Remember all those liberals and lefties huffily denouncing this blog's attempts to make sense of Sarah Palin's bizarre stories about the pregnancy and birth of her alleged fifth child? I was nuts, crazy, vile, disgusting, etc etc to indulge in what Dave Weigel, with no working knowledge of the story, calls "nonsense." You may also recall that the liberal media didn't touch this with a barge-pole - and still hasn't (apart from a NYT puff-piece that I found utterly credulous at the time). Newsweek has even put its entire reputation behind the details of the story as outlined in Going Rogue, without doing any independent reporting on the subject.Look, I enjoy these Sullivan meltdowns as much as the next guy on the intertoobs, the whole "NO WIRE HANGERS!" quality of the whole thing when you imagine the article read in a British voice is just amusing as hell. But...really? The "They called me mad at the university but who is mad now?" defense? That's it?
Well, we now know, that, for some at least, I wasn't crazy. I was just not disciplined enough to curtail what this blog airs in order to conform with what many Journo-listers believed were the interests of the Obama campaign. Any delusions that Journo-List was not, in part, a collusory venture to shape the media narrative in ways to benefit Obama, above and beyond ferreting out the truth about any and all candidates, must now be abandoned. Ezra Klein has already been caught in a bald-faced lie about his discretion in picking members; and the notion that this was simply a water-cooler collection of journalistic thoughts is also belied by the emails now published by the Daily Caller.
One should say this, however: I have no way of knowing what the DC has omitted, and how it has shaped this information. The thread stops rather abruptly. Maybe there is context that adds to what we know. I do not trust in any way the ethics of the Daily Caller. Nonetheless, I was obviously not alone in those August days, when I was pilloried for saying out loud what the entire chattering class was saying in private.
Awesome. So, let's complain about the tabloid, race-baiting gotcha journalism that is wrecking the media and then go on a hysterical tabloid bender about Trig Palin. Ugh. that's helpful.
Look Andy, the whole point was yes, people thought it, but no, they didn't think it was appropriate to the campaign to flog it in public because...it wasn't friggin appropriate to flog it in public. Of all the things to attack Sarah Palin on, (lack of knowledge, the many campaign lies, the money shell games, her term as mayor of Wasilla, etc) Trig Palin just is out of bounds, man.
Just...ugh.
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