Palin Bashers in the GOP Should Think Twice
By Rhetorical Gladiator
There is nothing wrong with expressing concerns about a candidate. We should ask tough questions and expect good answers.
It does not take long to notice that those in the GOP who "Palin bash" go out of the way to avoid discussing her record. They have been caught up in the elite media narrative and have not done their homework. To be frank, Republicans should not be so foolish to Palin bash for the sake of bashing as it can have serious consequences.
The first problems is obvious. If Republicans buy into baseless and mindless elite media spin they might as well just ask NBC to pick the nominee for them.
Related to that problem is that the elite media went all out to try and destroy a GOP nominee. They took every allegation from her political opponents and reported them as if they were facts and in most cases would not offer retractions when such stories were proved wrong. They accused her of faking a pregnancy, accused her of being a book banner, accused her of trying to deny sexual assault victims rape kits, accused her of ravaging programs to help teen mothers, and even accused her of being an accomplice to the murderous shooting by Jarred Loughner and continued that narrative even after it came out that he was a dedicated Bush hater who had gone schizophrenic. The aforementioned is just a sampling of the lies the elite media has willingly propagated. The idea of Republicans standing by and doing nothing about this doesn't sit well with me.
You can be sure if a shooting incident happens closer to election time, the commercials and "rhetoric" from the nominee will be blamed for it by the Democrats and their friends in the elite media.
You can also be sure, it will not matter who the GOP nominee is, be it if Mitt Romney or Michelle Bachmann, the elite media will accuse him/her of some kind of sexual misconduct. The New York Times baselessly accused Senator McCain of having an affair with a 40 year old lobbyist the day after he secured the primary.
Recently I had a conversation with some Palin bashers and in every case not a one of them was familiar with her actual governing record.
Palin Bashing Republican #1:
No, we don't like her because she doesn't have the leadership qualities to be president.
You might enjoy how I handled this "objection":
I Agree, everything Sarah has touched has been a disaster. Here are some examples:
She cut the state budget by 9.8% while maintaining state services. Heck, name me one GOP governor who didn’t accomplish the same and cut the budget by at least 13%.
She cut the governors personal expenses by 80% over the previous Republican governor, who cares if she had three young kids to cart around.
She implemented a plan to begin weaning the state off federal "earmarks" and cut the number of earmark requests three years in a row. No one cares about that, after all earmarks are only less than 1% of the federal budget.
Cut Alaska's Medicaid backlog by 83%. There are no long wait lists or backlogs in Massachusetts… oh wait…
Sarah was terrible for the Alaska GOP machine. When she rooted out the corruption of bought off Republicans in state government and sent many bad actors packing lots of party people were even fined. That is no way to lead a machine /nods.
She was able to pass sweeping ethics reforms and reform a state contract bidding process that was rigged and controlled by cronies? Doesn’t Sarah understand that when WE own the machine those are OUR cronies? Sheesh!
Sarah is SO behind the times. She had the NERVE to develop a competitive process to construct a gas pipeline [which languished for decades and is the largest state financed infrastructure project in US History]. Doesn’t she understand that “green jobs” are in?
And everyone knows that nothing got done when she:
Chaired the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission Chaired the National Governor’s Association (NGA) Natural Resources Committee. Chaired the Alaska Conservation Commission. Presided over the Alaska Conference of Mayors.
Of course her record as mayor is equally pale.
According to Wasilla City documents that are posted on their web server. The propagandists who are obviously her cronies rigged the paperwork to indicate that Sarah oversaw the economic growth of Wasilla by a factor of four as a leader in city government from 1992 to 2003. They have the nerve to claim that while Wasilla's population increased by 80%, city services were grown at a level to meet the challenge while property and business taxes rates were dropped. They even claimed Wasilla's tax revenue still increased by nearly 250%. How laughable. Everyone knows that when you lower the tax rate you get less revenue….
Rigged paperwork, crony government, constant under performance. That’s Sarah Palin!
As you would expect, this completely shut the GOP Palin basher #1 down. She had no response.
GOP Palin Basher #2:
Chuck- I think if Sarah Palin had stayed on as governor instead of becoming more of a "celebrity" she would have retained the support of conservative women. This is where I think she went wrong. And I don't think that women hate her because of her looks (jealousy), most conservative women I know believe in being/staying attractive. You are right , she has an excellent record- just wish she stayed on that path.
Again I went back to the facts:
[Editor's Note - A legal loophole in Alaska Law allows anyone to file a lawsuit or phony "ethics complaint", each requires an investigation and a ruling - the Governor must pay their own legal bills to fight them. Democrats filed dozens of these bogus lawsuits. Sarah easily won each of them, but it was eating up the Governor's staff's time and had put her into half a million dollars in personal debt.]
Palin Basher 2, if Sarah has stayed in office would have been endless bad press as the left continued to file one frivolous lawsuit after another against her using that legal loophole . I find it interesting that those who blast her for "quitting" never have anything to say about why she did it, or have anything bad to say about how sleazy the Democrats were in their behavior. Forgive me for being skeptical when people are far more willing and eager to blast our nominee than Democrats who behaved horribly.
Also, if Sarah had not taken on ObamaCare on her nation wide tour, not taken the slings and arrows for other conservatives, and not gone after Obama constantly to drive up his negatives, the 2009 and 2010 elections win margins would not have been what they were for us, so again if Sarah had taken any other course, Democrats would have been the ones who benefited. Who needs Democrats when "Republicans" are writing their spin and talking points for them?
Said Palin basher had no response. What is there to say? These facts are irrefutable and I am confident they felt embarrassed after being shut down with such authority.
Still, in the same conversation, entered a rather clueless Palin Basher #3:
And now we are rewriting history! Paul Revere warned the BRITISH that the British were comming! For me Intelligence is one of the must have traits to be President.
Palin Basher #3 did not bother to look up the record or the news all over the internet that Palin was correct in her account.
My Response:
NPR's historian said that Palin was absolutely right about that. So did Prof William Jacobson at Cornell Law School who posted the quote from Paul Revere himself about it. Palin is a voracious reader of the Founders and if you watch her interviews she quotes them at length from memory from time to time. It is all over the net how the Palin bashers are easting crow on that one. So why are we bashing a nominee when we are not doing the homework and getting it wrong? If our "best" are going to believe the elite media narrative and not do any homework we might as well just ask NBC to pick our next nominee.
Another GOP'er claiming to be wise who has not done a lick of homework and had no response. Republicans are not supposed to behave that way and will pay a price as long as they do.
Words of Wisdom
Here is a 25 minute interview with Sarah where Chris Wallace throws every policy question in the book at her, and she answers each one with the proper detail - www.therightscoop.com/full-interview-sarah-palin-on-fox-news-sunday/ so to say that she is unintelligent is not only wrong, but foolish for Republicans in the long run. On at least 70% of the issues all of the potential candidates agree so if Sarah is an idiot and our nominee agree on most issues, what does that say about our nominee? Do you think the left will not take advantage of that? Sarah may decide to run for Senate, what then? Make no mistake, since Sarah Palin is a GOP VP Nominee, smearing her is smearing the Republican Brand.
The simple truth is that Sarah Palin has posted detailed policy positions on almost very issue imaginable. Most of the others do not.
This early in the primary season, it is wide open. ANYTHING could happen and the political landscape can change radically in a single day. Never forget that.
Early in the primary season for Reagan he was in double digit negatives as well. We need to support all of our potential candidates. I will be supporting all of them (except Ron Paul as he goes places I simply cannot follow). Early in his campaign season Ross Perot had double digit positives.
Now is NOT the time to be violating the 11th Commandment. We should express concerns about our candidates, ask tough questions and expect good answers from all of them, but we should not trash them. Anyone who says that X can win and Y cant at this stage in the game is just off their rocker. At this stage before the last election people were like "What is an Obama?" or "Someone with a last name like Obama (Usama) could never get elected". Well here we are.
Lastly, Sarah Palin keeps score and is very good at political payback as Mitt Romney, Ed Rollins, Chris Christie, and a pile of now former political players in Alaska have found out the hard way. As the Alaska Daily News points out, "The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah”.
If Sarah Palin becomes our nominee she will control the RNC and perhaps the White House. All of those who smeared her will be on the outs for a long time.
So why be so invested in Sarah Palin?
The simple answer is that I am not. The the elite media is beyond incompetent and is in fact corrupt and there is no better or more numerous example of this truth than the elite media coverage of Sarah Palin, which is more wrong than it is right, and in which journalistic ethics is completely abandoned more often. I take an interest in correcting the record of the elite media, it is just that in the case of Sarah Palin, more correction is needed.