07.12.09 -- 11:43AM // RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (70)
Ground Zero
In case you're wondering, ground zero of the current round of Sarah Palin supplication is this article by Carl Cannon in AOL's Politics Daily, the upshot of which is that the true villain of the almost-year-long Sarah Palin train-wreck is the media itself, whose collective liberal bias led them to have it in for Palin from the beginning and strive from the beginning to take her down.
How soon we forget how hard reporters worked at first at grading Palin on a curve and talking around her manifest disqualifications for high office. My only question on reading the piece is whether Cannon actually believes this malarkey or whether he's like all those other conservative talking heads who talk Palin to the stars on camera and then more or less lavishly concede she's manifestly unqualified for high office.
Certainly, the press in collective scandal mode is often an unpretty thing. But the reasons for what eventually became Palin's titanic bad press stemmed from three causes -- 1) her rapidly demonstrated lack of grounding or familiarity with almost every major policy question facing the country, 2) the fact -- which took reporters a bit longer to get a handle on -- that her governance of Alaska had amounted almost to one string of ethics violations and possibly illegal behavior. Time and again she showed a signal inability to grasp that executive power was not to be used to pursue personal vendettas or enrichment. And then 3), growing from the recognition of items #1 and #2, that Palin was simply a liar, even judged against the frightfully generous standard customarily applied to the truth-telling abilities of elected officials.
We must apparently resign ourselves to the fact that special-pleading for this deceptively talented political huckster will simply never cease.
--Josh Marshall
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