Prologue: The Palin Myth: From hero to Harpy in Eight Short Weeks
. . .in the fall of 2008. . .
. . .If you listened to Democrats and the mainstream media, you learned that Palin was a Buchananite (she wasn’t), a member of the Alaskan Independence Party (nope), and a biblical literalist who believed dinosaurs roamed the earth several thousand years ago (an utter fabrication); that she was anticontraception (incorrect), wanted to teach creationism in schools (not really), and didn’t believe that man may be contributing to global warming (untrue); that she banned books (a gross distortion), claimed that she could see Russia from her house (never happened), faked her pregnancy (unbelievable), slept with her husband’s business associate (a myth), thought the Iraq War was a mission from God (not so), and didn’t know that Africa was a continent (baloney).
When they weren’t mangling facts, the press did their best to undermine Palin’s accomplishments. . . . .
. . . .The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Sarah Palin received much more negative coverage than she did positive. . . .Feminist activists denied Palin her womanhood because she did not share their politics. Comedians made fun of her accent, clothes, smarts, and looks. Campaign operatives (said) Palin was an incompetent ‘diva’, a ‘hillbilly’ who may have been suffering from postpartum depression.
Palin was routinely insulted and described in the crudest language. She has been called a ‘freak show’, a ‘joke’, an ‘extreme liability’, a ‘turncoat b*tch,’ an ‘insult’, a ‘fire-breather’, ‘xenophobic,’ a ‘sitcom of a vice-presidential choice,’ a ‘disaster movie,’ a ‘shallow’ person, ‘chirpy,’ a ‘provincial’, a ‘disgrace to women’, who was ‘as fake as they come,’ a ‘snide’, ‘babbling, barely housebroken, uneducated being,’ the ‘queen of fake outrage,’ a ‘cabrona’ ‘preposterous,’ a “f—king retard,’ a ‘balloon head,’ a lady of ‘glamour with no need for smarts’, an ‘atrocity,’ a ‘dangerous person,’ a ‘very special liar,’ a ‘nauseating,’ ‘cocky wacko,’ a ‘jack in the box,’ “Napoleon in bunny boots,’. . . .
--Matthew Continetti – The Persecution of Sarah Palin – Pages 1 and 2
