A revealing week
Jonah Goldberg discusses the strange week of the new and old media:
Liberal reporters inquired of conservative journalists, Republican delegates, right-leaning janitors, free-market short-order cooks, even the guys walking around in elephant suits: Will Sarah Palin drop out? What about the Eagleton Option?…it was hardly the only journalistic will-o’-the-wisp unleashed from the media bog.
The claim that Palin was a Buchananite — and hence an acolyte of a “Nazi sympathizer” according to Florida Rep. Robert Wexler — was not true. The claims she cut funding for pregnant teens, that she was a member of the more-goofy-than-scary Alaska Independence Party, that Trig Palin — her special-needs baby — was really her daughter’s: these were all bogus. As for the even more disgusting smears peddled at the Daily Kos and one blogger at The Atlantic — smears that drove much of the prurient investigation into the Palin family’s privacy by more reputable sources — they were as untrue as they were repugnant.
Governor Palin has only been the GOP’s Vice Presidential candidate for one week, and she merited all these wild stories. There are more than eight weeks to go before the election, and it is hard to see how more unhinged Palin’s opponents can get. But perhaps we lack sufficient imagination.