From Dan Balz of Washington Post:

Palin Opens Herself Up to Criticism

Right, right… because lefty journalists weren’t attacking Sarah Palin before last weekend’s resignation announcement.

Frankly, I don’t get the Palin thing either, but don’t act like the press wasn’t hounding her from her dress (slutty stewardess) to her family (hey, let’s make fun of her Down’s kid!) relentlessly before this. If she’s doing it to be with her family than God bless her because the only thing more useless than a journalist is a politician. If she’s doing this to run in 2012, well, like I just said, I don’t really get it. It would stink of the same silly parlor trick McCain tried last fall (I’m suspending campaigning to cure the subprime crisis!).

Anyway, but even in her resignation the leftist loony mosquito fringe can’t stop their blood sucking. Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard finds one blogger buffoon who actually takes individual credit for pushing Palin out.

I don’t have any deep insight into why Governor Palin decided to step down, but I think there is at least one possibility that we can rule out: Max Blumenthal. The blogger takes credit for her decision in a column for the Daily Beast:

On July 1, CBS reported that a story authored by me and journalist David Neiwert for Salon.com in October 2008 about Palin’s ties to a secessionist political party caused her deep personal distress, and provoked a rancorous series of exchanges with her campaign manager, Steve Schmidt. Coupled with a withering profile of Palin published in the August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, the new round of exposés may have been too much for Palin to stomach.

The arrogance of that paragraph, even for a blogger, is striking. There is no evidence of “deep personal distress” from Blumenthal’s shoddy reporting and CNN’s subsequent decision to amplify it. At the time I spoke to a producer at CNN who seemed to be experiencing genuine “deep personal distress” at his network’s decision to run the segment. And I know Governor Palin’s office was bothered by the Vanity Fair piece, but no more so than the countless hit pieces just like it that have come out in the last 10 months.

Blumenthal, however, just can’t help but credit his own Pravda-style reporting with affecting the course of human history. Just a month ago he was personally taking credit for the Israeli government’s decision to demolish an illegal outpost in the West Bank — coupled with other factors, of course. He wrote at the time, “Netanyahu had issued a list of 26 illegal outposts he planned to demolish — an unsuccessful tactic to mollify the Obama administration — but Hilltop 26 was not among them. Dana attributed the sudden demolition to intense coverage of the controversy, particularly my video for the Daily Beast and an editorial he authored for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz.”

I would like to take this opportunity to take credit for President Obama’s decision to continue the Bush administration policy of indefinite detention, to take a harder line on Iran, and to add additional troops to the war in Afghanistan. I’ve written some really awesome stuff on those issues, causing the president “deep personal distress.” Even Continetti says so.

John McCormack of The Weekly Standard comments on the contradictory lines of attack on Sarah Palin. According to Newsweek Palin refused to go onstage with New Hampshire Republicans Sen. John Sununu and Rep. Jeb Bradley because they are pro-choice and opposed drilling in Alaska.

So according to the hatchet man/woman who talked to Newsweek, Palin is such an ideologue about drilling in ANWR that she won’t stand next to Bradley, even though John McCain has the exact same position?

And Palin is such an ideologue that she won’t appear with pro-choice politicians, even though she attended events with pro-choice Clinton donor Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild?

And we’re really supposed to believe that Palin is so dumb she doesn’t know Africa is a continent, but she knew about the voting records of John Sununu and Jeb Bradley in the first place?

Hmmm. I guess that might be remotely possible if it weren’t for the fact that John Sununu has a 100 percent pro-life rating from the National Right to Life Committee.

Glad to see that whoever leaked this story is too dumb to come up with a plausible smear. And kudos to Newsweek for dumping this whopper without bothering to check if Sununu is in fact pro-abortion.

Oh, and by the way, Jeb Bradley isn’t running for U.S. Senate, as Newsweek reports. Perhaps they might want to check out Wikipedia before publishing the next batch of Palin smears.

There is no one reason why John McCain lost, of course, just as there’s no one reason that Barack Obama won.

Having said that, perhaps you’ve heard the reports that former McCain staffers are now anonymously attacking Sarah Palin with leaks to the media of insulting stories — and they’re just that, stories.

To me, if these reports of two-faced McCain staffers are true, nothing says why McCain lost more than that fact itself — Indeed, how could McCain, who spent his career as a “maverick” thorn in the side of traditional conservatives, ever win them back if his own staffers were acting as elitist and derogatory of middle America as your run-of-the-mill far Left Democrat?

Here’s John McCormack on Palin’s reaction:

Bill Bennett asked me on the air the other day why voters were so hot for this hope’n’change mush, and I suggested that it’s the dominant vernacular of the age. Go into almost any American grade-school and stroll the corridors: you’ll find the walls lined with Sharpie-bright supersized touchy-feely abstractions: “RESPECT,” “DREAM,” “TOGETHER,” “DIVERSITY.” By contrast, Mister Maverick talked of “reaching across the aisle” and ending “earmarks,” which may sound heroic in Washington but ring shriveled and reductive to anyone who’s not obsessed with legislative process. This dead language embodied the narrow sliver of turf on which he was fighting, while Obama was bestriding the broader cultural space. Republicans need to start their own long march back through all the institutions they ceded. Otherwise, the default mode of this society will be liberal, and what’s left of the Republican party will be reduced (as in other parts of the west) to begging the electorate for the occasional opportunity to prove it can run the liberal state just as well as liberals can.

– Mark Steyn

Here’s Andy McCarthy:

Let’s try a thought experiment. Say John McCain attended a party at which known racists and terror mongers were in attendance. Say testimonials were given, including a glowing one by McCain for the benefit of the guest of honor … who happened to be a top apologist for terrorists. Say McCain not only gave a speech but stood by, in tacit approval and solidarity, while other racists and terror mongers gave speeches that reeked of hatred for an American ally and rationalizations of terror attacks.

Now let’s say the Los Angeles Times obtained a videotape of the party.

Question: Is there any chance — any chance — the Times would not release the tape and publish front-page story after story about the gory details, with the usual accompanying chorus of sanctimony from the oped commentariat?

This shouldn’t surprise anyone…

[Byron York] One of the things I’ve seen at Republican rallies is that people just don’t believe Barack Obama when he says he’ll raise taxes only on those who make more than $250,000 a year.  It’s not that these people make that much money or even think they’ll make that much money sometime in the next four years.  It’s that they believe Obama, once in office, would lower the threshold and raise taxes on people who make less than $250,000.

Obama’s position in the past was that he would raise taxes on families making more than $250,000 a year and individuals making more than $200,000.  But in his new ad, “Defining Moment,” he seems to lower it to $200,000 for families. “Here’s what I’ll do as president,” Obama says in the ad.  “To deal with our current emergency I’ll launch a rescue plan for the middle class That begins with a tax cut for 95 percent of working Americans. If you have a job, pay taxes and make less than $200,000 a year, you’ll get a tax cut.” That seems kind of ambiguous, but the graphic on the screen says clearly: “Famlies making less than $200,000 get tax cut.” Now, the McCain campaign is pointing out something that Joe Biden said in a Pennsylvania TV interview yesterday:

What we’re saying is that $87 billion tax break doesn’t need to go to people making an average of 1.4 million, it should go like it used to. It should go to middle class people — people making under $150,000 a year.”

This morning, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, McCain started pushing hard:

Senator Obama has made a lot of promises. First he said people making less than 250,000 dollars would benefit from his plan, then this weekend he announced in an ad that if you’re a family making less than 200,000 dollars you’ll benefit — but yesterday, right here in Pennsylvania, Senator Biden said tax relief should only go to “middle class people — people making under 150,000 dollars a year.” It’s interesting how their definition of rich has a way of creeping down. At this rate, it won’t be long before Senator Obama is right back to his vote that Americans making just 42,000 dollars a year should get a tax increase. We can’t let that happen.

People who think Barack Obama is going to be a third term of Bill Clinton are in store for quite a shock I think.

First, there turns out to be no standard of objectivity in contemporary journalism. Palin’s career as a city councilwoman, mayor, and governor of Alaska was never seen as comparable to, or — indeed, in terms of executive experience — more extensive than, Barack Obama’s own legislative background in Illinois and Washington. Somehow we forgot that a mother of five taking on the Alaskan oil industry and the entrenched male hierarchy was somewhat more challenging than Barack Obama navigating the sympathetic left-wing identity politics of Chicago.

– Victor Davis Hanson

The reason Bill Clinton is sulking in his tent is because he feels that Obama surrogates succeeded in painting him as a racist. Clinton has many sins, but from his student days to his post-presidency, his commitment and sincerity in advancing the cause of African Americans have been undeniable. If the man Toni Morrison called the first black president can be turned into a closet racist, then anyone can.

– Charles Krauthammer.

It is a rare cold day that I post something from Pat Buchanan, particularly due to his odd defense of Charles Lindburgh isolationists just prior to the Second World War, his seeming apologist attitudes towards Nazi Germany (albeit some taken out of context by his enemies), and his rhetoric — that would make your typical far Left conspiracy nut blush — accusing the U.S. of being beholden to Israel’s interests.

Having said that, I must agree with his question, “What if Saturday Night Live mocked Michelle Obama?”

The media cannot get enough of the “Saturday Night Live” impersonations of Palin as a bubblehead. News shows pick up the Tina Fey clips and run them and run them to the merriment of all.

Can one imagine “Saturday Night Live” doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her “I’ve never been proud” of my country, this “just downright mean” America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent?

“Saturday Night Live” would be facing hate-crime charges.

How do we know? When the New Yorker ran a cartoon of Michelle in an Angela-Davis afro with an AK-47 slung over her shoulder, New Yorker editors had to go on national television to swear they were not mocking Michelle, but the conservatives who have so caricatured Michelle and the Messiah.

Is there a media double standard? You betcha.

At a John McCain rally in Virginia on Saturday, Tito Munoz had come to face the enemy: the news media, which had declared war on Joe Wurzelbacher.

“Why the hell are you going after Joe the Plumber?” Munoz yelled at a group of reporters, including my National Review colleague Byron York. “Joe the Plumber has an idea. He has a future. He wants to be something else. Why is that wrong? Everything is possible in America. I made it. Joe the Plumber could make it even better than me. … I was born in Colombia, but I was made in the U.S.A.”

… So we’ve listened to Joe Biden question the patriotism — and, at times, piety — of those who don’t share Obama’s economic vision. We’ve listened to Michelle Obama promise that her husband will make Americans “work” in his effort to fix our “broken souls.” We’ve heard the candidate himself say that we should agree to higher taxes in the name of “neighborliness,” and that he’d raise the capital gains tax — even if it demonstrably lowered revenues — “for the purposes of fairness.” His “tax cut” for 95 percent of Americans is in large part a middle-class dole. He will cut checks to millions who pay no income tax at all and call it a tax cut.

In short, Obama’s explanation to Joe the Plumber that we need to “spread the wealth around” is a sincere and significant expression of his worldview, with roots stretching back to his church and his days as a community organizer.

Millions of Americans don’t share this vision. They don’t see the economy as a pie, whereby your slice can only get bigger if someone else’s gets smaller. They don’t begrudge the wealthy their wealth; they only ask to be given the same opportunities. They look at countries such as France and, rather than envy its socialized medicine and short workweeks, they fear its joblessness and tax policies that punish entrepreneurialism. People like Tito Munoz look at America and see an open path to their own American dream.

It would be nice if the media at least tried to understand this point.

Instead, they attacked and belittled a citizen who asked a candidate a question. They think he’s stupid or a liar for not understanding that a promised check from a President Obama is more valuable than some pipe dream about future success.

It’s funny. When PBS’s Gwen Ifill had a straightforward conflict of interest — her forthcoming book hinges on an Obama presidency — that should have prevented her from moderating the VP debate, she and her fellow journalists tittered at the critics. All that matters, Ifill and company insisted, are the answers, not the questioner.

That’s apparently the standard for people like Gwen the Journalist. But if Joe the Plumber gets revealing but embarrassing answers out of the media’s preferred candidate, suddenly the questioner matters more than the answer. And he must be punished.

– Jonah Goldberg.