After the debacle in Iowa Sarah Palin loses one of her staunchest supporters.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast, from an article entitled You Betcha I Was Wrong About Sarah Palin:

Demosthenes, she is not, but there’s nothing new about Palin’s penchant for populism or lowbrow rhetoric. What does feel new is that she has finally gotten around to roundly losing conservative opinion leaders. (OK, this has been a long time coming. In 2011, Conor Friedersdorf noted that the hard right was skewering Palin, and that Kathleen Parker had been vindicated. And as recently as this past April, I wondered whether it was finally safe for conservatives to criticize her publicly. But it does feel like we have finally reached a tipping point where criticizing Palin isn’t only acceptable for conservative opinion leaders, it’s now almost expected.) 

Before we go any further, I should confess that I might be one of the most unusual Palin critics you’ll ever encounter. Before most Americans had ever heard of her, I was among the few suggesting she’d make a fine veep pick. My intern at the time even started the Draft Sarah Palin movement. A few years later, I edited a book of Palin quotes, titled The Quotable Rogue. 

I defended her when some on the left said she was to blame for Gabby Giffords’ shooting, and recently defended her daughter Bristol when the press laughed at her for being a victim of what certainly sounded like a physical assault. (For what it’s worth, I’ve also criticized Palin when I thought she was wrong.) This is all to say that I’m not reflexively anti-Palin; I don’t suffer from Palin Derangement Syndrome. 

In fairness, Palin was once a reform-minded governor who enjoyed an 88 percent approval rating. But something happened on the way to Des Moines. I suspect the most vicious attacks (especially the “Trig Truther” stuff) radicalized her and embittered her, but I also suspect she also took the easy way out. Instead of going back to Alaska after the 2008 defeat, boning up on the issues, continuing her work as governor, and forging a national political comeback, she cashed in with reality-TV shows and paid speaking gigs.

There have been a number of conservatives who have recently washed their hands of Sarah Palin, but Matt Lewis is certainly noteworthy in that he was once one of her staunchest supporters and somewhat instrumental in inflicting her on America in the first place.

So for him to break ranks is no small thing.

However I have to admit that what made me decide to write this post was this one line from the article: 

I suspect the most vicious attacks (especially the “Trig Truther” stuff) radicalized her and embittered her.

Lewis views these as "vicious attacks."  But the truth is that if there were no validity to the charges then they would have been the easiest for Palin to have laughed off. In fact she could have used them as proof positive that liberals will say anything to besmirch her character.

However the reason why the trig truther allegations drew blood is because they are grounded in facts. And as more time has passed the stronger the case that she faked her pregnancy and Trig's birth has become.

We now have photos which prove she was not pregnant,  e-mails that indicate access to information that she could not have had before the birth, and even a Providence Hospital schedule that seems to prove that CBJ could not have been the attending physician.

Yes I agree that all of this could have "radicalized" and "embittered" her. I just disagree that it was vicious.

If anything it was necessary. Even, if I dare say, patriotic.

So if there is ANY validity to the charge that the questions about Trig's birth had the effect of making Sarah Palin babble like a demon possessed lunatic in Iowa, which resulted in her losing the last vestiges of support from the conservative Right, then I call that a job well done.

At the end of the article Matt Lewis offers this mea culpa:

It’s probably time to concede that the early critics of Sarah Palin had a point, and that they shouldn’t have been tarred and feathered and (in some cases) nearly purged from the conservative movement. I’m not excusing the vilest attacks, of course, but for a long time, there was close to zero tolerance of anything remotely critical of Palin (or, at least, even mild criticism would evoke stern rebukes), and that was wrong. And, as evidenced by the spate of articles coming from conservative venues this week, it’s also over. 

It is not exactly how I pictured babygate taking her down, but a victory is a victory.

Bumped. Sarah Palin cannot resist jumping into the Hillary Clinton brain damage controversy. Of course she brings Trig along as a shield. Update!

Courtesy of the Poster child for brain damage's Facebook page:

Hey! Hillary’s brain is off-limits! Leave her health records alone! Democrats are right – scouring records of a female candidate is just politics of personal destruction, and for the media to engage in it would be unfair, unethical, and absolutely UNPRECEDENTED. You can’t probe a woman like that because, well, it’s a war on women! 

Bunch of sexist, big meanies engaging in something heretofore unheard of, for shame. 

America, you deserve fair and consistent coverage of relevant issues before deciding a Presidential/Vice Presidential ticket, so have faith the agenda-less media will refuse to push whispers and wildly inaccurate information about a partisan politician’s body part. (Oh, I know where THIS is going!) Goodness, no one credible would print lies, continually harass a candidate’s doctor, disrupt local hospital staff, or even offer to pay locals to give “quotes” about her health records to be included in a “research book” by a public university professor (your tax dollars at work?) which the candidate’s attorney will need to respond to. 

At this point Palin, or her ghostwriter, provide a number of links to Brad Scharlott's attempt to prove that Palin was not Trig's mother, and then this one that she offers as proof that she is.

Of course we dealt with that article back in 2011, which was not hard as virtually all of it was based on various reporter's impression that she seemed pregnant, or that her face "looked fat."

Including this one by Wesley Loy in which he claims that seeing a bump outside of her clothing convinced him.

And of course my response to that is simply this, and this:

March 26, 2008

Palin goes on: 

Thank goodness liberals are consistent in refusing to apply double standards, thanks to their disdain for hypocrisy – so they’ll come through once again! Rest assured these self-designated protectors of what they obviously believe is the “weaker sex” needing protection in the political arena will elevate political discourse. Apparently, Democrats demand their next chosen one’s brain must be absent. Opposition – go there exploring a liberal’s brain and you find nothing; or, find something and you’re just trying to distract voters from the REAL issues. (Okay did that make sense to anyone?)


See, the country’s just swell under the Obama regime (which includes any cabinet member who’d lie and prove ineptitude by shining the boot that’s now on America’s neck). With enormous issues to debate before choosing a Presidential/Vice Presidential ticket, have confidence no mean-spirited salaciousness will be pushed by “real journalists.” 

Nope. This just doesn’t happen at this respectable level of American politics. 

Just ask me. And Trig. 

- Sarah Palin

Then Palin offers this picture of her and little Trig as her shield against any blowback from this ridiculous post.

Yes, Trig is very cute. However his mother may be a psychopath!

Palin must feel awfully confident that she has managed to put the Trig controversy behind her at this point. Or else she would not be so cavalier about bringing it up all of the time.

And that is really too bad. Because I am quite confident that we have more than enough proof to convince a judge or jury that Palin did indeed fake her last pregnancy.

And if there are any journalists out there willing to reopen this investigation I would be more than willing to offer my photos, past posts, and information that I have gathered over the last six years.

Remember Joe McGinniss set out to prove that I was wrong about Trig, and in the end he became a believer. Whether he admitted it in print or not.

Update: Apparently in my rush to type this out I did not pay very close attention to all of the links that Palin used to prove she was harassed.

Believe it or not, she actually used this one to prove that trig truthers were barking up the wrong tree.

Seriously who looks at this and thinks, by gosh she was pregnant?

Update: I decided to bump this up to the top today after several of you asked me to do so.

I really never do this, but since so many of you were interested in this topic, and wanted to discuss it further I figured I would make an exception. 

Here are a couple of response from other media outlets to Palin's pity party/

The National Journal essentially agreed with her.

The Daily Mail covered it in depth, but was also mostly on her side concerning the Trig issue.

And Joan Walsh tweeted about Palin linking to the Salon article, which "debunked" the controversy.

I'm proud that @SarahPalinUSA posted @salon and @JustinElliott's debunking of Trig theories to attack the media's Trig reporting
— Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) May 20, 2014

Do you think @SarahPalinUSA even bothers to read what she posts on FB? Or was she praising @Salon? https://t.co/ifP240fa35
— Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) May 20, 2014

By the way I tweeted Walsh back and told her that Salon did not debunk anything.

I doubt she'll respond though.

In attempt to slam media for not being outraged sooner over the Martin Bashir comments, Greta brings up Andrew Sullivan's questions about Trig. Uh oh!

Here was the actual headline from Gretawire:

Here is a question: was “MSM” outraged when Andrew Sullivan, member of the media, said Trig Palin was not the Governor’s child?

Oh yes, she did just open Pandora's box, and that box is just chick full of things that Sarah Palin SHOULD by all rights want to be locked up forever.

Here is the rest of the post:

I just spotted this tweet…and yes, I have read the recent outrage…but what took so long? How about Andrew Sullivan’s comments? how come the media silence for him? And that was not someone shaming himself with crude language but picking on a special needs child! or how about the thing David Letterman said about the Palin’s daughter when she was about 14? Any outrage? From MSM or women’s organizations or women role models? 

It is one thing to have substantive and ideological differences, but this Bashir level (the gutter) thing really isn’t that new. So what took the media so long? 

 Gee what was it that Andrew wrote way back when?

It seems to me we have two options. It’s possible that Palin simply made up her drama of labor, or exaggerated it for effect, when in fact it was a routine, if rare, pregnancy, and she had mild warnings that the birth may be premature, and she gussied that up into a tall tale of her pioneer spirit, guided by her doctor, who refused to take the NYT’s calls as soon as Palin hit the big time. I think that’s the likeliest explanation, given the sheer world-historical weirdness of the alternative. 

But it’s also possible that she never had that baby at all. I mean, if you read the emails and independent reports above and were asked if this woman were in labor with a special needs child, and that her water had already broken, would you believe it? Just put all the facts in front of you and ask yourself that question. 

So she is either a self-serving drama queen who didn’t realize her story would imply she put her child – and many others on the planes – at great risk and then winged it to make her story more plausible; or she is a fantastic hoaxer and liar at a world class meshugana level that, at some point, will make Weinergate look like a damp squib. 

To my mind, either option makes her unfit for high office, which is all you need to know really. And the fact that she has never been asked about this by any MSM journalist tells you so so much about what motivates the DC press corps. It’s certainly not curiosity. 

I must really thank Greta for allowing us this trip back through Trig Truther memory lane, I almost forgot how much fun calling Palin out on this obvious deception can be.

And if I may blow my own horn a little, I think that almost immediately following that post by Andrew Sullivan, that I offered the two most compelling posts (One from the same day June 2011 and the other from August of 2011) for the argument that Palin did NOT in fact give birth to Trig Palin. (And of course this one did not hurt at all either.)

Ultimately I believe that we, as a community, have  proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that Palin did not in fact give birth to Trig Paxson Van Palin on April 18th. In fact I remain convinced that if Sarah Palin ever grew the backbone to take me to court over my assertion that she is a liar I would have little trouble proving, beyond reasonable doubt, that I am telling nothing but the truth and that she is in fact a liar of almost epic proportions.

However apparently Palin herself  remains blithely unaware that her web of deception has been untangled, and seems confident that she will never be held accountable for the egregious lies that she told to the American people. As further evidenced by this response on Gretawire to Van Susteren's post:

SHP Private • 4 hours ago − Greta - I appreciate how conscientious you are regarding the bigger picture surrounding issues like this. The public appreciates your fairness & willingness to bring to light more background info. You & John have a great day! - Sarah Palin

The famous "Wild Ride" interview revisited, and analyzed. Let's see what we might learn, shall we? Update!

A while back a reader sent me this rather interesting e-mail which included the original interview with Palin concerning her "wild ride" accompanied by an analysis of her words. I found it rather interesting and thought I would share it with all of you today. .

Here it is in full (With the e-mailer's name removed, of course.) 

Hello Gryphen. I know you've covered the wild ride a hundred times, but I took part of Sarah's interview and applied statement analysis to it. I hope you can use it. Statement Analysis is the most accurate way of determining if a person is lying in a verbal or written statement. A person cannot give a lengthy deceptive statement without revealing that it is a lie. This is because people will always word their statement based on all their knowledge. Therefore, their statement may contain information they did not intend to share. This is the transcript from the Wild Ride interview with Sarah Palin. The statement analysis is in italics and the sensitivity indicators are highlighted red.

(Since I tend to put everything that I don't personally write in italics I decided to use quotation marks to identify the analysis instead.)


Transcript of Palin Interview 

Reporter: I was hoping you could walk us through a little bit about kind of what happened because he came earlier that you thought and not when and where. 

Palin: And, uh, he wasn’t due for 4 or 5 weeks later and um, while I was at the energy conference. I felt perfectly fine but uh, had thought maybe a few things were starting to progress a little bit that perhaps there was an idea there that he might come early. So I called my doctor at about uh four in the morning in Texas and um I said ya know I’m gonna stay for the day here at the energy conference - have a speech that I was determined to give at one o’clock that afternoon and, um, had Todd check on a couple of flights that were earlier than we had scheduled. I decided it would be ok to, um, skip the reception that night that we’d already by that time have taken care of our meetings and my speech. So Todd checked on flights. A flight allowed us to get out a little earlier than we had planned. 

" Her use of the word "I"-- I was at the energy conference. I felt fine. I called my doctor. I said I'm gonna stay. I was determined. I decided. This is distancing between her and her husband and leads an analyst to wonder if Todd was present with her during those times she described. When she changes the pronoun from "I" to "we" it indicates when they were actually together (after the meetings and speech). By repeating twice that Todd was checking on early flights, she shows us this topic is sensitive to her, which indicates deception. Sarah says, "I was at the energy conference, I felt perfectly fine." These are true statements; there are no unnecessary words added in and no effort made by the subject to clarify them as she feels the need to do with Todd checking on flights. Reader: note that she uses "he" to refer to Trig. She does not use his name or any kind of pet name or nickname, which suggests that she is not at this time close to Trig on an emotional level."

Skipped the reception and, um, called my doctor before I got on the plane to say, ‘Yea, we think that we will come home a few hours early,’ and, uh, she said ‘OK call when you land and I’ll check you out.’ But none of my babies had been early and being my fifth child I know what labor feels like (laughing) and if I had felt at all that I was really engaged in uh, labor activities I would not have desired to fly and, um, get back uh, to deliver in Alaska. But anyway, so no real huge labor signs. Landed in, uh, in Anchorage at about10:30. Got out to the valley at 11:30 and she met us at the hospital, checked me out and said, ‘Um, Yea you look, you may have it um tonight or in the morning.’ And it was smooth, it was relatively easy, in fact it was very easy, the easiest of all of them because he was so tiny. And, um, it’s just been absolutely wonderful. It was all, it just all seemed meant to be… the logistics and everything else just worked out so perfectly and to us he’s absolutely perfect, too. 

"Note that her narration changed from her deciding, her coming home has changed to "we." Also note the missing pronoun for "skipped the reception and called my doctor." This indicates deception because she has skipped a large chunk of time. She is not being led by questions, she is free-editing her own story and for some reason decides to go straight from Todd checking on flights to skipping the reception and getting on the plane. Judging from her use of pronouns, we can determine that she was not alone when she arrived at the hospital. However, she gives no indicators as to who she was with."

"She refers to her other children as"my babies," not "our babies, which is very telling. She then refers to Trig as her "fifth child." For those well-versed in Statement Analysis, when someone uses the word "child," it is associated with risk, danger, harm, and abuse. It is not called baby abuse/kid abuse, it is called child abuse. Trig is not her baby like her other children have been, he is simply her fifth child. She starts out by describing her labor as relatively easy, and then corrects herself by saying it was not just easy, not just very easy, but very very easy. When the subject uses these qualifiers, she is telling us she wants us to believe them. From this sentence we can say that his birth was not very easy." 

Reporter: Of course you’re back to work already today and actually signed a bill that day, right? 

Palin: That day, yeah, staff came out to the hospital and I signed a bill there so I could uh make sure we transmitted that in time and then uh here today also yeah, we have some energy updates I didn’t want to miss so that was good. Look at him he’s just doing so well and it’s been easy and relaxing and again it all seems just meant to be this way. 

"Please note that any use of "so, since, therefore, because" shows a reason why something did or did not take place. This indicates sensitivity. She had no reason to explain why she signed the bill but offers us a lengthy response as to why she did. Again, Trig is mentioned using only he/him pronouns. He has not yet been mentioned with a name/term of endearment/nickname by his mother. "Meant to be" indicates that God is controlling the situation (freeing her from all guilt) and that God is the only person who can judge her alleged actions." 

Reporter: You said you felt some signs of labor, what were those signs? 

Palin: Well not contractions so much because I had Braxton Hicks contractions for months as every pregnant woman does, and nothing real painful but just knowing that, um, it was feeling like, I may not um, be able to be pregnant a whole another four or five weeks knowing that it would be not a bother to call our doctor and let her know. 

"And um she’s delivered how many babies over the year did she say? Extra words in describing that not just she, but all pregnant women have Braxton Hicks for months. This indicates sensitivity concerning her labor. She says she was not in pain and not having contractions which would have alerted her. She goes on to say knowing that she may not be able to be pregnant and corrects herself halfway through by saying it was feeling like she may not be able to be pregnant for much longer. Her first response indicates that she knew Trig was close to being delivered. She gives no indication as to what alerted her to this. This is also the first time that "my doctor" has been referred to as "our doctor," why the change? Sarah then asks how many babies CBJ has delivered over the year; it is a specific time frame (the year) that she changes to a couple of decades in her next breath. 

Todd: Lots 

Palin: A lot. It’s been a couple of decades of her delivering babies. We knew to call her and just get her advice and, um, from there we again decided to skip the energy conference reception and come on home and get checked out. 

"She says "we knew to call her" but in her first paragraph she said that she called the doctor herself. Usually the person dialing the phone makes the statement that they were the one who called. In her whole paragraph she indicated she was alone when she called to talk to her doctor. Was the decision-making in reference to phoning the doctor made over text messaging? She also says "we again decided to skip the energy conference." Who is "we?" In her first paragraph, she describes herself as making the initial decision, indicating that Todd had nothing to do with the decision. Her priorities are also telegraphed by her saying "come home and get checked out." Getting back home was paramount to her getting checked out." 

Reporter: So did your water break? 

"Readers note that this is a very straightforward question. It is a yes/no answer. The strongest statement Palin could make to answer this truthfully would be to say "Yes, my water broke" or "No, my water did not break." She does neither of these." 

Palin: Well, if you must know more of those type of details, but, um… 

Reporter: Well, your dad said that and I saw him say it so that’s why I asked. 

Palin: Well that was again if, if I must get personal, technical about this at the same time, um, it was one, it was a sign that I knew, um, could lead to uh, labor being uh kind of kicked in there was any kind of, um, amniotic leaking, amniotic fluid leaking, so when, when that happened we decided OK let’s call her. 

"This response is incredibly sensitive to Palin. She telegraphs this by repeating words: if if, personal technical it was one it was a sign, amniotic leaking amniotic fluid leaking, so when when that happened. This shows she does not want to answer the question and indicates deception. Her use of synonyms with regards to "personal, technical" also indicates sensitivity. Is the question personal or is it technical? One implies she shouldn't have to answer it and the other implies it's too difficult to answer it. She was asked, did your water break and answered that "I knew [amniotic leaking] could lead to labor being kicked in. When that happened we decided OK let's call [the doctor]." She again states that "we decided" to call CBJ, although she does not indicate that anyone was with her when she called, only that there was another person who helped her make the decision to call. 

Todd: There’s a lot of new doctors out there on the streets in the last couple of days. 

"This is a sarcastic remark. It would seem to be aimed at the interviewer, since she was asking personal/technical questions." 

Palin: Yeah, that’s significant too. Todd said, uh, after getting a couple of comments he said that he said wow everybody’s a doctor, Everybody’s going to tell us what we could have should have done and even though these folks - especially the critics- they’re not doctors. They didn’t know the situation. They don’t know the situation. They, they certainly don’t know our doctor and the consultations that we’ve had with her. So we did nothing to put our child nor anyone else in danger, uh, going through this five times I know what labor is and, uh, I am not a glutton for pain and punishment. I would have never, um, wanted to travel if I had been fully engaged in labor. 

"That's significant too, she says. What is it significant to, especially since it was a facetious remark and not intended to be serious? The timing of this remark in this interview suggests that the doctor comment was significant to what she was just talking bout: her water breaking. This implies that she does not think discussion of her whether or not her water broke is significant. She states that "they didn't know the situation, they don't know the situation;" there is only one situation being questioned which is her labor. She indicates that there is not just a past situation, but also a present situation that people are unaware of. Presumably because they are not doctors, don't know CBJ, and were not present during consults. Consultations is plural, meaning they had more than one need to consult her. A consultation is not a prenatal appointment or testing." 

"Conclusion: there is marked deception indicated multiple times throughout her story. She does not refer to her newborn as her baby, a baby, by a nickname-- only as her "fifth child" or "child." She uses pausing fillers like "um, uh, yeah" more than thirty times in this section of the interview, this indicates she is not recalling an actual memory but has to think of what she's going to say. Her ums and uhs stop entirely when she gets defensive and angry about people acting like doctors. She is genuinely upset. They start up again as soon as she mentions that they did nothing to put their child in danger. Does this interview give proof that Sarah Palin did not give birth to Trig Palin? Sadly, no. It does indicate that she is lying throughout the entire interview concerning the Wild Ride, however. Does it give proof that Sarah has a poor relationship with her husband and her fifth child by using distancing language? (Skeptics please remember that if Trig was adopted, he's legally a Palin) Yes. I know that many mothers, nurses, doctors, and Trig Truthers have already decided that the Wild Ride was a load of Palin crap. But hopefully this analysis gives us a few more clues as to certain nuances in the Palin clan."

Now I did not conduct this analysis myself, so I a cannot vouch for its accuracy, but in my opinion it makes some rather striking points that I thought would be interesting to discuss.

So what did you think?

P.S. Here is a video of the interview courtesy of Palingates for you to use for reference.

Update: Apparently this analysis has already been posted at Sarah's Scandals a couple of weeks ago. I apologize for not providing a link, or giving them credit, but I was not aware of that fact when I posted this. This does happen from time to time, and since I don't get the chance to visit everybody's blog I really have no idea.

Anyhow it certainly cannot hurt to have something like this show up more than one place.

Bill Maher has a message for Trig Truthers. Update!

 I totally buy it.  Why do you think I call Palin Snowdrift Snooki?

Video courtesy of the Huffington Post.

Update: You know Maher might have a point!

H/T to curiouser and curiouser

The reason that Steve Schmidt soured on Sarah Palin so quickly becomes more clear. He may have secretly been a Trig Truther.

Steve Scmidt and wife Angela.

Recently I received a rather interesting message from a source who has provided me quite a lot of very credible information in the past. Much of this information I had been able to confirm through other sources, or had simply allowed the events to play as the source had predicted they would on their own.

This is what they relayed to me the other day:

After the airing of the movie "Game Change" Steve Schmidt's wife, a labor delivery nurse, expressed to certain Washington journalists her doubts about Sarah's story of Trig's birth, and revealed to them that she expressed the same doubts to her husband during the 2008 campaign. 

Now just mull that over in your head for a little while.

This would mean that fairly early in the campaign Steve Schmidt would have had a very credible medical professional telling him that Sarah Palin's delivery story was simply not believable.

And do any of us doubt that if Angela Schmidt had bothered to do any research on the matter, and happened upon some of the babygate sites, that she would have similar doubts about the ENTIRE pregnancy?  Yeah me either.

So if this information is credible, and I would be willing to bet that it is, then that would have made Schmidt's almost immediate "buyer's remorse" all that more understandable.  He could not help but to have realized that he had a potentially explosive situation on his hands.

And just imagine how more convinced he was that she was lying about giving birth to Trig when after being asked by the campaign to produce a birth certificate to put the matter to rest (I have sources which say that did indeed happen), instead she proclaims that of course she is the mother because the only other possible birth mother is her daughter Bristol who was currently five months pregnant with her own baby. 

I think that refusal to provide proof (At least to the campaign), and the totally bizarre note from her doctor, must have been more than enough to convince Schmidt that something smelled fishy, and it was more than the clothes the Palins brought with them from Alaska.

It ALSO means that "certain Washington journalists" have also heard that a medical professional with ties to the McCain campaign was very doubtful that Palin's story was credible. And that those doubts remain to this day.

So the question is, WHY is Schmidt still refusing to talk about this?  Is it out of loyalty to John McCain? Is it out of embarrassment for how easily duped they all were by Wasilla's village idiot? Or is it something else?

I find it interesting that Schmidt's wife is a labor delivery nurse, because it was a labor and delivery nurse who first tipped ME off as well.  I was just as ignorant of the deception as everybody else until I received an e-mail very late at night on the day she was picked, from a friend of mine, who is a nurse, telling me that there was NO way that Palin's pregnancy and birth story could have happened. NO way!

It was after I received that e-mail that I started to do the research, and do you know what? She was right!

Well I for one would like a journalist to actually ask Schmidt this question face to face. Schmidt can be evasive at times but I have to imagine that he would be unwilling to deny that his wife had these doubts if confronted.

Joe McGinniss is not to yet quite finished talking about Sarah Palin. This time in Australia.

"The Rogue" stripped away the Palin mythology and revealed to the world what lay beneath . Eww!

Courtesy of The Sydney Morning Herald:

 His research - or at least his accommodation in Alaska - made news around the world. "Joe McGinniss has rented the house next to the Palin family's lakeside home in Wasilla, Alaska, for five months while he completes his work," reported this paper's website in May 2010. 

"Palin did everything she could to stop it," says McGinniss. "She threatened. She had a lawyer announce she was considering a lawsuit." That didn't happen. But within weeks of publication, Palin announced she would not be running in 2012. 

McGinniss is far from claiming sole responsibility. As he sees it, Palin faced two problems running for the Republican nomination this year: she didn't have a hope of winning and any attempt would expose her to the sort of scrutiny that would put at risk her lucrative new career as a political celebrity. 

"These people worked out a way to game the system," McGinniss says of the Palin family. "I don't blame them. They are just grifters who suddenly saw a chance at the main chance and they were clever enough and canny enough to take it. The American media was so gullible and the right wing was so desperate for new heroic figures that they basically got a free ride. She knew she wouldn't get a free ride this year in 2012." 

His attack on Palin is full throttle. "I think everything about her is false. I think her claims of super Christianity are as false as everything else. She discovered who she needed to be to play to a very small audience in her town of Wasilla and she has calculated her way every step of the way. There has been an opening for a woman of the extreme right. She saw that. 

"Even in Alaska there were no openings for educated, intelligent women of the left because Alaska - part of the anomaly that is the state - had a number of those already. What they needed was a militant crusader for evangelical values. And she combined - and we can never underestimate this - raw sex appeal with Christian platitudes. The Anchorage Daily News called her 'The Joan of Arc of Alaska politics'. There was nothing subtle about it." 

What followed in his eyes was a tale of cunning and vengeance; high ambition and lazy performance; bobsleds and cocaine; a toxic marriage that saw Todd sleeping on the couch most nights and the kids roaming the neighbourhood looking for a feed. Then young Track was shunted off to the military after the high-school bus fleet was mysteriously vandalised one winter. 

"I laughed," says McGinniss. "The closer I got and the more people I talked to who knew her, the more I laughed. After a while laughter gave way to a numb stupefaction that this brainless, venal, definitely crafty, religious fanatic and self-aggrandising bimbo could have become a powerful factor in national politics." 

The Herald even asked Joe about the mystery of Trig:

McGinniss devotes hilarious and scurrilous pages to the mystery of little Trig, the Down syndrome baby born soon after Palin won John McCain's endorsement. "The story she tells of her pregnancy and the birth simply can't be true," says McGinniss who wonders if the "birth" was designed to make Palin the poster child of the Right to Life. 

"It would be the most cynical ploy and the greatest hoax ever pulled off in American politics," he says. Pursuing the story with him are bloggers and the influential columnist Andrew Sullivan. But McGinniss despairs of the failure of the "establishment media" to take the story seriously. He doesn't believe the issue is yet settled either way: "I remain Trignostic," he says. 

I have to say that I know Joe is FAR from Trognostic, but I also know that he was very frustrated that he was never able to crack open that particular part of the Palin mythology.

Still he managed to bring the controversy to the forefront of the American audience for a short time, and may very well have been the MAIN reason why Palin has moved as far away from the political scene as she has recently.

And now Joe will be in Australia this month to discuss this most scandalous of deceptions with an entirely new audience.  And didn't "Sarah Palin-You Betcha!" just start appearing on Australian TV recently as well?

Why yes it did!

Happy 4th birthday Trig Paxson Van Palin!

Trig, the enigma, is introduced to the world.

Do ears and baby weight fluctuate this much?

Teagan Cole, Sarah's best friend Kristan's daughter, holding "Trig?"

Five months later all deformities are gone.

Best buds!

Time to make an appearance, and put those internet rumors to rest.

Wow, four years! Has it really been that long?

I guess time flies when you are trying to piece together a puzzle with ever evolving pieces to work with, don'tcha know?

I think I can safely say that I have come about as close to solving this mystery as anybody on the planet.

I do in fact know, with absolutely no doubt, that Sarah Palin did not give birth to Trig on April 18, 2008 at the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center. (I even have a fair idea as to how the ruse was pulled off.)

I am also convinced that we have seen more than one baby standing in for Trig.

And as you know I don't believe that Bristol is the mother of the child that we now know to be Trig Paxson Van Palin.

Still there are more questions yet to be answered.  The biggest one being exactly WHY there was this fake pregnancy?  I have some theories, and I have discounted many more, but I have to admit that I am not certain of the motive. In fact part of me thinks the motive, much like the babies, evolved over time.

One of the questions I get asked all of the time is, "Do you think this scandal will EVER be revealed to the public?"

And my answer is always "yes," in fact in many ways it already has been revealed.  The only part that is really left is to PROVE it.

And THAT is proving to be a MUCH more difficult undertaking.  Though I still have a few irons in the fire which may accomplish that very goal. Hopefully.

However for today I simply hope that Trig has the BEST birthday ever (And no I DON'T believe today is his real birthday! But it IS the one they celebrate.), and that he is well cared for and loved.  Because regardless of why he is part of the Palin family, the fact remains that he is.  And he deserves our best wishes and hope for the future.

Because as we know being in close proximity to Sarah Palin can be poisonous to ANYONE, and little Trig may be particularly vulnerable.

The new "Game Change" poster and a discussion with director Jay Roach.

Here is a portion of the interview courtesy of Inside Movies:

Putting Palin at the center of your story is a thankless task in some ways, for you and especially Julianne Moore. Not only is Palin still extremely visible both politically and in pop-culture, but she’s already been famously caricatured as well. 

It was daunting. She’s one of the most famous people on the planet. We [knew] people watching the film would have all sorts of expectations about what Sarah Palin should be like. We expected people to bring up Tina Fey. We expected people to be skeptical about anyone who played her. My approach was to not try to impersonate her. In fact, we tried to go right at those expectations by having a scene where Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin is watching Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, replicating the moment where she watched SNL the night that [skit] ran. We have actual Tina Fey in that footage on the monitor specifically to say, “Okay, that’s one thing. And this is a different thing, entirely different.” This is not a caricature, and it’s not an impersonation. Julianne wanted to get not just into the surface — her skin, her clothes, her hair, and her accent — but to kind of internalize what she could imagine Sarah was going through psychologically, what anxieties she was experiencing stepping out on to the national stage. 

You know there’s no way you’re going to win over Palin partisans with this… 

We tried to reach out. I wrote two long letters — one to her attorney and one to her directly because I very much wanted to speak to her to get the story right. She just declined; that’s how it goes. I had to settle for getting her voice through her audio books and through interviews and many of the personal accounts of people who were in the rooms with her at the time. But people have made films before based on true stories without having full access. It’s up to the audience now to judge whether we pulled it off, but we sure put a lot into it. 

My take after seeing Game Change is that audiences might be highly critical of Sarah Palin the politician, but it’s nearly impossible not to have empathy for Sarah Palin the woman. 

I like how you put that, because we tried to play her without being critical of her as a person and more just trying to question the decision — about how the process went. She’s a very interesting person who had a lot going on in her life at that point. She’s got five kids, a new baby with Down syndrome, an older boy going off to fight in Iraq, two teenage daughters, and now she is in the middle of a national campaign. You couldn’t really write a fictional situation with forces that could pull on someone harder than those forces pulled on her. Then with all that going on, to electrify her constituents as powerfully as she did. That was an amazing person that can do that.

You know part of me wants to call up  Mr. Roach and point out that Palin did NOT actually give birth to her fifth son, and what the real reasons were that Track was suddenly so patriotic, but you know it would be a waste of time.  And besides the movie is already made, and about to debut, so it would really not do much good anyhow.

I learned a long time ago that journalists, documentary filmmakers, and authors might be completely sold on the fact that Palin faked her pregnancy, and that almost ALL of the things that we think we know about her are invented specifically for consumption by the public, but that by NO means indicates that they are willing to put that information into their project.

After all they have a product to sell and if it seems too far out on the fringe nobody will buy it.

I also think that Palin counts on this fact. That is why she seems to feel so comfortable making fun of the "Trig Truthers."

Which is why I am still convinced that when Joe McGinniss wrote that there were still lingering doubts about her last pregnancy, even though he did not take a definitive stand one way or the other, that it scared the crap out of her. And I really do think that it had much to do with her decision to finally admit she was not jumping into the 2012 race.

And I also believe, that even if this movie avoids that particular topic, it is still going to have a fairly devastating effect on how the public perceives her moving forward.

Which is good enough for me.

Following Palin's lead Fox News uses Trig Truther smear to discredit Andrew Sullivan's article in support of President Obama.

This is how Sullivan responded yesterday:

Fox News is now waging war on the essay. I'm not surprised. Megyn Kelly has declared that I am "not a real journalist." She has also just said that I have written that Trig is not Sarah Palin's child. As longtime readers well know, I took great pains never to state that and merely to ask Palin, given her insane story about the birth of her child, to provide some evidence for it, which she said she would but never did. The Beast has asked for a correction. Real journalists do not tell untruths on air without correcting them. 

What I want to know is why they cannot invite the author of an essay to debate it, rather than two random individuals (including Rich "Starbursts" Lowry) to discuss. Surely that's only fair - unless, of course, I am on a blacklist. So this is an open challenge to Fox News. 

If you want to trash my work, have me on to defend it. Any time, Megyn. Any time. What are you afraid of?

I would be very surprised if they had him on, especially since he can easily out talk them, and also reopen that Sarah Palin's birth story in a way that might be too much for the viewers of Fox News to handle.

I am a little surprised that Fox was willing to use Palin's impulsive response to Sullivan as their jumping off point, since it means that many people will start Googling "Sarah Palin's pregnancy" and that will lead them to all kinds of places that Fox may not want to to go. Including here of course.

So personally I would like ot thank Fox News for the increase in traffic.

Dumb-asses!