Dan

Calabrese

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September 4, 2008

Scumbag Media Cowards Attack 17-Year-Old While Hiding Behind Phony ‘Vetting’ Story

Since when did anyone make a campaign issue out of “vetting”? Since the mainstream media needed a sneaky excuse to attack Gov. Sarah Palin’s family without being obvious in doing so, that’s when.

The coverage of John McCain’s running mate over the past several days has been some of the most disingenuous, disgusting behavior I have ever seen from the mainstream media. They are engaging in character assassination without having the courage to at least do so honestly.

When the news broke on Monday that Palin’s 17-year-old, unmarried daughter is pregnant, the left-wing chatterbox sites went bananas with glee and smug satisfaction. They think evangelical Christians consider themselves to be morally superior, and they especially hate the notion among Christians and many other conservatives that abstinence from sex is the best thing you can teach kids about sex.

So when Bristol Palin’s pregnancy became public, the folks on DailyKos, DemocraticUnderground and Reddit.com could hardly contain their exuberance. One of those uppity Christians was proven a hypocrite! Abstinence-only education doesn’t work! Moral superiority – fail!

They were having their best day since we learned that Bill Bennett was a high-stakes gambler.

For the media and the Obama campaign, it was a trickier matter. They couldn’t be seen as attacking Palin’s family. Lots of Americans these days deal with teen pregnancies in their families – including lots of evangelical Christians (a category of which I am a part), who don’t see themselves as morally superior at all, just covered by the grace of Jesus Christ and hoping the same for others.

So how to make it a story without appearing to attack a 17-year-old girl?

In order to turn this into a scandal, while keeping their hands clean, the media are suddenly pretending that the McCain campaign’s vetting of Gov. Palin was somehow inadequate, and that this storyline deserves days of coverage. This is complete and utter garbage. For one thing, it’s false. The McCain campaign knew about the pregnancy before they chose Palin. They also knew about Todd Palin’s 22-year-old DUI. They decided that neither piece of information reflected on Palin as a candidate or as a potential vice president.

Nevertheless, we remain inundated with headlines like “Questions Swirl,” as if the answers are not known.

By making the questions the story, the media also give themselves license to repeat intimations that have already been thoroughly refuted. They repeated a claim that Palin had supported nativist anti-Semite Pat Buchanan for president in 2000. (She didn’t.) They repeated a claim that Palin had belonged to an Alaskan secessionist party. (The party’s own chairman says she was never a member.)

But it doesn’t matter if the stories are true. Now that the story is the “vetting,” it only matters that people thought they were true. That allows the media to attack the McCain campaign for not dealing proactively with information that was completely false in the first place, while making sure to let the voters know about the allegations – the very allegations, remember, that the media know are false.

In fact, nothing has come out that reflects negatively on Palin as a potential vice president. Nothing whatsoever. The media know this. But they are desperate to turn Sarah Palin into Dan Quayle, so instead of just letting it go, they continue on with a storyline that essentially says, “McCain should have known that we would harp on all this, even though it’s nonsense, so the fact that he still picked her reflects poorly on his decision-making process. Therefore, vote for Obama.”

No wonder Americans despise the news media. This is the scummiest excuse for journalism I have ever seen.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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