Political Poison

This is really kind of a local story, and not the kind of thing we want to write about on this blog, but the situation is so incredulous, that I feel a need to document it herein.

It is a part of the continuing Sarah Palin story, who from the start was subjected to the most devastating media "hit" job in modern political history. Successful governor of America's largest state, attractive person with a compelling life story, and most of all, a stunningly new, riveting political speaker who was one of only two people in the recent election cycle capable of drawing 20,000+ to any event she attended. Apparently that she was a political draw in the same class as Obama scared the left to such a degree that they became, frankly, unhinged in their reporting about her.

Of course, that's all we can expect from the degenerate media we have today. But what was not expected was to see some anonymous persons, high up in the McCain campaign, add their own substantial weight to the media "hit job," and therein lies the peculiarity that makes me write this post.

It began before the McCain campaign ended when a "Senior McCain Official" leaked to CNN's Dana Bash that Palin was acting like a spoiled selfish celebrity “diva." Then, immediately after the McCain campaign lost its bid for the Presidency, Carl Cameron of Fox News suddenly broke into the Shepherd Smith and Bill O'Reilly shows to breathlessly report that "Senior Officials" of the McCain campaign said that during the campaign Sarah Palin was a shop-a-holic who indulged in temper tantrums and refused to prepare for the important interviews with Charlie Gibson and/or Katie Couric, she was grossly ignorant about foreign affairs to the extent she did not know the countries involved in NAFTA or that Africa was a continent, not a country, that she was unprofessional, once appearing at a meeting with the Campaign staff in a bathrobe, and etc., etc., etc.

These reports were subsequently shot down by various other McCain campaign people, including the foreign policy expert who briefed her for the upcoming debates. He insisted that she was very bright and extremely knowledgeable about foreign policy. So, ultimately Carl Cameron's report (which he subsequently regretted, according to Greta van Sustern), simply exposed that there was a faction within the McCain campaign that somehow felt the need to throw Palin under the bus with information that was at best malicious gossip, and at worst, outright lies.

My thoughts at the time were simple and straightforward: who the hell are these petty "Senior Officials" who would go out of their way to trash their own Vice Presidential candidate a day after the election. And what the hell is their agenda? Because whatever it is, I personally want no part of any candidate they might be supporting in the next election cycle. This was grubby politics of the worst kind that I will not abide in any political candidate I might support down the road.

But the story is not over. Vanity Fair recently published a 9,300 word article trashing Sarah Palin, complete with, yes, you guessed it, more quotes from "Senior Officials" of the McCain campaign, which included the stunningly crude statement that “Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression?". I am pleased to report, however, that they went to the poisoned well of anonymous gossip once too often, and the evidence suggests that these Senior Officials are in fact Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace.

Mark Krikorian of National Review Online does a great job of unraveling all of the threads in this current controversy here, but here are the salient points:

The major players are Senior Campaign Managers, Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace, Randy Scheunemann, a McCain Senior Foreign Policy Advisor, and Bill Kristol, Managing Editor of The Weekly Standard. After the Vanity Fair article, Bill Kristol reveals that Steve Schmidt was the anonymous leaker from the McCain campaign. Steve Schmidt vehemently denied this, and then stated the following: "

At the end of the campaign there were a series of leaks that were so damaging that it was consuming the 24-hour cable news cycle. Leaks to reporters where Sarah Palin was called all manner of names. [McCain senior adviser] Rick Davis and I jointly felt that was outrageous. So we made an attempt for the first time in the campaign to try to ID who was leaking information that was so damaging and demoralizing to a campaign that was in very difficult circumstances ... “What was discovered was an e-mail from a very senior staff member [Randy Scheunemann] to Bill Kristol ... ”

So let's see. Steve Schmidt is accused by Bill Kristol of spreading damaging gossip about Sarah Palin. He responds by insisting how outrageous he thought the Palin campaign leaks were, so outrageous that he ordered an investigation at the time to find the leakers. And what does he find? That the leaks were, in fact, from "Senior Staff Member" Scheunemann to Bill Kristol!

This is patently absurd. Randy Scheunemann was always one of Ms. Palin's most ardent supporters and Bill Kristol, also a Palin supporter, would not ever be described by anyone as a "Senior Official" of the McCain campaign. Mr. Schmidt's response is an embarrassing and clumsy prevarication.

Any candidate considering a run in 2010 or 2012 best stay well clear of Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace. These two should be forced to work for their more natural clientele among the poisonous partisans of the Left.