Posted on 09/07/2008 4:54:42 AM PDT by Kaslin
"Here ruining people is considered sport," so concluded Vince Foster in what many believe was his suicide note. "Here" is Washington D.C., and the instrument of ruination is the politics of personal destruction.
Alaska's Governor Sarah Palin is the latest person to find herself in the crosshairs of those aiming for her ruination. Her offense? She accepted Senator John McCain's invitation to be his running mate for the 2008 Presidential election. This historic milestone of a woman running on the Republican ticket was soon transformed into histrionics. Any real analysis of Governor Palin's public record was jettisoned in favor of digging up dirt about her personal life, real or concocted.
First came the snide comments on Governor Palin's looks. Most of those comments came from feminists, the same women who decry sexism and complain that too much attention is paid to how a woman looks. Nevertheless, they are the same women who keep us abreast of Hilary Clinton's changing hair styles and her preference for pantsuits. Who can forget the vitriol aimed at Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris during the 2000 Florida recount? How she applied her makeup became more important than how she applied the law. We may have come a long way baby, but cattiness persists among the feminists.
Next, Governor Palin was attacked for being a bad mother. Suddenly the crowd who proclaims women can only find fulfillment working outside the home have become homebodies. Crocodile tears were shed over whether Governor Palin would be abandoning her children if she became Vice President. It's ironic that feminists now complain that she should be at home with her kids.
But let's not kid ourselves. Many of the folks now supporting Governor Palin's bid for Vice President would be casting similar aspersions upon her if she were Senator Obama's running mate. Their unconditional support for Governor Palin, notwithstanding her family circumstances, is, for many, an abandonment of the notion that motherhood is a woman's highest calling.
Then came the attacks on Governor Palin's family. Her husband's DUI when he was 22 years old (over twenty years ago) was trotted out to see what kind of reaction it would receive. It didn't receive much of one but hey, it was worth a shot.
The most despicable attack was directed at Governor Palin's 17 year old daughter Bristol. One columnist tried to fabricate a scandal that Trig, Governor Palin's 5 month old son, was actually Bristol's and that Governor Palin claimed to be the mother in order to avoid embarrassment and save face. The scandal was replete with pictures of Bristol from 2006, claiming she was then pregnant with Trig, a mere eighteen months prior to Trig's birth. The columnist—not one to let the facts stand in the way of a good story—still demands a note from Governor Palin's doctor before he will be satisfied.
All of this microscopic scrutiny did lead to the Palin family's acknowledgement that Bristol is indeed pregnant (five months) and that she and her boyfriend plan to marry. This, of course, led to more aspersions on Governor Palin's fitness as a mother and provided a chance to extol the virtues of condom use as the centerpiece of sex education. You see, Governor Palin believes children should not be having sex and, thus, abstinence is what they should be taught. No doubt Bristol's circumstances have reinforced her belief.
Congressman Barney Frank joined in the mud slinging by commenting that Governor Palin's home is "in great turmoil." That's the same Barney Frank who claims he didn't know that a homosexual brothel was being run out of his Georgetown townhouse some years ago.
Thankfully, the one adult in all of this has been Senator Obama. He reacted to the attacks by saying, "Let me be as clear as possible. I have said before, and I will repeat again, I think people's families are off limits. And people's children are especially off limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Governor Palin's performance as governor or her potential performance as a vice president." The Senator went on to remind everyone that he also was born to an eighteen-year-old mother.
One blogger got it right when he wrote, "In our politics today, we don't just debate people, we destroy them." Both the left and the right are guilty of this bloodlust. The casualty count is high. No doubt many good people—people that would be of great service to the country—are reluctant to serve in public office because of the politics of personal destruction.
America will be better served if voters stay focused on the issues that face the country. Tabloid political coverage takes our focus off the important issues, and diminishes our electoral process. We can do better.
I can say without reservation that I hate the left.
Do you really want a VP who is against all forms of contraception, anti-labor, believes you can "pray for a gay" and change them into a heterosexual, is married to a guy who wants to secede from the USA, whose daughter is a seventeen year old slut, who endangered her unborn baby, who hired a lobbyist for pork from Washington for her town as mayor, and is governor of a state with a smaller population than most cities in the US! She's unqualified for God sake to operated the asshole on an elephant. Who the hell is McCain kidding? Except maybe yourself? Love ya Bro, Bob
I reject this sort of moral equivalence. The Left destroys people as a matter of policy. The right does not have a equivalent policy.
Scooter Libby’s life was destroyed for no reason. Honestly, I can’t think of any dems who didn’t get what they deserved.
There was a major article being read on c-span this morning about where is Sarah? she hasn't done a major interview(hope she never does) and they get 80-100 requests per day.
Looks like our guys don't really need the DBM as much as they would like to be needed. Must "drive" them nuts.
Meanwhile over at FNC Gerta did a great piece on Sarah last night well done.
I object to the moral equivalence. I assume you can go out into the conservative blogosphere and find personal attacks on liberals but you won’t find anything that remotely approaches the Palin family smears, the Clarence Thomas smears, the smears on several Reagan cabinet members, etc. And you will certainly not find the smear campaigns picked up and advanced by the mainstream media, which obviously has no standards whatsoever when a conservative is being attacked. Anything goes.
Doesn’t anyone recall the Chelsea Clinton/Web Hubbell morph? How the speculation about her parentage swarmed the web back in the early 2000’s?
The politics of personal destruction is alive and well on both sides of the aisle.
Problem for them is that Sarah "was" born in the US, is "not" a dual citizen, is "not" friendly with Billy Ayers-a homegrown terrorist who hates America, does "not" let her kids throw the American flag on the ground after their convention and she actually "loves" America and respects it.
Looks like the comparisons are getting to some of the more rabid Dems.
I thought this smear was started at KOS by a poster, hardly what I would call a "columnist"
Someone correct me if I'm wrong
“Chelsea Clinton/Webb Hubbell morph from the early 2000s”
What the hell are you talking about? Ass.
Ya right.
That's what he says with the cameras rolling.
His surrogates are busy doing something else and it's pretty obvious.
No thanks -- I prefer The Politics of Dancing!
Haven't heard that phrase lately. Rush likes that one. Glad to see it back. We need to gkue that on Obama and his MSM.
Gee, I don't recall that making the front page of the NYT, LAT, WaPo, Newsweek, Time like these Palin smears
The politics of personal destruction is alive and well on both sides of the aisle.
Though technically true, when we do it and it's pretty rare and we rarely get down to the levels of the "rats" employ almost daily
We also get called on it quickly and our party leaders tend to reign the offenders in as opposed to the "rat" party leadership who employ surrogates at their behest to do the politics of personal destruction for them
It is proper to hate evil and love good.
Everything about the left is anti-God and against His ways, so I have no reservations about calling them evil.
Satan’s minions scream when exposed to the Light of good character.
Simply by living her life with the beliefs that she does, Palin condemns them by example.
Well of course he has to do that. But he's loving every minute of it and cheering his muck-raking troops on.
That one’s still around,
and pretty hard to deny.
So, the Clinton’s had a surrogate father for their kid, and someone noticed -
how is that “politics of personal destruction” on the scale that we’ve seen waged against Palin?
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