Sarah 'Barracuda' Palin and the Piranhas of the Press

[PJABBER]

Sarah 'Barracuda' Palin and the Piranhas of the Press

This article stands out as a most thoughtful and insightful analysis of press coverage over the last 12 months and the attendant consequences for the news industry and the country.

Highly recommended reading for everyone, no matter if you are Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, progressive or libertarian.

Carl M. Cannon is the senior Washington correspondent for PoliticsDaily.com. Previously, Carl was the DC bureau chief for Reader's Digest and for a decade before that, covered the White House for non-partisan National Journal. Before coming to Washington during the Reagan presidency, he worked for six newspapers over a 20-year span, covering police, courts, politics, education, and race relations at newspapers in Virginia, Georgia, and his home state of California.

He has covered every presidential campaign and major political convention since 1984, was honored for his White House coverage by winning the prestigious Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting of the Presidency and in 2006 received the other top honor on the White House beat, the Aldo Beckman award for ?excellence in presidential news coverage.? He is also a past president of the White House Correspondents? Association.

In 2007, Carl was a fellow-in-residence at the Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he taught a study group on the Press & the Presidency. He is a co-author of Boy Genius, a 2005 biography of White House aide Karl Rove and author of The Pursuit of Happiness in Times of War, a 2003 book exploring how presidents and other American leaders have employed the language of the Declaration of Independence in times of national crisis. He and his father, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, co-wrote Reagan's Disciple: George W. Bush's Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy, which was published last year. His next book, co-written with California writer Patrick Dillon and due out later this year, is Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees.

 

[senseamp]

Republicans always blame the media for their failures.

 

[Red Dawn]

Cull the weak.

 

[JayhaVVKU]

While the "media" I suppose broadly treated her, or maybe more so her family with disrespect, there can be no denying that she brought most of that treatment on herself. She was woefully unprepared to handle the media's questions as evidenced by her numerous gaffes and blunders. I think most people extrapolated correctly from her poor question answering that she is not someone with a lot of critical thinking going on.

Not that treating mentaly challenged people poorly should be tolerable, but when she attacks others instead of being humble and gracious it's hard to feel sympathy for her.

 

[Moonbeam]

I think it's all about money and advertising. Have to be sensational to get viewers to get ad dollars. Fuck rational thinking and analysis. Let's talk about Palin's knocked up daughter.

All problems in America go back to the people. They want bread and circuses that's what we'll have.

Turn off your stupid television.

 

[spittledip]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
I think it's all about money and advertising. Have to be sensational to get viewers to get ad dollars. Fuck rational thinking and analysis. Let's talk about Palin's knocked up daughter.

All problems in America go back to the people. They want bread and circuses that's what we'll have.

Turn off your stupid television.

yeah, pretty much

 

[Harvey]

Originally posted by: senseamp

Republicans always blame the media for their failures.

The press wasn't the reason for Palin's failure. She is her own epic failure. She's the antithesis of Al Franken's "Stuart Smalley" character's signature line -- She's bad enough and dumb enough, and gosh darn it, people don't like her.

 

[Red Dawn]

The main reason she was picked as McCain's running mate is because she was a Pretty Woman. I can assure you that if she looked like Madeline Albright or Janet Reno they wouldn't of even considered her. Now that's sexist.

 

[shrumpage]

Originally posted by: Harvey

Originally posted by: senseamp

Republicans always blame the media for their failures.

The press wasn't the reason for Palin's failure. She is her own epic failure. She's the antithesis of Al Franken's "Stuart Smalley" character's signature line -- She's bad enough and dumb enough, and gosh darn it, people don't like her.

Do you think the press was harder on Palin's mistakes or Biden's in the VP debate?

 

[Red Dawn]

Originally posted by: shrumpage

Originally posted by: Harvey

Originally posted by: senseamp

Republicans always blame the media for their failures.

The press wasn't the reason for Palin's failure. She is her own epic failure. She's the antithesis of Al Franken's "Stuart Smalley" character's signature line -- She's bad enough and dumb enough, and gosh darn it, people don't like her.

Do you think the press was harder on Palin's mistakes or Biden's in the VP debate?

Palin's mistakes were those of an uninformed airhead. You could have done just as well. Well maybe not, you wouldn't have been able to pull off the wink.

 

[CallMeJoe]

The thing I remember from the Vice Presidential debate was not any mistakes made by Governor Palin (or Senator Biden, for that matter), but how incredibly bizarre it was that the Republican candidate appeared to think she could win by flirting her way through the debate.

 

[Red Dawn]

Originally posted by: CallMeJoe
The thing I remember from the Vice Presidential debate was not any mistakes made by Governor Palin (or Senator Biden, for that matter), but how incredibly bizarre it was that the Republican candidate appeared to think she could win by flirting her way through the debate.

Well it worked on a bunch of Bush Pilots and Bear Hunters when she was running for Governor of Alalska:laugh:

 

[shrumpage]

Originally posted by: Red Dawn

Originally posted by: shrumpage

Originally posted by: Harvey

Originally posted by: senseamp

Republicans always blame the media for their failures.

The press wasn't the reason for Palin's failure. She is her own epic failure. She's the antithesis of Al Franken's "Stuart Smalley" character's signature line -- She's bad enough and dumb enough, and gosh darn it, people don't like her.

Do you think the press was harder on Palin's mistakes or Biden's in the VP debate?

Palin's mistakes were those of an uninformed airhead. You could have done just as well. Well maybe not, you wouldn't have been able to pull off the wink.

? "John McCain voted against a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that every Republican has supported," Biden stated. (Actually, in a 1999 vote in Congress, McCain sided with 50 other Republicans to kill the treaty. Only four joined the Democrats.)
? "Pakistan already has deployed nuclear weapons," Biden said. "Pakistan's weapons can already hit Israel and the Mediterranean." (Pakistan has no known intercontinental missiles. The range of its weapons is thought to be 1,000 miles ? halfway to Israel.)
? "When we kicked--along with France--we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, 'Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't...Hezbollah will control it.'" Biden recalled. "Now what's happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel." (Except that the U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon or anywhere else. They've been entrenched in Lebanon since 1982. Actually, Hezbollah, insofar as it was responsible for the 1983 suicide bombing at the Marine barracks that killed 241 U.S. servicemen, kicked America out of Lebanon, not the other way around.)
? "The president...insisted on elections on the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, 'Big mistake. Hamas will win. You'll legitimize them.' What happened? Hamas won," Biden said. (Only the last two words of Biden's strange soliloquy are true. The rest are false. For one thing, Fatah controls the West Bank. Biden was thinking of Gaza. Secondly, neither Biden nor Obama predicted the 2006 victory for Hamas in Gaza's legislative elections. Third, McCain and Obama ? but not Biden -- signed a letter urging the president to pressure Palestinians to require that candidates adhere to democratic principles before being allowed to run for office. Fourth, Biden served as an election observer and later wrote an article expressing high praise for Bush's actions. To sum up: One factual error and three fibs in only 31 words. Pretty impressive, in its way.)
? "With Afghanistan, facts matter...we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spend on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan. Let me say that again..." (He did say it again, but that didn't make it true. It's wildly and weirdly off the mark. Yes, facts matter. The facts here were that at the time Biden was speaking, the U.S. had spent $172 billion in Afghanistan. The Iraq War consumes between $7 billion and $8 billion every three weeks. Biden's math was off by 2,000 percent.)
? "Can I clarify this? This is simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say (he'd) sit down with Ahmadinejad." (He most certainly did. And among those who criticized him at the time for it was Joe Biden, who told Byron York of National Review that the idea of a president meeting with the likes of the Iranian president or Hugo Chavez was "naïve.")

If Palin had said any of that, she would have been torn apart, but Biden gets a pass.

 

[LegendKiller]

Palin was ripped on because she had absolutely nothing to discuss, rebut, or opine about. All she had was "maverick", "family values", and ripping on "community organizer". That's it, her foreign policy blunder "I know the Russians" was a joke and she kept defending it. Her "family values" bullshit was a veneer of a joke, keeping around Levi to show "values" for her unwed pregnant daughter (fucking hypocrite).

Biden? He may be a fool for being a blabbermout, but at least he has foreign policy experience and discuss things.

Palin is a sad joke of a person who, unfortunately, people take as the "typical" American. Uneducated, loud-mouthed, poorly behaved, brash, and ignorant to the world.

 

[shrumpage]

Originally posted by: LegendKiller
Palin was ripped on because she had absolutely nothing to discuss, rebut, or opine about. All she had was "maverick", "family values", and ripping on "community organizer". That's it, her foreign policy blunder "I know the Russians" was a joke and she kept defending it. Her "family values" bullshit was a veneer of a joke, keeping around Levi to show "values" for her unwed pregnant daughter (fucking hypocrite).

Biden? He may be a fool for being a blabbermout, but at least he has foreign policy experience and discuss things.

Palin is a sad joke of a person who, unfortunately, people take as the "typical" American. Uneducated, loud-mouthed, poorly behaved, brash, and ignorant to the world.

An oddly enough, she was able to work with a nearly evenly split legislature and get laws pasted.

 

[fskimospy]

Originally posted by: shrumpage

Originally posted by: Red Dawn

Originally posted by: shrumpage

Originally posted by: Harvey

Originally posted by: senseamp

Republicans always blame the media for their failures.

The press wasn't the reason for Palin's failure. She is her own epic failure. She's the antithesis of Al Franken's "Stuart Smalley" character's signature line -- She's bad enough and dumb enough, and gosh darn it, people don't like her.

Do you think the press was harder on Palin's mistakes or Biden's in the VP debate?

Palin's mistakes were those of an uninformed airhead. You could have done just as well. Well maybe not, you wouldn't have been able to pull off the wink.

? "John McCain voted against a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that every Republican has supported," Biden stated. (Actually, in a 1999 vote in Congress, McCain sided with 50 other Republicans to kill the treaty. Only four joined the Democrats.)
? "Pakistan already has deployed nuclear weapons," Biden said. "Pakistan's weapons can already hit Israel and the Mediterranean." (Pakistan has no known intercontinental missiles. The range of its weapons is thought to be 1,000 miles ? halfway to Israel.)
? "When we kicked--along with France--we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, 'Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't...Hezbollah will control it.'" Biden recalled. "Now what's happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel." (Except that the U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon or anywhere else. They've been entrenched in Lebanon since 1982. Actually, Hezbollah, insofar as it was responsible for the 1983 suicide bombing at the Marine barracks that killed 241 U.S. servicemen, kicked America out of Lebanon, not the other way around.)
? "The president...insisted on elections on the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, 'Big mistake. Hamas will win. You'll legitimize them.' What happened? Hamas won," Biden said. (Only the last two words of Biden's strange soliloquy are true. The rest are false. For one thing, Fatah controls the West Bank. Biden was thinking of Gaza. Secondly, neither Biden nor Obama predicted the 2006 victory for Hamas in Gaza's legislative elections. Third, McCain and Obama ? but not Biden -- signed a letter urging the president to pressure Palestinians to require that candidates adhere to democratic principles before being allowed to run for office. Fourth, Biden served as an election observer and later wrote an article expressing high praise for Bush's actions. To sum up: One factual error and three fibs in only 31 words. Pretty impressive, in its way.)
? "With Afghanistan, facts matter...we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spend on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan. Let me say that again..." (He did say it again, but that didn't make it true. It's wildly and weirdly off the mark. Yes, facts matter. The facts here were that at the time Biden was speaking, the U.S. had spent $172 billion in Afghanistan. The Iraq War consumes between $7 billion and $8 billion every three weeks. Biden's math was off by 2,000 percent.)
? "Can I clarify this? This is simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say (he'd) sit down with Ahmadinejad." (He most certainly did. And among those who criticized him at the time for it was Joe Biden, who told Byron York of National Review that the idea of a president meeting with the likes of the Iranian president or Hugo Chavez was "naïve.")

If Palin had said any of that, she would have been torn apart, but Biden gets a pass.

Palin's mistakes reinforced the stereotype of her being an airhead. (as did most of her other actions) Since Biden did not have that reputation, people did not react to his mistakes in the same way. You do realize that people behave differently when two people say the same thing, right? I love how people on here constantly develop selective political autism when they try to claim they don't get how this works.

 

[Harvey]

Originally posted by: shrumpage

Originally posted by: Harvey

The press wasn't the reason for Palin's failure. She is her own epic failure. She's the antithesis of Al Franken's "Stuart Smalley" character's signature line -- She's bad enough and dumb enough, and gosh darn it, people don't like her.

Do you think the press was harder on Palin's mistakes or Biden's in the VP debate?

In Palin's case, I think it doesn't matter. It has nothing to do with whether there's a sexual bias. As an individual, irrespective of gender, Palin's intellectual and logical capabilities are substantially south of mediocre.

 

[PJABBER]

I really wonder how many of the above posters actually read the article?

:roll:

 

[LegendKiller]

Originally posted by: shrumpage

Originally posted by: LegendKiller
Palin was ripped on because she had absolutely nothing to discuss, rebut, or opine about. All she had was "maverick", "family values", and ripping on "community organizer". That's it, her foreign policy blunder "I know the Russians" was a joke and she kept defending it. Her "family values" bullshit was a veneer of a joke, keeping around Levi to show "values" for her unwed pregnant daughter (fucking hypocrite).

Biden? He may be a fool for being a blabbermout, but at least he has foreign policy experience and discuss things.

Palin is a sad joke of a person who, unfortunately, people take as the "typical" American. Uneducated, loud-mouthed, poorly behaved, brash, and ignorant to the world.

An oddly enough, she was able to work with a nearly evenly split legislature and get laws pasted.

So what? She did her job, most likely through backroom machinations and maneuvering.

I manage to brush my teeth every morning. I guess that alone qualifies me to be President.

 

[Vic]

Palin was a rank amateur who thought she could play with the pros. End of story.

 

[shrumpage]

Originally posted by: Harvey

Originally posted by: shrumpage

Originally posted by: Harvey

The press wasn't the reason for Palin's failure. She is her own epic failure. She's the antithesis of Al Franken's "Stuart Smalley" character's signature line -- She's bad enough and dumb enough, and gosh darn it, people don't like her.

Do you think the press was harder on Palin's mistakes or Biden's in the VP debate?

In Palin's case, I think it doesn't matter. It has nothing to do with whether there's a sexual bias. As an individual, irrespective of gender, Palin's intellectual and logical capabilities are substantially south of mediocre.

And Bidden proved on national television that he doesn't understand the historic role of the VP.

And completely made up some event in the middle east? We are not talking about a simple of a slip of a name but something HE COMPLETELY MADE UP! With the example's listed he comes across as: A some one who thinks he can BS his way through anything with out fear of being called about it or B a Senile old man.

either choice isn't good. And thanks to media, who should be challenging candidates and bring facts to the people, was complicate.

 

[Moonbeam]

She'll be back.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Ther article makes some valid points. Palins family was the victim of attacks that I've not seen before, and I hope never again. There is no doubt that the Dems seized on it. I remember how it went here with the Down's child.

Palin was an unknown initially, and the Dems feared her. They immediately decided to go for the family, and start rumors about who the parent was. Nice.

In that, they were reprehensible. Nevertheless, Palin proved to be incompetent. The authors contention that she "cleaned Bidens clock" simply is wrong. She wasn't able to stay with the moderators questions. All she could do is repeat the talking points. That she demonstrated a complete lack of ability was certainly enough to disqualify her, yet the Dems decided that her daughters pregnancy was somehow germane to the discussion.

So by a mixture of Palin's incompetence and the circus the press made of her family she was destroyed.

Doesn't make me a Palin supporter, but Palin had to be destroyed by any means, and any means were used.

 

[Red Dawn]

Originally posted by: Hayabusa Rider
Ther article makes some valid points. Palins family was the victim of attacks that I've not seen before, and I hope never again. There is no doubt that the Dems seized on it. I remember how it went here with the Down's child.

Palin was an unknown initially, and the Dems feared her. They immediately decided to go for the family, and start rumors about who the parent was. Nice.

In that, they were reprehensible. Nevertheless, Palin proved to be incompetent. The authors contention that she "cleaned Bidens clock" simply is wrong. She wasn't able to stay with the moderators questions. All she could do is repeat the talking points. That she demonstrated a complete lack of ability was certainly enough to disqualify her, yet the Dems decided that her daughters pregnancy was somehow germane to the discussion.

So by a mixture of Palin's incompetence and the circus the press made of her family she was destroyed.

Doesn't make me a Palin supporter, but Palin had to be destroyed by any means, and any means were used.

Just imagine, President Palin. Yeah it 's laughable.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Originally posted by: Red Dawn

Originally posted by: Hayabusa Rider
Ther article makes some valid points. Palins family was the victim of attacks that I've not seen before, and I hope never again. There is no doubt that the Dems seized on it. I remember how it went here with the Down's child.

Palin was an unknown initially, and the Dems feared her. They immediately decided to go for the family, and start rumors about who the parent was. Nice.

In that, they were reprehensible. Nevertheless, Palin proved to be incompetent. The authors contention that she "cleaned Bidens clock" simply is wrong. She wasn't able to stay with the moderators questions. All she could do is repeat the talking points. That she demonstrated a complete lack of ability was certainly enough to disqualify her, yet the Dems decided that her daughters pregnancy was somehow germane to the discussion.

So by a mixture of Palin's incompetence and the circus the press made of her family she was destroyed.

Doesn't make me a Palin supporter, but Palin had to be destroyed by any means, and any means were used.

Just imagine, President Palin. Yeah it 's laughable.

Certainly nothing I'd like to see.