RSM: Obama Campaign Created ‘Palin Incites Violence’ Meme in '08

Origins of the Big Lie documented
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The attempt by Democrat/Media Complex to lay the Tuscon massacre at Sarah Palin's feet last week is nothing new. It's actually just a recycling of a Big Lie that has its origins in the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, explains Robert Stacy McCain, who on December 23 of that year, debunked the original smear in The American Spectator's "Political Hay" column:

The tactic of blaming Palin for “racist anger” toward Obama developed as a theme during the fall campaign, evidently based on post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking within Team Obama. Threats against Obama increased as the campaign heated up after Labor Day, and since this followed the Aug. 29 announcement of the Alaska governor as Republican running mate, Palin herself was scapegoated.

That claim was distilled in a November article in the London Daily Telegraph with the misleading headline, “Sarah Palin blamed by the US Secret Service over death threats against Barack Obama.”

The Secret Service never said any such thing and the Telegraph‘s story didn’t actually say that they had said it. Rather, Telegraph reporter Tim Shipman was paraphrasing a Newsweek account of the campaign that quoted Obama adviser Gregory Craig in mid-October expressing concern about “the frenzied atmosphere at the Palin rallies.” The same paragraph of the Newsweek story asserted (without attribution) that the Obama campaign had been “provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a sharp and very disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October.”

It was the Obama campaign, not the Secret Service, which suggested a connection between the “frenzied atmosphere” around Palin and the threats. Obama himself appeared to believe there was such a connection, raising it in his final debate with John McCain.

That accusation evidently stemmed from an Oct. 14 newspaper report that an audience member at a Palin rally in Scranton, Pa., shouted “kill him” when Obama’s name was mentioned. The Secret Service investigated but was unable to corroborate that account, as Newsweek subsequently reported, and yet the alleged threat has entered the colloquial what-everybody-knows version of the campaign.

All this fits within a narrative arc that Democrats and their media allies are constructing around Palin, portraying her as an uncouth rabble-rouser leading an angry (and perhaps dangerous) populist opposition to Obama.

Fast forward two years, and it's "deja vu all over again." Stacy sums it up:

This was where the media’s “Blame Palin” narrative about the Tucson massacre began, and we see how liberals continue recycling the same dishonest talking points, long after their lies have been exposed.

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- JP