The moment GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin stepped off the stage in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after speaking at the Republican National Convention, there was this horrifying fear and panic that immediately shot up the spines of those in the progressive movement and the media establishment. They flew into a frenzy of lies, smears and innuendo against her, fully knowing that there was little time to get this genie back into the bottle before election day rolled around. Mark that day as the beginning of the smear campaign against Sarah Palin. Mark today as the end of it.
Don't mistake this as the end of opposition to Sarah Palin. That still exists in the mainstream media and is rearing its head more and more in the Republican establishment. But opposition requires legitimate tactics and intellectually honest debate to succeed. The smear campaign is over. Stopping Sarah Palin means having to take her head on now rather than slithering through the weeds and hiding behind unsubstantiated "anonymous sources" to spread gossip and toss out rhetorical garbage that the ignorant and uninformed will feed into.
That's right. The Palin haters in the media think you're stupid. They thought you'd actually believe their nonsense. For those who have bought into their nonsense, you have been had. Those who work hard and don't have the time to do all the research relied on the mainstream media for their information and they were given misleading information intentionally.
This writer commends Team Sarah, Conservatives4Palin, Ron Devito, Gary P. Jackson, Stacy Drake, William Jacobsen, Adrienne Ross, Josh Painter, William Collier, Pamela Geller, Dr. Gina Loudon, Tammy Bruce, Jedediah Bila, Andrew Breitbart, Dan Riehl, Robert Stacy McCain, Whitney Pitcher, Rachelle Friberg, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh and the thousands of others who collectively stood up for Sarah Palin and ended the smear campaign that was started up in the Mudflats of Alaska, a Celtic Diva's garden, a girl from Homer's microphone and an Immoral Minority's own personal hell.
The Immoral Minority website is now defunct. Patrick has been kicked off Palingates.com. Shannyn Moore struggles to further her career now that Keith Olbermann is no longer on MSNBC (a Google search on her name shows August of 2010 as her last first page accomplishment). Jeanne Devon earns blood money by collaborating on hit books about Sarah Palin.
The journalistic and pop culture worlds are littered with boats that have wrecked on the rocks of their own Palin hatred. Well known people like Kathy Griffin, David Letterman, Bill Maher, Martha Stewart, Peggy Noonan, Joe Klein, Norah O'Donnell, Mike Tyson, Madonna and others like them have all lost varying shades of respect from the public at large. Their hatred consumed them and it hurt their brands in one way or another.
If negativity is like a cancer that eats away at one's soul, it also eats away at one's reputation. Those who responded to the most existential threat to the progressive movement to ever walk the planet since Ronald Reagan have learned one universal truth: hate damages the hater more than the hated.
We can trace the smear campaign against Sarah Palin from the 2008 presidential campaign, through the frivolous ethics complaints that resulted in her strategically brilliant resignation, through her book tours and speaking engagements all the way up to today where the final last gasp is symbolized by a book by Joe McGinniss which is being torn to pieces by both the left and the right for its lack of substance and documentation.
Conservatives4Palin and Andrew Breitbart reports that it's even worse than the Palin haters thought. The McGinnis Book is a fraud and a hoax. "Now that there is evidence available to the public that shows there isn’t an ounce of proof to back up the claims made by McGinniss in his book, [Random House Publishing] should move to do the right thing and pull it from shelves," Stacy Drake writes in the Conservatives4Palin piece.
If the smear campaign against Sarah Palin was a fireworks show, the closing displays would be duds. Those trying to destroy Sarah Palin thought the McGinniss book was the final nail in Palin's coffin. Instead, it became the final nail in the coffin of the smear movement against Governor Palin.
The death of the smear campaign against Palin parallels the death of the media's ability to keep us from paying attention to "that man behind the curtain." The "One," who would stop the rising of the seas and whose voice boomed hypnotically from the speakers at campaign rallies where people fainted and cried for being in his presence, has had the shroud of mythology pulled away from him by the hard working people in the new media who have taken to the blogosphere and Twitter to present a truth the mainstream media desperately tried to hide for the last three years.
The media's agenda to protect and promote Barack Obama was the motivating force behind their smear campaign against Sarah Palin. They saw her as so viable and electable in 2012 that, even after she lost in 2008, they continued the campaign to destroy her knowing that she'd be back to possibly take down their beloved Barack. To this day, there are still people, even on Fox News and in the Republican Party, who have unknowingly allowed these media tricksters and subliminal manipulators to succeed in getting them to believe that Palin can't win in 2012. They underestimate Palin at their own peril.
Despite this mind crime, Palin's numbers remain strong. Her army continues to grow. Just look at how Organize4Palin continues to expand its scope throughout the country. She is polling in the top tier of Republican candidates even though she has not yet announced if she's running for president. SarahPac is saying she is on the verge of announcing. She was supposed to be living in a trailer park with curlers in her hair if you believed what was being written about her two years ago.
Had the smear campaign succeeded, Palin would have been destroyed by now. Had the trembling tigers - the weak minded amongst the more conservative punditry and within the Republican ranks - stood up for her and took on the media lies, Palin would probably be the front runner right now. These weaklings don't have the guts to articulate that it was the media that was damaging Palin and not her reality show, not "blood libel," not her supporters (Ann!) and not her book tours.
Yet, here she stands viable and electable. And, she hasn't even shown her stuff yet on the campaign trail.
It's becoming obvious to many that the media has lied to us. The failing Obama presidency was easily foreseeable had those in the media just done their jobs and reported accurately on his ideology, his associations, his false assumptions and his lack of experience. At the same time, they tried to destroy the one among us who had the real abilities to be president (vice president at that time) by lying about her.
The media may itself be no longer able to stomach the lies as talk begins to circulate that they may be ready to turn on Obama.
Monty Pelerin at American Thinker writes:
Barack Obama won the Democrat nomination because the mainstream media adopted him and went out of their way to ensure that he, rather than Hillary Clinton, won. As expressed by the Rex Murphy:The media malpractice that got Obama elected and Palin targeted is a failure. The slobbering love affair is over.
American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barrack Obama's rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign and it hasn't reclaimed them since.As a result, the press gave the great American republic an untried, unknown, and, it is becoming more and more frighteningly clear, incompetent figure as president. Under Obama, America's foreign policies are a mixture of confusion and costly impotence. They are increasingly bypassed or derided; the great approach to the Muslim world, symbolized by the Cairo speech, is in tatters. America's debt and deficits are a weight on the entire global economy. And the office of presidency is less and less a symbol of strength.
To the degree the press neglected its function as watchdog and turned cupbearer to a styrofoam demigod, it is a partner in the flaws and failures of what is turning out to be one of the most miserable performances in the modern history of the American presidency.
A tipping point appears to have been reached in the last month or so. The myth of Obama has ended. There is now open talk from the media that Obama cannot win in 2012.
Just as Democrats don't want a pariah at the top of the ticket, many in the media do not want to continue plugging what is obviously a failed candidate. The protective shield that existed is being dismantled. The press is more interested in saving what credibility they have left, rather than justifying an increasingly indefensible and broken presidency.
The American people are busy, prone to bad information when they expect truth from an institution that failed them. But, they are not stupid. "Snake oil is never purchased a second time," Pelerin writes. "Instead of the brilliant problem-solving uniter much of the nation believed they were buying, they got an incompetent, small, and not likeable mountebank."
Conversely, if the media was completely out of its mind for running cover for Obama, then it makes sense that the media was completely out of its mind for participating in the smearing of Sarah Palin. Obviously, if they were wrong about Obama, they were wrong about Palin. The haters relied on the established media to push their memes. The gravy train is no more. Turn out the lights. The party's over.
The Palin haters have emptied their arsenals. Their relentless attacks for three years made her stronger. It challenged her to think outside the box about her resignation strategy. It gave her the opportunity to extricate herself from a potentially bankrupting experience at the hands of miserable sacks with miserable lives who's only answer to their own unhappiness was to spend their time and efforts trying to destroy her. She became more successful because of it, not less.
They have fed the beast they so wrongfully tried to destroy. Because of their efforts, Governor Palin is the most vetted candidate ever. Should she run, the "October surprise" will be impossible to conjure. Should she run, impaling her on her record, her character and her work ethic will be a futile attempt. Yes, the Democrats will come after her. They will smear any candidate who wins the GOP nomination. But with Palin, you get a tried and tested product. There will be no surprises. We have the failed smear campaign against her to thank for that.
Though this smear campaign is over, it doesn't mean they will stop trying to stop her. A new door is about to open. New challenges lie ahead for Governor Palin if she runs and gets the nomination. For the Palin army, the fight goes on. For her detractors, trying to defeat her now is going to be even more difficult. The Caribou Barbie days are over. It doesn't stick anymore.
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