Even after losing the election, VP candidate Sarah Palin has continued to be in the news for various reasons. Among them was the claim that Palin is so stupid that she thought Africa was a continent, not a country. She was also said to not be able to name the three NAFTA countries. The source: “Unnamed former McCain advisers.”
Makes sense, right? After all, Sarah Palin is your typical simple-minded, non-Ivy-League-educated, baby-making, hick conservative Republican, right? She was John McCain’s middle finger to the American people, right libs?
Well, turns out the whole story is false, a hoax, a scam.
Only this time, one of the guilty parties is Fox News. Carl Cameron, whose producer was the source’s contact, reported the false information. Maybe Cameron was trying to keep up with FNC’s “fair and balanced” moniker by doing a negative piece on Palin. Who knows?
But then David Shuster at MSNBC did a “Breaking News” story on it. Then Olbermann had a field day with it, not to mention the blogosphere.
Now enter Martin Eisenstadt. Turns out he’s the “unnamed former McCain adviser,” who admitted on his website that he leaker. Mr. Eisenstadt is supposedly employed by the “Warren G. Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy” (which doesn’t exist; who would name an institute after a failed president who served for only two-years?). But no one at MSNBC or FOX picked that up.
On his site, Eisenstadt brags:
By now you’ve all heard the Fox News report last week that “unnamed” former McCain advisers leaked that Sarah Palin was confused about whether Africa was a continent, and which countries were in NAFTA. I was perfectly happy staying under the radar as an anonymous source for Fox News‘ Carl Cameron, but now that Palin has accused accusers of being “unprofessional…jerks…cowards… taking things out of context, and then tried to spread something on national news” and begun to cast doubt on the Fox News report, maybe she’s right to a certain extent. For those of us on the McCain campaign who thought that she acted like a rogue diva and lost John the election, maybe we DO have a responsibility to come out in public. But Sarah … careful what you ask for: some of us may have more to reveal.
This guy is completely unashamed. On the contrary, he’s proud of the smear he perpetuated that he put one over on Fox (And you know what? They deserve it). Oh, what a contribution to the human race. Eisenstadt’s parents must be proud.
Rick Moran blogging at the American Thinker site makes an important point:
Sarah Palin is not stupid despite every effort to portray her as such in the media. This is the same tactic used by the left for 60 years against Republicans and one would think they would tire of it.
That’s exactly right; there’s the conventional wisdom among the rabid left Palin-hating media that any plausible juicy tidbit about her must be true. Which is why it’s a shame that even Fox fell for the hoax; they should have known better.
Tony George, also blogging at AT, makes the following interesting observstion:
The “Palin doesn’t know Africa is a continent” turns out to be a lie. But it should remind us that the anti-war left were in fact the ones who didn’t understand basic geography of Africa.
In his State of the Union speech in January of 2003, President Bush talked about aspects of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs and stated that the Iraqi dictator had “sought quantities of uranium in Africa.” Somehow, this generated a boondogle investigation by Joe Wilson to the country of Niger the following summer, after which he pronounced in a July 2003 op-ed piece in the NYT that Bush was wrong about an Iraq-Africa uranium connection.
That a former US Ambassador could possibly provide an assessment about an entire continent based on a visit to one country on that huge land mass is mind-boggling.
What I find mind-boggling is how the media—even Fox News in this case—has gone so so down into the gutter, and will probably get not even a wrist slap for this journalistic malpractice.
Recent Comments