Media Goes on Search and Destroy Mission

The major media failed to take notice that it was a bad week for them last week.

They were badly wrong on the Sarah Palin / Paul Revere story last week. They rushed into a blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy and pushed the Sarah-is-Stupid meme hard, getting ahead of the facts - which turned out to be that Palin was actually historically accurate. Paul Revere, as it turns out, did warn the British Regulars while he was detained that night that the militia was aroused and waiting. The Regulars did have orders to seize the patriot's weapons. There were shots and bells from those Revere had alarmed. Palin had taken the tour, listened, and got her facts essentially right - if a little inartful.

They were badly wrong on the Breitbart / Weiner story. Again, the left media rushed into a feeding frenzy, quite sure that Andrew Breitbart had faked a story and hacked the Congressman's Twitter feed, and setup one of their heroes. How dare he? What? He didn't. Weiner was lying? Well, Breitbart's still evil.

This would be the natural place for left-media types to step back and gut check their bias. You would think. How did they get the two stories so wrong? Bias is the unadvoidable answer. They had their heroes and villans predetermined and fit their stories to those memes before the facts were out.

Not only was their no gut check, certainly no apologies, but the major media stepped their malfeasance up a considerably despicable notch. They went on a search-and-destroy mission on the 24,000 emails that the State of Alaska released on Friday from Governor Sarah Palin.

The gloves came off. The masks dropped. Partisan game on. How else can you describe both the Washington Post and the New York Times advertising for volunteers to comb through the emails for details of interest? Why don't they just say "help us find dirt" or "do our slander for us"? Surely those volunteers and all of the news organizations that showed up for their copies of the emails will be fair and balanced? Neutral? Ah, I crack myself up just saying that.

It's not like there are important news stories to report on, like say China dumping 97% of their US securities and asserting that the US is "already defaulting" on our debt. That could have important implications, don't you think. But hey, let's get right on those Palin emails.

Yahoo News headline this morning: "So far, no bombshells in Palin emails".

Really? That's a news headlines? You were hoping for bombshells, and are disappointed not to find them?

How about this: "Search of emails shows Palin to be competent and engaged Govenor"?

I used the term search-and-destroy earlier. If you grew up in the Vietnam era, as I did, you know that term. It's an aggressive brutal warfare tactic. Drop in troops, find the enemy, destroy them, and leave the battlefield. It's not an exact analogy of course to the media's actions this week, but it expresses the change in media tactics regarding Palin and other prominent conservatives. It's moved past negative coverage. It's moved past relentless snark. It's moved to character assassination, as this band of left-partisans scours Palins emails, hoping publicly to find damaging tidbits. It's repulsive.

Let me just recap for the left partisans your bad behavior:

- You pushed too hard in the 2008 election cycle, savaging Sarah Palin as a Vice-Presidential candidate.

- You pushed too hard in the 2010 election cycle, relentlessly slandering the good people showing up for Tea Party rallies - me included - as ignorant racists.

- You pushed too hard in the immediate aftermath of the Tuscon shooting of Congresswoman Giffords, with slanderous accusations that conservatives had responsibility - when the shootings were the work of a deranged individual with no political motive.

- You pushed too hard with the Sarah-is-Stupid meme in the wake of her "blood libel" statement in her video response to the Tuscon shootings. You maliciously accused her of blood-on-her-hands culpability in a heinous mass murder for God's sake. Blood libel was a perfectly reasonable term for that, as verified by prominent rabbis and scholars. But you never apologized and push to this day.

- You pushed too hard with the media wilding on Palin and Breitbart last week, and you weren't even right about it. But you never stop pushing.

And you're way out of bounds with this Palin email search and destroy mission.

It's clear that the 2012 election cycle is going to be a nasty political war. It's clear that the major media sources have already chose sides and methods. Slander of conservatives. Protection and promotion of Democrat liberals.

Well, you're not the only source of information in town anymore. There are conservatives with a voice. And we're going to call you on it every step of the way.