Regarding Sarah

If you want to keep up on Palin news, Talking Points Memo is probably the best place to bookmark. Such news is slow in coming, because the campaign has decided that shielding her entirely from the mic is their best bet right now, but there are muckrakers around the country digging up bits. Bits which go entirely unanswered by the campaign, which may be as telling as the bits themselves.

I'm going to quote one of their posts at length here, because it's a very very good one. Submitted to Josh from a friend:

Campbell Brown isn't the story - people are underestimating her, as they always have. No, the story is that Tucker Bounds went on national television without material to answer what is maybe the simplest, most straightforward follow-up question any reporter can ask: "What's your evidence for that assertion?" And I suspect that the reason they canceled Larry King is not to punish CNN (it doesn't work that way) it's that they still couldn't come up with an answer to the question by the time his show aired.
Now look at this comment from McCain honcho Steve Schmidt to Katie Couric last night: "Members of this campaign went to off-the-record lunches with reporters today, and they were asked if she would do paternity tests to prove paternity for her last child. Smear after smear after smear, and it's disgraceful and it's wrong. And the American people are going to reject it overwhelmingly when they see her."
First of all, that's the first time I've heard anyone in the campaign/political press throw out the notion of paternity tests. So Schmidt is to blame for bringing that issue into the mainstream. If anyone is smearing the candidate, it's Schmidt. This is as cynical a tactic as I've ever seen in politics.

Update: I made the mistake of turning on the teevee and checking the web at the same time, and I'm about to vomit.

The teevee is giving me (predictably) a slew of surrogates explaining why American Women Will Love Sarah Palin, and the "journalists" are buying into the mommy-wars-blame-the-media shit.

Meanwhile: why the fuck aren't they asking whether she has a preacher problem? What about whether she has a fringe-freak secessionist problem?