Anatomy of a Palin Smear Campaign Gone Wild

Don't Hate the Players; hate the game.

This blogger explained the dynamics behind how smear campaigns work in this blog post. Let me pick up where I left off on that post with a clear look at what happened in Homer this week when Sarah Palin went to shoot a portion of her documentary about Alaska for TLC. Melissa Clouthier gives a summary of events here. Now the left is fighting back claiming that the Palin protestor is really a teacher in rebuttal to an article that claims she's not. Allow me to explain why this is happening.

I posted a reprint of the article that broke the story that the Palin protestor was not a teacher. It's a technique I learned from the Alaska bloggers as a matter of fact. The Immoral Minority blog or Palingates blog would post what appeared to be damaging information on Sarah Palin and Blue Oasis, Mudflats and Just a Girl From Homer would piggy back off of it. I just did what any good Mudflatter would have done with an article from their side if it was as helpful as Gateway Pundit's was for us.

Instead of Twitter outrage from the left, we should be getting compliments from them. If I was playing baseball and someone used a pitch I perfected to strike me out, I'd show some sportsmanship and throw my opponent a compliment.

The left successfully tarnished Republicans in 2006 and the second term and legacy of George W. Bush. They successfully smeared Newt Gingrich out of the Speaker's chair in 1997 and 1998. They destroyed one of the most intelligent men in the GOP in 1992, Dan Quayle. And for 57 days while they smeared Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign, we scratched our heads.

For far too long, conservatives have been sitting back letting the left attack it, smug in a false belief that most people are intelligent thinkers, moral God loving family people and that the majority would never fall for the craziness of the left. Traditional, pro-family, pro-life, pro-business and pro-gun values used to be a given. They are no longer. In order to understand why this is the case, we had to understand the tactics of the left and respond with positive and effective tactics of our own. We could no longer be the silent majority.

That's when we finally figured it out.

What happened as a result of Sarah Palin's trip to Homer is that the right took on one of Alaska's most heinous of bloggers and beat her at her own game.

The left will have a hard time debunking the Gateway Pundit story as they try to come whimpering back with proof that the Palin protestor is a real teacher. Just go to page 28 and try to determine if you can tell if someone who is labelled Theater Tech sandwiched between Nurse and Counselor is a teacher.

But let's assume it turns out that the woman is a teacher. Then all we have to do is go to another page in the liberal playbook: either retract or correct the story after it's gone viral. The liberal media understands how that works. They would sometimes knowingly put out a false story about Sarah Palin and then come back and correct it later. They'd run the story, maybe on the front page even, then issue a retraction buried somewhere. By that time the damage has already been done.

Check this tweet out from @BowedOak

@shannynmoore know this is a bad time but the teacher needs to send cease and desist re: tinyurl.com/gatewaylies this is spreading

Is this a progressive sending word to the mother ship? It is a progressive who knows her smear campaigns. The key desperation in the tweet is the part where she says the story is spreading. Any good artist knows its hard to stop the paint from running after it's been applied the wrong way.

We could also poke at the tweeter by asking if she wants Shannyn Moore to restrict the Gateway Pundit's First Amendment rights, but we'll just leave it at desperation for now. This one just got away from them. It's out of the bottle now. It's their monster. Let them scramble to fix it. Besides, this one is a win for us. There's no need to run up the score.

I could teach a political science journalism class off of what I've learned from the left. Watching Breitbart, The Daily Caller and other conservative publications turn these tactics on the left indicates to me that we have rounded the corner and are on offense now. We have become better at their game than they are. Those who have lived by the rhetorical sword of the smear are now beginning to die by the rhetorical sword of the smear.

The proper way to conduct political discourse is for each side to lay out its facts and rebut each other. But when the opposing side doesn't have facts or they know that their ideas are not acceptable to the majority, they have to cheat the facts and play on emotions instead. They try to make us feel sorry that conservatives don't care about the poor (not true of course) or that people died in an "unjust war." If they admit that we care about the poor, but have a different strategy for helping them or that volunteers who die defending their country in war are heroes and not victims of the state (and are people operating under orders from a commander in chief who is operating out of good faith, even if there is disagreement among the people on tactic or strategy), then they admit to the very weakness of their flawed premise that mindless emotion should trump reason and logic. Sell myths and smears if you can't debate the facts.

We conservatives are in a steel cage match with liberals. We can stand there and let our opponent beat us silly because "we don't play that way" or we can get our hands dirty and do what all good steel cage wrastlers do, hit them over the head with the chair they snuck into the ring.

If we want to ever play this game like grown ups again and have a civil discourse on the issues without the liberal mainstream media letting every little piece of nonsense that they allow to fly up the media flagpole get in the way, then we must destroy our opponent and get out of the steel cage by winning elections and taking back our government.

Liberals don't just want power. They want our ideology dead. This is a battle to the ideological death - a political battle royale. Respecting our democracy's politics as the ebb and flow of power between parties, states and local communities and adhering to the Constitutional checks and balances on that power is how we keep that democracy alive. Rejecting those things in favor of fundamentally transforming the whole thing into something that it is not is a danger to our democracy, a very serious danger.

With a complicit media, we can no longer rely on the "fourth estate" to be our watchdog to combat this danger. We have become our own watchdogs and have build an online army that continues to grow even as I type this. You might even say the new media has become the "fifth estate," a check and balance on the check and balance that the mainstream media should be if it did its job properly.

The liberal mainstream media and Shannyn Moore may think that they can take down Sarah Palin with personal attacks, false allegations and twisting the truth. Therein lies their most exploitable flaws. Palin Derangement Syndrome sufferers don't think straight. They make mistakes. They lose touch with the concept of journalistic credibility because they are hasty in responding to their irrational fear of Sarah Palin, a monster they have manifested in their own minds and one which they inadvertently feed in their futile attempts to destroy it.

As Jedediah Bila says "some in the media are still afflicted with Palin-OCD." Sarah Palin would say it's easier to tear something down than to build it up.

In order to make something happen in America, you need to stand tall for something, not tear something down. It would be easy for us on the right to slam home memes about Obama's birth certificate, a Vera Baker affair or gay bath houses in Chicago. But that's just a waste of our time. That's not positive. We're selling a shining city on a hill here, not a ghetto or a trailer park called "hope and change."
A simple story on how Sarah Palin interracted with a protestor like the one on The Daily Caller would have sufficed. In fact, a lot of this Palin-mania could have been avoided had the left just left her alone after she went back to Alaska.

The video was a small story. I could have told them just from looking at the video that it was a waste of time to try to spin it into something bad for Palin. They've been out of ammo for awhile.

This one is weak, really weak. The question is not whether or not the protestor is a teacher, if she worked with a drag queen band or if Sarah Palin rolled her eyes (it's really pathetic now that they're circulating slow motion clips of that part of the video - they don't give up, do they?). The question is did the left see how well the right played those grey areas to obtain virality on the counter smear of the so called "teacher"? Come on liberal smear experts, give us some points for that - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

But the real message in all this is did the left and the mainstream media learn its lesson this time about making a mountain out of a mole hill? And did they get the message that the right will be all over them like white on rice every time they try to do it again? Probably not. As this post is being written, the Levi Johnston for Mayor story is being debunked. It's becoming laughable.

The smear campaign has become the theater of the absurd. And we on the right are just sitting here eating popcorn laughing our asses off now. Truly unhinged, it's like watching a spacewalk where the astronauts are becoming untethered from the ship. They are punch drunk, yet they still don't realize our growing ability to smack them down. There will come a time when we can only beat them so much before it becomes too cruel.

There will be no more free shots at Sarah Palin. There will be no more lies, slander and artificially flavored red meat for the left wing base that will go unchecked. If the left doesn't like that, all I can tell them is don't hate the players; hate the game - their game.