Free Republic

Mitt Romney tweets: "TIME says unnamed advisors disparaged @SarahPalinUSA. Anonymous numbskulls. She’s proven her smarts; they’ve disproven theirs."

Even as the starting bell rings for the first round of the Republican presidential free-for-all, we’ve got a couple of anonymous Mitt Romney advisors coming off the top rope, aiming elbow smashes at Sarah Palin’s back. They said she’s “not a serious human being” and “if she’s standing up there in a debate, and the answers are more than 15 seconds long, she’s in trouble.” This childish and incoherent nonsense does a lot more damage to Mitt Romney than Sarah Palin. What, exactly, are the criteria for being considered a “serious human being?” Should she just give up her half-hearted...

Sarah Palin's recent web video making a pitch to conservative women may have again shifted the political spotlight to the former governor of Alaska, but more than a half dozen other GOP hopefuls are toying seriously with a presidential run this summer. ......................................................... Still, few express much regard for Palin's ultimate chances. One adviser to Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, and, by traditional standards, the putative 2012 frontrunner, says of Palin, "She's not a serious human being." Another Romney intimate warns, "If she's standing up there in a debate and the answers are more than 15 seconds long, she's...

Huckabee’s taken potshots at her from time to time, but between this fusillade from unnamed Mitt advisors and the furious counterattack on Romney at Conservatives 4 Palin, I’d say that the 2012 primary is now, at long last, officially on. In the immortal words of Greg Stillson, “The missiles are flying. Hallelujah.” Still, few express much regard for Palin’s ultimate chances. One adviser to Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, and, by traditional standards, the putative 2012 frontrunner, says of Palin, “She’s not a serious human being.” Another Romney intimate warns, “If she’s standing up there in a debate and...

Going Rogue brims with testimony about Palin's Christian faith. Its opening pages relate how Palin's daughter Piper literally became the poster child for the antiabortion group Alaska Right to Life by posing for a picture with "pretend angel wings fastened to her soft shoulders." The book's final paragraph, meanwhile, reads like an altar call, the part of a church service when pew sitters are invited to commit their lives to Christ. "I do know there is a God," the former Alaska governor writes. "My life is in his hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago,...

Depictions ‘took place entirely in her imagination,’ says Wallace. NBC NEWS and NEWS SERVICES NEW YORK - Former McCain campaign senior adviser Nicolle Wallace says Sarah Palin's book "Going Rogue" is "based on fabrications," and that the basis for Palin’s depictions of her and former McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt as villains "took place entirely in her imagination." In a statement to The Rachel Maddow Show, the former McCain spokesperson repeatedly used the word "fiction" to describe Palin's narrative and echoed criticisms by other former McCain staffers. "She [Palin] probably has a legitimate complaint that things could have been better...

Sarah Palin says she was blindsided by Katie Couric's devastating interviews last year because John McCain's aides lulled her into thinking the CBS anchorwoman was a fan. In Palin's new book, "Going Rogue," the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee reveals that her handlers talked up Couric as a working mom - just like her - who was struggling with low self-esteem and even lower ratings. Couric liked and admired her, advised campaign media honcho Nicolle Wallace. The interviews would be a nice favor. The scouting reports were so sympathetic, Palin writes, that that she almost began to "feel sorry" for...

HER TURN! Fri Nov 13 2009 07:27:12 ET Going Rogue: An American Life by Sarah Palin Chapter Four; Section 8, pages 255-257 By the third week in September, a “Free Sarah” campaign was under way and the press at large was growing increasingly critical of the McCain camp’s decision to keep me, my family and friends back home, and my governor’s staff all bottled up. Meanwhile, the question of which news outlet would land the first interview was a big deal, as it always is with a major party candidate. From the beginning, Nicolle [Wallace] pushed for Katie Couric and...

Levi Johnston, not content with just a GQ spread, heads to Condé Nast sibling Vanity Fair to offer a first person account: "Me and Mrs. Palin." The magazine posted a couple excerpts early this morning, including Johnston's account of how Palin considered keeping Bristol's pregnancy a secret. Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret — nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning...

In the mail this morning was an advanced copy of Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson's extremely well-reported history of the 2008 presidential campaign: The Battle for America is what the two veteran Posties have called it. The book will be published on August 4; Balz and Johnson will talk about it on Meet the Press on August 2. There are plenty of scoops, and I can't resisting sharing just one involving a critical phase of the campaign in early October of 2008. Whose idea was it for Gov. Sarah Palin to attack Barack Obama as a guy who "pals around...

Internal campaign e-mails exchanged three weeks before Election Day offer a rare look at just how frustrated then Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin had become with the manner in which top McCain campaign aides were handling her candidacy. The e-mails, obtained exclusively, also highlight the power struggle and thinly veiled acrimony that pervaded the relationship between Palin and the campaign's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt. The episode in question began when an investigative report published on the left-leaning Web site Salon.com raised questions about Palin's relationship with members of the Alaska Independence Party (AIP) when she was mayor of Wasilla....

The publication of a Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin appears to have opened old wounds in the McCain campaign. At issue is a question that was never resolved following McCain’s loss in November: Who in the McCain campaign was secretly trashing Sarah Palin to the press?

Alaska's lipstick-wearing pit-bull is a "Little Shop of Horrors." That's how one longtime friend and campaign trail companion of John McCain, the vanquished 2008 GOP presidential nominee, described veep nominee Sarah Palin. In an expansive story in the August edition of Vanity Fair, a slew of senior members of McCain's campaign team told reporter Todd S. Purdum that they suffer a kind of survivor's guilt following the 2008 presidential election.

Next time you’re debating Bob Shrum and want to lure him into making ugly and over-the-top attacks, just remind the audience of his unblemished 0-8 record of having lost every presidential race on which he’s worked . . . This morning’s Today offered a prime example of the phenomenon. Nicolle Wallace, former Communications Director to Pres. George W. Bush, made passing reference to Shrum’s failed work on behalf of John Kerry in 2004. A clearly stung Shrum responded by referring to her as “pathetic” and accusing her of possible “foolhardiness.” For good measure, Shrum called Wallace’s claim that Dems are...

University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication presenting CBS “Evening News” anchor Katie Couric with the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Journalism In a word, preposterous. The question I have is if she is getting this award for journalistic excellence, or for fulfilling her role in the liberal political agenda machine? The interview did, in fact, have a huge impact on the election. She achieved the result the Democrat’s desired. Imagine, if you will, if one of her softballs to Obama had garnered similar devastating results and had brought down his candidacy. Would there have been any...

Remember when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin accused journalist Katie Couric of "exploiting" their disastrous exchange — the one in which Palin couldn’t name some of running mate John McCain’s policies? Couric’s work obviously paid off, because the 52-year-old today received the prestigious Walter Cronkite Award for the exchange. The Baltimore Sun elaborates: "Couric, who weathered one of network TV’s most criticized anchor-desk launches when she took over from interim anchor Bob Schieffer, was named winner of the University of Southern California’s Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in TV Political Journalism for her focused and illuminating interviews with Republican vice-presidential candidate...

Even some former Bush aides are smitten with the new president. Now, will lefties let the GOP inside the tent? No American could watch the inauguration of President Barack Obama this week and not feel pride in the splendor and strength of our democracy. No one watching could miss the drama of this moment of challenge and self-examination for our nation—of seeing a man so well-suited to meet the expectations of the office he fills. The presidency is now within reach for any man who dares to dream big enough. It is no longer an office attainable by members of...

Article in an non-partisan fem website seems pretty believable, despite it being another anonymous source. "Today, a source close to John McCain’s presidential campaign revealed exclusively to wowOwow that it was two stylists who often do work for CBS journalist Katie Couric who were hired by former CBS News political analyst and McCain senior strategist, Nicolle Wallace, around the time of the Republican National Convention. Wallace had worked for CBS Evening News until May 2008 when she left to work on the McCain campaign. Said the source, "They weren’t given any budget or parameters. They just told the stylists to...

I worked for Jeb Bush. Sarah Palin reminds me a lot of Jeb Bush, who was very hands on. He was always in direct contact, email-wise, with reporters. He'd often get back to them before I'd get back to them. She's like that. She's very hands on. Reminds me of my time working for Jeb Bush. She doesn't like a lot of bureaucracy. She gets on her email and deals directly with press and the staff and it's very, very impressive. Very appealing. She works harder than anyone I’ve known in politics. She’ll go until one or two in the...

Wow -that is some savage cutting & gutting that Nicole Wallace has just performed upon Sarah Palin. Nicole & I crossed swords once, during the Harriet Miers nomination battle. Watching what Nicole can do when she is seriously annoyed, I am grateful that I got away from that fight with nothing worse than a few bumps and bruises .... That said: Some of these stories do not ring quite true to me, especially the story about Palin allegedly not realizing that Africa was a continent rather than a country. Apparently she did not grasp that "South Africa" was not the...