The Well Organized Vast Coalition of Leftist Bloggers

Cleta Mitchell was on the Diane Rhem Show today & suggested that this coalition has joined together in an organized front to smear Palin (the Governor of Alaska, not the Monty Python cast member). Having missed the organizing meetings, I'm perhaps a couple days behind on this one (I had to let Landon have his say). That said, I'm not certain that it really takes a "vast coalition" to find fault w/ her. Mitchell's claims were about the attention on Bristol (the 17 year old daughter, not the city in England) & Palin's alleged attempts to get books banned from the Wasilla, Alaska Public Library. First off, I absolutely agree w/ Obama's stance that the families should be off limits & therefore we shouldn't attack her because of her daughter. However, when she & the GOP put her eldest son on a pedestal for joining the military & attempt to win our sympathies based on her youngest child, it seems like she's trying to have it both ways (which I'm also sure she's done before... not that there's anything wrong w/ that either). If we are all supposed to look @ 2 of her kids, all should be fair game. As far as the book banning goes, the only "proof" so far that this happened has come from a 1996 article in The Frontiersman, the Wasilla newspaper, where she discussed it a little bit. Of course, it's not completely out of the question; the mid-nineties were full of library book-banning movements. Remember the dude in Ohio who shat in a children's' book about gay parents? Those were the good ol' days of book-banning (well, not as good as Nazi Germany, but pretty good none-the-less). Mitchell's response to the book-burning question was "I'm not commenting on that. She is the target of a smear campaign and I don't know if that even ever really happened, but remember, many parents have been upset by the books their children are forced to read." This is fantastic: what she means here is this: "I'm not talking about it, it might not have happened, if it did it's justified anyway." In her defense, she is right that parents are often upset by what their children are forced to read... Huck Finn, Harry Potter, Slaughter House 5... but that is an issue to be settled between the parent, the student, & the teacher. No one in the public library system is "forcing" people to read books. I don't know though, maybe in Alaska, librarians carry guns... Librarianators... Biblio-enforcers... pistol packin' Athenaeumians... they get archival on our asses... perhaps these are the brain police Frank Zappa warned us about. Maybe I spent too long discussing the book-banning issue, but I'm not in the camp that says this is a personal issue. Her support of censorship may actually be an important thing to know about before we cast our votes.

Anyway, it seems to me that these aren't even the issues people are really talking about. The only times I hear about them is when the GOP think-tank people don't want to discuss the real issues they keep saying we need to discuss. In fact, McCain's appearance on Larry King was canceled after one of these alleged "personal attacks" by the media when Campbell Brown asked Tucker Bounds to discuss Palin's Foreign Policy qualifications. She pressed him to answer the question he tried to deflect in the way any good journalist is expected to & they say she was "attacking" Palin's personal life. Before you watch the interview, I want to say that I keep hearing people say their Republican friends are scared by this VP pick... 1 heart beat away from being the PILF... the hottest VP since Mondale... yet all I see is GOP support. I don't really know any Republicans though, so I'd love to hear from some & get a reaction to these issues. Now, enjoy the CNN clip (& then a little Daily Show fun w/ soundbites), & don't forget, the next meeting for the Well Organized Vast Coalition of Leftist Bloggers will take place in my living room next week... bring beer: