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By Anonymous Mike, pseudonymously.



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Wednesday, September 3, 2008
 
For a Few Smears More

Maybe I'm getting to be like Vox, all Palin all the time. However the stuff is just too compelling to turn away.

When Palin was announced last Friday, she was an unknown quality to most in the media; first-term governors of small states on the far edge of the country are like that. Goodness gracious, in Anchorage they get the early Sunday NFL game at 9:00 AM. So the rush was on for the media to vet her, sure McCain already said he did and the voters will get their chance later but as for the MSM, they had yet to pronounce on her.

The first cracks appeared on the far lefty blogs and Andrew Sullivan (but I repeat myself) with allegations that Palin's newborn son was actually her daughter's. The story seemed silly and easily refutable but that didn't stop it from beginning to top the retaining wall into the MSM, compare and contrast with the long silence on the Edwards affair. By Monday, Palin felt compelled to stop the flood tide and release an announcement stating that her daughter was 5 months pregnant and would marry the father.

The allegations and the actual story are familiar, too familiar. It is if Sullivan and bloggers at Daily Kos acted as stalking horses or even shock troops to pull the pregnancy story out with the MSM acting as willing participants. After all they just report the facts even if the facts are just allegations. Once the pregnancy story was out, once they could get Palin to reveal her daughter's pregnancy and ask the media to back off, then it was off to the races. Gotcha... the daughter as mother of Trig vector could be shelved, it did its job.

Even active reporting of the daughter 5 month pregnant story could be shelved; not just because the family asked for privacy but because it did its purpose of opening up a line of attack on Palin herself, her fitness, and on the judgment of McCain for picking her. The moose hunting woman governor from Wasilla was going to get vetted big time.

Take a look at an article from Monday's New York Times "Palin Disclosures Raise Questions on Vetting." Notice "disclosures" is in the plural, also notice that the supposed disclosures open a can of worms for both Palin and McCain. If she has these types of skeletons in the closet, what else do we know and who in the heck eats mooseburgers anyway? What kind of an idiot picks a person like this for the VP?

Let's look at the article:

3rd paragraph down we find out what other "disclosures" exist.

Among other less attention-grabbing news of the day: it was learned that Ms. Palin now has a private lawyer in a legislative ethics investigation in Alaska into whether she abused her power in dismissing the state’s public safety commissioner; that she was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party, which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede; and that Mr. Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge.

Start with Mr. Palin's drunk driving charge which technically gives us the necessary criteria for the plural of "disclosures." It happened in 1986 when the man was 22. before he got married, and in an era when driving under the influence was viewed much differently than today. Look at the next "disclosure," that Governor Palin was once a member of the Alaska Independence Party. The person making that allegation is now backing off and there is no evidence that Governor Palin was ever a member of the party.

Finally the private lawyer issue... the article implies that Palin herself has retained the private lawyer instead of using a lawyer from the AG's office which would be normal practice. However an article from the Anchorage Daily News states that the lawyer in question was hired by the State of Alaska becuase of a potential conflict of interest by the Attorney General

In fairness to the NY Times reporter, Elisabeth Buhmiller, the backtracking on the AIP disclosure and the Daily News piece on the private lawyer came after her article was published but you can still call her piece pretty hasty right? After all her article implies a whole mess of "disclosures" and so far we are back to a 22 year old drunk driving charge.

Well I'm generous and I'll help Ms. Buhmiller increase her disclosure count; it appears Ms. Palin was once cited for fishing without a license. Btw... if you follow the link, you get a much more detailed account of how Governor Palin was vetted including the fact that she quickly revealed to McCain's chief investigator the pregnancy, the drunk driving arrest, and the whole trooper-gate scandal.

However I'm not done with Ms. Buhmiller's hack piece. Later in the article she follows up with some Alaska politicians and finds out that no one asked them or people they knew about Palin. We're talking about heavy hitters like the State Senate president and the former speaker of the State House. Of course if you go back and check on these 2 politicians, Lyda Green and Gail Phillips, you find that both are political foes of Palin, have feuded with the Governor over legislation, and Phillips herself is tied directly to two of Palin's biggest foes, Frank Murkowski and Ted Stevens. It's like calling Harry Reid to get the straight scoop on President Bush. For more on the holes in Buhmiller's Alaska sources, check out this post in National Review's Media Blog.

So Buhmiller started off for big game. She wanted to take the Palin daughter pregnancy and blow it up to imply that Palin had many more skeletons in the closet and to accuse the McCain campaign to do its due diligence. Instead of scoring some trophies, we instead find her "disclosures" to be so old as to be hopelessly out-of-date, down right inaccurate, overblown, or reliant on the insinuations of Palin's Alaskan enemies.

That my friends is how the media vets our future leaders