esther–and as a presidential candidate–her shrinking hard core of unblinkingly blind zealots is praying out loud that the propaganda film made by one of their own can somehow overcome all that Sarah herself has done over the past two-and-a-half years to make herself irrelevant, laughing all the way to the bank.
The serious neo-cons, such as Kristol, Barnes and Krauthammer, whom she so successfully seduced in 2008, have abandoned her.
To them, she’s become a dirty joke they wish they hadn’t told.
Most of the Tea Partiers have given up on her, too, transferring their affections to Bachmann, while dreaming of Perry.
This leaves Sarah increasingly isolated, no more a “Mama Grizzly,” but a polar bear marooned on an inexorably shrinking ice floe (but one, she will assure us, that isn’t melting because of man made global warming.)
God used to open doors for her. Now she needs a deus ex machina just to keep herself afloat.
The dwindling few who still proudly proclaim themselves as cult members see “The Undefeated” as their last best hope.
See this frantic call to arms–or at least to the box office–at The Daily Caller.
Or listen to the last gasps of the drowning at Conservatives4Palin, such as this and this.
As if a propaganda film could save her now.
For the record, Sarah Palin is not undefeated. She was not only defeated as McCain’s running mate in 2008, but she was defeated in her race for lieutenant governor of Alaksa in 2004.
“The Twice-Defeated” would be a more accurate title.
Not that accuracy has ever mattered to Sarah.
Posted in 2012, evangelical, glenn beck, Greta Van Susteren, Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, michelle bachmann, right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, The Rogue | Tags: 2008, charles krauthammer, conservatives4palin, deus ex machina, dirty jokes, fred barnes, god, ice floe, john mccain, mama grizzly, michelle bachmann, palin movie, polar bears, propaganda, queen esther, rick perry, the daily caller, the undefeated, william kristol | 71 Comments »
Sarah’s Decision Coming Soon? Not likely.
June 17, 2011
The NYTimes summarizes todays non-story here.
In short, The American Spectator wrote that Sarah would announce her decision within a week or so.
Sarah promptly tweeted thusly:
“Really? Hmm, guess they forgot to inform me what I’m ‘expected to do’ next wk…”
The latest I’ve heard from sources I consider both reliable and informed is that Sarah will drag out whatever suspense there is as long as possible.
She’ll go to Sudan, possibly to Israel in August for a Glenn Beck rally, and do two more legs of her bus tour, all the while delaying her announcement.
Unless of course she gets into a bad mood and cancels any or all of the above. (Her history of extreme mood swings is something I pay considerable attention to in THE ROGUE.)
In the end, my best sources tell me, she won’t run. All the skeletons in her many closets are begging her not to, and she’ll listen to them.
She’s afraid. She’s just plain scared of what might happen if mainstream media finally decides that the honeymoon is over and starts to dig. If she runs, they will, this time. If she doesn’t, why bother?
She also lacks the organizational ability to build the complex structure that a presidential campaign would require, and she doesn’t trust anyone enough to let a professional take over. Remember, in 2008, McCain just plugged her into an operation that was already in high gear, and even that didn’t work out.
Also, she’s not really committed to any cause except herself.
HOWEVER…I was told a month ago that the one factor that could change all the above would be the sudden emergence of Michelle Bachmann as the “new” Sarah Palin. Sarah’s ego would not allow her to stay on the sidelines and watch Bachmann take the center stage that Sarah feels belongs to her.
And that’s exactly what’s happened in the past few weeks. Bachmann is this month’s media darling. If that lasts through Labor Day, Sarah might have to take the plunge.
I’ve always thought she would run. I still think so. But people who know more than I do tell me she won’t.
Bottom line for now: expect the tease to continue until Sarah has sucked the last egg out of the golden goose.
Trig? New evidence from Sarah Palin emails//UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan reacts
June 14, 2011
I’ve declared myself as “trignostic,” meaning I am skeptical about Sarah’s story of her pregnancy with Trig and his birth, but I am not yet certain that it could not be true.
If it’s a hoax, it would be the worst ever perpetrated on the American electorate by a candidate for national office.
That’s a lot to swallow, which is why MSM has simply turned its collective head.
I’m still not convinced (i.e. persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt), but recent close readings of the newly-released Palin emails by Jesse Griffin at Immoral Minority and Andrew Sullivan at Daily Dish bring me closer to concluding that Sarah’s tale is an absolute and utter fraud and that Trig, in fact, was not her baby.
To me, the questions have always been valid, and the MSM dismissal of Sullivan as a misogynist freak with a tinfoil beard has been shameful.
The question of whether or not Trig was really Sarah’s baby was much on my mind last spring and summer in Alaska. Both Levi’s sister, who was photographed holding him soon after birth, and Levi’s mother assured me that conspiracy theories about Trig were absurd: Sarah gave birth to him, just as she said.
I devote a full chapter of THE ROGUE to this question, and have material in other chapters that relates directly to it.
My research did not uncover proof that Sarah was lying, but I returned from Alaska last fall more skeptical about the official version of events than I’d been when I got there.
In regard to this question, I recall the words of a US Army CID detective who on April 6, 1970 questioned Jeffrey MacDonald about his account of the murders of his wife and two daughters: “Anything is possible, but some things are more possible than others.”
I now think in regard to Trig that anything is possible, but that it’s more possible than not that Sarah’s whole story is a lie.
Even so heavily redacted, the Palin emails offer startling new evidence. By evidence, I mean facts that could be submitted to a jury in a court of law. For a long time, there have been photos online–both of Trig’s ear and Sarah’s belly–from the spring of 2008 that would seem to contradict her version of events. But much of what a photograph demonstrates, in a forensic sense, is in the eye of the beholder. If you already believe Sarah’s story to be a lie, the photos prove it. If you don’t, they’re just pictures, taken from different angles by different people at different times.
The emails, however, are in Sarah’s own words.
As I point out in THE ROGUE , for someone who wrote in her memoir that “desperation…overwhelmed me” when she realized her amniotic fluid sac had ruptured in Dallas at 4 a.m. on April 17, 2008, Sarah was strangely indifferent to her baby’s fate. I describe how close she was to so many Dallas hospitals with neo-natal intensive care units, yet she felt no need to go to one, even though her baby wasn’t due for another month, and even though she already knew that his Down Syndrome and her age made the birth high risk.
Hell, Sarah didn’t even want to call her doctor!
I go into the hours that followed in great detail, pointing out that observations by others of her behavior every step of the way from Dallas to Wasilla cast doubt upon her version of events.
What’s new in the emails is proof that seven hours after being overwhelmed by desperation about the fate of her new gift from her Heavenly Father, Sarah was firing off BlackBerry messages, including one about Andrew Halcro, one of her opponents in the gubernatorial race of 2006, who’d started a blog often critical of her.
“What a goof he is…truly annoying,” she wrote in the throes of her desperation about Trig’s fate. She added, “I’m headed home from Dallas.”
We’ve all heard about compartmentalizing, but, hey, let’s get real: her great gift from her Heavenly Father is at risk of dying before he’s even born and Sarah is bitching about Andrew Halcro?
Despite being overwhelmed by desperation, Sarah also fired off a note to an aide that morning, instructing her not to proceed with a fake letter to the editor of the Anchorage Daily News–one that was to be sent as if it came from Sarah–responding to criticism from a couple of Anchorage radio personalities.
“Don’t submit at this time as there will be more thought put into this…” she wrote.
In THE ROGUE I wonder about how Sarah spent the hours between the onset of desperation at four a.m. and her luncheon speech. Now we know: she was on her BlackBerry, dealing with inconsequential matters, as her amniotic fluid continued to leak, putting her baby, hour by hour, at increasing risk.
IF there was a baby in her womb at the time.
Jesse Griffin’s close reading of Sarah’s letter to family and friends, written as if it were from God, provides the strongest evidence I’ve yet seen that Sarah was not pregnant in 2008 and did not give birth to Trig.
In the popular idiom, “God is in the details.” Here, God is in the redactions.
I read Going Rogue (don’t get me started.) In it, Sarah says she wrote a letter about Trig “to our family and closest friends.” Being Sarah, she opted to write it as if it had come from “Trig’s Creator, the same Creator in whom I had put my trust more than thirty years before.” She signed it, “Love, Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”
First, how crazy is that? You write a letter to family and closest friends announcing the arrival of a new baby as if you were God?
I’ve read saner communiques from Son of Sam and Charles Manson.
But…what’s relevant here is what Sarah redacted from the letter as published in Going Rogue.
There was sheer nuttiness, such as this paragraph, which was redacted:
(But tell me, what do you earthlings consider “perfect” or even “normal” anyway? Have you peeked down any grocery store isle, or school hallway, or into your office lunchroom lately? Or considered the odd celebrities you consider “perfect” on t.v.? Have you noticed I make ‘em all shapes and sizes? Believe me, there is no “perfect”!)
“You earthlings?” What is this, Star Trek?
But then there was the money quote:
“I let Trig’s mom have an exceptionally comfortable pregnancy, so she could enjoy every minute of it, and I even seemed to rush it along so she could wait until near the end to surprise you with the news…”
There’s more sentimental tripe about Piper not waiting too long for a Christmas present and Palins having four-day birthday parties (“You all really like cake”), which goes to show that the heavenly father really needs an earthling editor, but the bottom line is what Jesse Griffin spotted.
Jesse writes:
I believe we’ve now seen an email that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Sarah Palin’s pregnancy was not as reported.
On Monday, April 7th, Sarah Palin sent this letter from her official government account to her yahoo accounts. It was the draft of the letter she eventually sent to friends and family after Trig was “born” on April 18th, eleven days later.
This letter was written when Sarah Palin was supposedly thirty-four weeks pregnant. Six weeks away from her announced delivery date of May 18th.
How can you possibly explain her writing a letter which thanks God for giving her an exceptionally easy pregnancy (“Then, I let Trig’s mom have an exceptionally comfortable pregnancy so she could enjoy every minute of it,”) when she should have been six LONG weeks away from the end? Still facing the weeks that any woman will tell you are going to be the most uncomfortable…
How could Sarah know for sure that her birth would be easy and free of complications or that her baby would be, except for the Down Syndrome, healthy?…
And what about this sentence? “and I even seemed to rush it along…” I believe this is a clear reference to the fact that Trig came early. But how could Sarah possibly have known, on April 7th, that that was going to happen?…
Here is my question: if she could write on April 7th that her Heavenly Father let her “have an exceptionally comfortable pregnancy,” and she knew in advance she’d give birth so easily–although a month prematurely–that she wouldn’t even have to take a day off from work, how come “desperation…overwhelmed” her in Dallas ten days later?
Sarah: forget about “The British are coming!” What should worry you is “The questions are coming!”
Ever thicker and faster.
And by the way, where is Trig? Long time no see.
UPDATE:
See “A Trignostic Wavers” from Andrew Sullivan at Daily Dish today.
Posted in Andrew Sullivan, Business Insider, Fatal Vision, Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, Palin children, Sarah Palin, The Rogue, Trig Palin, Uncategorized | Tags: andrew halcro, charles manson, daily dish, down syndrome, fraud, god, hoax, immoral minority, jesse griffin, lies, son of sam | 284 Comments »
Palin Suckup Has Hurt Feelings, Whines
June 13, 2011
It’s not going well when even those with the brownest noses turn away from you.
Some poor chap who says he once “would once have taken a bullet for Sarah” now doesn’t like her any more.
Why?
Because she stopped paying attention to him.
Spurned lover John Ziegler tells his story of betrayal, at considerable length (for an online only piece), at The Daily Caller.
My reservoir of sympathy would have to be nearly drained before I’d feel bad for a right-wing huckster who took the bait only to find that there was a hook inside.
But Ziegler’s defection is just one more indicator that Sarah’s narcissism is so pathological that she can’t even be bothered to keep her acolytes on their knees.
She has the intellectual engagement of a bored seventh-grader, the attention span of a five-year old, and the impulse control of a toddler suffering from the terrible twos.
And now even those so pathetic as to have thought she brought meaning to their lives (aka Rebecca Mansour) are turning away from her.
Mainstream media is/are always a step behind because it/they are afraid to risk being a step ahead, so their people are still poring over meaningless emails, but Ziegler’s cri de coeur is like the canary in the coal mine: a warning to Palinists to get out now, while you still can, otherwise risk being found in the rubble.
Posted in Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, Sarah Palin, The Rogue, Uncategorized | Tags: john ziegler, rebecca mansour, the daily caller | 76 Comments »
Palin Emails – Redactions = Zero
June 12, 2011
What a waste of media resources, and how predictable to anyone who paid attention to the fact that while almost 25,000 emails from Sarah Palin’s tenure as Alaska governor–but stopping before Election Day, 2008–would be made available for public consumption, almost 2,500 additional pages would be withheld.
And who decided what to withhold? The state of Alaska.
And who is governor of Alaska today? Palin’s fellow-evangelical Christian lapdog, Sean Parnell, who became governor only because Sarah quit in July, 2009.
Just the list of withheld emails was 189 pages long.
As conservative Paul Jenkins explained in the Anchorage Daily News last week:
It turns out state lawyers and folks in the governor’s office — where some, it turns out, worked for Palin but now work for Gov. Sean Parnell, who was Palin’s lieutenant governor — made the calls on those 2,415 emails. Not an impartial panel of citizens and lawyers, or folks lacking direct or indirect ties to the authors of the emails or any court. Just insiders.
Does anyone detect a smell of fish?
Notwithstanding that the state announced in advance that more than ten percent of the emails would not be disclosed, MSM–even including The Guardian, from England, descended on Juneau in a state of mindlessness that can only be likened to mass hysteria.
As readers of this blog will know, I don’t have much truck with Greta Van Susteren, but her description of this as a “colonoscopy” was apt.
Sarah can only be relieved by the result: no malignancy found.
Of course, in a colonoscopy, the patient doesn’t get to hide ten percent of the area under examination.
To me, the most disturbing aspect of this whole overblown farce is that those assiduous protectors of Palin’s privacy, who redacted ten percent of the emails, did not bother to cross out personal contact information for anyone who’d emailed the governor’s office with criticism of Sarah. As first reported by PoliticusUSA, Alaskan citizens who exercised their right of free speech now find their email addresses, telephone numbers, and home addresses made available to the same sort of vigilantes who came after me last summer for merely moving in next door to her.
Let us hope that no harm–even in the form of threat or harassment–comes to anyone whose privacy has been invaded by Palin loyalists who retain government positions in the Parnell administration, and who were responsible for setting critics up as targets.
Will MSM call Parnell to account for this lapse?
Don’t hold your breath.
Now that they’ve come up empty in their frenzied quest for scandal, representatives of MSM will retreat as quickly and quietly as possible, asking the editors who put them on this cold case, “What were you thinking?”
The answer is, they weren’t thinking. They were hoping for a quick hit, a tabloid headline that could parlay the public’s ongoing obsession with all things Palin into website hits that equal advertising dollars.
It used to be only the supermarket tabloids that operated in such a fashion.
Now we witness the singularly unedifying spectacle of The New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, MSNBC, and even the Guardian hanging out their tongues in the hope that a tasty crumb might fall from Sarah’s table.
Sorry, folks. Move along, nothing to see here except a governor who was sensitive to criticism and worried about her public image as (see CNN) “she pushed to get landmark oil and gas legislation through the statehouse; [while] demanding that Exxon finish paying damages for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.”
There could be no stronger validation for the point of view (which, by the way, I don’t agree with) expressed by Joshua Green in the current issue of The Atlantic that Sarah was a strong and progressive governor before being blinded by the national limelight and running off the tracks.
The emails bolster Green’s argument in “The Tragedy of Sarah Palin” that:
“As governor, Palin demonstrated many of the qualities we expect in our best leaders. She set aside private concerns for the greater good, forgoing a focus on social issues to confront the great problem plaguing Alaska, its corrupt oil-and-gas politics.”
Or, as Molly Ball writes in Politico:
The emails from her governorship, released Friday, brought back the memory of a long-lost Palin: the popular, charismatic, competent woman of the people.
That’s like going in for a colonoscopy and being told that not only is your colon fine but you’ve got no cavities.
Nor could there be better advance advertising for Steve Bannon’s upcoming cinematic hagiography, “The Undefeated,” which will receive national release on July 15.
Note to MSM: Be careful what you wish for. Especially if it’s going to be redacted.
Posted in evangelical, Greta Van Susteren, Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, Sarah Palin, The Rogue | Tags: daily best, huffington post, joshua green, molly ball, MSNBC, new york times, palin emails, politico, politicusUSA, redaction, sean parnell, state of alaska, the atlantic, the guardian, Washington Post | 45 Comments »
Whatever is or isn’t in them, Palin emails will be BIG NEWS because MSM says so. UPDATE//Yo, these aren’t the Pentagon Papers!
June 9, 2011
There hasn’t been such a mass mobilization of mainstream media resources in anticipation of a single event since President Obama’s inauguration.
And The New York Times and Washington Post want readers to help sort through the whole mess.
It’s like a contest where the winners get to work for big, rich media organizations for no money.
You, too, can be an unpaid intern for a day or two or three.
I have no idea what they’ll find, nor how much redaction there will be in the 24,000 pages, but I am certain that the nearly 2,400 pages that are being withheld by the state of Alaska would make for far more entertaining reading.
In any event, plenty of media fodder to fill a slow weekend in June.
UPDATE:
How over the top is this media frenzy about emails from the administration of a half-term governor of a state with three electoral votes who was a defeated candidate for vice president and who has not held any elective office for almost two years?
It’s mass media hysteria. I’ve seen nothing like it in regard to government documents since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers forty years ago.
And as The New York Times wrote at the time, the Pentagon Papers “demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance”: the Vietnam war.
Here’s the irony: the very same mainstream media whose paid pundits tell us over and over again how inconsequential Sarah Palin has become are treating the release of Palin administration emails as an event of transcendent national interest and significance.
The New York Times and Washington Post (see above) are asking members of the public to work without pay to help them sort through the emails, looking for nuggets of gold amid the dross.
MSNBC, Mother Jones and ProPublica have together hired technological experts to help them create a full database of the emails asap.
The ghost of Paul Revere set out on a midnight ride tonight to warn, “The emails are coming! The emails are coming!”
My question: given that almost everyone has agreed that Palin has become as irrelevant to our national discourse as a third tit on a mule, why–especially in this age of journalistic decimation–are so many major MSM outlets pouring so many resources down a dry hole?
The New York Times and Washington Post putting out help-wanted ads in order to attract volunteer labor to work on this story of transcendent national interest and significance?
Think about that for a moment: those twin pillars of MSM have never tried to shanghai crews of amateurs in advance to help them with any other story. But for the Palin emails it’s all hands to the pump.
Why?
All the experts tell us Sarah will not run for president next year.
If she doesn’t, her political career ended on July 3, 2009, when she resigned as governor of Alaska.
Yet the political chattering class can chatter about little else but Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. They remain obsessed.
As I write in THE ROGUE:
Sarah Palin practices politics as lap dance, and we’re the suckers who pay the price. Members of our jaded national press corps eagerly stuff hundred dollar bills into her g-string, even as they wink at one another to show that they don’t take her seriously.
Anybody who thinks I exaggerate need only witness the spectacle about to unfold over the weekend.
Posted in Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, Obama, Sarah Palin, The Rogue | Tags: internships, new york times, palin email, state of alaska, Washington Post | 112 Comments »
