On Gov. Palin--all the lies fit to print

By Warner Todd Huston

It seems that Froma Harrop of Creator's Syndicate news service was on vacation from just about five days before the general election until today and she's just catching up on all the Palin hatin' she must have missed. Unfortunately for Harrop, she still hasn't caught up with the truth yet because her latest is filled with every lie about Governor Palin she could jam into one column, quite despite that for weeks her digs have been proven lies.

In hers headlined, "Palin should move to TV talk show," Harrop proves that she should move from Creator's Syndicate to the National Enquirer... unless Creator's Syndicate is trying to unseat the supermarket tabloid in hack writing. If that is the case, then Harrop is on the right track.

Harrop starts with the canard that Palin was the one that bought the $150,000 wardrobe during the campaign. This is an outright lie as not one single reputable report laid the spending on Palin herself. Whether it was wrong to do or not, others did this spending like campaign staffers and the Republican National Committee. Also the clothes ended up being given to charities after the campaign was done. There is not a single shred of proof that Palin was the one that either requested the spending or did any of this shopping herself. In fact, it appears that a single GOP donor initially paid for the clothing with his donation to the RNC.

Obviously, Harrop hadn't a single fact at her command from the start.

Harrop then unleashes a line that is amusing for its disconnect from simple logic. She claims that Republicans were asked on the Sunday talk shows how they could defend the choice of Gov. Palin for the vp slot? "They gallantly withheld overt criticism," she wrote, "but offered enough faint praise to sink any of her lingering ambitions for 2012."

So, now NOT criticizing is really criticizing? In other words, no matter what these unnamed Republicans that Harrop is citing said about Palin it was damning, even when they didn't actually criticize her at all? It seems more like she heard inside her head what she wanted to hear. She hated Palin so every word anyone said of her was twisted inside of Harrop's ample grey matter to mean Palin was rotten to the core. "Sarah is great," became "Sarrah is the worst in the world and everyone knows it," as far as Harrop is concerned. Talk about refusing to see reality for what it is!

Next Harrop decided to let every governor of the nation know that they don't have a high office.

So what is next for Palin? She's clearly got native smarts, but not the intellectual heft required to hold high office.

I guess governor isn't a "high office"? That would be news to America's governors, wouldn't it? And the fact that many of our presidents have come from the ranks of our governors, well that might make the lie to Harrop's little fantasy world, there. Wouldn't you say?

Then we get the next straight out lie promulgated by Harrop's hate-filled rant.

The depth of that deficit became clear in the "reports" of a John McCain adviser complaining that she didn't know Africa was a continent. Though obviously no Palin fan, even I question such an extraordinary charge, especially attached to unnamed sources.

This fake charge was originally made by one Martin Eisenstadt, a supposed Republican strategist. But by November 12, it was revealed that Martin Eisenstadt doesn't even exist and that it was a made up persona meant to hoax the newsertainment industry.

I suppose that Harrop is trying to be clever by adding, "Palin says it is not true," as if this inclusion of the denial absolves Harrop of furthering the lie. But it absolutely does not do so. One need not continue to have to refute a story when the story has been flat out proven to be a lie.

Harrop is either wholly uninformed about the truth here, or she is purposefully promulgating a story that she knows has been proven untrue. In either case she makes herself either look like a fool or a liar. (And I use the word liar specifically, not just pejoratively. If she knows it is untrue but used the jab anyway she is simply lying to her readers. Period.)

Then we get Harrop using the false authority of her Old Media colleague's determinations as a way to ding Palin. Harrop says "Her divisive remarks during the campaign...," but this determination of "divisiveness" was one made by the news media. There was no hate or divisiveness in Palin's speeches as far as her voters were concerned. There were facts and characterizations used by Palin during the campaign, and they were themes that the largest number of Republicans fully agreed with. The only people that thought she was "divisive" were media types and Obamatons, neither of whom would have voted for Palin regardless.

Then Harrop goes on to prove she has no clue what she's talking about reading political futures.

Her hope of staying in the big game was to become a U.S. senator. The preferred path would have been through Alaska's Sen. Ted Stevens' downfall.

So, Harrop thinks she has the crystal ball to determine that this was Palin's only "hope of staying in the game"? Says who? One can go back and look at dozens and dozens of politicians whose careers were determined to be over because of the loss of an election, not the least of which was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln ran for an Illinois Senate seat in 1854, lost to Stephen Douglas, "the Little Giant," and retired to his law offices afterward. All the nattering Harrops of his day said he was finished as a politician. But, there was that other little episode where he later became president to confuse those crystal ball reading Harrops of the 1860s.

Froma Harrop committed journalistic malpractice of a gross nature with this lie-filled, uniformed rant. But, where Governor Sarah Palin is concerned, Harrop's slobbering is wholly unoriginal. She, like many of her hate addled colleagues, are so consumed with vitriol for Sarah Palin that any manner of lies and false charges are fair game and are to be considered "facts" in their world of venomous malignity. As far as Palin is concerned it's attack now, worry about truth later... or not at all. And in Harrop's case it is not at all because she regurgitates lies here that have been thoroughly debunked weeks ago.

Like those of the rest of her profession, Froma Harrop has a visceral hatred of Palin and a nearly pathological need to destroy her. Facts don't matter. Truth is unnecessary. Decorum and objectivity are disdained.

They just want Palin destroyed and they will do anything to get that job done.

(Photo credit: FoxNews.com)

© Warner Todd Huston