Let me get this straight. You are more upset at the AP spending resources to fact check her book than you are that she lied her ass off in her book? In obvious ways?
If you have two shipments coming in, one from a supplier who rarely screws up and one from a supplier who often sends the wrong parts of bad parts, which do you inspect more closely. Did the AP do a number on McCain’s campaign bio? Why not - is he a secret liberal - or did the AP know that he isn’t a lying buffoon, and thus there was less likely to be crap in the book.
There was an article in the Times that this reminds me of. Meat packing plants object strenuously to stores like CostCo checking for E coli infestations, because if they find some it will be expensive to clean up. (CostCo checks anyway - some don’t.) Wouldn’t it have been nice if all those fact checkers only found trivial errors? Why don’t you blame the source of the lies, not those who found them?
Much as I think the woman is a walking disaster and the biggest threat to this country outside of a resurrected HitlerStalinPotEnstein, the newspaper one could be considered a “gotcha” question.
If she names the Wasilla Wailer (or whatever), she looks provincial. If she doesn’t, she is snubbing her home town.
If she names the WSJ, she’s an elitist snob (ie. Democrat). If she doesn’t, she’s ignorant of financial matters.
If she names Life, it’s because she only looks at the pictures. Etc.
Again, not defending her, but because a politician’s statements are going to be spun negatively by the opposition there is no safe statement. And if you can’t take the heat, you provincial ignorant bitch, don’t get in the political arena!
I’m surprised we haven’t seen any stories about how Obama is advocating having all cats killed - you know, since he got a dog instead.
I should have said “supposedly ‘gotcha’ question” (which is kind of implied by the scare quotes around gotcha). Please note that the post of mine that you quoted from was attempting to refute the “liberal media” meme by pointing out that for every softball question that the Republicans considered a gotcha to Palin, there was at least one story pointing out Obama’s supposed links to Bill Ayers or his secret sympathy for Rev. Wright’s theology (accompanied by an utterly leeeeaning “explanation” of what Rev. Wright’s theology consists of).
I disagree. It’s possible to get the WSJ, or the NYT, or the Washington Times, in Wasilla. They deliver subscriptions all over the place. There’s no reason that a politician with some national ambition couldn’t be receiving papers from the lower 48 in order to keep up.
And I seriously doubt that Palin was worried about looking provincial when she answered that question. Frankly, I’m guessing she was way too desperate to try to remember the name of a newspaper…any newspaper…to worry about looking provincial.
Most of the early interviews (Gibson, Couric) were intended to be softball. When questions that most politicians would have sent Gibson and Couric fruit baskets for asking hit Palin, her reaction had to have stunned those two. They were about the easiest questions they could have asked without looking like they were on the campaign’s payroll…how much easier could they have possibly made them?
That’s politics. Damn near every politician gets asked questions about abortion, the death penalty, and war. Palin had no problem saying she was pro-life, pro-death penalty, and pro-Iraq war.
The idea that she can say those things and piss off 53% of Americans, but her answers to what newspapers she reads is too politically sensitive, is not realistic.
Whoops, forgot this point. Actually, her rambling answer touched upon things like, Alaska isn’t the moon, they get all sorts of newspapers in Alaska, and one shouldn’t think that just because someone is in Alaska they can’t get any news and therefore is a provincial hick, blah blah blah, and I read “all” the newspapers and magazines that are out there. She took a simple question and turned her answer into a defense against a non-existent charge of provincialism. She was ULTRA concerned about appearing provincial.
In reality, it seems that she reads “all” the newspapers and magazines out there, from “People” on one side of the spectrum, all the way over to “Us Weekly” and “Runners World” on the other.
This is a complete load. No one would have cared what she said she read, and no one would have called that a “gotcha” question if it had been asked of Obama, or Hillary, John McCain, or pretty much any other politician on earth. “What do you like to read” is soft as butter. Couric was trying to be kind, and made the mistake of assuming that Palin had some kind of normal, base level intelligence, education and acumen appropriate to a candidate for major political office.
Palin fumbled the question not because she was afraid of how the evil liberal media would spin her answer (which would still be an incredibly lame excuse even if it were true), but because she doesn’t read anything, and was stuck to even name a newspaper or magazine that exists in the world.
In the 2000 election, I remember GWB being asked a very similar question during an interview (“what book are you reading right now?”) and Bush handled it fine, instantly naming a credible sounding title (a biography of Dean Acheson). Nobody thought it was a “gotcha” question for Bush, and the evil liberal media didn’t give a crap about his answer. Jesus, compared to Palin, GWB actually looks like a person of substance and intellect.
Is there any chance at all that anybody would think Barack Obama was being victimized if somone asked him what he liked to read? Would they even think it about any other Republican but Palin? No. She’s a special, fragile case. Poor Sarah.
Ya know, I do think that the MSM is biased against Sarah.
You know what makes me think this?
Well its really kinda obvious doncha know - they are anti athletics, and she is a hockey mum so obvioulsy likes sport
Whoops sorry, I got confused, its actually because they just can’t stand alaskans.
Hold on a moment, actually they are paternalist and upset with her for breeding daughters instead of sons,
No no wait a moment, I think they hate her because she is a lady…
I mean, after all, the AP is biased right, the real reason they fact check her book really truely can’ty have been that they expected to find lies. Oh and also, if they hadn’t found lies I am sure they would have just made up lies to find right
This is one of the major deflection tactics used by Palin. Any question or criticism of her personally is instantly turned into an attack on something else. If you ask her what she likes to read, you hate Alaska. Other criticisms are deflected as attacks on the troops, on women, on Jebus, etc. Classic NPD. A pathological inability to self-examine or accept responsibility.
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html here is just one of many sites that fact check everything politicians say and write. The problem with Palin is not that she was fact checked. The problem was that what she wrote was false.
She should have written an honest book and defied anybody to find anything wrong. There are strings of falsehoods and distortions in Palin’s book. It should be put in the fiction department at the book store.
Now, Bush being given an impromptu round of “Name That World Leader” - those were “gotcha” questions, and I thought them quite unfair (even if he did at other times struggle to remember Tony Blair’s name when Blair was in the room with him).
Here is some really good news for us Democrats who hope and pray Palin gets the 2102 Republican nomination
With thousands lining up at every book tour stop plus popularity going up, I can only hope Sarah and her advisers are taking notice. I would favor an independent third party run for her as a presidential candidate but having her run as the Republican nominee would be the next best thing.
Unfair? What countries’ leaders was he going to deal with more consequentially than those of Chechnya, Taiwan, India and Pakistan? What sort of topic, or forum, would have been more relevant to an applicant for the job of Leader of the Free World?
Daly showed a New York bookstore that ordered 8 copies of her book. He asked how many were left. The response 8. She is carefully picking her locations to create the idea her book is selling like crazy. I got an email offering it for $4.95. I will wait til it is in a dollar bin. That should be in about 1 month.
She knows the “safe” answers to talking-point her way through an interview that asks question for which she’s been given the answers. It’s thinking on her feet that screwed her.
Again, don’t think I actually even believe this crap I’m saying here - I pretty much playing the Devil’s Advocate here. Fact of the matter is that woman is a threat to intelligence and sanity on a scale I’m not comfortable contemplating.
That’s why I asked for the cite. Sometimes these threads take a premise like “Palin was attacked” or “Palin was asked gotcha questions” and everyone divides into camps to argue about how Palin is responding.
I’m trying to make sure that the flawed premise doesn’t become accepted as true.