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The Palin tapes
Jun. 10th, 2011 08:31 pmDo the big left papers know something we don't? Are they so certain that, unless something utterly shattering comes to light in the next few days, Sarah Palin is going to run for President, shatter Obama and fill House, Senate and states governments with Tea Partiers and worse? Nothing except political despair of a transcendent, staring-eyed quality, nothing but terror, can possibly explain what they are doing.
Let's start from the bewildering fact that someone has somehow forced the state of Alaska to release all her e-mails from her time as Governor. This would be unthinkable in almost any other nation; it is understood that the private thoughts and confidential advice a senior executive might entertain must remain private and confidential, or else nobody would dare to give information and advice whose value depends exactly on the freedom with which it is offered. Nobody would urge on a political leader a policy which they thought right but which might prove unpopular, if there were a chance that in a couple of years at most their words would be made available to the world at large. This is nothing to do with freedom of information; it is allowing people to think and discuss in peace. This is a dreadful precedent for American politics, guaranteeing that the range of debate will become narrower and more cowardly - which is the last thing anyone needs.
Such an action would only be justified when there is justified reason to suspect malfeasance. Nobody has ever thought of doing it even to figures as hated and as suspected as Bush II and Dick Cheney; and if they had, I think it is a fair bet that they could not have found a judge in the land to allow them. The only partial parallel I can think of are the Nixon Tapes, and by the time these were released, Nixon was more than suspected of major, Constitution-breaking misdeeds. There is no comparison. I would dearly like to understand under what excuse this colossal fishing expedition has been authorized; but so far, the reports I have read have been curiously silent on who allowed it, and why.
Astounding as this is, it is nothing to what the three big beast of the English-speaking progressive establishment - the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post - have gone on to do. Journalists in search of a story would have sat down with their big registers of e-mails and patiently sifted through them, making sure they understood what they were about and trying to guard against false impressions. The three newspapers have done nothing of the kind; instead, they have called out to their online readership and asked them to go through the lot, each reader a little. This guarantees, to begin with, that a few serious stories will be missed because the items that set them out will have been shared out between different people or gone unnoticed or misunderstood by people with no journalistic experience. It will place the three newspapers at the mercy of the most stupid, the most vicious, the most attention-seeking in their still numerous readership. It will condemn them to a series of sputtering flashes of news few of which will quite catch fire. And it will leave a universal impression that they are out to get Palin, never mind how, never mind what with.
The only thing that can explain a decision so self-destructive, so against their own interests, is a sense of despair. It is a sense that they cannot wait the time it would take to properly read and examine those e-mails; that even though the primaries are months away and the election next year, if something is not done, here, now, to stop the Palin juggernaut, then its advance is as inevitable as tomorrow's sunrise. It is wild, blank, unreasoning terror.
And that is what is strange. The rest of us haven't seen a Palin juggernaut. We have seen a lady who is, indeed, fairly obviously running for the nomination; and who is certainly quite popular with a section of the electorate - but it is a minority section. That is what leaves me, for one, wholly bewildered - and I mean exactly that - at the behaviour of the three newspapers. That is why I ask: do they know something we don't? Do they really have a reason to envisage an unstoppable Palin avalanche such as not even most Tea Partiers, at present, dream of?
Indeed, I haven't said enough about the enormity of the newspapers' behaviour. This is a gamble that actually, by itself, increases the odds against their own evident wish. If they can't come up with a thundering game-changer in the next few weeks, then they will have done Sarah Palin the biggest favour anyone did since John McCain picked her as a running mate and made a star out of her. After all, this is their trade: to make people known or to make sure they aren't. And they know that the one sure way to bury anyone is not to speak of them. Now, for the next few weeks they will be running Sarah Palin stories; without saying a word, without so much as moving a finger, she has been given even more publicity than what she usually manages to get - which is plenty. And it will be publicity which will do nothing but underscore a lot of her own talking points: being the enemy and chosen target of the elites; having the media go after her. Unless there is something in those e-mails so spectacularly, irretrievably bad as to blast her whole campaign like a thunderbolt, then all this repetition will do nothing to affect her, except positively. It will not make the third of the population who hate her hate her any more, for that would be impossible. (If I were Sarah's husband and children, I would be begging her on my knees not to run, because if she does and wins there is a very high likelihood that she will be assassinated. The hatred for her is as psychotic as anything anyone ever felt for Lincoln, or for Reagan.) Evem less will it change the minds of those who love her, for they are already certain that the media are out to get her. It may, on the other hand, make a lot of moderates and independents feel that after all there may be something to be said for her; and after that, she would only have to demonstrate that she can actually walk and chew gum at the same time, or connect a few sentences, to blast all the negative campaigns to smithereens in their minds. If this happens, the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post will have done a lot to achieve exactly what they dreaded: the nomination and victory of Sarah Palin.
Let's start from the bewildering fact that someone has somehow forced the state of Alaska to release all her e-mails from her time as Governor. This would be unthinkable in almost any other nation; it is understood that the private thoughts and confidential advice a senior executive might entertain must remain private and confidential, or else nobody would dare to give information and advice whose value depends exactly on the freedom with which it is offered. Nobody would urge on a political leader a policy which they thought right but which might prove unpopular, if there were a chance that in a couple of years at most their words would be made available to the world at large. This is nothing to do with freedom of information; it is allowing people to think and discuss in peace. This is a dreadful precedent for American politics, guaranteeing that the range of debate will become narrower and more cowardly - which is the last thing anyone needs.
Such an action would only be justified when there is justified reason to suspect malfeasance. Nobody has ever thought of doing it even to figures as hated and as suspected as Bush II and Dick Cheney; and if they had, I think it is a fair bet that they could not have found a judge in the land to allow them. The only partial parallel I can think of are the Nixon Tapes, and by the time these were released, Nixon was more than suspected of major, Constitution-breaking misdeeds. There is no comparison. I would dearly like to understand under what excuse this colossal fishing expedition has been authorized; but so far, the reports I have read have been curiously silent on who allowed it, and why.
Astounding as this is, it is nothing to what the three big beast of the English-speaking progressive establishment - the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post - have gone on to do. Journalists in search of a story would have sat down with their big registers of e-mails and patiently sifted through them, making sure they understood what they were about and trying to guard against false impressions. The three newspapers have done nothing of the kind; instead, they have called out to their online readership and asked them to go through the lot, each reader a little. This guarantees, to begin with, that a few serious stories will be missed because the items that set them out will have been shared out between different people or gone unnoticed or misunderstood by people with no journalistic experience. It will place the three newspapers at the mercy of the most stupid, the most vicious, the most attention-seeking in their still numerous readership. It will condemn them to a series of sputtering flashes of news few of which will quite catch fire. And it will leave a universal impression that they are out to get Palin, never mind how, never mind what with.
The only thing that can explain a decision so self-destructive, so against their own interests, is a sense of despair. It is a sense that they cannot wait the time it would take to properly read and examine those e-mails; that even though the primaries are months away and the election next year, if something is not done, here, now, to stop the Palin juggernaut, then its advance is as inevitable as tomorrow's sunrise. It is wild, blank, unreasoning terror.
And that is what is strange. The rest of us haven't seen a Palin juggernaut. We have seen a lady who is, indeed, fairly obviously running for the nomination; and who is certainly quite popular with a section of the electorate - but it is a minority section. That is what leaves me, for one, wholly bewildered - and I mean exactly that - at the behaviour of the three newspapers. That is why I ask: do they know something we don't? Do they really have a reason to envisage an unstoppable Palin avalanche such as not even most Tea Partiers, at present, dream of?
Indeed, I haven't said enough about the enormity of the newspapers' behaviour. This is a gamble that actually, by itself, increases the odds against their own evident wish. If they can't come up with a thundering game-changer in the next few weeks, then they will have done Sarah Palin the biggest favour anyone did since John McCain picked her as a running mate and made a star out of her. After all, this is their trade: to make people known or to make sure they aren't. And they know that the one sure way to bury anyone is not to speak of them. Now, for the next few weeks they will be running Sarah Palin stories; without saying a word, without so much as moving a finger, she has been given even more publicity than what she usually manages to get - which is plenty. And it will be publicity which will do nothing but underscore a lot of her own talking points: being the enemy and chosen target of the elites; having the media go after her. Unless there is something in those e-mails so spectacularly, irretrievably bad as to blast her whole campaign like a thunderbolt, then all this repetition will do nothing to affect her, except positively. It will not make the third of the population who hate her hate her any more, for that would be impossible. (If I were Sarah's husband and children, I would be begging her on my knees not to run, because if she does and wins there is a very high likelihood that she will be assassinated. The hatred for her is as psychotic as anything anyone ever felt for Lincoln, or for Reagan.) Evem less will it change the minds of those who love her, for they are already certain that the media are out to get her. It may, on the other hand, make a lot of moderates and independents feel that after all there may be something to be said for her; and after that, she would only have to demonstrate that she can actually walk and chew gum at the same time, or connect a few sentences, to blast all the negative campaigns to smithereens in their minds. If this happens, the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post will have done a lot to achieve exactly what they dreaded: the nomination and victory of Sarah Palin.
