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Pulling the plug on Dish posts based on new, "shocking" (sarcastic finger quotes, not for citation) evidence brought to bare through Palin's book, evidence that must be digested and considered now rather than later - because of the "possibility of a huge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.

I'm In Palinville And Andrew Sullivan Is The Mayor

Breaking news: Palin not fat enough before Trig's birth. And in our next segment, Barack Obama born in Saudi Arabia?

Andrew Sullivan continues his unhealthy fixation on the "truth" of Trig Palin's birth, now with new photographic evidence showing Sarah Palin three weeks before the alleged delivery. Sullivan marginalizes all the good work logged during the 2008 campaign, ever-vigilant in exposing Sarah's myriad lies and hypocrisies, with this descent into political paranoia. He can't help himself. He's addicted to this Republican heroine.

And it is a sad, sad day when this author begrudgingly makes a strange bedfellow in Michelle Malkin, forming a coalition of the sane against The Daily Dish.

The brazen demands for more proof of Trig's maternity arrive from the same baneful impetus fueling questions about Obama's "vault" birth certificate, notwithstanding that an official birth certificate has been provided.

Gather yourself, Andrew. Take a moment. I was about to purchase The Conservative Soul, but you're pushing me towards In Defense of Internment.

We're all going through the dead air doldrums of the post-election, pre-inauguration season. The blogosphere is decidedly not buzzing. But that's no warrant to light fires just to report on them.

Supporting A Left Turn For The Right

Right-thinker Andrew Sullivan offers ten reasons permitting conservatives to vote for Obama:

10. A body blow to racial identity politics. An end to the era of Jesse Jackson in black America.

9. Less debt. Yes, Obama will raise taxes on those earning over a quarter of a million. And he will spend on healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan and the environment. But so will McCain. He plans more spending on health, the environment and won't touch defense of entitlements. And his refusal to touch taxes means an extra $4 trillion in debt over the massive increase presided over by Bush. And the CBO estimates that McCain's plans will add more to the debt over four years than Obama's. Fiscal conservatives have a clear choice.

8. A return to realism and prudence in foreign policy. Obama has consistently cited the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush as his inspiration. McCain's knee-jerk reaction to the Georgian conflict, his commitment to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and his brinksmanship over Iran's nuclear ambitions make him a far riskier choice for conservatives. The choice between Obama and McCain is like the choice between George H.W. Bush's first term and George W.'s.

7. An ability to understand the difference between listening to generals and delegating foreign policy to them.

6. Temperament. Obama has the coolest, calmest demeanor of any president since Eisenhower. Conservatism values that kind of constancy, especially compared with the hot-headed, irrational impulsiveness of McCain.

5. Faith. Obama's fusion of Christianity and reason, his non-fundamentalist faith, is a critical bridge between the new atheism and the new Christianism.

4. A truce in the culture war. Obama takes us past the debilitating boomer warfare that has raged since the 1960s. Nothing has distorted our politics so gravely; nothing has made a rational politics more elusive.

3. Two words: President Palin.

2. Conservative reform. Until conservatism can get a distance from the big-spending, privacy-busting, debt-ridden, crony-laden, fundamentalist, intolerant, incompetent and arrogant faux conservatism of the Bush-Cheney years, it will never regain a coherent message to actually govern this country again. The survival of conservatism requires a temporary eclipse of today's Republicanism. Losing would be the best thing to happen to conservatism since 1964. Back then, conservatives lost in a landslide for the right reasons. Now, Republicans are losing in a landslide for the wrong reasons.

1. The War Against Islamist terror. The strategy deployed by Bush and Cheney has failed. It has failed to destroy al Qaeda, except in a country, Iraq, where their presence was minimal before the US invasion. It has failed to bring any of the terrorists to justice, instead creating the excresence of Gitmo, torture, secret sites, and the collapse of America's reputation abroad. It has empowered Iran, allowed al Qaeda to regroup in Pakistan, made the next vast generation of Muslims loathe America, and imperiled our alliances. We need smarter leadership of the war: balancing force with diplomacy, hard power with better p.r., deploying strategy rather than mere tactics, and self-confidence rather than a bunker mentality.

Those conservatives who remain convinced, as I do, that Islamist terror remains the greatest threat to the West cannot risk a perpetuation of the failed Manichean worldview of the past eight years, and cannot risk the possibility of McCain making rash decisions in the middle of a potentially catastrophic global conflict. If you are serious about the war on terror and believe it is a war we have to win, the only serious candidate is Barack Obama.

Nothing left to say. Sullivan and his contemplative band of brothers and sisters, stalwart and steadfast against the ambling rank and file of the Grand Old Party, rests its case.