The Ugly Truth Behind the Palin E-mails

First of all, Sarah Palin is not my candidate in the field of Republicans starting this electoral cycle.   In truth, while I desperately want to see a woman in the oval office—and will one day—she is not my choice.  That being said, I am wondering what the hopes and secret yearnings were of the people who sought the release of 24,000 pages of then Governor Palin’s e-mails.  Why her?  Why not all Republican candidates?  Why not all Democratic candidates?  Why not Sen. Clinton? Sen. Obama? Sen. Kerry? Are we going to see the requests for all e-mails of all incumbents running for higher office?  Fate save us, I hope not.  Whoever said that legislation was like sausage, you should never watch either being made, spoke the truth.   

What makes my teeth itch about the Palin e-mails is that the media request for them is so blatantly self-serving.  The people who requested these documents and recruited the online volunteers (with what specific instructions I wonder????) to poor over them, simply hate this woman.   They hate her not because of who she is, but because she was not what they expected from John McCain.  When President Obama was nominated, almost anointed, by the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party and those who love it so, he was marketed like the second coming of Camelot.  His acceptance speech was the best I’ve ever seen.  But the electorate, probably for the unworthy reasons of latent racism, didn’t give him the bump in the polls which usually accompanies the declaration of a major party’s nomination.

Liberals started seeing another Kerry debacle as a possibility and they were worried, but, they had a solid plan of attack still in the wings.  John McCain would nominate some stolid white male and they could point to his ticket and say, with absolute certainty, “Business as usual.”  But John McCain is nothing if not politically savvy.  He knew that a Vice President named Pawlenty or Huckabee, no matter how qualified, would be met with a yawn and dismissal.  So, quite to everyone’s surprise, he chose a nominee who could not—would not—be dismissed.  He chose Sarah Palin. 

Palin gave the Republican ticket the bump that the Democrats did not get.  While now it is popular to talk about Palin as, “sucking the oxygen” out of the Presidential field, during the early campaign she filled it with oxygen.  She was a wildcard that no one had anticipated.  She was interesting, unique, even pretty (evidently Republican women are supposed to be dowdy).   But, because she couldn’t be dismissed, she had to be destroyed.  The word went out, not in an overt way, I don’t believe in conspiracies, but simply by common knowledge and tacit agreement.  This woman had to be diminished in thought, word and deed.  And she was.  She even made it easy.   The feminist in me was dismayed at the ferocity of the act.  I have been politically active since Eisenhower and I have never seen a male candidate treated with such venom. 

By now, Palin is standard chum whenever sharks are needed.  But I think she will come out of this e-mail mess looking better than she ever has.  Even the New York Times has reported that the effort is, “…prompting some critics to accuse the news media of overkill at best and vigilantism at worst.”  The stench of hypocrisy does hang heavy in the air. 

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