Sarah Palin will NEVER be president.

How do you allege that anyone were "suckered?"

And now it seems that FOX, MSNBC, other major news outlets, the political left, and the dems have all been suckered.

There was a report on the networks that an "unnamed McCain campaign figure" claimed that Sarah Palin didnt know that Africa was a continent.

Now that appears to have been an elaborate hoax.

The pranksters behind Eisenstadt acknowledge that he was not, through them, the anonymous source of the Palin leak. He just claimed falsely that he was the leaker--and they say they have no reason to cast doubt on the original story. For its part, Fox News Channel continues to stand behind its story.

I didnt say that you did use that as a basis for your decision.
You are protesting to much.

I simply said that ANYONE that repeated the story, or believed it, or reported it as fact got suckered by a bogus story.

"Eisenstadt" wrote on his blog that he alone was the source for the rumors, and that indeed Palin didn't know -- and MSNBC hurried to get that on the air after the fake blog post was linked in several mainstream political blogs, including The New Republic. More here.

The prank highlights the vacuous nature of cable news, where information is pumped and then dumped without too much awareness of who provided it, or why. But more importantly it's a caveat to bloggers -- who is behind that Typepad page you want to quote? Do you know them? Do you know if they're reliable, or even real?

BLITZER: Does that mean you want to come up with a new Sarah Palin initiative that you want to release right now.

PALIN: Gah! Nothing specific right now. Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.

PALIN: Gah! Nothing specific right now. Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.

Rich "Starbursts" Lowry does a McCain post-modem:

Quote:

The split over Palin, of course, poisoned everything at the end. One of the dividing lines was between her communications team and the policy advisers. The communications team seemed to consider her a dolt, while the policy people"like Steve Biegun and Randy Scheunemann"were impressed with her and her potential. As one McCain aide told me, "It's the difference between considering her someone who lacks knowledge and someone who is incompetent, and they [the communications aides] treated her as the latter."

But this is to my mind the most revealing quote from a Palin defender:

Quote:

"Look, she wasn't ready for this, obviously."

If she wasn't ready for this, how was she supposed to be ready to be president? And if she wasn't ready to be president, why did you pick her?

The focus in all this - apart from getting closure on some factual questions - should be on discovering who vetted, or didn't vet Palin. This was massive political malpractice - and it's McCain's, Davis's and Schmidt's responsibility. Thank God these incompetents and risk-takers will not run the country.

I just re-read that quote of hers