J.R. Dunn: The Network That Slanders Sarah Palin

J.R. Dunn's latest American Thinker essay on the smear campaign to destroy Sarah Palin is a grand slam home run. Excerpts:

Sarah Palin was the victim of the most vicious, global, and organized campaign ever carried out against a modern politician. It might have begun spontaneously, as the standard mud-flinging attendant to any political campaign. (Yeah, I know - liberals don't actually do that, they sit around on chaise longues wearing togas discussing policy in Socratic dialogue. I'm just being a throwback.) But it soon expanded well beyond the customary level of heated campaign rhetoric to fill every last niche of the media sphere, a process that could not have occurred without manipulation at every last turn.

[...]

The basic hypothesis is simple: that there exists an organized, centrally-controlled network, based on the Internet and related technical systems, entirely devoted to spreading slander and disinformation against individuals -- primarily politicians -- opposed to the progressive program. This system utilizes e-mail, comment threads, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever somebody invented last week. It is staffed and operated by the usual left-wing suspects -- students, eccentrics, outpatients, paranoiacs -- layabouts with plenty of time on their hands. It operates in loose coordination with the legacy media and liberal political operatives, forming the third leg of a national left-wing propaganda machine. It operates sub-rosa and without acknowledgement -- exposure would leech it of much of its power.

[...]

One innovation marked the campaign against Reagan. So desperate were the left to get at him that they targeted his family. Pat Nixon and her daughters were left more or less alone even at the height of the anti-Nixon frenzy. But Nancy Reagan became nearly as much a target as the president himself. One of the few limits acknowledged by the Mafia is a taboo against attacks on a man's family. The American left can't even match the moral standing of professional gangsters.

[...]

Contemporary leftists... view their opponents as people you send off to the Gulag, unworthy of any respect, deserving of any kind of low blow, no matter how foul. So you accuse Goldwater of insanity, slander Justice Thomas as a sexual monster, casually publish plays, books, and films calling for the assassination of President Bush, and assault the first serious Republican female candidate at her weakest point -- her family. And of course, you scream to high heaven if any form of turnabout occurs in your direction, as in the case of the Obama family, which was declared "off limits" early in the presidential campaign, at the same time that Palin's family was being stretched on the media rack.

Don't just read the whole thing. Go here, read it all and then bookmark it so you can read it again and again.

- JP