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| "Hey Tawd, you better remember who wears the pants in this family. Got it buster?" |
What happened was that Alex Pappas of The Daily Caller, one of the rising stars among political scribes and a meticulously careful and wonderfully polite, fair-minded young man (an aside: I've known him since he was in junior high school), wrote a perfectly fine story about Palin's current stances vis-a-vis the presidential race. In it, one of the things she said was that if Mitt Romney is the nominee, well, of course she would endorse him over Barack Obama.
Fox Nation picked up the story and, in its own headline (not Pappas', not the Daily Caller's, but its own headline completely apart from anything Pappas ever wrote) played up the "Romney endorse" angle in a way that apparently did not make it clear that the endorsement might be in the general election, rather than the primary campaign. (The headline is no longer available at Fox Nation, so I can't say exactly what the wording was.)
Anyway, the Palin team pounced. Specifically inviting over reporter Kasie Hunt from Politico so she could hear the exchange, Palin called Pappas' cell phone and began berating him in a very scolding manner for writing a headline suggesting she supports Romney.
Courtesy of Politico:
"So you’re saying that I said that I support Mitt Romney?" she said to the reporter. "And what’s your headline? You need to be clear, otherwise people really lose faith in the state of journalists today and that is, I said ‘ABO’—anybody but Obama. And I would support the candidate who surfaces to take on Barack Obama. But no, your headline leads readers to believe that I’m supporting Mitt Romney at this time in this process, and no that’s not accurate." Pappas didn't even know what she was talking about. When he tried to say that neither he nor his editors had written such a headline, she said she didn't have time for this, that she needed to go back to the "real people" at the State Fair, and hung up on him.
Later, when it became clear that Fox Nation, not Pappas or The Daily Caller, had written the semi-offending headline, a Palin press aide called Pappas back not to apologize but to say that they now realized it was Fox and that the headline had been taken down.
"No," Pappas said, far more bemused than angry or upset, "he didn't come close to apologizing."
Now see THIS is the Sarah Palin that Alaskans have come to know and loathe. The "attack first and get the facts later" Palin that once chased me out into a parking lot. The same woman who tried to destroy the career of an ex-brother-in-law, as well as her Public Safety Commissioner when he refused to help with that endeavor. The same woman who once penned a poorly crafted screed to the ADN after confusing a reference to Lisa Murkowski's father to one aimed at her own dad. (By the way if you have never read that letter, do yourself a favor and look it over. It is one of the few authentic examples of Palin's writing that you will find on the internet.)
You see the reason I have never really been terribly concerned that Palin was ever going to win the White House, or even win the GOP nomination, is that no matter how hard people work to groom the pitbull to look like an inside house poodle, sooner or later it will rip your throat out.
And eventually even the MOST supportive conservative cable news networks and right wing blogs were going to have no choice but to call her out on that kind of behavior. As evidenced by the last line from the American Spectator article:
If Palin wants to get rid of the image of being a difficult diva with a rude streak, she needs to stop acting like a difficult diva with a rude streak.
In other words folks, the next time you are looking for Sarah Palin in a crowd, just look for the giant fork sticking out of her.
