Rabidly Biased Politico Promotes Anti-Palin Lunatics

It's one thing to be a run of the mill, left-wing press agency. However, on Monday Politico took their bias to a whole new (yes, rabid) level. On a morning when gas prices were approaching record highs, the EPA blocked drilling in the Arctic, Obama escalated America's role in Libya, and the IMF predicted that the Chinese economy will surpass our own in a few short years, this bastion of journalistic hackery chose instead to promote a group of nuts "on a mission" to destroy Governor Palin, as their top story. As William Jacobson noted:

Under the guise of reporting on the anti-Palin movement, Politico manages to dredge up almost every crank accusation against Palin. The fourth word in the first sentence of the article just happens to be "promiscuous." How nice.

In the course of the article, Politico manages to compare Palin to Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, Hitler, and Father Coughlin, but only because such people were controversial and celebrities, of course. And Politico did not make the connection itself, it merely quoted someone making the connection, that's how real reporters do it, right?

Politico even refers to Rebecca Mansour, an aide to Palin who helps with SarahPAC, as an "attack dog," with an embeded link in Mansour's name in the Politico article to the viciously anti-Palin Palingates website. This is beyond contemptible even for Politico.

Politico's writer, Ken Vogel sets out in this piece to legitimize crackpot websites like "Palingates" and authors like Joe McGinniss to make them mainstream for his own readers. After interviewing all of these individuals, Vogel indicates that legitimization is actually what these anti-Palin writers wish to accomplish:

A number of forthcoming books promise to delve deeply into — and, they believe, give mainstream credibility to — some of the more salacious Palin rumors and conspiracy theories that have sprouted in the anti-Palin blogosphere and on supermarket tabloid stands but have mostly been rejected by the mainstream media.

Well that settles any question about how "mainstream" Politico even considers itself.

The first person Vogel tries to pass off as a credible critic "on a mission," is the ever present Sherry Whitstine. Now I know Sherry is a fruitcake because I've had the unfortunate experience of having a back-n-forth with her online. This woman if full of anger and is a classic hater in every sense of the word.

Back in March of 2009, the aforementioned Rebecca Mansour wrote a piece noting that she had received an email from Whitstine in which Sherry referred to Governor Palin as "the whore that rides the beast." She wrote:

Today I encountered the most frightening case of Palin Derangement Syndrome (PDS) I've witnessed to date.

[...]

The "whore that rides the beast"? So now Gov. Palin is the "Whore of Babylon"?
If you have Google Toolbar and have it set to suggest search terms as you type, you can type in the words "whore of babylon" and "whore of babylon sarah palin" will pop up as a leading search -- even before "whore of babylon catholic church," and my fellow Catholics have been called the "Whore of Babylon" for centuries before Sarah Palin was ever born. This is the level of insane vicious hatred we're dealing with, friends.

[...]

People who are critical of Gov. Palin have the same First Amendment rights as the rest of us. However, people who behave in this manner of PDS-vileness should not be taken seriously by any news outlet or any other serious-minded person. Their behavior regarding Gov. Palin and her family discredit them from the word "go."

One would tend to think, but here we are two years later looking straight at a news outlet taking Whitstine very seriously, and even promoting her agenda for her.

The next person Vogel highlights as a credible foe, is far-left writer and Trig Truther, Geoffry Dunn. Dunn has been around for a long time and has made numerous claims about Governor Palin that are not true. Dunn used to write for HuffPo where his anti-Palin shtick was welcome, but now must look elsewhere to post due to his loony conspiracy theories. The Huffington Post banned Trig Truther posts from their site, which humorously now makes them much more credible than Politico. Go figure.

Next, Vogel turns to Frank Bailey's upcoming book which was actually written by Jeanne Devon. (Click here to see Jeanne in a mask attending an anti-Palin rally set up by the Democrat party)
I've read the transcript, and I can tell you that Bailey's book is garbage. We covered it extensively here and elsewhere.

What article promoting anti-Palin loons would be complete without a section cut out for Griffin? Griffin, who was fired from his teaching job for his online nuttiness, has a long record of deranged behavior regarding Governor Palin, amongst other things. It's truly mindbogglingly that any journalist would even admit to talking to Griffin, much less cite him as a reference.

Vogel then sets out to promote world reknown stalker, Joe McGinniss' new anti-Palin, Trig Truther book. McGinniss, also known for referring to Palin supporters as the "hounds of hell," has been given credibility by the mainstream press before, only later did they regret it. The man is crazy and giving him more than two seconds of airtime clears away any doubts of that.

Politico has never been a very unbiased source for news, but what they did on Monday will further denigrate their credibility. Giving proven liars, disgruntled losers, stalkers, and suspected psychopaths a platform to promote their agenda driven products, is NOT news. It certainly isn't worthy of a four page spread, splashed across readers screens, front and center at the beginning of a busy news week. The article was shameful, and only proves that those of us who have been preaching to our neighbors to not trust the media, are correct. Would Politico ever highlight and promote people who write books and blog articles about Barack Obama's alleged homosexuality or any other number of strange conspiracies about the President? Heck no, nor should they.

The title of the Vogel piece reads "Mission for anti-Palin movement: Expose her." Considering the article is full of baseless conspiracies and outright lies, the only one 'exposed' here is Politico. The nuts cited in the piece exposed themselves a long time ago.

I could end by asking Politico to be professionals and plea with them to stop their politics of personal destruction in regards to Governor Palin. That would be an empty plea considering so many writers over there are highly motivated to do just that. Perhaps we should just stop reading this garbage. I don't read the National Enquirer, and after what Politico did with this article, I don't see much difference between the two.

Mark Levin weighs in and coins a new name for the political rag - "Pervertico"

The Strategy of the Media's Bias

The Associated Press and Politico found it necessary to report Bristol Palin's honest wages to the broad public, via their respective front page. Whether their reporting was honest, is another matter. It's hard to tell considering that Rachel D'Oro (a name longtime C4P readers are familiar with), author of the first MSM piece, used the Trig Truther freaks at "Palingates" as a source. Using terms like "rakes it in" and getting a "payout," these so-called "news" articles are clearly designed to sell a narrative that the media has been pushing about Bristol's mother for a long time. There is nothing wrong with what Bristol did for the foundation she worked for. This "story" belongs nowhere near a front page, much less a news publication. It isn't a story, it's one young woman's life. Running this piece, with vile conspiracy theorists as the source, is disgraceful behavior by an already close to illegitimate press.

Kelsey has more on Bristol here.

For many years I believed that the media had a blanket left-wing bias towards all Conservatives. It has been proven lately that there is more of a strategy at play, in regards to what the media reports and what they don't, versus knee-jerk ideology. Take for instance this story that popped up a few days ago on Mother Jones:

Send a public records request seeking documents from his 12-year stint as Arkansas governor, as Mother Jones did recently, and an eyebrow-raising reply will come back: The records are unavailable, and the computer hard drives that once contained them were erased and physically destroyed by the Huckabee administration as the governor prepared to leave office and launch a presidential bid.

In 2007, during Huckabee's campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, the issue of the eradicated hard drives surfaced briefly, but it was never fully examined, and key questions remain. Why had Huckabee gone to such great lengths to wipe out his own records? What ever happened to a backup collection that was provided to a Huckabee aide?

Huckabee is now considering another presidential run, and if he does enter the race, he would do so as a frontrunner. Which would make the case of the missing records all the more significant. These records would shed light on Huckabee's governorship—and could provide insight into how a President Huckabee might run the country. Meanwhile, observers of Arkansas' political scene—including one of Huckabee's former GOP allies—say the episode is characteristic of a politician who was distrustful and secretive by nature.

A truly fascinating piece of information, especially for a "GOP front-runner," is it not? Yet, there were no corresponding stories from AP and the only thing Politico had on it was a link buried on Ben Smith's blog page. Why didn't the media cover this? Doesn't the public have a right to know what kind of behavior a potential candidate for the presidency took part in? Can you imagine if Governor Palin ever would have done such a thing? I would bet every dollar I have ever made, and ever will make, that that story wouldn't be buried in a link in the blog section. It would be Top Story news, in every media publication, and on every network.

Speaking of 'what ifs'... What if Governor Palin had said this:

Bachmann, who's flirting with a presidential run, was in the early-primary state of Iowa last week for the Rediscover God in America conference. Bachmann was born in Iowa, as she told the crowd. But she couldn't leave it at just being an ordinary Iowan:

"I'm actually even more than just an Iowan," she told her audience. "I'm a seventh-generation Iowan. Our family goes back to the 1850s, to the first pioneers that came to Iowa from Sognfjord, Norway."

[...]

Unfortunately, the story doesn't hold water, as researcher Chris Rodda ably points out at OpEdNews.

"I was watching her speech, and it was when she said that she was a seventh-generation Iowan that I knew something was wrong," Rodda tells City Pages. "She's in her fifties--there's no way there could be seven generations between her and ancestors in the 1850s."

So Rodda, who has a background in genealogical research, decided to do a little digging. Without too much trouble, she found that Bachmann is actually a fourth-generation American, not seventh, as she claimed. And that's just the start.

Bachmann's immigrant ancestors didn't make a pilgrimage straight to the promised land of Iowa. From Quebec, they went to Wisconsin. That's where the 1860 census found them. From there, they moved to the Dakota Territory.

Bachmann claims that her people "kept going, and they persevered" through floods and crippling winters. Well, kind of. After enduring those trials in the unforgiving Dakota Territory, they actually turned tail and retreated to the relative ease and safety of...Iowa.

"Okay," Bachmann apologists may be saying at this point, "but history is hard and stuff! Maybe this was just an honest mistake."

Not a chance, Rodda says.

"The only historical sources where she could have found some of the details of her story--like the 13-week ocean passage--also clearly show that her family went to Wisconsin, not Iowa," Rodda says. "She couldn't have known those things without knowing that the whole premise of her speech was a lie."

You really can't blame Bachmann for that though. Tuesday night on O'Reilly, she stated (4:32 mark) that she just reads whatever is on the teleprompter. She also indicated during the interview that she isn't "afraid" of media attacks on her. After the mainstream media let a whole speech full of pandering distortions, slide on by without mere mention, I wouldn't be afraid if I were Bachmann either. At least, not at this point.

I think my Twitter buddy, Val said it best today:

Liberals & Dems SHOULD fear @SarahPalinUSA in 2012, b/c she is thee ONLY candidate who will NOT have an October surprise!

Clearly that has a lot to do with the strategy being implemented by the media, in this pre-primary season.

Here we have three possible contenders for the GOP nomination in the upcoming presidential election of 2012. While all three claim the mantle of "Conservative," one is treated very differently than the others. The reason for this is something I eluded to in my last blog post. The media and the left will promote and omit news that will help them in the long-run. For Governor Palin, there will be no "October surprise." Every little detail of her life is already out in the open. She would be the most intensely scrutinized candidate in our nation's history. With the other two possible candidates, that is simply not the case.

Let's face it, the other two Republicans here don't have the same name recognition as Governor Palin. Huckabee has been largely unscrutinized for years, and most people outside the world of politics, don't know who Michele Bachmann is. Governor Palin and her family are recognizable faces to rake over the coals.

With Governor Palin, the leftist media is forced to throw everything at her, as soon as they can. They do whatever they can think of to try and damage her in any way possible. With the others, they can afford to wait. This is after all, a strategy with the re-election of Obama in mind. The left, and their partners in the press know what's at stake. They don't want to face Governor Palin in a general election, but the others look like walk in the park in comparison. They will save their bias and garbage reporting for a more strategically significant date. At the right time, they will unload all the information they held from the public on these candidates, given the opportunity. Let's not give it to them.