Summary (posts follow):
The Beltway elites were not very happy at all about Sarah Palin being selected as John McCain's 2008 running mate, and they responded by lying, misleading, and generally smearing her. That started in September and ran all the way to election day, with the Washington Post being the worst offender.
Last modified Dec 31, 2008
... attempts from others, see the Sarah Palin smear page.
Note also the September 3, 2008 Klein piece "Angry Amateurs" (link):
There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before sh...
I haven't discussed a Frank Rich column here before, so let's start by showing several ways he's wrong in yesterday's "If Only Arizona Were the Real Problem" (nytimes.com/2010/05/02/opinion/02rich.html). It's centered around that state's new immigration law, but it's a wide-ranging rant. Here are just some of the ways he's wrong):
Politifact has named Sarah Palin's claim about there being "death panels" in Obama healthcare as their lie of the year; it was the top "lie" selected by both their editors and their readers. In an ironic - and not unexpected note - Politifact is misleading. You can read Palin's quote at the link above, and note that my predication came true: if Palin's supporters...
Yesterday at the Mall of America, someone threw a couple of tomatoes at Sarah Palin; he missed and hit a cop and is now under arrest. In response, Adrian Chen of Gawker offered "Who is the Hero Who Threw Tomatoes at Sarah Palin?" (150k screengrab here, URL at [1]) in which he calls the person who threw the tomatoes an "American Hero". He then followed that with "In Defense...
Mediaite offers "Canadian Comedian Fails Miserably In Trying To Embarrass Sarah Palin" (link):
During a book signing event in Columbus, Ohio, Canadian Comedian Mary Walsh ambushed (Sarah Palin) with camera crew and microphone to seek her thoughts on the Canadian health care system (and ostensibly embarrass her as well.)
While the event security detail prevented a meaningful interview, Pa...
In her book "Going Rogue", Sarah Palin claims that The Atlantic (meaning Andrew Sullivan) "ran" with the disgusting story claiming that Trig Palin was actually the son of her daughter. Sullivan takes umbrage at her claim, saying that he never "ran" with the story but simply asked questions. This incident is one of the things I've noticed time and time again from ...
The Huffington Post and the Associated Press are reviving a smear both perpetrated against Sarah Palin about a year ago. At the same time, most of Palin's defenders aren't taking effective steps to counter-act what HuffPost and the AP are doing.
In October of last year, AP writers Garance Burke and Justin Pritchard wrote about one of Palin's resume points, a pipeline deal. As contem...
Ask not why I'm writing a post about Sarah Palin's hair thinning. Ask why Serge Kovaleski, Jim Rutenberg, William Yardley, and others from the New York Times wrote an article making that false claim ("Palin’s Long March to a Short-Notice Resignation", link, via this):
Friends worried that she appeared anxious and underweight. Her hair had thinned to the point where she needed...
Former KFI talk jock John Ziegler has released his documentary "How Obama Got Elected" (link), which apparently contains example after example of the mainstream media lying about and smearing Sarah Palin. If anyone's seen it, please leave a review; note that I wasn't too very impressed with the Zogby poll Ziegler commissioned shortly after the election.
The trailer is attached;...
... part of that campaign. See the Sarah Palin smear page for a partial list.
During the campaign, Sarah Palin said that her favorite place to shop was a thrift store in Anchorage called ''Out of the Closet". I happen to know that there's also a chain of gay-benefiting shops in Los Angeles by the same name. If I had initiated the process whereby that chain considered filing a trademark infringement case against the Alaska store and that store had then ch...
The New Republic - home to a long series of reprehensible folks like James Kirchick and Jason Zengerle - has fallen for another hoax.
This time around, Michael Crowley offers the post "Even More Palin Cluelessness" (blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_stump/archive/2008/11/10/even-more-palin-cluelessness.aspx, via HotAir) about a supposed former McCain campaign advisor admitting that he was the ...
Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell offers "An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage" (link). Unfortunately, about the only "tilt" she admits to is in the amount of coverage. She almost completely ignores the fact that the Washington Post served as little more than an arm of the Obama campaign by lying and misleading on his behalf and by serving as the source for and amplifier ...
[IMPORTANT UPDATE BELOW]
An unnamed John McCain aide supposedly told Carl Cameron of Fox News - a tool if there ever was one - that Sarah Palin didn't know that Africa was a continent instead of a country. The aide also told him that she didn't know which countries were in NAFTA. Needless to say, this comes on the heels of a long line of smears against Palin, and it's almost assured...
The Anchorage Daily News - a paper that's endorsed Obama - offers "Misfire at Palin" (link) about last week's Associated Press "investigation" from Justin Pritchard and Garance Burke about bids for a major Alaskan pipeline project [1].
This report from The Associated Press is a remarkably skewed account with little new information to support the charge it implies. Pr...
How could anyone encourage people not to donate to Goodwill Industries? Well, because they spent the money they received in past donations on smear ad campaigns like the one described here. The two page ad features "Dear Sarah Palin, We eagerly await your $150,000 clothing donation on Nov. 5th" in the left pane and "Dear Barack Obama, If you'd care to donate any of your $1,500 ...
This site doesn't normally track the lies of Keith Olbermann since there are so many and no one outside his bubble trusts anything he says. However, sometimes he crosses the line, as he did with tonight's "Olbermann on Palin: Socialist, fraud/Governor doesn't have a problem with Alaska's socialistic collectivism" (link) which contains this:
Who was the collectivist sh...
Drew Griffin of CNN recently conducted an interview with Sarah Palin and asked her this:
Governor, you've been mocked in the press, the press has been pretty hard on you, the Democrats have been pretty hard on you, but also some conservatives have been pretty hard on you as well. The National Review had a story saying that, you know, I can't tell if Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, u...
Jimmy Lee Shreeve wrote an article for England's Telegraph yesterday ("Sarah Palin: Pointing a loaded gun at the environment?", link via this) which contained this completely fabricated Palin quote:
"magnificent, cuddly white bears are doing just fine and don't need our protection. If the ice melts, they'll adapt to living on the land."
That article went on to ge...
Showing once again that it's the dumb ones that give the game away, on the 16th Dana Milbank of the Washington Post claimed the following during an online chat:
In cooperation with the Palin campaign, [the Secret Service has] started preventing reporters from leaving the press section to interview people in the crowd.
As could be expected, various "liberal" sites rushed to retransmi...
Rachel d'Oro of the Associated Press offers an extremely sleazy, disreputable, race-baiting article called "Alaska's minorities feel ignored by Palin" (link). Articles like this show exactly how a Barack Obama presidency would operate: surrogates - assisted by the mainstream media - would attempt to racialize every decision made by Obama in an attempt to silence critics.
Alask...
Max Blumenthal - last seen here spinning a fantastic tale - joins with Mr. "white supremacist under every bed" himself, David Neiwert, to offer a smear called "Meet Sarah Palin's radical right-wing pals" (link). Their report was partly funded by the "Nation Institute Investigative Fund", which isn't getting its money's worth.
In this campaign we've...
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times offers "Palin's Kind of Patriotism" in which he sleazily questions Sarah Palin's patriotism (link). It starts out with this:
Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But given the huge attention she is getting, you can't just ignore what she has to say.
If someone said the same first sentence about BHO, the Huffingto...
Unctuous liar Dana Milbank - last discussed here in May regarding him misleading for Barack Obama - is back with an even more disgusting smear. This one a) portrays Sarah Palin supporters as bloodthirsty yahoos, b) tries to give the impression that Palin doesn't renounce bloodthirsty yahoos, and c) most importantly, raises the specter of Barack Obama being assassinated by a Palin supporter.
...
Sully links to this video of Margaret Thatcher being grilled by a regular citizen during the Falklands War as, of course, a way to criticize Sarah Palin:
The horrifying sequestering of Sarah Palin from a press conference and anything like this kind of public interrogation is a scandal.
Of course, what Sully fails to note is that Barack Obama has been "sequestered" since he started runnin...
Scott Shane of the New York Times offers "Obama and '60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths" (originally titled "Obama Had Met Ayers, but the Two Are Not Close"). If you believe the NYT, then everything's fine and dandy, and Barack Obama and 60s radical Bill Ayers are not close. The fact that they aren't close and never were close and nothing funny went on and the...
Followers of the MSM's attempt to destroy Sarah Palin have probably noticed a trend: the MSM reports something that's false or misleading and uses the "recollections" of a Democratic politician from Alaska as their authority on the matter. That's then picked up by the blogs and amplified, until such time as a new smear is ready.
Thus it is that Justin Rood of ABC News o...
Since around September 8, various sites and news organizations have tried to push the smear that Sarah Palin knowingly charged victims in Wasilla, Alaska for rape kits, and that her city stood alone in that practice. As it turns out, those claims are false (link). How did this start? A chronology is here [1], and an amplification is below.
One of the "hidden hands" behind the smear appea...
Desperately trying to glom onto AntiPalinMania, professor Catherine McNicol Stock - chair of the history department at Connecticut College - offers a hilarious slab of absolute stupidity called "Intolerance thrives in Palin's Pacific Northwest" (link). Summary: Sarah Palin is from the Pacific Northwest; there are many white supremacists and "antistatists" in the Pacific No...
As pointed out here countless times, the mainstream media has a habit of asking extremely weak questions, not coming up with any sort of follow-up, accepting answers that are just stock speeches as if they contained new information, and not asking about immigration matters unless necessary.
But, all that's going to change! In fact, the Washington Post's Anne Kornblut is gleefully soli...
Alternet is trying to start a smear that Sarah Palin thinks the U.S. Army is on a mission from God. Needless to say, trying to claim that a vice presidential candidate thinks our troops are literally on a crusade is extremely dangerous and those who do so are putting political concerns ahead of the interests of the country. But, Alternet is desperate enough to offer this (alternet.org/story/97907/...
[See the updates, it gets a lot worse: what Paul Kane describes as a "slash[ing]" of funds to a non-profit was over a threefold increase from all the government funds they received in 2006.]
Paul Kane of the Washington Post should consider a career as a DailyKos diarist, as he offers "Palin Slashed Funding for Teen Moms" (link):
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-...
On the one hand, it seems that the John McCain campaign didn't do their due diligence - in a GOP, mainstream sense - on vice presidential pick Sarah Palin. On the other hand, Jake Tapper's attempt to break news isn't as bad as the "news" recently coming from DailyKos, as he breathlessly lets us know that (link):
Officials of the Alaskan Independence Party say that Palin w...