Category: Sarah Palin

Palin-Hating Columbia Professor, Huffington Post Blogger, Busted for Incest

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Let’s begin with a flashback, shall we? In July 2009, when Sarah Palin resigned as governor of Alaska, Columbia University professor David Epstein wrote at his Huffington Post blog:

Palin has done what weak, self-centered people do when the going gets tough — they quit and blame someone else.

Got that? Sarah Palin is “weak” and “self-centered.” And, Epstein added, “voters can rest a bit easier with . . . the knowledge that they chose wisely” in voting for Obama-Biden, not McCain-Palin.

Now, let’s flash forward to yesterday’s New York Daily News:

A popular Columbia professor was charged Thursday with incest – accused of a sick sex relationship with a female relative, prosecutors said.
Political science Prof. David Epstein, 46, bedded the young woman over a three-year period ending last year, according to court papers.
He was arraigned before a Manhattan judge on a single felony incest count.
Sources said the victim was over 18 when the relationship began in 2006 and that the two often exchanged twisted text messages.
Epstein faces up to four years behind bars if convicted.

This is the guy who called Sarah Palin “weak” and “self-centered.”

Project much, professor?

UPDATE: Oooh, details emerge of Professor Pervo’s (alleged) crime:

He had relations with his daughter, now 24, from 2006 through 2009, the complaint said.

So, according to his own daughter, Professor Pervo was engaged in this twisted behavior the whole time he was blogging at HuffPo.

UPDATE II: “Police say the relationship between Epstein and his daughter was consensual.”

All together now: Eeeeewww! Yuck! Continue reading Palin-Hating Columbia Professor, Huffington Post Blogger, Busted for Incest →

Does Sarah Palin Need a Tutor? Would Richard Wolffe Volunteer for the Job?

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Cubachi has a post about Richard Wolffe on Hardball with Chris Matthews, in which Wolffe ridiculed the British writer C.S. Lewis as a mere “children’s author”:

Lewis was, of course, a master of Christian apologetics and a good friend of J.R.R. Tolkien — they were colleagues at Oxford University — with whom he shared a desire to use literature to as a means of spreading the Christian worldview. Most fans of the Lord of the Rings trilogy are probably unaware that they are absorbing a sort of sermon when they read the tales of Frodo and his comrades, but that’s the point: Tolkien (and Lewis) understood that many people who wouldn’t sit still for a theological lecture would be only too happy to read a well-written adventure tale about elves and dragons and magic.

Why was Wolffe discussing 20th-century British literature on Hardball? Because Sarah Palin had named C.S. Lewis as one of her favorite authors and, in the minds of liberals, whatever Palin does is deserving of ridicule:

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball” with Chris Matthews, Wolffe expressed incredulity, noting that Lewis wrote “a series of kids’ books.”
Matthews interrupted Wolffe: “I wouldn’t put down C.S. Lewis.”
“I’m not putting him down,” Wollfe responded. “But you know divine inspiration? There are things she could’ve said to divine inspiration. Choosing C.S. Lewis is an interesting one.” . . .
The discussion occurred as Matthews, Wolffe and Time’s Jay Newton Small on Thursday discussed a recent interview Palin gave with Barbara Walters about her reading habits.
The prospective candidate for president in 2012 also said she reads the Newsmax magazine, the Wall Street Journal and Alaska newspapers.
Matthews was stunned she admitted to reading Newsmax.
“Explain Newsmax,” he said. “Why should she would say something like that? That’s a digest of conservative right wing conservative thinking. You don’t have to read. They just tell you the little items you’re supposed to know.” . . .

Well, Chris, if you want someone to “explain Newsmax,” I will: It is a monthly news magazine, developed originally as a Web site by Christopher Ruddy. While I might have preferred it if Governor Palin had named The American Spectator on her reading list, it is no stain on Palin’s credibility that she mentioned one and not the other. (Just don’t let it happen again, governor!)

What Wolffe and Matthews are doing, of course, is conveying the consensus opinion  of the American journalistic elite that Palin is an anti-intellectual imbecile.

This consensus, I would argue, is a perception deriving from the vast gulf that separates the lives of the journalistic elite from the lives of Ordinary Americans like Sarah Palin.

Let’s look at Palin’s résumé, shall we? Television sportscaster, wife, mother of five, mayor of Wasilla, chairwoman of Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, governor, 2008 vice-presidential candidate, and so on down to today: Reality TV star, Fox News contributor, bestselling author and — the reason she’s relentlessly mocked by liberals, let’s admit — prospective 2012 presidential candidate.

Looking at that résumé, then, we see a woman very busy with practical everyday activities, a life which probably didn’t permit a lot of time to sit around thumbing through Thucydides, Cicero, Locke, Hume, Smith, Gibbon, Burke, De Tocqueville, J.S. Mill, etc., etc. Governor Palin is by profession neither an academic nor a think-tank scholar nor an essayist. She is not Peter Robinson or Thomas Sowell or Christopher Hitchens. She is not the sort of person we have in mind when we use the term “intellectual.” Continue reading Does Sarah Palin Need a Tutor? Would Richard Wolffe Volunteer for the Job? →

Bristol Palin, Margaret Cho, Kathy Griffin and the Politics of Sexual Destruction

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“Everyone was trying to pit me against Bristol, but the truth is, we got along well. She never asked me to babysit Tripp or anything like that, but I consider her a friend. . . . I really like Bristol as a person. . . . I am proud of her for shaking her ass!”
— Margaret Cho

You might think Hollywood liberals would embrace it as a feminist Cinderella success story: The teen mom, seduced and abandoned by a two-faced cheater, gets a once-in-a-lifetime chance at a nationally televised dance competition. (Plot complication: She’s never danced in her life!) And yet, despite all odds, overcoming her own awkwardness and the disparagement of critics who call her “fat,” the small-town girl makes it all the way to the finals, becoming the object of worldwide admiration and a role model for young mothers everywhere.

But there have been no reports of bigtime producers bidding for the rights to make The Bristol Palin Story, and instead the heroine is predicably scorned and mocked, used as yet another weapon to attack Sarah Palin because . . . well, Sarah Palin is a conservative Republican, and therefore deserves to be attacked — by any means necessary.

(Quick aside: Note how accurately liberals identify their targets. If they wanted to mock chubby daughters of famous GOP politicians . . . uh, no, that won’t mock that one, because she’s a liberal, just like them.)

So here’s Margaret Cho, claiming to be Bristol’s friend and being “proud” of Bristol’s performance. Bristol had never said anything negative about Cho, and yet Cho could not resist the opportunity to use Bristol as a weapon against Governor Palin:

I heard from someone who really should know . . . that the only reason Bristol was on the show was because Sarah Palin forced her to do it. Sarah supposedly blames Bristol harshly and openly . . . for not winning the election, and so she told Bristol she “owed” it to her to do DWTS so that “America would fall in love with her again” and make it possible for Sarah Palin to run in 2012 with America behind her all the way. Instead of being supposedly “handicapped” by the presence of her teen mom daughter, now Bristol is going to be an “asset” – a celebrity beloved for her dancing.

And don’t miss the viciousness of Cho’s let-me-call-her-fat-while-I-pretend-to-be-sympathetic shot:

It’s heartbreaking that people are so awful to her about her weight. I think she looks fantastic, and why does everybody think they have a right to comment on our bodies? . . . If people call her fat what kind of impact does that have on women who have similar body types – which is most of us?

Can we talk bluntly here? Continue reading Bristol Palin, Margaret Cho, Kathy Griffin and the Politics of Sexual Destruction →

If Charles M. Blow Never Wrote Another Word About Sarah Palin . . .

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. . . it would be nearly as good as if he never wrote another word, period:

This is it. This is the last time I’m going to write the name Sarah Palin until she does something truly newsworthy, like declare herself a candidate for the presidency. Until then, I will no longer take part in the left’s obsessive-compulsive fascination with her, which is both unhealthy and counterproductive.

The biggest problem with these useless overpaid pundits is their arrogant belief that nothing really matters until it’s written up by the New York Times.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Letter to a Damned Fool

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Tim Rogers, executive editor of Dallas magazine, decided that my flame war with Barrett Brown (which has provoked the threat of legal action) was a fit subject for a blog post that linked Max Blumenthal — of all people — as the authoritative source on me. Which is damned foolish, considering that I’m rather authoritative about myself. At any rate, the folly of Tim Rogers seemed to require correction, which I provided in an e-mail sent at 11:16 a.m. today:

You really, really need to learn a thing or two about journalism standards. Or at least learn to use Google. Also, your reading comprehension skills seem less than adequate.
“From what I’ve read about McCain” — and then you link to an error-riddled article by that notorious idiot Max Blumenthal and call me “one of the ghostwriters of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue“? Time does not permit the refutation of every error made by Blumenthal, a leading contender for the world championship of producing fact-impaired nonsense. It might be simpler to say, as Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, that every word Max writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.” But two important facts ought to be made clear:
1. Sarah Palin didn’t have a “ghostwriter” on Going Rogue. Palin had a collaborator, Lynn Vincent, a professional journalist and author who has collaborated on many books, including two New York Times bestsellers. The difference between a collaborator and a “ghostwriter” is vast and important, in that the latter term suggests a species of deception.
2. I had no role in Going Rogue. I have only met Sarah Palin in person twice, very briefly, once in Pennsylvania while covering her during the 2008 campaign, and once while covering the March 2010 Tea Party rally in Searchlight, Nevada.
However, I suppose I might claim some small credit. My blog on January 26, 2009:
Clark Stooksbury at The American Conservative suggests me (tongue-in-cheek) as ghost-writer for Sarah Palin’s $11 million book. Actually, I’d think my Donkey Cons co-author Lynn Vincent might be ideal for the job, since she’s already co-authored the bestseller Same Kind of Different As Me. 
As I later learned, Lynn saw that blog post, had her agent put her in for the job and was selected from among the many top writers vying for it. Lynn’s contract with Harper Collins, of course, included a confidentiality clause and so Lynn has made little or no public comment about her work with Governor Palin since then.
Max Blumenthal’s article at The Daily Beast was an attempt to do a third-hand guilt-by-association smear on Sarah Palin, using “white supremacist” accusations against me that I have addressed at some length elsewhere. To summarize briefly: I am a conservative, which means that I disagree with liberals about everything, including their dogmatic fanaticism about race. In the course of discussing these disagreements, I have sometimes unwisely written things that have been malevolently misinterpreted by others, who have attributed to me hateful sentiments that I neither feel myself nor advocate to anyone else. “White supremacy” and “racism” are terms that have actual definitions, neither of which could be properly applied to me.
In the age of Obama, many Americans have grown tired of the lazy imputation of racism to everyone who disagrees with liberalism. I’ve made a running joke of this: “There are 5 A’s in ‘raaaaacism!‘” I have learned to be indifferent to the damage done to my reputation by such nonsense. “With enough courage, you can learn to live without a reputation,” as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara. Yet I cannot permit lazy writers such as yourself to inflict political damage on innocents by repetition of the cheap guilt-by-association smears employed by Max Blumenthal and others.
Over the course of a journalism career now spanning nearly a quarter-century, I have “associated” with thousands of people — colleagues and acquaintainces, politicians, activists, authors, etc. — of every race, creed and ideological orientation you could possibly imagine. For you or others to play a six-degrees-of-separation game, attempting to make me an instrument of journalistic prestidigitation that falsely attributes to some people the controversial beliefs of other people they’ve never even heard of, is shabby and unprofessional. I’d call it “McCarthyism,” were it not for my concern about unfairly maligning the late senator from Wisconsin.
If you had bothered to do any research, Tim, you might have learned all this yourself. My e-mail address is publicly available on the “about” page at my blog, TheOtherMcCain.com, and I would have been only too happy to clarify any misunderstandings. As it is now, I hope that you will do me the kindness of publishing this communication in full.

Robert Stacy McCain
Co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of
DONKEY CONS: Sex, Crime & Corruption in the Democratic Party

Thanks to Dave at Point of a Gun for the e-mail tip about this idiot Rogers. And a friendly reminded to readers that they can contribute to the “F*** You, Barrett Brown” Legal Defense Fund. In the 99% likelihood that my legal expenses in the case of Brown v. McCain are exactly zero, proceeds will go to help repair the deer-damaged KIA and buy my six kids Christmas gifts.

Happy Hannukah From Sarah Palin

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Her Facebook page:

As Jewish families all over the country and the world come together to celebrate the festival of lights – the miracle of one day’s worth of oil lasting for eight – we are reminded that this holiday is also about the miracle of taking a stand against impossible odds, surviving existential threats, and staying true to one’s values and beliefs through it all.
More than two thousand years after the Maccabees rebelled against their oppressors and reconsecrated their Holy Temple, the Jewish people continue to face threats to their existence, and they continue to persevere and overcome great odds. Today we should all recommit ourselves to ensuring that the miracle of a Jewish state endures forever. The dreidel is one of the most familiar symbols of Hanukkah, with Hebrew letters on it representing the phrase Nes Gadol Haya Sham – “a great miracle happened there.” Indeed a great miracle is still happening there. Todd and I wish the Jewish community a very Happy Hanukkah.

Calling B.S. on Ed Rollins

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Dan Calabrese has had it up to here with the anti-Palin crowd: 

it seems that just about everyone else is obsessed with Palin’s presidential prospects, and that includes a certain Ed Rollins, who holds forth today on CNN.com with a piece titled, “Palin, I knew Reagan. You’re no Reagan.”
Well.
There is much to mock about a piece on Gov. Palin’s supposed lack of presidential qualifications, especially coming from a man who once tried to help win the presidency for H. Ross Perot, who was not only unqualified but also insane.

Jennifer Caballero at Liberty Pundits asks the all-too-obvious question:

“Why is Huckabee’s ex- campaign manager
telling us who’s worthy of Reagan’s mantle?”

Bingo, Jen. Whatever your opinion of Sarah Palin, the problem is that nearly all her most prominent critics are professional operatives of one sort or another. If they are not already on the payroll of some prospective 2012 GOP presidential candidate, then they are presumably seeking such work. And they know they can get headlines and ingratiate themselves to those prospective employers by publishing anti-Palin rants.

The real danger here, as I’ve said before, is that this relentless Palin-bashing from within the GOP can have no good result. Either (a) Palin wins the nomination anyway, in which case the GOP 2012 nominee will have been damaged by all these friendly-fire attacks, or (b) someone else will win the nomination as the beneficiary of a none-too-subtle “Anybody But Sarah” campaign in the primaries. And then good luck getting those people energized for the general election.

Rush Limbaugh did a great segment Wednesday on the anti-Palin crowd, featuring this quote from GOP operative Nicolle Wallace:

Only Sarah Palin can beat Sarah Palin.  And let me tell you why no one will take her on.  Her defenders and supporters, the likes of Rush Limbaugh and people I admire, are so powerful on the right that nobody wants to anger any of those people, nobody wants to end up in the crosshairs, and nobody wants to look like they are unwilling to let her do her thing.  I don’t think people should be, you know, uptight and angsting about Sarah Palin.  I think she’ll reveal herself, and people will love her or hate her.  I really believe that if it looked like she were about to become the nominee, or, heaven forbid, the leader of the free world, a whole lot of people would stand up and say a whole lot of things.

Understand one thing: Nicolle Wallace is Team Bush all the way. She is speaking for, and serving the interests of, the Bush wing of the GOP. I’ve long warned that there is a Jeb 2012 bandwagon geared up and ready to roll at a moment’s notice, if Jeb decides to take a shot at it. If that doesn’t happen, the Bushies are trying to keep their thumb on the scale, to make sure that whoever gets the 2012 nomination, it’s someone acceptable to them.

But the Bushies know that, whatever else happens, it’s all over for them if Sarah Palin gets the 2012 nomination. Establishment phonies like Nicolle Wallace will be persona non grata to a Palin-led Republican Party. 

Just keep that in mind. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes of the GOP than most grassroots conservatives suspect.

P.S.: Ed Rollins? Dude worked on the Huffington ’94 Senate campaign.