Media

The Enemy Commits All Its Forces to the Main Front

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In this post I said that Palin’s speech had left the Donks and their stooges in the MSM who do their dirty work, temporarily stunned, but they would come back like the cornered rats they are, with a massive effort to destroy Gov. Palin. I expected that they would come up with something major by now, but their initial digging seems not to have unearthed much. I was forwarded two pretty trivial emails this weekend that seemed to be initial “feelers”. Both purported to be revalations about Palin by individuals who knew her, but both were pretty weak. And so far Obama’s campaign has seemed to be unsure of how to respond.

Some concrete evidence is emerging of what must be the most massive and desperate effort to counterattack an enemy with momentum since the Nazis before Kursk. Beneath the layers of slimy water, a vast, foul beast is stirring. The MSM is taking its experienced reporters off of coverage of terrorism and devoting them to try to find something, anything, to use against Gov. Palin. (Via Instapundit.) These people have their priorities, and getting Barack Obama elected is the top priority of them all.

They don’t need much. Just something that sounds plausible and damaging and they will repeat it over and over until the election. I am amazed they haven’t started their barrage of garbage yet. But as Jonathan once told me years ago, about another class of purported professionals, long before anyone ever thought of blogs, “these guys are usually either corrupt, overworked or incompetent, and frequently all three”. For the MSM add: Smug, Arrogant, Utterly Ignorant of Real America outside of LA/NYC/DC and usually Lazy. So, they have failed to accomplish anything for several valuable days, just as they failed to anticipate that Gov. Palin might be picked as VP, even though it has been talked about for many months prior to the event.

But stay tuned. They will either find or fabricate their “story” soon.

Wait for a front-page, above the fold story in the New York Times this week, which will be the cue for the whole loathesome, yapping pack. That is my guess.

UPDATE: A comment on the (always good) Right Coast has an angle that the Donks may become desperate enough to try: “Jesus was a community organizer, and Pontius Pilate was a governor.” It does fit in with the whole Barack-is-the-Messiah schtick.

Quote of the Day

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The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media’s prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.

Bill Kristol. RTWT — a sneering but still accurate assessment.

I love that line: McCain/Palin v. Obama/Media. We know who Obama’s real “running mate” is! It’s his horde of little pals who are working away like Santa’s elves to bring to an America that is hungry for change the gift of hope we can believe in.

Feh. (Spits on ground.)

Your Move, Mr. Donkey

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For the first time ever in this election cycle the GOP actually has momentum.

We were watching this election slowly trickle down our pantlegs, until last night.

But now McCain and Palin have gone off-script.

The planned ritual execution of the Old White Guys before the coronation of His Holiness Barack I is now officially not-going-as-scheduled.

McCain threw a barracuda into the swimming pool. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t.

But it has made life interesting, for now.

(And it has made Obama’s defensive eat-up-the-clock approach look ill-advised. It has also made his, or his wife’s, rejection of Hillary look like the weak decision it was. Real leaders have the stones to surround themselves with the strongest people in their own party. JKF took LBJ, Reagan took Bush I, Clinton took Gore. That is how the pols with balls do it.)

The MSM and the Donks are stunned.

But they won’t stay stunned.

Their initial volley of vicious slime attacks and jeering, arrogant condescension have failed. The Donks and their MSM allies, the ones who are assigned to do the dirty work, will now come back like cornered rats, like animals. It is going to get way, way worse.

Expect a massive and vicious counter-attack, possibly based on some purported “new revelations” of corruption, against Palin to begin today or tomorrow. No doubt Mr. Axelrod and his team, Obama’s brain, are working hard right now on the counter-attack.

They have to destroy her now.

Gov. Palin and her family are going to have an ugly two months.

UPDATE 1: “I’m really looking forward to the VP debates. And – for the first time – the election itself, although there’s a lot of water between here and there, and something tells me that the long knives are being sharpened.” Neptunus Lex (The Other Lex!) gets it.

UPDATE 2: I laughed out loud at the spirit of this, and its apparent accuracy:

There’s also more to the pit bull thing: Why do they bite so hard? Because that is what they love to do most in life. And it’s not funny, unless the person get chewed up richly deserves it. She even found a funny, extemporaneous (apparently) way to say explicitly that she was, in fact, a pit bull, though one with lipstick. Translation: I wear lipstick and I am your worst nightmare.
 
This lady was not fighting for her life. She was having the time of her life. She’s a stone fighter, not the kind of victim the bullies want. I begin to get the barracuda moniker. A natural born killer. I think I’m in love.

The Right Coast

UPDATE 3: Here’s the photo of Gov. Palin with the moose she bagged. I’d heard about it, but I had not seen it before. Looks like good eatin’.

The Democrats’ Denial-of-Service Attack

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The TV news is all Palin, all the time. And daughter of Palin. Politically this isn’t necessarily bad for Republicans, to the extent it focuses scrutiny on Governor Palin, who I think stands up well to it. However, it is bad (or good, depending on your partisan inclination) in that it removes scrutiny from Obama, who does not. The risk of a media pile-on on Palin was one of the risks McCain took in selecting Palin. Only time will tell if it was a justified risk.

The distributed Obama campaign — including the Obama organization, leftist bloggers and MSM — quickly figured out the dynamics of the situation and are responding effectively. The campaign or bloggers introduce daily talking-points that are repeated and amplified by a media cascade and can generate enough network (online and TV) discussion to crowd out most other topics. That’s what happened today and yesterday. Today’s main talking point was, McCain didn’t adequately vet Palin. This is clearly not true, given that McCain’s people were checking out Palin months ago. Yet given the story about the daughter, the talking point is just plausible enough to give media people cover in keeping it alive for a day as a major story. Conservative and Republican bloggers and MSM people unwittingly help their opponents by focusing even more attention on Palin in order to defend her and correct the record. While all of this is going on, Obama is almost invisible, and he appears to have picked up a few points in the polls. (Notice that the bounce didn’t begin until waves of Palin stories rescued him from the media spotlight.) The concurrent weather story, which isn’t really a story but is being hyped for all it’s worth by the pro-Obama media, further distracts scrutiny from Obama.

Conservative MSM people haven’t quite caught on to the full extent of what is happening. Their supposedly non-partisan colleagues are gleefully helping Obama by repeating endlessly “questions” about Palin that displace both McCain’s message and serious scrutiny of Obama. Who wants to talk about Obama’s relationship with Ayers, or about offshore drilling or tax cuts, when there’s juicy gossip (or merely reckless speculation) to be spread about Palin’s family. On Brit Hume’s show tonight, the conservative commentators were almost sputtering with rage at the Democrats’ dishonest attacks on Palin. Yet these same conservative commentators spent most of their time attempting to rebut the attacks, which means they didn’t talk much about anything else. Larry Kudlow devoted much of his show to defending Palin. Conservative media people watch impotently as their leftist colleagues do Obama’s work. The big-media conservatives aren’t temperamentally or tactically equipped to respond effectively. Perhaps the pro-McCain bloggers will do better.

Obviously Obama would like to keep Palin at the center of media focus. Obviously McCain would like to keep his own policies, and Obama’s failings, at the center of focus. McCain’s electoral prospects depend on how quickly he and Palin can maneuver to shift the focus back to Obama. McCain may yet come out OK if public disgust with scummy media partisanship generates a backlash, or if voters lose interest in the MSM’s dishonest Palin-as-soap-opera meme. Whatever happens, it’s clear that Governor Palin and her family are in for a nasty ride. The leftist political-media complex will go all-out to destroy her as long as attacking her deflects attention from the radical leftist at the head of the Democratic ticket.

UPDATE: Other views, from Rich Karlgaard, Jay Cost and Tom Smith (Smith’s post links to several additional good posts).