Friday, July 23, 2010

On The Day McCain Introduced Sarah Palin, The Media Started Coordinating Their Best Lines Of Attack. More Journolist Revealed



This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].

~ Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation and Journolist contributor

The big news on Thursday, from the Daily Caller’s series of exposés, is the corrupt, dishonest media has colluded to take Sarah Palin down since the day John McCain introduced her to the nation, and the world.

In other breaking news, water is wet.

Look, we have been writing about the attacks on Sarah for a long, long time. We have thoroughly documented the attacks on Sarah by the Obama regime, coordinated by Pete Rouse, whose office is only a few feet from the Oval one.

We’ve written extensively about the network of hate bloggers who were given complete access to some of the nation’s best know websites to spew their insane hatred and lies about the Governor. We’ve also well documented the fact Team Obama tasked these malcontents and reprobates with the job of recruiting people to continually file bogus ethics complaints against Governor Palin, and her staff, which you can read more about here.

With that said, the exposure of Journolist takes everything to a higher level.

As we pointed out in our piece, The Day Journalism Died, where we discuss Journolist, and some of the many ways the so-called "guardians of truth" have conspired to lie to the American people on any number of issues, Team Obama was heavily involved with the take down of Sarah Palin.

One of the things done was having Sam Nunn, a high ranking Marxist-democrat, someone who was on Obama’s short list for Vice President, sit down with Katie Couric before she conducted her many hours of interviews with Sarah. Nunn spent a considerable amount of time coaching the Perky One before she interviewed Sarah, helping her craft the very best "gotcha" tactics.

Think about that a minute. This supposed "guardian of the truth" this "trusted new anchor" for CBS actually sat down with a member of the opposing team, before interviewing the potential next Vice President of the United States, in an effort to derail her candidacy.

As an American, this should be of great concern to you. 

Let’s not even get into the fact that hours of the taped interview were chopped up and edited to paint Sarah in the worst possible light.

As we look at the latest, remember, even though only a few names are mentioned, there are over 400 members of this "august body" and all of them participated and benefitted from the collaboration. There are some of the biggest names in "journalism" on this list.

Before we look at what these people were up to, the author of this piece, Jonathan Strong, appeared on Thursday’s Fox and Friends to discuss these attacks on Sarah:







In the hours after Sen. John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the last presidential race, members of an online forum called Journolist struggled to make sense of the pick. Many of them were liberal reporters, and in some cases their comments reflected a journalist’s instinct to figure out the meaning of a story.

But in many other exchanges, the Journolisters clearly had another, more partisan goal in mind: to formulate the most effective talking points in order to defeat Palin and McCain and help elect Barack Obama president. The tone was more campaign headquarters than newsroom.

The conversation began with a debate over how best to attack Sarah Palin. "Honestly, this pick reeks of desperation," wrote Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation in the minutes after the news became public. "How can anyone logically argue that Sarah Pallin [sic], a one-term governor of Alaska, is qualified to be President of the United States? Train wreck, thy name is Sarah Pallin."

This nimrod can't even spell her name, but she's the train wreck.

Not a wise argument, responded Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. If McCain were asked about Palin’s inexperience, he could simply point to then candidate Barack Obama’s similarly thin resume. "Q: Sen. McCain, given Gov. Palin’s paltry experience, how is she qualified to be commander in chief?," Stein asked hypothetically. "A: Well, she has much experience as the Democratic nominee."

One very interesting thing, and we've seen this from day one, both Team Obama, and the media, treated Sarah as if she was at the top of the ticket, the presidential nominee, rather than VP, right from the start. She was rarely compared to Biden. More times than not, she was compared only to Obama.

"What a joke," added Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker. "I always thought that some part of McCain doesn’t want to be president, and this choice proves my point. Welcome back, Admiral Stockdale."

Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s "non-official campaign" would need to work hard to discredit Palin. "This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama]."

Read that last paragraph again. If you didn’t have a chill run down your spine, there is something wrong with you. Rather than being concerned with learning more about Sarah Palin, her outstanding record as a public servant, and all of the accomplishments she had amassed, and how to tell her incredible life story to the world, these people saw themselves as part of Barack Obama’s "unofficial" campaign team, whose duty was to defeat her. 

These are people crafting lies, propaganda, that would rival the best one could find in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or Woodrow Wilson’s "progressive" America.

What we are witnessing here isn’t a bunch of sports reporters hanging around the locker room after a game and overhearing the team shoot the bull. No, this is the reporters, sitting down with the team, and going over the play book with them, and asking how they can help.


Ryan Donmoyer, a reporter for Bloomberg News who was covering the campaign, sent a quick thought that Palin’s choice not to have an abortion when she unexpectedly became pregnant at age 44 would likely boost her image because it was a heartwarming story.

"Her decision to keep the Down’s baby is going to be a hugely emotional story that appeals to a vast swath of America, I think," Donmoyer wrote.

Politico reporter Ben Adler, now an editor at Newsweek, replied, "but doesn’t leaving sad baby without its mother while she campaigns weaken that family values argument? Or will everyone be too afraid to make that point?"

Please note "sad baby" is most likely a typo by Adler, we believe he meant to write "said baby." Unlike the way these freaks operate, we’ll give Adler the benefit of the doubt here.

Anyhow, how many times during the campaign did you hear various reporters and other "experts" lament that it was wrong for Sarah Palin to be running for Vice President, when she had young children? Bear in mind, Joe Biden tragically lost his wife when his kids were quite young, and he commuted daily to D. C. for his job as a United States Senator. Nothing was even said of that, nor should it have been.

Of course, as we all know, while politicians' kids are normally off limits, those rules were thrown out the window with Sarah and her family. These "journalists" trashed her for "parading her kids around" and "forcing them in the spot light" while at the same time doing puff pieces of the Obama children who were equally "paraded around" and "forced into the spotlight."


Blogger Matt Yglesias sent out a new post thread with the subject, "The line on Palin."

"John McCain picked someone to help him politically, Barack Obama picked someone to help him govern," Yglesias wrote.

Ed Kilgore, managing editor of the Democratic Strategist blog, argued that journalists and others trying to help the Obama campaign should focus on Palin’s beliefs. "The criticism of her really, really needs to be ideological, not just about experience. If we concede she’s a ‘maverick,’ we will have done John McCain an enormous service. And let’s don’t concede the claim that [Hillary Clinton] supporters are likely to be very attracted to her," Kilgore said.

Amidst this debate over how most effectively to destroy Palin’s reputation, reporter Avi Zenilman, who was then writing about the campaign for Politico, chimed in to note that Palin had "openly backed" parts of Obama’s energy plan. In an interview Wednesday, Zenilman said he sent the information as a means of promoting a story he had written for Politico.

Chris Hayes of the Nation wrote in with words of encouragement, and to ask for more talking points. "Keep the ideas coming! Have to go on TV to talk about this in a few min and need all the help I can get," Hayes wrote.

Suzanne Nossel, chief of operations for Human Rights Watch, added a novel take: "I think it is and can be spun as a profoundly sexist pick. Women should feel umbrage at the idea that their votes can be attracted just by putting a woman, any woman, on the ticket no matter her qualifications or views."

Mother Jones’s Stein loved the idea. "That’s excellent! If enough people – people on this list? – write that the pick is sexist, you’ll have the networks debating it for days. And that negates the SINGLE thing Palin brings to the ticket," he wrote.

Another writer from Mother Jones, Nick Baumann, had this idea: "Say it with me: ‘Classic GOP Tokenism’."

How utterly pathetic is this. Let’s see, Sarah Palin was the Governor of our largest state, and a damned successful one at that, so this bunch sought to portray McCain’s pick as "desperation"? Funny thing, I haven’t see Joe Biden do a lot of "governing." For that matter, we haven’t seen much of that from the community organizer either!

It’s really interesting how the nominally female member of the "Ministry of Truth" went straight for the sexism angle. Must have been out of race cards that day. Let’s see, here’s the first woman ever chosen to be on a presidential ticket for the Republican party, and instead of being impressed, and proud, Suzanne Nossel had to try and spin it as a bad thing.

They were right though, this narrative was discussed, ad nauseum, throughout the campaign. And as we see now, totally fabricated.

It’s almost comical, by the way, to picture Chris Hayes pathetically begging his fellow propagandists for more ideas on how to smear Sarah. These people really are losers.


Kilgore wasn’t sold: "I STRONGLY think the immediate task is to challenge the ‘maverick’ bullshit about Palin, which everybody on the tube is echoing. I’ll say it one more time: Palin is a hard-core conservative ideologue in every measurable way."

[ ... ]

As the morning wore on into the afternoon, some on Journolist came to believe the Palin pick had been shrewd. Palin was coming off as appealing and a maverick, they worried.

"Okay, let’s get deadly serious, folks. Grating voice or not, ‘inexperienced’ or not, Sarah Palin’s just been introduced to the country as a brave, above-party, oil-company-bashing, pork-hating maverick ‘outsider’," Kilgore said, "What we can do is to expose her ideology."

And there you have it, when all other thinking started to fail, the went back to the default position these people use on every conservative. "Oh, she’s a far right ideologue." and "She’s dangerous!" The left said the same things about Ronald Reagan. These people haven’t had an original thought in 100 years!

Of course, anyone who has studied Sarah Palin, and her career as a public servant, knows she is anything but. Oh, she has some very strong personal beliefs, but when it comes to governing, the Constitution is her guide, not her "feelings." It’s the left that runs on feelings, not logic, or the Rule of Law. For them, emotion trumps all. It is hilarious to see them so desperate to stop Sarah they fall back on lines of attack older than they are.

There is so much more to this, which you can read here.

Just how egregious are all of these coordinated attacks against Sarah Palin by these "guardians of truth"? Even noted OB/Gyn Andrew Sullivan has cried foul!

What readers need to realize, is this is a lot bigger than Sarah Palin, or even the vile, malicious attacks she’s experienced non-stop since she was selected for the national stage. What we have witnessed by the nation’s media was a coordinated effort to make sure their candidate ended up in the most powerful job in the world.

These so-called journalists, threw their integrity away, and abused the trust of the American people to make sure their guy, a clearly unqualified, and inferior candidate, Barack Obama, won over an eminently superior and highly qualified candidate, Sarah Palin.

These revelations should shake America to it’s very core. This should be setting off alarms everywhere. Sadly, I wonder if people will really understand the magnitude of all of this. The dangers these people are to the very existence of the Republic.


A free and honest media is essential for Liberty and Freedom to survive. Honestly, at this point, much of our media is little more than a stenography pool for the Obama regime. As one looks back in history, one of the first things would-be dictators do is seize control of the media. They must control the message completely.

Many times this is done by force, but every now and then, the media become "useful idiots," not realizing that tyrants, once in complete control, usually eliminate all freedoms of speech, and communication, thus eliminating them. There are led like lambs to the slaughter.

There are over 400 members of Journolist. Out of those 400 plus, we know the names of sixty-five of them. While some are obscure, and unknown to many of our readers, some are quite prominent. You’ll recognize names of people who work for Time, CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Nation, Newsweek, and more. See how many you can pick out below:

The following 65 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv. 1. Ezra Klein 2. Dave Weigel 3. Matthew Yglesias 4. David Dayen 5. Spencer Ackerman 6. Jeffrey Toobin 7. Eric Alterman 8. Paul Krugman 9. John Judis 10. Eve Fairbanks 11. Mike Allen 12. Ben Smith 13. Lisa Lerer 14. Joe Klein 15. Brad DeLong 16. Chris Hayes 17. Matt Duss 18. Jonathan Chait 19. Jesse Singal 20. Michael Cohen 21. Isaac Chotiner 22. Katha Pollitt 23. Alyssa Rosenberg 24. Rick Perlstein 25. Alex Rossmiller 26. Ed Kilgore 27. Walter Shapiro 28. Noam Scheiber 29. Michael Tomasky 30. Rich Yesels 31. Tim Fernholz 32. Dana Goldstein 33. Jonathan Cohn 34. Scott Winship 35. David Roberts 36. Luke Mitchell 37. John Blevins 38. Moira Whelan 39. Henry Farrell 40. Josh Bearman 41. Alec McGillis 42. Greg Anrig 43. Adele Stan 44. Steven Teles 45. Harold Pollack 46. Adam Serwer 47. Ryan Donmoyer 48. Seth Michaels 49. Kate Steadman 50. Matt Duss 51. Laura Rozen 52. Jesse Taylor 53. Michael Hirsh 54. Daniel Davies 55. Jonathan Zasloff 56. Richard Kim 57. Thomas Schaller 58. Jared Bernstein 59. Holly Yeager 60. Joe Conason 61. David Greenberg 62. Todd Gitlin 63. Mark Schmitt 64. Kevin Drum 65. Sarah Spitz

Stay tuned, there is most certainly more to come.



No comments:

Post a Comment