It Puts The Palin In The Basket (With Update)

Andrew Sullivan and support staff at the Daily Dish have gone postal on Palin yet again and descended into fullbore bananas-mode. They now meddle with the dark arts of fanatacism, conspiracy theorizing and celebrity derangement disorder.

Pulling the plug on Dish posts based on new, "shocking" (sarcastic finger quotes, not for citation) evidence brought to bare through Palin's book, evidence that must be digested and considered now rather than later - because of the "possibility of a huge scandal" - is akin to John McCain suspending his campaign to think hard about the economy. It appears he is going after the "fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy" again with renewed zeal (Trig's mommy is Bristol not Sarah's, or something to that effect).

As if the smoking gun is in the pages of Going Rogue. It's not. Sullivan loves to create an atmosphere of intrigue and innuendo around Palin's tall tales (admittedly many), but the payoff is never worth the buildup and the portended "huge scandal" is invariably nothing more than a colorful restatement of the obvious.

Sullivan's grand proclamation of the coming exegesis of Going Rogue, a monastic vow of silence necessary to play the part of the erudite super-sleuth:

"To Our Readers :

This is only the second time in its nearly ten-year history that the Dish has gone silent. The reason now is the same as the reason then. When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life. There are so many fabrications and delusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it - and comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality she has previously provided - is a bewildering task. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. And the fact that she is now the leader of the Republican party and a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility. We take this seriously as we always have. We want to be fair to her, and to her family, and to the innocent people she has brought into the spotlight. And we are not reporters. We are merely analysts trying to make sense of evidence already in the public domain, evidence that points in all sorts of directions, only one of which can be true.

Since the Dish has tried to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Palin's unhinged grip on reality from the very beginning - specifically her fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy - we feel it's vital that we grapple with this new data as fairly and as rigorously as possible. That takes time to get right. And it is so complicated we simply cannot focus on anything else.
There are only three of us.

And we have had the book for less than a day. We feel we owe it to you to get it right - or as right as we can - until we post or publish anything. As readers know, we also differ on some key issues and intend to air them and thrash this out until we are confident that whatever we publish is as fair as possible.

At some point, we will also go back and make sure we have not missed all the evidence of the other lies that Palin is now peddling. We won't miss anything. But we ask for your patience.
There is a possibility here of such a huge scandal that we would be crazy not to take our time either to debunk it or move it forward for further examination.

We have only one commitment: to get this right. Please bear with us as we do the best we can."

What's that you say??? Hmmmm??? Palin's a liar, you say????? Good work Holmes! Scotland Yard thanks you!!!

***UPDATE***: I will always remember where I was on November 19, 2009, when Sullivan and his unrelenting, uncompromising, unassailable crackerjack team of investigative journalists over at the Dish cracked the Palin code, winnowed out the truth, deciphered it, and prove once and for all, to the chagrin of their naysayers and in the name of truth, justice, liberty, apple pie, Glen Beck, and the "American Way," that Trig's mother is indeed . . .:

This Dish will resume as normal tomorrow morning. We apologize for the lacuna. And I suppose some will say we've gotten this book and the issues it raises out of perspective. But since the last campaign, we have raised many questions about Palin to which we have been given no incontestable answers (and still haven't) and the only real evidence we have are news stories, interviews and now, critically this book.

In his hagiography of Palin, Matt Continetti accuses yours truly of earnestness about all this. I am grateful for his not accusing me of cynicism. I remain earnest in both suspecting every word she says but also in trying to find out the truth as best we can. It's not that Palin cannot tell the truth; it is that it is so mixed up with lies and delusions that separating them all out is not a quick or easy task. The Dish, meanwhile, has aired a whole range of views about her various 33 and counting verified lies, and the Dish's own Patrick Appel has weighed in independently on the whole, bizarre pregnancy/labor story, which has mystified me from Day One. So I feel obliged to do the homework properly - to be fair to Palin and to our readers as much as anything else.

Anyway, we're done now. And I hope to be up half the night trying to write a post on the great mystery of the stories about Trig, stories that have bedeviled the blogosphere and many others for months. There is no proof here of anything, but there is a much more nuanced and detailed narrative of the events (especially now we have Palin's first considered version of the events since the campaign) that when taken together has definitely helped illuminate what was once obscure and, well, bizarre. Believe it or not, it makes a little more sense now.

Stay tuned. And then the Dish will return to its normal programming.

. . . yep, sounds about right. Thanks for the hot lead. Don't rush back from your "lacuna," Definitely-Not-Captain Sully. We'll be fine on our own for awhile, you know, hearing Palin speak and realizing she's full of shit based on common sense, our ears, our eyes and the facts as we already know them.

Doctor. Doctor. Glad I'm Not Palin.

In her one-on-one interview segment with Brian Williams last evening, Governor Palin responded to the growing chorus of calls seeking release of her medical records:

"The medical records, so be it. If that will allow some curiosity seekers perhaps to have one more thing that they either check the box off that they can find something to criticize or to rest them assured over. I'm healthy, happy, I've had five kids, that's going to be in the medical records. Never seriously ill or hurt, you'll see that in the medical records if they're released."

So that settles it . . . or does it. Not so fast says the McCain campaign. As reported by an up-in-arms Andrew Sullivan, a parsing bit of wordsmithery comes from the GOP ticket sans medical documentation:

“When medical information related to Governor Palin’s health is ready to be released we will make that information available.”

Hmmm. Medical "information," not necessarily medical records. "Related to" the good Governor's health? I may or may not be a lawyer as far as you know, but Warm Apple Pie, Esq. asserts you can drive a forty-foot rig through the cavernous hole cleared out by "related to." And only when the information is "ready to be released?" By definition, doesn't the word "records" encompass accounts and diagnoses previously prepared by doctors? I don't think we're asking Governor Palin to submit to a physical before the election. The personal annals of her medical history will more than suffice.

I reject almost all conspiracy theories out-of-hand - including the sinfully delicious yarn about Sarah Palin concocting her purported pregnancy and birth of Trig to protect his true biological mother, Bristol Palin.

Notwithstanding, I do squint a bit at the hesitancy to provide full, unredacted medical records. She's the youngest of the four candidates. You would think the papers attest simply that she's the most vigorous as well.

Still, I submit this is garden-variety, election year dookie thrown around by fringe jesters seeking to defame and imbrue the opposition's candidate. However, Obama did supply his birth certificate to combat outrageous claims that he was born outside of the United States. It would seem Palin could immediately delouse herself of these sub-media lice by a timely release of her medical records. How about some of that government transparency you extol?

Alaska pays for Palin kids to come with; Alaskan babysitters' unemployment rate skyrockets

So what - so Sarah Palin charged a few thousand dollars to the ol' Alaskan Amex for Bristol and Norwalk and the rest of her kids she named after Connecticut towns to come with her on trips. Okay, so it was about $21,000 worth of benefits and they weren't declared as income - or declared at all. Sure the kids stayed in $500+ a night rooms at the Essex House on Central Park South. Sure they showed up at official events uninvited and without one iota of appropriateness or with anything to do there other than shove food into their pieholes and make long distance phone calls afterward from the hotel phone to Alaska to talk about the unprotected sex they'd have with their hockey hooligan boyfriends when they got back.

But let's examine what was SAVED, not what was SPENT. That is the threshold issue here and that is what should be discussed.

The going rate for a room at The Essex House is, sure, like $500 or $600 bucks a night (incidentally, I know for a fact the rooms are actually pricier than that now. She must have gotten the Alaskan Secessionist Party group discount). And sure, a plane ticket from Anchorage - via a real city - to New York is like over a grand. But that isn't the real story here. Fact is, Joe Six Pack, that Sarah Palin not only made the right choice in bringing them, but actually had no choice BUT to bring them. Fact is that if Palin had NOT brought the younglings, several terrible things would have happened:

1) The Alaskan taxpayers would have had to pay for a babysitter. Possibly more than one, considering the number of angry, hungry, secessionist mouths to be fed. My amateur sleuthing has revealed the going rate for a qualified babysitter in Alaska to be approximately $900 per hour, because in the entire state there are only two Inuit twins that do it and they price-fix since they've cornered the market. Thus, if the Governor had left the kids there with a full-time babysitter, it would have cost tens of thousands of dollars more than bringing them to New York and putting them up on Central Park South. It isn't that Sarah Palin SPENT Alaska's money. It's that she SAVED Alaska money. (The First Dude couldn't take care of them because he was off at an Alaska Independence Party rally on his Arctic Cat.)

2) Each Palin daughter (sigh, okay, probably just Bristol) would have had the opportunity, with both parents out of town and only supervised by said Inuit babysitting tandem, to get knocked up (or again for the first time), thus costing more money later on down the road to pay for the screaming offspring to come on future flights - in addition to the baby-daddy who would also need to come along to be properly supervised/sterilized and for any impromptu photo ops. We can assume the Palins would then have learned their lesson and would in this future bring all the kids everywhere to keep an eye on them (as they do now that Bristol has had it "slipped by Richter, no kick save"). Or, of course, they could leave the daughters at home again, tempt fate yet again and risk further knock-uppage, since we know those Palin girls will panty-drop for the first varsity hockey player with some spiked cider that knocks on the front door of the Governor's igloo. (Sigh, okay, again, only Bristol. Fine, perhaps that was unfair... but apples don't fall far from the tree, Sarah. We can see that your husband's penis has quite a habit of seceding from his pantaloons.) As you can see from this simple equation, every time a Palin daughter (okay, again, Bristol) would be potentially left alone, by the transitive property of unprotected Alaskan teenage sex, they would be impregnated by a second string high school hockey defenseman. The formula can be written quite simply as Levi over Bristol minus Sarah equals baby.

As you can clearly see, leaving the Palin children at home would have caused not only a teenage baby boom the likes of which haven't been seen since the drugstore on my corner ran out of condoms for three days in 1994, but would have cost the state countless dollars in babysitting fees and, down the line, in, uh, further babysitting fees. Thus, Sarah Palin did not spend irrationally and against the spirit of the rules. In bringing her daughters with her, she saved us all from other and further Palins. And that's a victory for every American.