Prog Blogs Force Palin to Come Clean.. hurray for our side!

Anyone have any idea which "liberal blogs" this may have been?

What the McCain people claimed in the statement sure rings true to my ears, but still...

[UPDATE] Over at NQ, someone cites Andrew Sullivan as, if not a leader in spreading the rumor, practicing his best "Well, it's OUT THERE":

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/th...

and, er.. calling for OB/GYN and other medical records to be released.

I suppose his ObamaLove of ther past year makes him a part of the "liberal" blogosphere. Ick. How many times can it be said? The Ariannas, Koses and Sullivans of the world? THEY ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS!

i put it out there as a rumor, and wasn't specifically trying to make any point out of the observation, except to say that it's out there in the chattering classes and that's more or less where it will stay.

free speech means everything to me, so i'm not afraid to speak of the rumors around this. as i said someplace else today: it's not about the behavior, it's the hypocrisy. if (and i don't know she has, but mccain certainly has) wants to make an issue about "family values" and deny me my full rights because "gays can't be trusted with children" and yadda yadda, then a little fact based investigative reporting on the actual mom of the kid in question is worthy of my attention.

otoh, if palin has never made an issue of the idea that the gov't should nose into people's reproductive patterns, then i'll say nothing more. but i'll be a dollar she has. there's a reason why i love the saying "don't go there..." republicans deserve all that we can throw at them when they do.

but gawddammit, i'm ready to play it.

look, the bottom line is that as good progressives, we have never advocated gummint intrusion into ob/gyn records, we don't think reproductive status is important to holding office, we don't want or support calls to investigate people's private lives. and yes, i hear you: those progressives who maliciously attack her solely on the basis of unsubstantiated rumour should be shunned by our side for failing to live up to their stated aims/values.

BUT

it's time to play hardball, no? who put reproductive status on the table? *republicans.* specifically J. Sidney McShame. and, if i understand her correctly, Palin too. so, a little medicine that's good for goose and gander, yo?

as i said, let's keep it "fact based." so i agree with you, w/o a cite, link, proof...good progressives should at the most make politically incorrect jokes about her, and not so many as there are far more pressing issues deserving of our time/effort/blogspace. but: if they want to bring it up, make it a center of their platform, campaign on how they are great Moral Values people who articulate in strong and clear language that I'm Not Worthy to touch children because i like grrlz...well, don't expect me to take it lying down.

i've said it before: this just isn't the best attack we can come up with, when it comes to why Palin is wrong for america. as you're very interested in the feminist project (i mean that sincerely and respect you for it) tell me then: what is a better line of attack? but don't deny that amurkins live for "sex scandals" and palin seems, at least, rife with example that most people will be unable to cease to speak of; let's take advantage of that, in a very realpolitik sense. if you need a reason to hold your nose, think of all the kids in iran and elsewhere who would likely die under an attack via a McStain/Palin admin. isn't that "Life" worth protecting as well?

is no different than the way humiliation was used by torturers at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo and its purpose is the same - not to accomplish some political goal, but simply to inflict pain on the enemy. If you took away their hatred, they'd have nothing left to post.

If dailyKos posters had more power, Palin and her entire family would be in some secret prison in Poland by now, and those posters would feel righteous about it and post facile defenses.

If I voted based on which side was more disgusting, I'd vote against Obama and for McCain. (I'm not voting at all).

Orwell miscalculated - it doesn't require a totalitarian state to generate 5 minutes hate and create enemies like Goldstein. It just takes a few liberal blogs to enable people to do it themselves.

...Palin just took lemons (a pregnant, unmarried 17 year old daughter wouldn't exactly go over well with the religious right) and made lemonade by tying the announcement of her daughter's pregnancy into an attack on Obama's supporters.

Next up, the Oborg attack Palin's parenting skills, alienating every parent who ever had a kid who got into trouble despite their best efforts -- and a 'pushback' against 'liberal permissiveness in the media'

Yahoo dutifully wrote down the PR-speak of the McCain campaign that it was festering in liberal blogs.

Even in a major post at the Confluence _today_, the author refuses to provide links to the Great Orange Satan out of principle, but it leaves the rest of us wondering whether the characterizations are true or not.

Without the linky goodness, we just have another zombie meme: LIBRULS ARE INVADING SARAH's VAGINA!

CD:

i put it out there as a rumor, and wasn’t specifically trying to make any point out of the observation, except to say that it’s out there in the chattering classes

Which makes it wrong. You know it's wrong. You know that's the same weak-ass "justification" which introduced the swift-boaters (and much, much more) into mainstream discourse.

if (and i don’t know she has, but mccain certainly has) wants to make an issue about “family values” and deny me my full rights because “gays can’t be trusted with children” and yadda yadda, then a little fact based investigative reporting on the actual mom of the kid in question is worthy of my attention.

If we were talking about a hidden abortion, or the fact that Sarah's pregnant daughter is in fact a big ol' dyke, you'd have a point.

Until that time that these things are shown to be true, asking a candidate "Hey, now - what's going on with your pussy, and are you treating it the way I think you should?" is not where we want to be.

No matter how much it benefits The Precious.

Someone suggested Palin wasn't a real choice, and just done to draw out the attack liberals. (give them enough rope).

I wouldn't be surprised if Palin bows out because of private intrusion and respect her private life martyr thing. And then McCain announces an actually qualified VP pick.

Just goes to show you, people are people, and people are stupid about some things, no matter what their differences are.

but I heard it was taken down yesterday.

Here's the original:

http://arcxix.dailykos.com/

It looks like it still works.

Shameful.

if they want to bring it up, make it a center of their platform, campaign on how they are great Moral Values people who articulate in strong and clear language that I’m Not Worthy to touch children because i like grrlz…well, don’t expect me to take it lying down.

On another forum I'm on, I apparently wasted breath trying to convince people that casting aspersions on moms who work despite having <1yr old infants, was, at BEST, always condescending, and in fact, much much worse.

And now, I've got an ostensible lib/progressive are sitting here telling me it's a good idea to slime (without leaving a trace) a pregnant 17 year old.

These are not good ideas. Are they a part of the world you hope to build? Your 1 step forward - if it happens at all - will most likely take you two steps back.

And for sheer pragmatic, political value: do you really want to go around ranting about working moms and pregnant 17 year olds?

[Madge]
You're soaking in it.
[/Madge]

Straight outta redstate.

Thanks for the GOS link.

There's a difference between fighting fierce and smart politics and resorting to dirty smears. If Palin was parading Bristol around as a paragon of pro-life policy, then the pregnancy becomes political. But the "liberal" blogs were pushing out nasty rumor after rumor until Palin was forced to reveal the news and she stated that it is a private family matter.

We can attack Palin for *her* declared stance on reproductive rights, but her daughter Bristol is a separate individual who, according to the evidence we have, made this decision on her own. Therefore, we should respect her situation as an independent and entirely private one.

And face it, Democrats cannot beat the Republicans at their own game: if Obamacans keep pushing this meme, it will blow up in their face just like in 2004, when Kerry tried to point out the dissonance between the Bush/Cheney anti-gay policies and Cheney's lesbian daughter. The Repubs will scream bloody murder and the SCLM will obligingly portray the Democrats in the worst possible light as ruthless rumor-mongers and practitioners of the dirtest politics.

Not only is nobody talking about the convention, Obama's speech or anything else, but now the so-called progressives are goaded into attacking single mothers and breathless speculating on what is going on inside someone's uterus. You couldn't do anything with Cheney's lesbian daughter (in fact, that kinda backfired, didn't it?), so if this line of attack will backfire in a big way too, if you make the mistake of obsessing about her personal life. It was the relentless, sexist bullying of Hillary that split the Democratic Party. Now the prog blogs seem determined to drive these voters into McCain's arms. Which is fine with me. I'm there already. So please, keep it up.

from exercising their legal choices as Governor--i've seen no proof at all. And i've seen talk about how she didn't want public financing for abortions, but no action taken at all about it.

And being pro-choice means it's your choice--whatever you decide to do.

Click here if you want a summation or click from there if you want to give characters like Aravosis some hits.

I ran into this proud little slime merchant in a thread at Avedon's "The Sideshow." Apparently this blogger is a fan of this site. I'm not sure what the slants of those sites are, I didn't bother to look around much.

Anglachel linked to Zuzu at Shakesville who has a pretty good take on this:

This is vintage Rovian turning-your-opponent's-greatest-strength-into-a-weakness politics. ...

Well, what's one of the Democratic Party's greatest strengths? Its appeal to women ...

Obama was losing support among women and other groups with his lurch to the right. And instead of trying to bring those voters back into the fold with persuasion and carrots and addressing their concerns, the campaign, the party, the media and especially the fan base turned to threats, mockery, infantilization, accusations of racism, doomsaying and RoeRoeRoeRoeRoe ...

And then a funny thing happened -- after a lot of tension about whether Clinton and her 18 million supporters would be shut out of the Convention, the Obama people agreed to give Hillary and Bill Clinton prime-time speaking slots. ... a lot of the Hillary diehards here watched those speeches and said they were convinced, they'd now vote for Obama. ...

Then McCain -- who, it should be noted, was telling the press he had not selected a running mate as late as the final day of the Democratic National Convention -- dropped the Palin bombshell.*

Right on cue, the sexist attacks against Palin began on the left -- which the McCain people were undoubtedly counting on. ...

But "finding" something at that site can be difficult if you're not there navigating it every day. It's not exactly linear.

I entered "pregnant" on their front page search and nothing Palin-relevant came up...

So thanks to the pointer to that particular diary.

this statement was forced out of McCain's campaign.

"... Reuters' Steve Holland writes: "McCain officials said the news of the daughter's pregnancy was being released to rebut what one aide called 'mud-slinging and lies' circulating on liberal blog sites." ..." -- http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/...

if not let me know and i'll remove that one again.
Sarah

comments don't automatically appear; but when they've been fished out of the firewalls, they'll show up back in the order where they should originally have appeared.

Is this how Democrats want to play the game? Do they really want to try to play with the Republicans on their custom-built court of smearing through rumor-mongering? This is ultimately dumb politics, because the Republicans always win the game of smearing, but more importantly, to me, I can not understand for the life of me why Democrats continue to want to try to alienate their base. For progressives, Palin is so wrong on policy that going after her personal life shouldn't even be attractive to a smart campaign.

I guess for them this saying holds true: The only thing I can't resist is temptation. If the Dems think that they are going to get away with doing to Palin what they did to Clinton, they are wrong. The DNC may have nothing to say about sexism and misogyny, but, ironically, the GOP sure will. That the Dems, by their very actions, left the GOP to defend against the media's critique of female politicians in this political season was one of the stupidest moves the party could have ever made.

Folks, the Democratic Party left John. Fucking. McCain. to benefit from defending female politicians from unfair media critiques. Really, just let ridiculousness of that sink in.

Looks like the McCain camp is relishing scoring points with this one...

Schmidt raises gender double standard

Swarmed by reporters upon coming into the convention, McCain campaign chief Steve Schmidt suggested Sarah Palin was facing a double standard because of her gender.

Questioned if Palin, who just gave birth in Apirl to a Down syndrome baby, could handle being vice president and the mother of a young family, Schmidt shot back: “I can’t imagine that question being asked of a man.”

Again, this world has been turned upside down.

Say this posted on a PUMA blog from the August addition of Vogue magazine:

Robert McCain - The Firecracker

"I think the treatment they've given Hillary is just awful. She's a human being, and she's certainly worked hard.

And, the Dems aren't going to even try to salvage this part of the base? Really? So, now only Republican's can call sexism and misogyny? Really? I hear even Cindy McCain is now speaking out against this.