Don't Panic

Hey, everybody!  Guess what we've got?  That's right - more Sarah Palin smears!

Did you know that [GASP] Sarah Palin hasn't always been a Republican?  Did you also know that for a few years in the early '90s she belonged to a party that wanted Alaska to secede from the Union and become a separate country?

Neither did New York Asswipe "reporter" Elisabeth Bumiller, who found an Alaska Independence Party official eager to either stick it to Governor Palin, or gain herself and her organization the obligatory fifteen minutes of fame, and served as her channeler to the world:

While the press scrambles to report on the process by which Governor Palin was offered the second spot on the Republican ticket, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller has opted instead to make up her own version of events. As the AP reports, “Sarah Palin voluntarily told John McCain’s campaign about her pregnant teenage daughter and her husband’s two-decade-old DUI arrest during questioning as part of the Republican’s vice presidential search, the lawyer who conducted the background review said.” Yet according to Bumiller, yesterday’s disclosures “called into question” how thoroughly Governor Palin had been vetted. Why the discrepancy? It seems one reporter actually reported the story, while Bumiller made up her own. …

And Bumiller writes that Governor Palin “was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party.” Not true, and unsourced. Governor Palin has been a registered Republican since 1982.

Not true, but not quite "unsourced".  This was ultimately AIPer Lynnette Clark's tall tale:

A day after ABC News requested a response from Palin as to whether she was ever a member of the AIP, McCain campain spox Brian Rogers told ABC News that Clark’s “allegations are false.”

“Governor Palin has been a registered Republican since 1982,” Rogers says, providing some voter registration documentation showing her to be a Republican. “As you know, if she changed her registration, there would have been some record of it. There isn’t.”

Rogers says the McCain campaign provided ABC News with all the voter registration information that exists. Rogers says that Palin didn’t attend the AIP convention in 1994, “but she visited them when they had their convention in Wasilla in 2000 as a courtesy since she was mayor.”

He would not comment as to why AIP officials are so convinced Palin was a member of their party. When asked if Palin ever identified herself as a member of the AIP, Rogers said, “No, she’s a lifelong Republican.”

So Bumiller didn't make up the story herself; her source did, and she didn't bother to fack-check it, since that would have gotten in the way of ripping another chunk of PR flesh off of Governor Palin's already-throughly pulped media carcass.

It wouldn't be a left-wing witchhunt without bringing Nazis into it.  Unfortunately for the Dems, there's even less evidence that Sarah Palin has ever been a member of the American Nazi Party than that she belonged to the AIP.  So in order to smear her as the New Eva Braun, MSNBC had to (for the bazillionth time by now) smear somebody else - and one of their own on-air personalities, to boot - in order to build a whole other "bridge to nowhere":

RUSH: This is DNCTV this morning, Joe Scarborough's show with Mika Brzezinski and the cohost Willie Geist along with Pat Buchanan.  Scarborough says, "Robert Wexler," a carpetbagger congressman from Maryland, who represents Florida, "accused Palin of "supporting 'a Nazi sympathizer...'" (sigh) "Robert Wexler," Democrat, Maryland, who claims to live in Florida, "accused Palin of supporting a Nazi sympathizer, then it came out that she didn't even support Pat Buchanan; that in 2000 she supported somebody else, but then here's the troubling part.  The Obama campaign put out a press release where they called Pat Buchanan 'a Nazi sympathizer.'  Now, if this is the politics of hope and this is the politics of change, then I'd rather go back to the politics of old, because that's as sleazy a gutter attack as I have ever heard," and then Scarborough added this:

SCARBOROUGH:  What's the Obama spokesman's name?  We want to call this jackass out, too.

GEIST:  Mark Bubriski.

BRZEZINSKI:  Mark Bubriski.

SCARBOROUGH:  Hey, Mark? Get a life.  You know what?  You're not running for county commissioner --

BRZEZINSKI:  M'yeeeeah.

SCARBOROUGH:  -- for Cook County anymore.  You're running for president of the United States.  Stop being a little kid.  If you want to write for Daily Kos, go write for Daily Kos.  If you want to put America in the gutter, then keep it up.  You are a pathetic human being, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

RUSH:  Spokesman Mark Bubriski was the one who passed this comment along with Palin supporting a Nazi sympathizer.  Then Pat Buchanan -- who is an employee of MSNBC, where he was besmirched as a Nazi sympathizer -- had this to say.

BUCHANAN:  To suggest that I sympathize with the evil regime about which I in that book which was responsible for so many crimes -- not only against Jews, but against Slavs and everyone in Europe -- is just outrageous.  They're tying me to Sarah Palin and they're saying this is evil.  Frankly, it's done from the Jewish community down there in Palm Beach.  But if they do that, you end the moratorium on Reverend Jeremiah Wright because Barack Obama's pastor and spiritual advisor for fifteen years did run an anti-Semitic church, does run an anti-white church, and has engaged in racist rants. [emphases added]

So much for Team Messiah "keeping its hands clean."  True, they didn't smear Governor Palin as a Nazi directly, but they did PJB, and then their filthy tag-team partner Bob "Hanging Chad" Wexler connected the dots for them.  Wow, who knew that "hopeandchange" would be so uplifting and edifying?

Perhaps by spending the past five days going stark raving berserk, the Left is trying to lure Team Sith into a no-holds-barred personal smear war in order to completely sour the public on both sides, then step back, blame McCain for it and then, as his October surprise, revert all the way back to his original "post-partisan/unifier" persona and strike that last minute phony "See, this is why we need a new kind of politics in Washington" contrast.  Darth Queeg has had the initiative in this race for at least the past two months and Barry doesn't know how to get it back, so he's throwing (himself and by proxy) a screaming, stomping, raging tantrum and won't stop until he's handed the keys to the American kingdom.

Stepping back from the histrionics for a moment, you must remember what the bottom-line objectives of such desperation tactics are: (1) to so exhaust and/or disgust the voters that they'll not just tune out, but associate the target of Donk abuse with that feeling of negativity; and (2) to raise enough doubt about him/her amongst the "undecideds" to tip the election in your favor.

There is evidence, from THE reliable polling source, that the War On Palin has - modestly - accomplished just that:

If McCain’s strategy was to reach out to women voters, however, thus far it hasn’t been successful. The night after the announcement, slightly more women voters viewed Palin as the right choice for McCain’s running mate, but now 41% say she was not, versus 36% who still believe she was a good choice. Forty-one percent (41%) of women say they are less likely now to vote for McCain because of Palin, as opposed to 31% who say they are more likely to support him. Women voters were essentially even on this question in the earlier survey…

[E]ven a plurality of men (47%) say Palin is not ready to be president in the event of the 72-year-old McCain being incapacitated while in the White House, although 32% believe she is ready. Women voters by a nearly two-to-one margin believe Palin is not ready…

Voters overall by a 48% to 29% margin say Palin is not ready yet to be president, a view shared by 74% of Democrats and 48% of unaffiliated voters but only 16% of Republicans.

Moreover, check out the Rasmussen three-day rolling average tracking poll:

AUGUST 24th (day before the Democrat convention): Obama 48%, McCain 45%

AUGUST 27th (day before Barry's acceptance speech): McCain 47%, Obama 46%

AUGUST 31st (three days after Barry's acceptance speech): Obama 49%, McCain 46%

TODAY (after five days of Slimeicane Sarah): Obama 51%, McCain 45%

False Messiah lost four points during his own negative, extremist, Bush-eviscerating convention; the O-cropolis Oratory got him back to where he started; and the gang-PR-rape of Governor Palin has actually doubled his small lead and gotten him outside the margin of error and over fifty percent for the first time ever in the Rasmussen survey.  At least that's what the timeline indicates.

However, the Barracuda gets her turn tomorrow night.  If she stumbles or "uhs" or gaffes, get the fork ready for her and Maverick.  But if she sets the PR ball for McCain to "kill" on Thursday, ala Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh, get ready for a whole new ball game - and, believe it, a whole new level of lib viciousness, insanity, and yes, violence, as the White House slip-slides away from them for the third straight quadrennium.

And once again, they'll have nobody but themselves to blame - and they never will.