Palin's Gift

Certainly the intellectually honest must now acknowledge the in-bred, pre-programmed liberal bias of the mainstream media. The left can no longer deny the suddenly obvious, and thanks to Sarah Palin. She, without intending to do so, exposed the whole shebang.

Palin as an individual tripped something in the liberal media that spotlighted the rotten core - CNN, NYT’s, AP, ABC, Newsweek, Time. Newsroom reaction to Palin’s candidacy reflected to the average American just why these folk are rapidly going broke.

Media vulnerabilities were especially accentuated in the coverage of Palin. What these "journalists" exhibited in 2008 was epitomized by an eradication of the lines between fact and opinion – and, even more troubling, between reporting and propaganda. Some journalists were content to repeat Democratic party talking points or bloggers' rumors as though they were established fact, interspersing them with ideological commentary. For example, remember Palin’s decision as governor to cut Alaska's special education budget by 62 percent? After receiving emails to that effect, CNN's Soledad O'Brien cited the figure on-air. Oops. Palin actually tripled the state's spending on special needs kids. Recall the one about her membership in the Alaska Independence Party, which favors secession from the union? That made The New York Times, and again, wrong.

The coverage of Palin’s family life took media behavior from reckless to indecent. "A day of stunning Palin disclosures," was how the Associated Press greeted the news that Bristol Palin was pregnant. "A political stunner!" echoed CNN's Campbell Brown. In one 30-minute stretch, CNN reporters and anchors referred to the teen's pregnancy as "a bombshell" four separate times. And of course the Palin pregnancy hoax by Bill Mayer and Vanity Fair. From our favorite liberal, Camille Paglia , "The vicious double standard is pretty obvious. Only the tabloids, for example, ran the photos of a piss-drunk Chelsea Clinton, panties exposed, falling into her car outside London clubs a few years ago. If Chelsea had been the scion of Republican bigwigs, those tacky scenes would have been trumpeted from pillar to post in the U.S. as signals of parental failures or turmoil in clan Clinton."

Perhaps it was the 10/02/08 debate which was most revealing, the night Biden exposed his total lack of a grounding in government and constitutional affairs, the night incidentally that Palin cleaned his clock. No one in the media even saw it, or, chose to report it. Leading up to the debate, such luminaries as John Alter of Newsweek wrote that, "She is a far-right conservative who supported Pat Buchanan over Bush in 2000. She thinks global warming is a hoax and backs the teaching of creationism in public schools." She did not support Buchanan, she questioned whether climate change is man-made (not whether it's occurring) and gave creationists the most minor of rhetorical nods – and never questioned the teaching of evolution in schools. Hah! Too much.

And then the debate. Biden erroneously claimed that McCain voted with Obama on a budget resolution and asserted wrongly that Obama wanted to return to the Reagan-era marginal income tax rates. When the talk turned to national security, presumably Biden's purported area of expertise, he went completely off the grid. For example, he said Pakistan’s nuclear weapons can hit Israel. That is false. Pakistan has no intercontinental missiles. He said we "kicked" Hezbollah out of Lebanon. That is false. The US never "kicked" Hezbollah out of anywhere. Biden criticized Bush for supporting elections of the West Bank and said BO did too because it would legitimize Hamas. He was confused. Fatah controls the West Bank. Biden was thinking of Gaza. With Afghanistan, facts matter he said..."we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spend on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan." "Let me say that again," he said. He did and he was wrong both times. The facts here were that at the time Biden was speaking, the U.S. had spent $172 billion in Afghanistan over the 7 years. The Iraq War consumes between $7 billion and $8 billion every three weeks. What a clown. What a buffoon. Or when dressing down Dick Cheney, who was not present, for supposedly being unfamiliar with the Constitution. "The idea that he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States – that's the executive branch – he works in the executive branch," Biden said. Unfortunately, Article I defines the legislative, not executive, branch.

All of us know that if Palin had said any of this, she would have been laughed out of town. Biden got a pass. How come? As SJ Valley neighbor Vic Hansen role plays the journalists view, "Can’t smart people see that Palin’s naugahyde family is a reification of all this middle-class, mindless consumerism, without style, erudition, nuance and skepticism? How infuriating to sit here in New York and think that a winking tart could ever be elected, when seasoned sophisticates like Joe Biden and cosmopolitan metrosexuals like Barack Obama, who see it all, might not have been."

One intellectually honest, liberal journalist, a chief Washington correspondent for a news service, put it this way, "In the 2008 election, we took sides, straight and simple, particularly with regard to the vice presidential race. I don't know that we played a decisive role in that campaign. What I am saying is that we simply didn't hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin, and for me, the real loser in this sordid tale is my chosen profession." Facts matter.. "But they didn't in 2008, not when it came to Joe Biden (our guy) against Sarah Palin (odd outsider). The ladies and gentlemen of the press were more interested in her hair, her glasses, her wardrobe, her accent, her sex life, her kids' sex lives, and her hunting habits than in whether her opponent knew anything about foreign policy, the Constitution of the United States, or the job he was running for."

Thank you Sarah, for the gift of illumination.

Robert Craven