Intelligent Discourse

It’s not bad enough that Sarah Palin’s egregiously underqualified. Now she’s converting her base into a lynch mob:

“Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness,” writes the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank.  “In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her ‘less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.’ At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, ‘Sit down, boy.’…

More here.

Comments

  1. maz says:

    That’s one reporter’s version. Funny how the DNC, I mean the Washington Post, couldn’t actually write what she said; only what they heard.

    What she actual said…

    “Palin called her Couric interview “a probably less-than-successful interview I had recently with kinda mainstream media,” drawing boos from the crowd.
    “Really, in that interview I was just getting really impatient because I was so convinced that Americans want to hear about the issues that are so important in your life,” including the war, the economy and education, she said.”

    I guess if you want to call that blaming Katie Couric, go ahead but judging from this story the Washington Post must have been the only reporters “greeted with shouts and taunts”.

    None of that reported here.

    More…
    http://www2.tbo.com/content/2008/oct/06/clearwater-palin-presses-obamas-link-ayers/

  2. Dave says:

    I’m going to leave the Washington Post = DNC mouthpiece thing alone. Seriously, what was that about?

    The Post could very well have written a separate article about her speech. I don’t know. However, the behavior of the people attending the speech was news in and of itself. And if you read the article, you’ll note that the crowd wasn’t targeting the Post writer specifically. The problem I have with all of this is the us vs. them, win at all costs bullshit that has tainted Republican politics since well before the 2000 election.

    Palin was given the opportunity to talk in depth about her position on all of those things last Thursday night. She didn’t bother, though; she stuck to her bullshit “folksy” persona, touched only the bare surface of the issues she claims to want to talk about, and retreated to her supposed strong position on energy whenever she didn’t have a good answer or couldn’t remember what she’d been coached to say.

    She’s trotted out the long-since debunked Ayers storyline, with thinly veiled attempts to call Obama a terrorist. The so-called “liberal media” pounded on the Ayers and Wright stories relentlessly during the primary season, and neither story actually went anywhere. But leave it to Palin to bring that crap out now; it goes along well with the Republicans stated plans to get away from talking about the economy and get back to mudslinging because they have no good plan for the economy.

    By the way, when did CBS become “kinda” mainstream media? Shouldn’t that “kinda” thing be reserved for NRO, Drudge, and DailyKOS?

    While we’re at it, here’s a fair analysis of the whole Ayers thing. I sincerely hope that NPR isn’t viewed as a DNC mouthpiece organization. An excerpt:

    Regardless of his background, it was never a problem for anyone — including Republicans and Chicago’s most powerful business leaders — to work with Ayers on Chicago’s public schools. In fact, Ayers is widely respected in the field of urban education.

    “It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he had led a fugitive life years earlier,” said former Illinois state Republican Rep. Diana Nelson, who worked with both Obama and Ayers over the years. “It’s ridiculous. There is no reason at all to smear Barack Obama with this association. It’s nonsensical, and it just makes me crazy. It’s so silly.”

    Damn that silly Republican, not parroting the talking point like an automaton.

  3. Dave says:

    What do you know…the Washington Post did a writeup about her speech.

    “Okay, so Florida, you know that you’re going to have to hang onto your hats,” Sarah Palin told a rally of a few thousand here this morning, “because from now until Election Day it may get kind of rough.”

    You betcha. And the person dishing out the roughest stuff at the moment is Sarah Palin.

    “I was reading my copy of the New York Times the other day,” she said.

    “Booooo!” replied the crowd.

    “I knew you guys would react that way, okay,” she continued. “So I was reading the New York Times and I was really interested to read about Barack’s friends from Chicago.”

    It was time to revive the allegation, made over the weekend, that Obama “pals around” with terrorists, in this case Bill Ayers, late of the Weather Underground. Many independent observers say Palin’s allegations are a stretch; Obama served on a Chicago charitable board with Ayers, now an education professor, and has condemned his past activities.

    “Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.

    “Boooo!” said the crowd.

    “And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,’” she continued.

    “Boooo!” the crowd repeated.

    “Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.

    Palin went on to say that “Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers’s living room, and they’ve worked together on various projects in Chicago.” Here, Palin began to connect the dots. “These are the same guys who think that patriotism is paying higher taxes — remember that’s what Joe Biden had said. “And” — she paused and sighed — “I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America, as the greatest force for good in the world. I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as ‘imperfect enough’ to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.”

    “Boooo!” said the audience.

    So. A Palin supporter called for the murder of Bill Ayers. Palin could have taken the high road for once and spoke out against mindless violence. But Sarah Barracuda couldn’t find the high road with a flashlight and a map.

  4. Jim says:

    Unless there was a moose on it.

  5. Other Jim says:

    OK.
    Not that this should be important less than a month before the election, but I’ll ask…..how is the Ayers story “debunked”? I’m not arguing, just curious because of course there’s been alot about it. Overall, how someone like Ayers can end up a college professor is beyond me. I’ve heard alot of “downplaying” the relationship, he tried to blow up the Capitol when Obama was 8 years old, blah blah blah. How is the story wrong? The NPR article link said merely he felt he was taken out of context, did some nice things. It’s a spin piece. Is Obama a good judge of who to surround himself with?

  6. dave says:

    short reply from the road: Ayers’ past didn’t seem to bother the Republicans who sat on the same board. Ayers was never convicted, unlike McCain’s buddies in the Keating Five. This is just a smokescreen to distract you from McCain’s weak position on the economy.

  7. dave says:

    Also, McCain has surrounded himself with the scumbags who pull Bush’s puppetstrings. Do we need more of their shit? The answer is an emphatic NO.
    Remember when McCain repeatedly said he’d run a positive campaign? His ads are now 100% negative, to Obama’s 30%. So much for McCain sticking to his word.
    Plus I like Obama’s call for a concerted energy independence program, something that the other guy has had no interest in until the last month or so.

  8. maz says:
  9. maz says:

    McCain admits that he made a poor judgment with Keating:
    “The appearance of it was wrong. It’s a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do.”

    Obama thinks Ayers is “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” or “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”

  10. maz says:
  11. Dave says:

    Yes. Scumbags. I’m not talking about the low-level schedule wrangler or the person who puts together the oh-so-helpful printed booklets. I’m talking about his advisors.

    This quote always makes me chuckle:
    “The appearance of it was wrong. It’s a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do.”

    Of course it was wrong, John. That doesn’t make it any less truthful. It’s also worse than trying to make hay out of something that Ayers did when Obama was EIGHT. You’re trying to make him guilty by association while you were guilty by submission. That’s not a small distinction, and it’s not something anybody cares about – as evidenced by your polling numbers.

  12. maz says:
  13. Dave says:

    I don’t know. There’s absolutely no excuse. We had entirely too much of that crap here in 2004 (thanks to Blackwell), and I don’t agree with any of it. I’d be happy if we went to a fully paper-based, hand counted voting system. At least we’d have a paper trail and no easily-hacked Diebold machines.

  14. maz says:

    Dave,
    Have you ever looked at this?

    http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/23733.html

    It does a nice job at correcting McCain and Obama. Good resource.

  15. Dave says:

    Yeah, that’s a good resource.

    I have another post brewing in my head in which I’ll tell y’all why I’m voting for Obama, I just don’t have time to lay it all out right now.

  16. Other Jim says:

    So you’ve decided on Obama? Whew. This indecisiveness was killing me.

    BTW — if McCain had served on a board with some “unconvicted” abortion clinic bomber, he would be raked over the coals as well. Granted, it probably wouldn’t have happened when he was 8. I guess when he was 8, the country was railing against unfair taxation from England. PAH DONK A DONK!!! YEAH! —Come on, that was awesome.

  17. maz says:

    Other Jim,
    You are by far the funniest contributor to this site. You make me laugh out loud almost every time you write. Thanks. t*

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