http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/53641;_ylt=AiEj5gEdLdSEeS4_tlGOJn2s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNmNzI3YWJpBGFzc2V0A3BvbGl0aWNvLzIwMTEwNDI1LzUzNjQxBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDNwRwb3MDNARwdANob21lX2Nva2UEc2VjA3luX2hlYWRsaW5lX2xpc3QEc2xrA3RoZWFudGktcGFsaQ--The anti-Palin crusaders
Kenneth P. Vogel Kenneth P. Vogel Mon Apr 25, 5:32 am ET
She is a promiscuous, petty and unintelligent, yet deviously conniving warmonger intent on capturing the Oval Office and, from there, the world.
Those are just some of the opinions about Sarah Palin held by members of a small but extremely active network of gadflies, bloggers and authors who have devoted much of the last 2½ years to proving their case to American voters.
This self-styled anti-Palin movement — whose members span the globe and are mostly but not exclusively liberals — has been behind some embarrassing revelations about the former Alaska governor, her family and allies. But some of their leading theories have been thoroughly discredited and earned them widespread criticism. (See: 'Mama Grizzly' Sarah Palin back on the prowl)
Yet that only seems to have hardened a commitment to accomplishing what they profess to be their ultimate goal: the absolute and complete exposure of Palin as a fraud unworthy of a role in American civic life. And now, with Palin edging back into the political spotlight in the face of flagging poll numbers, they believe that they are closer than ever to achieving it. (See: Poll: The incredible shrinking Sarah Palin)
A number of forthcoming books promise to delve deeply into — and, they believe, give mainstream credibility to — some of the more salacious Palin rumors and conspiracy theories that have sprouted in the anti-Palin blogosphere and on supermarket tabloid stands but have mostly been rejected by the mainstream media.
“We’re at a tipping point, where her character and her lack of ethics will be revealed on the national stage,” asserted Sherry Whitstine, a 49-year-old grandmother who lives in Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, and has infuriated her famous neighbors with blog posts and online comments accusing Palin of being unfaithful in her marriage and corrupt in her political career. (See: Troopergate report: Palin abused authority)
“Some things are just going to come to light that they just won’t be able to shake, and I have faith in that. It has already started, but these books will add to it,” she said.
The Palin camp has dismissed these critics as inconsequential ankle-biters but also has occasionally lashed out against the stories and rumors they have circulated. While the latter approach has engendered sympathy among her supporters, it’s also helped enable some of the rumors to break through into the “lamestream” media Palin so despises. (See: Sarah Palin trashes 'lamestream media')
Nonetheless, a source close to Palin downplayed the impact of the relentless scrutiny, telling POLITICO, “There are many things that are said on the Web about Gov. Palin that make it into the public domain. Many are so laughable, they don’t require a response.”
Their forbearance likely will be tested next month, when two major publishers will release books that have the anti-Palin movement buzzing.
St. Martin’s Press has scheduled a May 10 release of “The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power,” by Santa Cruz, Calif.-based author and documentarian Geoffrey Dunn, who has joked that he might need three or four volumes to adequately cover the subject matter suggested in the title.
He told POLITICO he decided to write the book after hearing stories from Alaskans about Palin’s “childhood through her governorship that were troubling to me.” He said his goal is to frame Palin’s career in the contexts of both an Alaska political scene “plagued by a culture of corruption” and also in “the larger tradition of American political populism and demagoguery.”
A couple of weeks later, a Simon & Schuster imprint is set to offer a tell-all memoir by Frank Bailey, a disgruntled former top aide to Palin, using her personal emails to paint an ugly portrait of her as a vindictive and vain dilettante obsessed with her public image, who allegedly broke election laws and targeted a state trooper by leaking damaging information. (See: Former Sarah Palin aide's tell-all coming to bookstores near you)
Then, in September, Crown will release “The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin,” by journalist and author Joe McGinniss, whose decision to rent the house next door in Wasilla last summer prompted Palin to warn him to “leave my kids alone.” (See:Palin: McGinniss 'disturbing')
In a series of blog posts, McGinniss, who said his publisher wouldn’t let him do interviews, has compared the Palin family’s life to a soap opera and signaled that his book will focus on the mother of all Palin conspiracy theories: the long-simmering, though widely rejected, allegation that Palin’s daughter Bristol or someone else entirely is actually the mother of Palin’s youngest son, Trig.
Dunn last week wrote a 2,700-word piece for Business Insider in which he questioned Palin’s account of Trig’s birth, asserted “Palin has never provided sufficient concrete evidence to put the conspiracy theories to bed” and acknowledged he “spent a considerable amount of time and resources trying to sort out the facts of Trig’s birth” while writing his book.
The piece initially was rejected by the Huffington Post, which has published a series of Dunn’s previous attacks on the former Alaska governor but said the Trig post violated its “policy against conspiracy theories.”
Dunn insisted in an email to POLITICO that he has never actually advocated the “Trig Truth” theory and is merely asking questions — a stance similar to that taken by influential Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan, a hero among Trig Truthers and the broader anti-Palin movement.
Though Dunn said his book barely addresses Trig’s birth, other books are reportedly in the works that deal with the rumor. It also is the subject of an academic paper by a professor at Northern Kentucky University that was released this month that sparked debate about whether the maternity of Palin’s children is an appropriate topic for political discourse.
The persistence of Trig Trutherism despite multiple investigations endeavoring to definitively debunk it is similar in some ways to the more widespread, but similarly discredited, “birther” theory holding that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and is, therefore, ineligible to be president. Obama also has faced a host of other persistent but debunked rumors, including that he is a secret Muslim and that his youthful drug use continued into adulthood.
But the sheer number of negative stories, rumors and conspiracy theories that continue to swirl around Palin, her family and allies is perhaps unprecedented for a politician who never held national office and has given few indications that she has either the ambition or the wherewithal to make another run after her failed 2008 Republican vice presidential campaign.
The Palin fixation more closely parallels the tabloid rumors and scandals that dog controversial Hollywood personalities like Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen than the ideologically motivated attacks on politicians, said Michael Kazin, a Georgetown history professor who has written about politically polarizing populist figures.
As if to underscore that point, it was revealed Monday that a Simon & Schuster imprint in the fall would publish yet another book on Palin - a tell-all by Levi Johnston, the mother of Bristol’s child and a harsh Palin critic who promised to dish on his “close relationship with the Palins” and “sense of Sarah.”
“This is only tangentially about politics. It’s really about celebrity,” he said, comparing the anti-Palinites to the liberals who pushed stories about unethical financial activity by Father Charles Coughlin, the influential but inflammatory 1930s conservative radio show host.
Those stories “helped to undermine” Coughlin, said Kazin, adding that, while Palin was able to use rumors and negative stories about her to “gain sympathy from conservatives,” that tactic now appears to be less effective.
The anti-Palin mythology exploded nationally after John McCain in August 2008 tapped the little-known first-term governor to join him on the Republican presidential ticket.
“When there’s not a lot of information about somebody, it does leave this vacuum where crazy rumors and things on the Internet can kind of fill in what people want to believe about someone,” said Lori Robertson, managing editor of the nonpartisan FactCheck.org website.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, FactCheck.org debunked the birth rumors about Obama (after its researchers were allowed by Obama’s campaign to physically examine the official copy of his birth certificate) and Trig Palin, as well as a host of other claims about Palin, such as her alleged demand as Wasilla’s mayor that certain books be banned from the town’s library.
Today, most of the attention is focused on her personal life and that of her family, in part because Palin has been out of government since her 2009 resignation as governor and also because she and her family have embraced the trappings of celebrity, complete with frequent appearances on television — the family in a reality series and daughter Bristol’s appearance as a contestant on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars.”
Many of the rumors about the Palin family can be traced back to a coterie of bloggers in Alaska, including Whitstine, a self-identified Christian conservative who alleges Palin’s gubernatorial administration pursued a “socialistic redistribution of wealth,” and liberal anti-Palin bloggers Jeanne Devon, Jesse Griffin and Shannyn Moore.
Their posts have been linked, amplified and complemented by a broader network of blogs around the world, from the France-based blog Palingates (which lists its mission as “examining the many lies and deceptions of Sarah Palin” and whose devoted readers helped it win a 2010 Bloggers Choice award as “Best Political Blog”) and its Germany-based offshoot, Politicalgates, to Sullivan’s widely read Washington-based The Dish, which recently moved from the Atlantic to the Daily Beast/Newsweek.
After an extremely critical and widely panned October story in Vanity Fair drew heavily on their work — asserting “without these blogs, the world would have much less information about Palin’s life right now” — Palin lashed out against “impotent, limp and gutless reporters” who quote anonymous sources criticizing her.
Not only have those bloggers helped shape hard-hitting stories about Palin in mainstream media outlets, they also have been involved to varying degrees in the coming wave of Palin books, with Devon co-writing Bailey’s memoir and McGinniss and Dunn interviewing Whitstine, Griffin and a Politicalgates blogger.
“Once you have a Joe McGinniss or a Geoffrey Dunn writing on the same things you’ve been talking about, it validates what you’ve been doing and makes you feel like you haven’t been wasting all your time, people are finally starting to hear these stories and they’re doing the research that I was doing before,” said Griffin, who visited McGinnis when the latter was renting next door to the Palins.
A 51-year-old Anchorage single parent who talks in explosive torrents of words that sound like his posts read, Griffin says he spends as many as 10 hours a day on his largely Palin-focused blog. On it, he uses unnamed sources to report a steady diet of Trig Truth updates, along with items examining the state of Palin’s marriage (once provoking aggressive pushback from Palin, her aides and allies by falsely reporting that she and her husband had “decided to end their marriage”), legs, and children’s alleged misbehavior.
The 30-something Frankfurt, Germany-based lawyer behind Politicalgates, who goes by the pseudonym “Patrick” because he fears retribution from Palin and her allies, sounds a more ominous tone in describing his motivation for originally joining Palingates as an investigative blogger.
“There are quite a lot of reasons to compare her to someone like Hitler, but of course, you have to look at Sarah Palin’s life really closely, investigate her really closely to find these details,” said Patrick.
Those investigations have run the gamut from Trig Truth to posting pre-publication copies of both of Palin’s books to revealing that Palin had flown on a private jet between stops during the much-hyped bus tour to promote her first book, “Going Rogue,” to revealing that her political action committee had hired leading independent Palin attack dog Rebecca Mansour.
The members of this loose network have had their spats and rifts. Moore and Devon, for instance, reject Trig Trutherism, while the founder of Palingates asked Patrick and his partner to leave the blog after he posted an item about a massage therapist who had been implicated in a prostitution sting and with whom the National Enquirer tabloid alleged Palin’s husband, Todd, had a dalliance — a report the Anchorage police pushed back against.
But they have nonetheless found common cause in their shared belief that Palin is not what she purports to be and that the mainstream media, for the most part, have miserably failed to expose her.
They’ve scored a number of Palin mini-scoops that have driven mainstream media coverage, including a report this month on Palingates that Bristol Palin was paid $262,000 in 2009 for being a spokesperson for a teen pregnancy prevention nonprofit and one last year on Devon’s blog, The Mudflats, showing that the Palins hadn’t paid property taxes on backcountry cabins built on land they co-owned (turns out the cabins were never added to the tax rolls).
But they’ve also run with some wild Palin rumors that caused the MSM to give chase only to find no there there.
After the National Enquirer, in the heat of the 2008 campaign reported that Palin had been romantically linked to an unnamed business partner of her husband’s (a story the McCain-Palin campaign called a “vicious lie”), for example, Sullivan suggested that the affair was with a family friend who had recently filed for divorce, and that the filings may contain proof of the affair.
That prompted a stream of reporters to make their way to a suburban district courthouse near Wasilla to pore over the 75 or so pages in the marriage dissolution file — only to find the sole references to Palin in the divorcing couple’s holdings, which included a recreational property they owned with Sarah and Todd Palin.
Patrick asserts that the cumulative effect of all the efforts of the anti-Palin movement has helped cut into Palin’s support.
“It’s not me alone, of course,” he said. “It’s a group of people who are working on this, and I think we definitely got under the skin of the Palin clan.”
Indeed, the reactions of Palin and her allies have arguably drawn more attention to the attacks themselves.
The paper by Northern Kentucky University professor Brad Scharlott — which argues that Palin “likely … staged a hoax concerning the birth of her son Trig” and that the media “failed to show appropriate skepticism about Palin’s unproven claim that she is the birth mother of Trig” — only got attention after an outburst by Palin’s fiercely loyal former spokesman Bill McAllister. He sent Scharlott an email — which wound up in the student paper, eventually making its way to the anti-Palin blogs — calling his study “reprehensible” and threatening to “slap” him, then forwarded the missive to five other members of the faculty, with the subject line “Brad Scharlott disgraces your university.”
The publicity around the study prompted a number of mainstream, if left-leaning, media outlets to run items dismissing the study. But Scharlott says he’s been received “like a rock star” in the anti-Palin movement and predicted “the tipping point will come … when the mainstream media start talking about” the truth behind Trig Palin’s birth.
Sullivan, who did not respond to interview requests, told Harvard Magazine in a recently published profile that his continued questions about Trig Palin have made him “more of an outlaw” in Washington and “alienated from mainstream media.” Griffin — who like Scharlott and Whitstine — has been targeted by Palin or her allies — shares the optimistic view of the professor and blogging grandmother that their work is winning influential converts.
“Maybe only looking back on it a year or two years from now, we’ll know what I did or didn’t do,” said Griffin. “And how involved I was in hopefully what is her fate, which, by the way, is going to be bad.”
