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Point of View »Michelle Malkin: Cowardly Character Assassination

Michelle Malkin: Cowardly Character Assassination

By Michelle Malkin | Posted on 11/09/2008

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McCain's high-minded emphasis on honor is undermined by his campaign's post-election sniping at Palin.

Sunken ships loosen bitter lips. The failed McCain campaign, for all its high-minded talk of honor, duty and courage, is now teeming with unscrupulous gossipmongers. Seems the dishy staffers forgot to crack open their copies of Sen. John McCain’s bestseller, Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember.

Michelle Malkin
Michelle Malkin
Rest assured: Their cowardly character assassination of McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, won’t be forgotten.

The finks turned to Newsweek and Fox News to spread petty rumors about Palin’s intellect and character. The magazine peddled anecdotes from sources horrified that Palin greeted top advisers at her hotel room — gasp! — “wearing nothing but a towel” and “wet hair.” Fox News reporter Carl Cameron breathlessly reported that his unnamed McCain sources told him Palin lacked “a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate” because, they claimed, she didn’t know which countries were parties to the North American Free Trade Agreement and “didn’t understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself.”

Let’s assume for a moment that the McCain rumormongers are telling the truth about Palin (and I don’t believe they are). Who would it damn more: Palin, or McCain and his vetters, who greenlighted her for the vice-presidential nomination? Don’t need a fancy Ivy League degree to figure that one out.

In introducing her to America, McCain praised her independence and backbone: She “stands up for what’s right, and she doesn’t let anyone tell her to sit down.” The inside snipers are now roasting her for that very attribute — redefined as “going rogue” — because she had the nerve to try to schedule media interviews on her own. The nerve of her!

Palin’s response to the campaign fragging? At a late Wednesday airport news conference in Anchorage, immediately upon landing home after the election defeat, she smiled cheerfully. Shrugging off the “foolish things” said by the McCain saboteurs, she simply said, “It’s politics. ... It’s rough and tumble and you’ve got to have a thick skin just like I’ve got.”

Hollywood savaged Palin. Journalists mocked her. Liberal blogs slimed her. Opponents cursed her, Photoshopped her, hacked her e-mail, hanged her in effigy, called her bigot, Bible-thumper and bimbo, and attacked her husband and children. But nothing Palin endured during the election season compares to the treatment she’s receiving from these backstabbing blabbermouths who worked on the same campaign she poured herself into over the last three months.

Palin worked her heart out. She energized tens of thousands to come out when they would have otherwise stayed home. She touched countless families. I didn’t agree with everything she said on the campaign trail. But she vigorously defended the Second Amendment and the sanctity of life more eloquently in practice than any of the educated conservative aristocracy. And she did it all with a tirelessness and an infectious optimism that defied the shameless, bottomless attempts by elites in both parties to bring her and her family down.

Liberty needs a virtuous people to survive; self-governance requires virtuous leaders. “Knowledgeability” is a necessary trait in political life, but it is not sufficient. The elitist critics of Palin, so blindly enamored of President-elect Barack Obama’s ability to hold forth for hours on theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, ignored the Founding Fathers’ counsel: Character counts. In times of adversity and crisis, it counts more than IQ points, instant trivia recall and bloviation skills.

“The most important thing I have learned, from my parents, from teachers, from my faith, from many good people I have been blessed to know, and from the lives of people whose stories we have included in this book,” McCain wrote in Character Is Destiny, “is to want what they had, integrity, and to feel the sting of my conscience when I have risked it for some selfish reason.”

McCain not only failed to make that message stick with the electorate, he apparently couldn’t persuade his own staff to heed his advice and practice what he preached.

Michelle Malkin is author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild. Click here for more information. She can be contacted at .

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» sbnative wrote on 11/10/08 @ 01:00 AM

This Picking-On-Palin thing is an obvious, pathetic ploy to divert attention from the LOSERS who ran McCain’s campaign. Palin may or may not have been the best VP pick, but she brought an undeniable spark and energy and the public loved her for it. She is most certainly NOT the reason McCain lost the election--had he been fiesty like her he’d have helped himself! His own campaign staffers are to thank for that, as well McCain’s old-fashioned sense of honor that prevented him from playing the Reverend Wright card, etc. BIG MISTAKE. Joni Mitchell said it best, it’s been dirty for dirty down the line… and the Obama camp was just plain better at being the dirty-for-dirty. Not a pretty lesson. But worth taking note.

» Another SB Native wrote on 11/10/08 @ 03:57 PM

What does Michelle (and I guess Sarah) expect from the McCain campaign people?  McCain ran a dirty, character-assassination campaign, hiring some of the same people who used those same tactics against McCain himself. 

Remember how the Bush campaign raised questions about McCain’s age, his sanity (implying that his heroic stint as a POW made him unfit for office!), his alleged love child, etc. etc. in 2000?  It worked in 2000, to the world’s detriment, but at least it didn’t work out this time.  Thankfully, a little more than half the country now knows better than to take the GOP, Faux News, Rush, and Hannity seriously.

SB Native thinks the Obama camp was plain better at being dirty-for-dirty?  What campaign did s/he watch?

Hopefully the McCain staffers, Palin, and all the Rove progeny will slink under a rock soon, never to be heard from again, like Rumsfeld and Cheney have already done, and Bush has almost done.

» Palin is the reason wrote on 11/10/08 @ 07:37 PM

Look at the polls. Palin is one of the main reasons why McCain lost. She was not ready and the independents saw through the gimmick. She was uninformed on basis issues and in fact displayed a basic lack of curiousity. McCain did not do his homework before the selection.

P.S. I hear that Palin is trying out to be a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader next season.


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