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Scully wrote the speech [Palin's acceptance speech] largely before Palin was selected. Which makes sense. But the parts that seemed tailored specifically to her? Who wrote those? Specifically, the line about small towns, and how they grow great people? That line, as was revealed this week, was written by a very bigoted columnist named Westbrook Pegler. That line seems like a landmine of unintentional readings: it was written by a racist, about a man who became president when the old man before him died. Not really a single good interpretation there, right? Well either someone more wacky and right-wing than...

The CBS MarketWatch columnist, Jon Friedman, has posted a column that appears to have been composed in an alternate universe in an entirely different space/time continuum than ours. It is a universe in which the media somehow built up Sarah Palin and in which the public will also become bored with her. Does this sound like our own universe? Of course not. In our universe, the real one, the media has been tearing down Sarah Palin from day one.

I'm a Director in Hollywood. I've also created visual effects for movies and commercials for 23 years. I'm not disclosing my name at this point, because frankly I've already suffered enough job loss because I was "outted" as a conservative. But enough about me. I caught a commercial teaser for the Charlie Gibson interview of Sarah Palin and something caught my attention as a Director immediately: The use of the position and choice of lenses to minimalize Governor Palin. To be objective to see if I was jumping to conclusions, I immediately reviewed Mr. Gibson's interview with Senator Obama. Take...

How distasteful was Donna Brazile's line about Jesus being a community organizer and Pontius Pilate a governor for purposes of making an invidious comparison between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin? Enough that even ardent Obama-phile Chris Matthews rapped Dem congressman Steve Cohen's knuckles for repeating it on the House floor. But, incredibly, when Rudolph Giuliani appeared on Meet the Press today, Tom Brokaw used the same line to confront Rudy over comments in his GOP convention speech about Obama's community organizing. Brokaw went so far as to display a button [screencap after jump] bearing the phrase. Brokaw might just as...

Today, The New York Times leads with a smear piece entitled, "Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes." Likewise, today's Washington Post competes in the ever-further-downward spiral with its own hit piece, "As Mayor of Wasilla, Palin Cut Own Duties, Left Trail of Bad Blood." Cronyism, lashing out, cutting personal duties and a trail of blood. NRO cites Jen Rubin's criticism of the NYT's hatched job, finding that the facts hardly warrant the egregious language and condemnatory tone of the article. The Post article supplies even less substance - by it's rationale, every elected official who fills a cabinet...

"I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail." -- Bob Herbert, NYT, 9-13-08 Bob Herbert's item in today's New York Times, She's Not Ready, is not so much political analysis as a howl of MSM shock and outrage. No-o-o-o-o!, Herbert seems to cry. I can't believe this is happening to us! Meanwhile, with condescension worthy of Charlie Gibson, ABC's David Wright suggests that Palin has been in need of a "chaperone" on the campaign trail. View video.

No Left Turns wonders what made a fairly reasonable Liberal journalist snap and appear to go batshit crazy like the anchorman Howard Beale in “Network.” Watching somebody go unhinged in public is both fascinating and repellent. It makes you realize the beneath that urbane exterior there was a boiling cauldron of repressed fury that colored every word uttered or written. It strips Howard Kurtz naked and to see the naked Kurtz is not a pretty sight. Gone is the pretense of objectivity; gone is the pretense of seeing all sides, gone in a single essay is any pretense of impartiality....

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin’s pluck...

EXCERPTS: Charlie Gibson Interviews Sarah Palin (September 11, 2008) THE BOLDED & UNDERLINED PARTS WERE EDITED OUT OF THE INTERVIEW

As we watched Sarah Palin on TV the last couple of days, we kept wondering what on earth John McCain was thinking. If he seriously thought this first-term governor — with less than two years in office — was qualified to be president, if necessary, at such a dangerous time, it raises profound questions about his judgment. If the choice was, as we suspect, a tactical move, then it was shockingly irresponsible. It was bad enough that Ms. Palin’s performance in the first televised interviews she has done since she joined the Republican ticket was so visibly scripted and lacking...

Wasilla: Outpost Built On A Broken Dream Robert M. Thorson September 11, 2008 Wasilla The media attention on Alaska's governor has been torrential. Not wanting to give her any more attention, I'll focus on the geography that shaped her character. Frommer's Travel Guide to Alaska describes Wasilla as "the worst kind of suburban sprawl of highway-fronting shopping malls and gravel lots." How did this happen? The town's history is the kind of story Mark Twain had in mind when he wrote: "Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." First, some background. Alaska is so rich from pipeline royalties...

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere? These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies. Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending...

Ex-Clinton Aide: Media Tougher On Palin Sept. 12, 2008(CBS) Political Players is a continuing conversation with the leaders, consultants and activists who shape American politics. This week, CBS News' Brian Goldsmith talked with Mark Penn, a top strategist to both Clintons, about the state of the Obama campaign, and the appeal of Sarah Palin. CBSNews.com: Sen. Obama is struggling and, in some states, dropping in the polls. Sen. McCain now has higher favorable ratings. How serious is this decline? Mark Penn: Well, I think you're seeing a real decline after the two conventions. I think after the Democratic convention, Obama...

John McCain chose the supremely under-qualified Sarah Palin as his running mate partly because she is a woman. If you have a problem with that, you're a sexist. She talks incessantly about being a mother of five and uses her newborn, Trig, who has Down syndrome, as a campaign prop. If you wonder how she'll handle all those kids and the Veep job too, you're a super-sexist. "When do they ever ask a man that question?" charges that fiery feminist Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, Palin, who went back to work when Trig was three days old, gets nothing but praise from...

NBC/NJ’s Matthew E. Berger reports that Palin couldn’t wait to descend down the stairs from her campaign plane lat night. The plans called for her to wait for the media and staff to leave first, set up, and then allow the doors to open for a grand entrance. But the sight of her family, and several thousand of her Alaskan brethren waiting for her on the tarmac of the Fairbanks airport, was too much. Palin could be heard nearly squealing with delight in the front of the plane at the sight of three of her children at the foot of...

Former GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson is pushing back hard against a CBS reporter’s editorial assessment of his remarks at a rally for John McCain and Sarah Palin earlier today. “Seems as if, all of a sudden, some of my old buddies over at CBS have become very sensitive to what they consider to be hyperbole on the presidential campaign trail. Imagine that,” Thompson told Townhall. Listen to Senator Thompson's full statement here. CBS Reporter John Bentley, who covered Thompson’s presidential campaign as an embed reporter, wrote a very negative analysis of the speech Thompson gave to introduce GOP vice...

Despite snowballing reports and rumors, Sarah Palin's eldest son, Track, was not part of the gang of four teenagers who criminally vandalized 44 Alaska school buses in 2005, a key culprit told The News. "Track wasn't with me. Track had nothing to do with it," participant Deryck Harris, 20, said Wednesday in an exclusive interview.Citing an anonymous judicial source, the Anchorage radio station 1080 KUDO was the first to report last week that Track Palin was the unidentified 16-year-old delinquent who not only trashed the buses but also swiped the bottle of alcohol that fueled the teen rampage. The...

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One wonders: What did Sarah Palin ever do to inspire the rage and bile that exploded on her selection by John McCain? What is there either in this woman's record or resume to elicit such feline ferocity? What did we know of her when she was introduced? That she was a mother of five who had brought into this world a baby boy with Down syndrome, thus living her Christian beliefs. That she was a small-town conservative who had risen from mayor of Wasilla (population 9,700) to be governor of a state twice the size of Texas. That she was...

Before Gov. Sarah Palin came flying in from the wilds of Alaska for the Republican convention in St. Paul, there was a lot of sniggering in media rooms and satellite trucks about her beauty queen looks and rustic hobbies, and the suggestion that she was better suited to be a calendar model for a local auto body shop than a holder of the second-highest office in the land. Ms. Palin, unwilling to be rendered as a caribou-skinning cartoon, stepped to the microphone on Wednesday and punched back. “I’ve learned quickly, these past few days, that if you’re not a member...