Eric

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October 6, 2008

Sarah Palin, Newspaper Aficionado

Sarah Palin reads newspapers.

This is a point about which she wishes there to be no confusion.

It’s been a couple of weeks since Palin’s disastrous interview with Katie Couric, during which the governor was caught flat footed on the question of what newspapers she reads to stay informed. Palin’s answer was much like her answer to every question she’s been asked since – evasion sprinkled with down-home folksiness.

Since then, everything she learns apparently comes from reading a newspaper.

It first popped up late last week, when she said she didn’t know about John McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign in Michigan until she read about it in the Friday’s papers. She said her response was to fire off an e-mail – no doubt liberally sprinkled with those colloquialisms she’s been using to cover up the fact that she has no substantive answers to any questions – asking him to reconsider, doggone it.

If true, that suggests the McCain campaign is treating the running mate like a mushroom – keeping her in the dark and feeding her healthy doses of crap.

Perhaps. She did say that she endorsed the Cheney approach to the vice presidency, one that contorts the Constitution into giving her a legislative role. While most everyone assumed that Dick Cheney’s rationale was a desire to dodge accountability, for Palin – if no one bothered to clue her into the decision leave a battleground state – it would mean creating a vice-presidential role in the legislative branch because she would have none in the executive.

On the other hand, McCain’s decision was broken in late morning. By that afternoon, it had supplanted the previous night’s debate as the lead media story. If Sarah Palin really learned about McCain’s decision by reading about it in the next morning’s paper, it lends support to the argument that she really is a bumpkin from the North Slope and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the machinery of government.

Just two days later, she was again reading newspapers. This time, she learned that Barack Obama knows a guy who was once a member of a ’60s radical group. In fact, this time she fingered the culprit – the New York Times, which she said is hardly ever wrong.

The Times is hardly the first place where Obama’s ties to William Ayers have been brought up. In fact, Fox News reported Sunday that the McCain campaign has long threatened to try to make Ayers a campaign issue. People with their ears to the ground, politically speaking, first started hearing that Ayers was going to become an issue raised by McCain as early as Friday, when Palin was supposedly just learning about her ticket’s decision to abandon Michigan.

The two are about as coincidental as are Palin’s new interest in reading the newspaper and her bomb appearance with Katie Couric. The nation’s deepening economic problems have removed the floor from McCain’s support, and he’s now in danger of losing states long believed to be safe for him. Luckily for him, Sarah Palin reads The New York Times and found out that Barack Obama once attended a meeting in a domestic terrorist’s house.

Worth noting for the upcoming week is what is supposed to be the release of a report from Alaska detailing Palin’s abuses of power as governor by using the machinery of government to reward friends and pursue vendettas. Of course The Times, which Palin said is hardly ever wrong, went into great detail laying all of this out a couple of weeks ago. Guess she missed that edition.

Will we finally get some answers from her about her conduct as governor, and previously as mayor of the small town of Wasilla, where she is said to have done the same thing? The answer to that is a down-home folksie “You betcha” . . . if she happens to read about it in the newspaper.

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

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