Sarah Palin, via Facebook, responds as she points out the media's double standards.
My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that…
Of course, the paragraph above is based on a series of misstatements and verbal gaffes made by Barack Obama (I didn’t have enough time to do one for Joe Biden). YouTube links are provided just in case you doubt the accuracy of these all too human slips-of-the-tongue. If you can’t remember hearing about them, that’s because for the most part the media didn’t consider them newsworthy. I have no complaint about that. Everybody makes the occasional verbal gaffe – even news anchors.
Obviously, I would have been even more impressed if the media showed some consistency on this issue. Unfortunately, it seems they couldn’t resist the temptation to turn a simple one word slip-of-the-tongue of mine into a major political headline. The one word slip occurred yesterday during one of my seven back-to-back interviews wherein I was privileged to speak to the American public about the important, world-changing issues before us.
If the media had bothered to actually listen to all of my remarks on Glenn Beck’s radio show, they would have noticed that I refer to South Korea as our ally throughout, that I corrected myself seconds after my slip-of-the-tongue, and that I made it abundantly clear that pressure should be put on China to restrict energy exports to the North Korean regime. The media could even have done due diligence and checked my previous statements on the subject, which have always been consistent, and in fact even ahead of the curve. But why let the facts get in the way of a good story? (And for that matter, why not just make up stories out of thin air – like the totally false hard news story which has run for three days now reporting that I lobbied the producers of “Dancing with the Stars” to cast a former Senate candidate on their show. That lie is further clear proof that the media completely makes things up without doing even rudimentary fact-checking.)
Bloggers are expected to have fun with political gaffes and we do so quite often before we move along to the next piece of news or the next major gaffe on the part of a political figure, but news outlets are expected to do their due diligence, dig a little and round out a story with details and facts, not speculation.
More importantly, if you click over to all the Youtube links Palin supplied, you wonder immediately why, if gaffes are so newsworthy to news outlets, the ones she quoted and provided videos of weren't given the same intense scrutiny instead of nothing or just mere mentions as those same media outlets moved along to other more newsworthy stories.
Palin's response was brilliant and for those that believed or simply tried to convince their readers that Palin truly thought North Korea was our ally, does that mean they also think gaffes by Obama meant he believed his own misstatements when he made them?
Does Obama really believe there are 57 states in America? Doubtful and when we, conservatives bloggers, had fun with that at the time, we joked about it but most never tried to convince their readers that he actually believed it.
The Politico was one news outlet that did mention that it was "Worth noting that she got it right earlier in the conversation," although even Ben Smith, the writer of that Politico piece, added it as an update, not in the original reporting.
The whole transcript of the Palin interview at Glenn Beck's website.
PS- Once again the liberal media and blogger's complete fascination with Sarah Palin has put her Facebook response at the top of political news discussion sites.
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