Now that Hillary Clinton's initial press conference on her email troubles is a week behind us -- and, trust me, this matter is going to malinger through several more weeks and months of news cycles -- it's time to take a closer look at Sarah Palin's deceitful and self-serving response to the Clinton email controversy.
Let me make one thing clear up front: I offer no excuses and provide no quarter for the manner in which Clinton handled her email communications during her tenure as Secretary of State. I found her explanation, such as it was, hardly sufficient for someone serving in her diplomatic capacity and with an eye on the presidency.
But the way in which former Alaska governor Sarah Palin forced her presence into the national conversation around this issue (Google News listed more than 5,000 articles on the subject) underscores the utter fraud of Palin's continued role in varied national political debates -- and the troubling way in which the mainstream media continue to sustain her seemingly never-ending con job of selling political snake oil to the American people.
In widely reported Twitter and Facebook postings, Palin's bread-and-butter method for advancing the complex nuances of American democracy, Palin characterized the Clinton "email scandal" as "shady and corrupt." She followed those up with an oft-cited "opinion piece" on the Fox News website, in which Palin did what she does best -- she went into martyr mode and played the pity card. And, of course, she lied.
"I know something about how annoying FOIA requests can be for public officials," she wrote. "After I returned home from the 2008 vice presidential campaign, the state of Alaska was flooded with innumerable FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests to see literally every single email I ever wrote while governor."
She went on:
What a crock. An absolute crock. But not once in reporting on the Clinton-Palin dustup did the national media challenge Palin on these utterly duplicitous renditions of what happened during her tenure in Alaska. (Kendall Breitman's shamefully uncritical piece in Politico provides an excellent case in point). In fact, the process of obtaining access to Palin's emails lasted nearly a half-decade, and Palin's personal lawyers and her hand-picked attorney general did everything in their power to keep those emails from ever seeing the light of day. In the end, many Palin emails and passages from emails were redacted or withheld for reasons that had nothing to do with "attorney-client privilege" (she claimed "executive privilege," "deliberative process," "personal privilege," and "privacy," on almost all of them). Others were destroyed. It's all simply another Palin lie.
Much More: Shady and Corrupt: The Real Story Behind Sarah Palin's Deceitful Response to Hillary Clinton s Emails - Geoffrey Dunn
Sarah is just being Sarah - a deceitful con artist and self-serving carnival act. Her fans eat it up.
Let me make one thing clear up front: I offer no excuses and provide no quarter for the manner in which Clinton handled her email communications during her tenure as Secretary of State. I found her explanation, such as it was, hardly sufficient for someone serving in her diplomatic capacity and with an eye on the presidency.
But the way in which former Alaska governor Sarah Palin forced her presence into the national conversation around this issue (Google News listed more than 5,000 articles on the subject) underscores the utter fraud of Palin's continued role in varied national political debates -- and the troubling way in which the mainstream media continue to sustain her seemingly never-ending con job of selling political snake oil to the American people.
In widely reported Twitter and Facebook postings, Palin's bread-and-butter method for advancing the complex nuances of American democracy, Palin characterized the Clinton "email scandal" as "shady and corrupt." She followed those up with an oft-cited "opinion piece" on the Fox News website, in which Palin did what she does best -- she went into martyr mode and played the pity card. And, of course, she lied.
"I know something about how annoying FOIA requests can be for public officials," she wrote. "After I returned home from the 2008 vice presidential campaign, the state of Alaska was flooded with innumerable FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests to see literally every single email I ever wrote while governor."
She went on:
The only emails redacted were the very few that were protected by attorney/client privilege -- a determination agreed upon by my lawyers and the Attorney General's office who reviewed them... Because nothing was kept secret in any way. Everything was done in the most transparent way possible.
Much More: Shady and Corrupt: The Real Story Behind Sarah Palin's Deceitful Response to Hillary Clinton s Emails - Geoffrey Dunn
Sarah is just being Sarah - a deceitful con artist and self-serving carnival act. Her fans eat it up.
