By Patrick
"Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs. From this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt—as secure and shielded against attack as, for instance, the statement that two and two make four.
It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared."
–Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics” in Crises of the Republic (1972)
It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared."
–Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics” in Crises of the Republic (1972)
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The ride is not over yet, it's just about to begin.
Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy, for years a taboo subject in the mainstream media, is not a taboo subject any more - but that doesn't mean that the media have "distinguished" themselves. Indeed the opposite has been the case. We have recently observed respected journalists put their credibility on the line for the serial liar Sarah Palin, claiming in a serious of articles that the faked pregnancy never, ever possibly could have happened.
These articles, which will go down in history as one of the major failures of American journalism, steadfastly and stubbornly ignore facts, reason and common sense, as we have explained in a series of posts. Journalists such as Julia O'Malley from the Anchorage Daily News, Justin Elliott from Salon, Dave Weigel from Slate, Megan Carpentier from Raw Story and Jason Linkins from Huffington Post are going to ask themselves how it was possible that they actually believed the claims of Sarah Palin, a woman who basically lies about "everything", even "about the weather", as Palin-biographer Geoffrey Dunn recently mentioned in an interview with Politicalgates. A woman who also produced a piece of "100% fiction" with her book Going Rogue, according to the former McCain-campaign manager Steve Schmidt.
Their articles will surely come back to haunt them.
Well, I guess they believed Sarah Palin because they wanted to believe her.
Like it or not, that was how Sarah Palin looked on March 26, 2008, just about three weeks before officially giving birth to a six-pound baby (click to enlarge):
Sarah Palin on March 26, 2008, at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau. See our recent post about the ADN-article by Julia O'Malley for the extensive documentation regarding this picture.
For anybody who is not willing to close his or her eyes, the picture which Prof. Brad Scharlott recently published in a post at Politicalgates is also a real "eye-opener":
The fact that many journalists were only too happy to embrace the assertion that "Trig Trutherism" is a nutty conspiracy theory becomes particularly apparent when one looks for example the way in which Dave Weigel recently exploited the issue of "Trig Trutherism" in an article at Slate and wrote what you could call a roundup of the "world of conspiracies", as Weigel calls it, which apparently plague the American nation.
Good news, everyone! We have survived the latest flare-up of the conspiracy theory generally known as "Trig Trutherism"—the discredited hypothesis that Sarah Palin's youngest son is not hers.
Last week, The Lies of Sarah Palin author Geoffrey Dunn published a lengthy piece—spiked by the Huffington Post, then acquired by the traffic-hungrier Business Insider—going over the same turf. His argument was blown to smithereens by Justin Elliott at Salon as well as by other reporters who sighed and decided to engage with one of the duller conspiracy theories of all time. (A serious conspiracy theory should seem less like a General Hospital subplot.)
(...)
It's a familiar rationale for conspiracy theorists: They investigate as much in sorrow as in anger. They are always just one confession away from the truth. This kind of logic is much more understandable, if no more sensible, after reading Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground, a smart and serious new book by Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay. His book shows why Americans are becoming so willing to believe lurid fantasies about the government or politicians they don't like or vaccines or the theory that the federal government was behind the attacks of 9/11 (these believers are the "truthers" of his title). And you realize that the world of conspiracies is only going to get larger.
The "world of conspiracies is only going to get larger?" Well, I don't know about that, but I would say that the world of journalists who don't believe in fact-checking and rational arguments is getting larger - and growing very fast.
Yesterday, the journalist Debra J. Saunders, a long time Sarah Palin apologist, joined the club of clueless journalists in a particularly ridiculous article in the San Francisco Chronicle called "Was Sarah Palin done in by Trig "birther" story?" Astonishingly, she claims that the babygate-bloggers are somewhat responsible for Sarah Palin's demise and writes:
When McCain picked Palin, his campaign team thought the media would hail Palin as a fellow maverick, a moderate who could work with Democrats, and avoided polarizing social issues by, for example, vetoing a bill banning benefits for same-sex spouses of state workers. That is, Camp McCain expected the sort of in-depth look that Green provided in "The Tragedy of Sarah Palin."
They also thought that personal profiles would portray Palin as a pro-life Republican who walked the walk when she chose to give birth to a son with Down syndrome.
Alas and woe to her, Palin had the misfortune of walking onto the national stage in the era of the blogosphere. A Daily Kos blogger charged that Palin faked giving birth to Trig five months earlier in order to conceal her teenage daughter Bristol's pregnancy. Other bloggers, as well as British and Australian newspapers, joined the pile-on. That rumor was put to rest for all but the most ardent Palin "birthers" when Bristol turned out to be five months pregnant.
While most reputable American news outlets did not report the rumors, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz wrote at the time that reporters deluged the campaign with questions "about the governor's amniotic fluid, the timing of her contractions and whether she would take a DNA test to establish the baby's parentage." Those questions enraged the McCainiacs.
But how can the "Babygate-bloggers" be responsible for Sarah Palin's recent fall from grace, if there was nothing at all "to see?" It would have taken Sarah Palin less than one day to prove that she is the biological mother of Trig - after all, she would virtually "drown" in a huge pile of documentation, wouldn't she? Birth certificate, hospital records, insurance records, photos, emails, etc. etc. etc.
How much documentation do YOU have for the birth of YOUR child, dear journalists all over the USA who do a solid, professional and diligent job every day?
Where are the journalists? Very slowly, they appear. Fore example, Henry Blodget from "Business Insider" recently distinguished himself with giving the "doubters" of Sarah Palin's pregnancy a voice, and for asking Sarah Palin to release Trig's birth certificate. Although he also took a lot of heat from his readers in the comments, as was to be expected, his efforts will not be in vain.
That's the situation we have right now, but it's about to change - radically.
Already more than a month ago, we received information from "somebody in the business" that a major D.C. based journalist is currently writing a book solely about "babygate", Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy - and that the book deal has already been signed and that it should be published soon! We did, of course, immediately share this information with some important people behind the scenes who will no doubt be conducting their own follow up investigations.
Up until now we kept this very important piece of information quiet on Politicalgates because we didn't want to spoil the "surprise". However the facts about the existence of this book are now being alluded to in public so we believe that the time has come to reveal what we know. The pending publication of such a book comes as no surprise to us, as anyone who questions Sarah Palin's account of "babygate" in an unbiased way and with an open mind will quickly realize that the pregnancy was faked.
There are major forces, especially in Alaska, that are desperately trying to prevent the publication of the truth. Several people in Alaska are deeply implicated in covering up Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy, especially the officials of Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Palmer, where Sarah Palin "officially" gave birth. The largest newspaper in Alaska, the Anchorage Daily News, is "guilty" as well, as their journalists have started to twist the facts and distort the truth of the details of Palin's pregnancy and the details of the subsequent investigation into the pregnancy in order to keep Sarah's "secret" under wraps. Apparently because they are afraid too lose valuable government contracts. The ADN interviewed Sarah Palin's now "invisible" doctor, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, in late 2008, as well as other people, including babygate-bloggers, in a new investation by ADN-journalist Lisa Demer, for a story which in the end never appeared. Editor Pat Dougherty observed back then, in an email to Sarah Palin in January 2009:
It strikes me that if there is never a clear, contemporaneous public record of what transpired with Trig's birth that may actually ensure that the conspiracy theory never dies.
Well, the "conspiracy theory" hasn't died, and how could it - the truth will always prevail, especially when it comes to a serial, and bad, liar like Sarah Palin.
Let's conclude with a quote by another late intellectual, Aldous Huxley:
"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make ye mad."
I won't be mad, I will just be happy. Although I am still mad with some journalists who do not perform their job.
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*** All posts by Politicalgates about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy are available HERE, HERE and HERE. ***
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Additional note:
The donation of ten copies of Geoffrey Dunn's book to those readers who could not afford to buy the book was a great success. Many thanks again to everybody who came up with the idea and who donated! We plan to offer more free books, after publication, by Frank Bailey, Joe McGinniss, Levi Johnston and of course after the publication of the mentioned upcoming book about "Babygate." Some readers have already agreed to take part in our new upcoming " book donation drive." As always, we are happy that we have such a great, vibrant and supportive community here at Politicalgates.
