Palin responds to the lies

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Gov. Sarah Palin denounced anonymous criticisms leveled at her by former John McCain aides as lies, including allegations that Republican lawyers were traveling to Alaska to reclaim her high-priced wardrobe and that she didn't know Africa was a continent.

"Those accounts are not true," the former Republican vice presidential candidate said in her first public comments on the matter since the election Tuesday.

Palin returned Friday to her Anchorage governor's office and said she had no immediate plans to build on her newfound national name-recognition and popularity with the Republican base for a possible 2012 presidential run.

Instead, Palin said, she wanted only to get back to the governor's desk to advance a proposed pipeline tapping Alaska's vast North Slope natural gas reserves and to prepare Alaska's proposed 2010 budget.

CNN (of all things!) investigated the weird allegations that were leveled against Governor Palin and found them to be utterly false. This is why you don't see them burning their way through the media right now. Anyone who reports on them as anything but a hoax will look like a deranged fool.

Of course the left-wing loon websites will always take them as gospel but they already thought that she was a corrupt incestuous adulteress so what are you going to do? The fact that the nutjobs who post on places like dailykos hate her is one of the best recommendations she could ask for.

There are two interesting questions about why these accusations were made. One is the why of it. Why are McCain "insiders" leaking vile lies about the woman they picked and vetted? The other is why they thought they could get away with spreading a bunch of false rumors which could easily and quickly be discredited.

The answer to the first question is partly that they want a scapegoat for the failure of themselves and their candidate but mostly it is an attempt to preserve the dominance within the Republican party of the "McCain wing", that is the moderate/liberal/"reach across the aisle"/country club - Blue blood wing of the party. You know the ones I'm now calling the Defeat Wing. This is something I'm going to write more about later today so check back in if you are interested.

The second question, about why they thought they could get away with it, is simple to answer. They thought the press would cover for them. Whenever anyone from the Democrat party lies about any conservative the media simply assumes that the lie is true and it becomes part of the accepted narrative. Whenever John McCain has ever lied about and trashed his fellow Republicans the media has just accepted whatever he said as being true as well.

So these scumbag "McCain insiders" just thought that the media would accept what they were saying as absolute truth and make no effort whatsoever to do any kind of fact checking.

The real puzzler is why CNN (of all things!) bothered to do any kind of investigation and then why they reported on the fact that the lies were in fact lies.

Perhaps someone over at CNN has some trace of journalistic ethics left? Perhaps this was an act of contrition to remove some of the guilt associated with colluding with a Marxist presidential candidate in his efforts to lie his way into office and ruin the country?

Whatever the reason the refutation got out there quickly enough to keep the lies from becoming part of the public narrative of the campaign and for that we can be grateful.

PS - there's another really big question here. Any time in the campaign when someone on the Republican side would do so much as mention Barack Obama's middle name McCain would break the speed of light to get to a camera and denounce that person. So why did he not utter one public word of condemnation of the slanders against Gov. Palin? She's only the person who almost put him in the White House.