More Quote of the Day Honorable Mention, Part 79

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Special JounoGate Edition: "She who must be destroyed"...

Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters:

"New e-mail messages published by the Daily Caller Thursday show a coordinated effort by the JournoList's members to destroy Sarah Palin the moment she was named John McCain's running mate on August 29, 2008. Some even discussed how the former Alaska governor's decision to have a Down Syndrome baby rather than abort it could be used against her... Witness America's so-called journalists conspiring to destroy a woman most of the nation had not even heard of yet... This kind of coordinated attack by journalists should really be offensive to folks on both sides of the aisle. The need for an independent press is essential to our democracy... Think there really is a free and independent press anymore?"

Penraker:

"The Daily Caller has some more serious breaches of journalistic duty... Today, we have them strategizing to destroy Sarah Palin’s image..."

John at Verum Serum:

"Now I don’t have a list of all 400 members of Journolist, but I have cause to suspect that either Adam Serwer or Ann Friedman of the American Prospect might be on that list. Here’s Ann’s reaction to the Palin pick. It’s titled simply McCain’s Sexist VP Pick: 'Palin’s addition to the ticket takes Republican faux-feminism to a whole new level. As Adam Serwer pointed out on TAPPED, this is in fact a condescending move by the GOP. It plays to the assumption that disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters did not care about her politics — only her gender. In picking Palin, Republicans are lending credence to the sexist assumption that women voters are too stupid to investigate or care about the issues.' Wow, that sounds familiar."

Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit:

"The criminals in the state-run media planned to destroy Sarah Palin. We all knew they did... Now there is not only speculation but proof that there was indeed a meticulously planned media attack on Sarah Palin."

Ace at Ace of Spades HQ:

"When Dave ('Who?') Weigel wanted to bash conservatives about Palin, he asked why we were freaking out over Joe McGinnis invading her privacy, because 'any journalist' would jump at that chance. See, that's the problem Dave: No they wouldn't. How do I know this? Because they haven't... Not 'all journalists' would do this about their subjects. Not because they don't want to sell more books. But because the peer disapproval from their like-minded liberal colleagues discourages them from spying on Hillary Clinton. And they do it to Palin because none of them care if Palin's privacy is invaded; in fact, they applaud it. Because she is 'The Other.' She is inhuman -- and you can treat her worse than an animal."

USAction News:

"There really has been a left wing conspiracy to smear Sarah Palin from the beginning and now there is proof. Leftist libs came up with a strategy that was implementd all across the left wing propaganda media."

Stacy McCain at The Other McCain:

"Daily Caller’s Journolist revelations are valid evidence that the synchronicity of liberal media messaging during the 2008 campaign was not altogether coincidental... If all politicians with an “R” beside their names are presumed to be fundamentally illegitimate and unworthy of high office, that premise supports a syllogism with certain conclusions, including... Covering the anti-Palin accusations of ax-grinding Alaska gadfly bloggers (Dennis Zaki, Jesse Griffin, et al.) as if they were legitimate news stories, while attempting to shut down coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright... Thus, the young Journolisters refuse to recognize any basic wrong in their efforts, because to undertake such a reappraisal might lead them to reconsider the validity of their political worldview."

CosmicConservative:

"I think I predicted this."

Jim Geraghty at The Corner:

"A lot of it is predictable, garden-variety 'what are her weaknesses?' talk, probably not all that different from every other left-of-center political circle at that moment. But there’s one note that raises the theme of collective group activity to influence media coverage of the new vice-presidential candidate: Suzanne Nossel, chief of operations for Human Rights Watch, added a novel take: 'I think it is and can be spun as a profoundly sexist pick. Women should feel umbrage at the idea that their votes can be attracted just by putting a woman, any woman, on the ticket no matter her qualifications or views.' Mother Jones’s Stein loved the idea. 'That’s excellent! If enough people – people on this list? – write that the pick is sexist, you’ll have the networks debating it for days. And that negates the SINGLE thing Palin brings to the ticket,' he wrote."

OlBroad at An Ol’ Broad’s Ramblings:

"This isn’t journalism. This is not news reporting. This is propaganda. Woodrow Wilson and Joseph Geobbels must be SO proud!"

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

"The participants were certainly critical of Palin, as they were in public, but the bigger revelation may have been how much they worried that Palin might do real damage to Barack Obama’s chances... This piece makes the argument that JournoListers attempted to shape coverage through their debates. Klein wrote this article in the first person, attributing these ideas to himself... While Klein is very clearly an opinion journalist at Time, he represented those opinions as his own — and one has to wonder how many other talking points from JournoList Klein passed off as his own over the years at Time. The magazine needs to address that issue immediately."

Merv Benson at PrairiePundit:

"Many of the themes suggesting by the plotters found their way into the narrative they were trying to spin about her candidacy. While this story does not discuss her brilliant convention speech, that actually sent them into a deeper frenzy because it was such an effective criticism of Obama. She still makes them crazy."

Ed Driscoll:

"Back in the 1920s, the iconoclastic H.L. Mencken wrote that 'It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.' Flash-forward almost a century, and his would-be successors see it not as as permanent opposition, but an element of the 'non-official campaign' of one’s party’s presidential candidate. As we noted in 2008, it was astonishing to watch John McCain not immediately grasp that the Beltway media he had worked so hard to cultivate as a senator would, once he secured the GOP presidential nomination, instantly drop a moderate Republican for a full-fledged liberal (or at least what passes for liberal these days) Democrat. So who’s going to be first GOP candidate who understands and articulates to his or her supporters what the new rules are: the media he or she will be doing interviews with on the campaign trail define themselves not as 'objective' journalists, but part of the opposition’s 'non-official campaign?' Well yeah, besides this potential candidate, of course"

Patterico at Patterico's Pontifications:

"Let’s Get Together and Trash Palin! Your media betters, working in a pack..."

Fuzzy Slippers at NewsReal Blog:

"So we have a leftist woman suggesting that gynoguilt should immediately be used, strategically so, to discredit Palin and to undermine the selection of a woman to be vice president. In this instance, gynoguilt is leveraging guilt associated with the historic repression of women and using it to cut down a woman to further their own political agenda... There is no need to argue facts, to examine positions, or to assess fairly experience and ability. Add in Ben Adler’s argument that Palin’s decision to keep her baby with Down Syndrome somehow destroys the courage and morality of that decision because (oh the irony!) Palin ran for political office, taking her away from hearth and home, and the resulting picture shows exactly how gynoguilt worked to undermine Sarah Palin."

More to come...

- JP