This morning, a friend of mine who lives in Texas sent me a link to a Dallas Morning News article that recounted Palin's visit to Dallas on Friday.
The subject of his e-mail read "Things you do not want to say in Texas."
Knowing that Texans don't have anything against words like Maverick and also, I followed the link to see what the woman another friend calls Caribou Spice had to say . . .
The Dallas Morning News article started out riding the tire swing:
Fresh off a stronger-than-expected debate performance, Sarah Palin launched the final phase of the presidential campaign Friday in Dallas, touting John McCain's ideas and experience to satisfy the country's desire for change.
But then, in the second paragraph, they quoted the folksiest Maverick John McCain's met in the last five weeks:
"It is good to be visiting here in Alaska's little sister state Texas," the Republican vice presidential candidate told more than 1,000 people at a fundraiser at the Fairmont hotel.
She spoke for about 20 minutes, discussing energy, government reform and the tough sledding for the McCain campaign, which trails Barack Obama in most polls, in the final few weeks before Election Day.
"It's not just in Washington, D.C., it's across the country, the hunger for reform," Ms. Palin said.
"Little sister state?!" Now I'm just one of those dangerous California elitists who likes to read books, but I lived in Texas, and I know a lot of Texans. Last time I checked, calling Texas anybody's little anything would result in the opening of a can of Texas-sized whoop ass.
I realize that pn a scale of one to "In what respect, Charlie?" it's really not that big of a deal, especially when she's speaking to a crowd of supporters who will vote for herMcCain no matter what, because she'she's a good Republican reformernot the scary brown guy who is going to make Osama Bin Laden his chief of staff and force us all into gay marriage ceremonies presided over by Louis Farrakhan, but to Texans outside of the base, it's the sort of gaffe that would likely be talked about around the barbecue this weekend. But I thought it was amusing, so I submitted it to Reddit early this morning: Sarah Palin says, "It is good to be visiting here in Alaska's little sister state Texas." Texans are not amused.
I checked back about twenty minutes ago, to see if anyone had commented. There were a few comments, and one of them said, "Uh. Where in the article does said quote appear?"
Before I replied, "In the second paragraph, Captain Observant," I double-checked the link, and discovered that the Dallas Morning News had pretty seriously altered the quote. The story currently says:
Fresh off a stronger-than-expected debate performance, Sarah Palin launched the final phase of the presidential campaign Friday in Dallas, touting John McCain's ideas and experience to satisfy the country's desire for change.
"It's not just in Alaska, it's all over the country, this hunger for reform and new energy and new ideas and new vision and living out that worldview that John McCain and I have," the Republican vice presidential nominee told more than 1,000 people gathered for a lunchtime fundraiser at the Fairmont Hotel.
Now, maybe this is a silly thing to even write about, but isn't context important? Doesn't it matter that Sarah Palin went to a huge Republican stronghold and effectively insulted the entire state? I mean, she clearly messed with Texas.
But it's not even about what she said. This isn't anything close to her suggestion that she wanted to expand Fourth Branch's powers even more, or all of her outrageous lies in the debate. The real story is that the Dallas Morning News omitted a potentially-embarrassing quote from their story, in an effort to portray Palin in a more favorable light. That's not journalism, that's . . . oh, what's the word I'm looking for? Oh! Propaganda. (And if you can stomach it, read the entire article; it's like a freaking press release from the campaign.)
I can't find a way to get a cache of the Dallas Morning News article before they wiped out the original quote, but a site called Trading Markets still has the original syndicated, non-scrubbed feed:
"It is good to be visiting here in Alaska's little sister state Texas," the Republican vice presidential candidate told more than 1,000 people at a fundraiser at the Fairmont hotel.
She spoke for about 20 minutes, discussing energy, government reform and the tough sledding for the McCain campaign, which trails Barack Obama in most polls, in the final few weeks before Election Day.
"It's not just in Washington, D.C., it's across the country, the hunger for reform," Ms. Palin said.
Apparently, the editors at the Dallas Morning News were also hungering for reform, and decided that reform starts right at home with their own paper's reporting. I guess that's the kind of change they can believe in over at that fine journalistic institution.