Parting Shots at Palin

[tongodeon]

I would have had a hard time believing it, but Sarah Palin is even more stupid and irresponsible than we imagined. She allegedly didn't know which countries were in NAFTA and thought that Africa was a country. After her first interview with Charlie Gibson she "just didn't have the bandwidth" to study for the Couric interview. She also spent a

Comments

[tongodeon]

Things that there's actual documentation of, sure, if the documentation can be produced. Random allegations by unnamed individuals, I'm disinclined to take their word for it.

To be fair, I said "She allegedly didn't know which countries" because I agree - those allegations have not been proven and it's important to separate what you know from what you suspect or what someone has told you. But the allegation isn't "random" the way that finding a piece of paper on the ground is random. I have documentation of a reporter with regular and direct access to campaign staffers in direct contact with Palin is saying that they told him something. The evidence isn't as strong as the original digibeta tape of the actual gaffe but it's not nothing either.

Listening to people with a grudge slam someone behind his or her back doesn't seem like the best way to get an accurate, much less balanced, picture of what's been going on.

Granted, but what is a better way? Asking her own staffers? Sees like we're going to deal with weak credibility either way. And before we discount these "people with a grudge" - people in her own campaign and her own party - why would these people have these grudges in the first place?

It seems to me that there seems to be a growing consensus among reporters and campaign staffers that Palin was poorly behaved and not especially competent. Multiple independently sourced accounts from different publications that paint a similar picture. Like Global Warming there's some wiggle room for which reports are most credible or how big the problem is, but I don't think you can take issue with a single report and write the whole thing off as "I don't believe it".

[jwgh]

A better way in this case might be to wait for the outcome of the RNC audit, when it will become clearer whether any of this stuff is true.

There is some trickiness here. I agree that it's an interesting story that there were people in the McCain campaign who hated Palin, and that the question of why is a valid point of inquiry. It would be nice if this could be reported in a way that didn't involve repeating the admittedly biased people's mostly unsubstantiated allegations, though.

Regarding growing consensuses among reporters, you will pardon my skepticism as to their wisdom; see their attitude towards Gore in 2000 and near-unanimous uncritical support for the Iraq war.

(Although regarding questions of Palin's intelligence and competence I don't really need much more than the Katie Couric interview. Not to mention her public conduct in the campaign. Man.)