Presswatch

...Emmons “flatly refused to consider any kind of censorship...

...Her claim that she was quoting a completely unrelated comment by Lincoln was absurd...

...Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them [soldiers] out on a task that is from God...

...The librarian was aghast...

...At its most respectable, this took the form of a September 2 New York Times story titled “A New Twist in the Debate on Mothers”: With five children, including an infant with Down syndrome and, as the country learned Monday, a pregnant 17-year-old, Ms...

...Two days later, Time magazinerepeatedthetale, attributing it to John Stein, the incumbent mayor Palin had defeated in 1996: Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times...

...The media attacks on palin proved devastating for Obama’s campaign...

...This does not speak well for the state of sex education in Illinois...

...being normal, Obama’s supporters in the media sucBristol’s pregnancy moved this theory from the ceeded in transforming him into the candidate of realm of the preposterous to the impossible...

...Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a ‘task that is from God.’” Yet the day before the AP’s report, the liberal-left Huffington Post had posted a video of Palin’s actual words: Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right...

...She resigned in August 1999, two months before Palin was voted in for a second mayoral term...

...This crackpot story that Obama’s campaign “seemed flummoxed in figoriginated on the Angry Left website DailyKos.com, uring out how to deal with [Palin...

...PressWaTcH TheWarAgainst the Normal by James Taranto I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town,” Sarah Palin told the Republican National Convention...

...When...

...His aides said they and mainstream media mostly kept mum about it...

...It wasn’t even written or published then...

...Which, needless to say, doesn’t exactly was pregnant in order to put an end to a bizarre please reporters...

...Palin has set off a fierce argument among women about November 2008 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor 59 PressWaTcH claim: “Her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove… that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right...

...The chairman of the Alaska Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee told the Daily News that there was no evidence in her files of any censorship at the Wasilla library...

...soldiers on a task that is from God...

...Stein had hired many of the department heads...

...Kilkenny made an appearance in the Daily News story, quoting Palin as asking Baker at a city council meeting, “What would be your response if I asked you to remove some books from the collection...

...Palin: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said—first, he suggested never presume to know what God’s will is, and I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words...

...editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today colA writer for the left-liberal Salon.com echoed the umn for OpinionJournal.com...

...On August 31, two days after Palin joined the ticket, a hometown critic, Anne Kilkenny, sent out what became a widely circulated e-mail that claimed, among other things, that “while Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed...

...Smith Goes to Washington...

...Obama got angry...

...A reader of West’s site named Andrew Aucoin then posted “the list of books Palin tried to have banned”—90 of them in all...

...Newsweek’s website even published an article by a professor at the University of Chicago, where Barack Obama once taught, that said of Palin: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman...

...Want to clear up what’s on the Internet...

...She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them...

...The story had been so thoroughly debunked by September 11–12, when Palin sat for a series of interviews with ABC News’s Charlie Gibson, that Gibson lobbed a softball: Gibson: There’s a lot on the Internet about a conversation you did or did not have with a librarian about banning books...

...Both Emmons and Stambaugh had publicly supported him against Palin...

...An AP dispatch on the interview relied on the wire service’s own inaccurate reporting of a week earlier in claiming that Palin had “contradicted an assertion she made at her former church that ‘our national leaders are sending U.S...

...Indeed, neither the Times story on September 11: nor most others in the genre noted that when Joe Biden took his Senate seat in 1973, he was the single The McCain camp has already accused the MSM father of two boys, two and three years old...

...ABC apparently realized its mistake...

...which published a series of screeds on its website Instead, by waging war against Sarah Palin for demanding that Palin provide proof of maternity...

...net reader traced the list to a website where it appeared under the title “Books Banned at One Time or Another in the United States...

...Gibson: Exact words...

...were looking to the news media to debunk the image But there was one notable exception: the Atlantic, of her as a blue-collar reformer...

...And although a September 13 New York Times news story pointed out ABC’s YouTube sleight-of-hand, a Times editorial the same day repeated the false story: Her answers about why she had told her church that President Bush’s failed policy in Iraq was “God’s plan” did nothing to dispel our concerns about her confusion between faith and policy...

...As I write, in mid-September, McCain is ahead in the polls, after trailing Obama throughout the spring and summer...

...When they weren’t portraying her as a religious nut, journalists in and out of the mainstream were trying to paint Palin as a bad mother...

...only she is right to try...

...Emmons’s response was firm and negative, according to Kilkenny, who acknowledged that Palin did not cite any specific books for removal...

...But the media were determined to depict her as something out of Deliverance...

...In their place was a YouTube clip that made clear Palin was praying, not asserting, that Iraq was a task from God...

...Emmons survived the loyalty test and a second one a few months later...

...As for the librarian’s resignation, it appeared to be unrelated to the putative censorship: Four days before the exchange at the City Council, Emmons got a letter from Palin asking for her resignation...

...How Perhaps not coincidentally, “the media are getdare they do that...

...One survey in early whether there are enough hours in the day for September found that 51 percent of Americans her to take on the vice presidency, and whether thought reporters were “trying to hurt” Palin...

...Not only was the list a fake, but when the Anchorage Daily News investigated the story, it found no evidence that Palin had ever sought to remove books from the library...

...Are we fighting a holy war...

...spend with her children and be vice president...

...Similar letters went to police James TaraNTo chief Irl Stambaugh, public works director Jack Felton and finance director Duane Dvorak.… Palin told the Daily News back then the letters were just a test of loyalty as she took on the mayor’s job, which she’d won from three-term mayor John Stein in a hard-fought election...

...Back in 1996, Baker (then Mary Ellen Emmons) did tell the Wasilla paper, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, that Palin asked her, in the Daily News’s words, “about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose...

...But Gibson repeated another falsehood, as the ABC transcript shows: Gibson: You said recently, in your old church, “Our national leaders are sending U.S...

...But the those who oppose religion and motherhood...

...But another Librarian...

...soldiers on a task that is from God.’ ” That claim disappeared from later versions of the AP story...

...By the Atlantic wasn’t finished with Trig Palin...

...The same day, Jessamyn West, a Vermont librarian, posted the Time story to her website, Librarian.net, and added that “Mary Ellen Baker 58 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008 resigned from her library director job in 1999...

...Neither the AP nor ABC issued a correction...

...Biden’s of trying to “destroy” the governor of Alaska...

...35 percent thought journalists were even trying to provide unbiased coverage...

...When do they ever ask a man that ting mad” as well, the Post’s Howard Kurtz reported question...

...So wife and their year-old daughter had died in a car any challenge to her record or her veracity can accident three weeks earlier...

...Palin: I never banned a book, never desired to ban a book.…It kind of cracked me up seeing the list of books that I supposedly banned—one of them was Harry Potter...

...a child with Down syndrome as a act of politics—a salvo in a “culture war” and an effort to prove her JamesTaranto,a member of the Wall Street Journal’s “pro-life credentials”—rather than of maternal love...

...rumor that Bristol was the real mother of Trig Palin, the governor’s youngest son, who was born in April The New York Times reported on September 12 2008 and has Down syndrome...

...But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that’s a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God’s side...

...That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan...

...This story appears to have originated with an Associated Press dispatch of September 3, which began: “Alaska Gov...

...That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor...

...Palin: You know, I don’t know if that was my exact quote...

...60 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008...

...I was just your average hockey mom...

...When it aired the interview, the network cut the lines in which Palin disputed the quote and Gibson insisted it was her “exact words...

...his In his convention keynote speech the next day, campaign promised what a September 12 headline Rudy Giuliani asked indignantly: “How dare they on the Washington Post website called an “aggressive question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to response to GOP attacks...

...To John McCain’s supporters, his selection of Alaska’s young, reform-minded governor as his running mate felt like a feminine remake of Mr...

...now be cast as the product of an oh-so-unfair Palin had announced that her daughter Bristol press...

...Its writer time you read this, perhaps they’ll have gone negarepeatedly described Palin’s decision to give birth to tive on apple pie...