Disgruntled campaign aides for John McCain aides are now blabbing to the media blaming their man’s defeat on Sarah Palin-and the stuff they’ve been saying about her is both pathetic and amusing.
Like this story: She-horrors!-opened a hotel room door for them wearing a bathrobe because she had been taking a shower when they knocked. “Whore-y,” pronounced an aide. Another aide claimed Palin thought Africa was a country, not a continent. (Does anyone seriously believe this stuff? Oh, right, David Frum and Peggy Noonan probably do.) And a third anonymous “angry aide” described-to Newsweek, no less–the campaign-trail shopping spree Sarah and her family took (at the behest of the Republican National Committee, mind you) as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”
Very classy thing to say about a state governor from your own party that’s now kind of dwindling in terms of its elected representatives, folks. How about, say looking in the mirror, “angry” aides, and wondering if maybe the fact that McCain lost might have had something to do with the dumb, unfocused campaign you ran for him. As Michelle Malkin points out:
“Sarah Palin worked her heart out. She energized tens of thousands to come out who would have otherwise stayed home. She touched countless families. I didn’t agree with everything she said on the campaign trail. But two fundamental conservative stands she took mattered greatly to me: She vigorously defended the Second Amendment and the sanctity of life more eloquently in practice than any of the educated conservative aristocracy.
“And she did it all with a tirelessness and infectious optimism that defied the shameless, bottomless attempts by elites in both parties to bring her and her family down.
“Shame on the smearers who don’t have the balls to show their faces.
“Thank you, Sarah Palin. Thank you for stepping up the plate and serving your country.”
And Jennifer Rubin of Commentary points out that the in-house nastiness oozing from the McCain campaign suggests that maybe it wasn’t so bad that McCain lost:
“Watching his team engage in vicious, public fighting suggests that perhaps he was never the ideal person for a chief executive role. After all, if the campaign was this bad, imagine what the White House would have been like.”
The best reaction of all comes from this commenter on the Hot Air:
“If the Republican party wants to make [Palin] the scapegoat, and is complicit in portraying her to be an idiot, then we don’t deserve to win another election.”
Darned right. If Sarah Palin hadn’t been on the ticket, there’s a good chance that McCain would have lost even more dramatically than he did. Meanwhile, Malkin has posted an online “Thank you, Sarah Palin” petition. Sign it (click here), and show your gratitude to the tough and gracious woman who brought high spirits, street smarts, and boundless energy to a battle to restore faith, personal responsibility, and loyalty to country and its defense to the central place they ought to occupy in American public life.