Convention notes #4

Pay attention: the media smear job on Palin is an example of the need to keep conservative talk radio

By Wes Vernon

When the elite media forms a lynch mob to destroy — not just someone's career — but that person's life, they don't want any voices in their midst to sass them back. So they are determined to see that the dissenting "new media" is eliminated.

The "get Palin" jackals

Right now, the wolfpack sees Governor Sarah Palin as a dangerous woman. She is a threat to every stereotype the radical feminists — with media collaboration — have attempted to foist on the public as to how American womanhood should be understood.

Examples

How else does one explain three stories on the front page of the New York Times trashing the Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin?

The radicals who call the shots in the New York-Washington axis can't abide a smart, attractive woman who is pro-life and has had experience in handing the liberals' heads to them — not just Democrat liberals, either. Here is a woman who took on a sitting governor in the Republican primary and beat him before going on to beat a former Democrat governor in the general election.

The right schools?

The McCain campaign vetted Governor Palin and knew that she had a 17-year-old daughter who is pregnant.

What?! And she didn't insist that 17-year-old Bristol have an abortion? Scandalous! The more mature and intelligent course would have been to heed Barack Obama's plea that if his daughters later in life make a mistake, "I don't want to punish them with a baby." Got that? Having a baby is "punishment." Every sophisticated person knows this is a "choice," not a child.

What?! Governor Palin knew when she herself was pregnant that her baby son would be a Down syndrome child, and she didn't exercise her "choice" to have the child aborted? Scandalous!

How dare this public woman publicly reject the liberal sacrament of abortion? What does this say to other women who should heed the advice of her betters to avoid "the baby trap?"

What?! She didn't graduate from Harvard or Yale, but instead graduated from the University of Idaho? "Fly-over country!" Unheard of!

What's this? She hasn't even been on Meet the Press? Obviously a nobody.

Or as media high priestess Andrea Mitchell has intoned, no "educated" woman will vote for Palin.

Joining the mob from the Baltimore Sun was Susan Reimer who writes," You want to look good to evangelicals? Choose a running mate with a Down syndrome child." It's not enough that having a Down syndrome child causes family members heartbreak and inspires extra loving care; now they're accused of offering him up as a political prop. Vicious? Stick around; it only goes downhill from here.

Don't believe me? The big media has demanded that a paternity test be applied to Sarah Palin regarding the birth of the disabled boy. That according to the McCain campaign.

Bring it on

Palin was warned by McCain's people that when her daughter's pregnancy became public, there would be no holds barred in the lynch mob effort to demonize her. Her response reportedly was that the best way to tell the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull was "lipstick."

But as columnist Michelle Malkin has observed, "There is something about outspoken conservative women that drives the left mad." She should know. Check out Malkin's revealing tome Unhinged: Exposing liberals gone wild.

When the entrenched power-brokers and their puppets go after Palin, their aim is — again, not to just destroy her career, but to destroy her life. Just as the "high-tech lynching" against Clarence Thomas was meant as a warning to successful black men never to wander off the liberal plantation, so too is the lynch mob determined to make an example of Sarah Palin as to what a public woman should be.

Sally Quinn lectures

Perhaps the "modern woman" fits the mold desired by Sally Quinn of The Washington Post. The veteran postie writes her first reaction to the Palin pick "was shock. Then anger." That is understandable, given that Sally Quinn has played the ultimate oft-ridiculed role model as to how a woman gets ahead: marry the boss.

That may be unfair, but the one time when Sally Quinn could project her talents away from the safety zone of the legendary Ben Bradlee, she was the joke of the CBS water-cooler gatherings during her four-month stint at CBS back in the seventies. By her own acknowledgement, she was a poor fit.

What this says about the future

It is important, as we said at the outset, to pay attention to the feeding frenzy whipped up by a liberal media determined to destroy Sarah Palin.

Bear in mind that if an Obama White House gets to appoint new FCC commissioners with a filibuster-proof Senate to support him, the FCC will re-impose the so-called "Fairness" Doctrine — more accurately, the Muzzling Doctrine. That will effectively accomplish the liberal goal of putting conservative talk radio out of business, thus mimicking the Nazi and Communist regimes of tyrants who have shut down critical media.

That would be the ultimate dark day for the First Amendment and freedom of speech in the United States of America. There is no limit to the jackboot tactics these people will employ to shut you up if you criticize them, especially if they're on a jihad against a strong conservative woman.

Just look at the current anti-Palin hysteria in the media and — more to the point — just look at who are in the front lines of her defense, talking back to the New York-Washington media axis. Conservative talk radio — Rush, Sean, Mark, Laura — all of them.

If those voices are driven off the air, the next time the media elite go off on a smear binge, talk radio won't be around to undercut their lies. The jackals will have clear sailing in access to a greater slice of America. Editorials and columns in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, and others are necessary and appreciated, but the absence of talk radio will make a big difference.

So again, our humble advice: pay attention to what is unfolding before our very eyes, and try to imagine what would happen if we had no talk radio to set the record straight.

The GOP platform

The Republican Party platform should warm the hearts of grassroots conservatives. If the elite media were not so focused on trashing Governor Palin, they would be damning it from coast to coast.

Senator John McCain was smart enough not to upset the rank and file at his nominating convention. He declined to impose his will on those platform issues where he and they have parted company.

Prime example: McCain has bought into the "global warming" scare, but the GOP Platform Committee has not. Thanks to the efforts of David Keene and his American Conservative Union (ACU) and other stalwarts such as Phyllis Schlafly, the platform declares: "Republicans caution against the doomsday climate change scenarios peddled by aficionados of centralized command-and-control government." It points to methods of cutting carbon emissions without wrecking the economy, including drilling for more oil right here in America and also advancing nuclear energy.

Other platform highlights

The platform vows to reduce "profligate spending," which Senator McCain says "has characterized this administration's fiscal policy."

On illegal immigration: "The rule of law suffers if government policies encourage or reward illegal activity."

The GOP also promises to keep the Bush tax cuts and cut the economy-threatening corporate tax.

Win or lose in November, the GOP is drawing the bead on some Beltway sacred cows.

© Wes Vernon