Media Orgasms

This week two more totally unfounded rumors were circulated by the media about the Palins.  The first involved Sarah Palin's  appearance to watch daughter, Bristol, on Dancing with the Stars.  Because there was booing before she was interviewed, the booing was attributed to Sarah being unpopular with the audience.  DWTS, the number one show on television, had to take time the next evening to show that the booing related to low scores given to a couple that had just danced and had nothing to do with Gov. Palin. 

The second "controversy" that was media created was Bristol's appearance in support of DWTS at the Rumrunners, an Anchorage bar and grill.  Her dance partner, also a musician, gave a performance and Bristol attended and ate some nachos and drank a glass of water. The event was covered by Entertainment Tonight and her attendance had been publicized for three days on the Bob and Mark radio show in Anchorage.  The next day, the Alaska media went nuts.  What was a 19 year old doing in a bar?  Did Bristol break the law? No one in the media bothered to check the business license status of the bar and grill.  If they had, they would have found out that the Rumrunners is licensed as a restaurant and it is legal for anyone 16 years of age to be there and eat there.  Younger children can also eat there with their familes.  After the media learned that Bristol's presence there was not violating any law, then they had to ask, was she drinking?  The Alaska beverage control was forced to conduct an investigation, gather film of the event and waste more of Alaskans' money investigating the Palins.  Many Alaskans will not hear about the resolution of this and will come away believing that Bristol was drinking in a bar and that the Palin family thinks they are above the law.

Why is it so important for people to believe that Sarah Palin's daughter has committed some crime?   Why is it so important that people think that Sarah Palin is unpopular?  It's hard to believe that Gov. Palin has done anything to anyone sufficient to justify such hate.  Is it jealousy?  Do some people resent Gov. Palin's success in business, politics, and her personal life?  It's hard to believe that jealousy could provoke such a response.  A more obvious reason is partisan political opposition.  Given that Gov. Palin did not govern from the extreme right in Alaska, and much of the anti-Palin sentiment is in Alaska, the political impetus must be coming from outside.  Perhaps some Alaska democrats feel a certain amount of guilt at having worked with Palin and having contributed to her success as governor.  Now that she's in the national arena, they have to redeem themselves by destroying what they helped to create.  Whatever the motivations, Palin supporters call this condition "Palin Derangement Syndrome or PDS".  The symptoms are that the sufferer is wedded to Sarah Palin 24/7.  They over-amplify every one of her actions and the actions of those who are with her and impute to them some inordinate significance.  They create rumors based on their "observations", circulate them on the internet and in the media creating the impression that Sarah Palin is some kind of idiot, hick, or otherwise dangerous person.  Not only does "PDS" affect the Palin family, but also anyone who is around them.  Even the DWTS audience was painted with the "PDS" brush.

The rumors of this week are not the last we will hear about Gov. Palin.  It would be a wonderful thing if, in the future, the rumors were about Sarah, and not about members of the Palin family, who have not and will not be seeking public office.

Another Week, Another Hit Piece

A man named Gross has lived up to his name publishing the ultimate of hit pieces in Vanity Fair.  The "information" contained in the article was not the story this time.  The story was the reaction to it.  Gross depicted Palin as the Wicked Witch of the West, demeaning her husband, tossing around the "f" bomb, and throwing cans of food.  He criticized every aspect of her life , her politics, her religion, her family life, as being fraudulent.  To bolster his case, he named only one second-hand source with all the juicy bits being provided by that always reliable "anonymous". 

This time, even some liberals had had enough.  Some liberal feminists thought the author was criticizing Palin for qualities that a male politician might be admired for.  They missed the point.  It was all lies.  Many on all ends of the spectrum knew that it was lies and wondered aloud what journalism was coming to when a major publication would print such a story without documentation.

Get ready, another will be coming along soon.  Author, Joe McGinniss, has completed his "vacation" living next door to Sarah and Todd.  He will soon produce a book based on many of the same sources as this article, although possibly better written.  The question is - Have people had enough of this?  Is the opinion of a dozen or so  unnamed Alaska critics and bloggers sufficient to counter-balance more than 2 million Sarah Palin Facebook friends?

What the seemingly endless and baseless critiques of Sarah Palin tell us is that there is a necessity to make her out to be a fraud.  The left can not accept the fact that a woman can achieve success in her personal and public life, being guided by her religion and while holding conservative values.  The life of Sarah Palin is a poke in the eye to their value system.  The idea that a woman would knowingly give birth to a Down Syndrome baby challenges their view that abortion is a sacrament and that the disabled have little value to society.  That a woman can achieve success at the highest levels of government without sleeping her way to the top is just not possible.  If Sarah Palin is not exposed as a fraud she might peel away enough women voters from believing the liberal victimization agenda that the Democrat Party would lose the largest component of its coalition.  Liberals will stop at nothing to expose this fraud.  Every sentence she speaks will be parsed, every eye movement played back in slow motion and, if they could, they would crawl under the covers with Todd and Sarah to report back on their sex life. 

Since this latest attack fell flat and forced an admission that one of the assertions that the author was supposed to have seen himself was untrue, the public may have gotten the measure of these Palin-haters and their small number of Alaska confederates.  The appetite for more sleaze may be diminishing.