Politico's Ben Smith quotes some so called experts to claim that liberals are doing the same thing to Palin that conservatives did to Obama - spreading vicious, ridiculous, mostly unsubstantiated rumors via the internet.
Politico compares Obama internet smears to Palin scandals
"Information abhors a vacuum, and like Barack Obama was at first, Sarah Palin was an unknown quanity," said the internet folklorist David Emery. "When you have all that pressure and very little information – that’s when the rumors start flying."
The article, however, neglects to mention a big difference between the Palin stories and the Obama rumors - all the Obama rumors are patently false, while many of the Palin stories are true. Minor detail. More below.
Essentially, Politico is arguing that liberals spreading "urban legends" about Palin are just like the wacko righties spreading those Muslim and fake birth certificate rumors about Obama.
Some of the viral e-mails coursing around the Internet about Palin contain straightforward criticism, but many others are totally unsubstantiated, drawn from a stew of race, sex, religion, and pure paranoia.
They’re also, for aficionados of the Obama rumor mill, jarringly familiar: There are allegations of racist comments, demands to see birth certificates, claims that the candidate is the thrall of an extreme faith, and that her associates are radicals and terrorists – all charges leveled at Obama as well.
Yes, the charges are similar (except for the terrorist part), but what Smith fails to even explore is the possibility that the evidence supporting the charges are very different.
Smith fails to point out that the rumors about Palin being in thrall of an extreme faith is based on evidence of Palin's own words mixing religious grandiosity with public policy positions, while the rumors about Obama being in thrall are based on the words spoken by third parties then attributed to Obama. If Smith can't tell the difference in the quality of the evidence supporting the allegations, then he has no business being in the journalism business.
Of course some of the rumors about Palin are baseless. But, then again, some are not. With Obama's rumors, I don't know of a single one that has any basis in the truth.
"The phenomenon seems to have developed during the Clinton presidency while the right was in opposition. So it has always seemed to me only a matter of time, including with time spent in opposition, until the left would catch up," she said.
Their resulting power and resonance is a reminder of the irrationality of politics, and of a race that both sides have said, at times, should be about the issues.
"It’s the opposite of what you think because we all want an informed electorate who would vote for people based on their positions," said the University of California’s Turner. "It’s the opposite. That’s not happening."
Do these experts even know what they're talking about? This is just a recycled version of the tired meme that the left and right are basically mirror opposites of each other, and it's a rather insidious way of covering up the fact that dozens of stories about Palin have been confirmed and verified. What I notice, in fact, is that here on DKos, liberal bloggers have very high standards about the evidence supporting an allegation, and are not willing to accept stories unless there is some form of evidence (video, eyewitnesses, etc.) backing them up.
The article mentions that fake list of banned books that went around as evidence that liberals do the same dirty spreading of lies that conservatives do.
McCain’s camp has put out memos responding to the faceless smears about Palin, one debunking the long list of allegedly banned books, which included books published after Palin left the Wasilla mayor’s office. (Palin did reportedly inquire in 1996 about her town’s policy on banning books, but no names of books that she sought to ban has emerged, and the City of Wasilla says no books have ever been banned from its library.)
What the article fails to mention is that that fake list has been debunked by liberals, and I myself held judgment about the veracity of the list, no matter how much I wanted to believe it to be true, because no one could verify it from an official Wasilla source.
Anyway, there have been various efforts by the McCain camp and others to shut down the public vetting of Palin. As Joe Klein wrote, members of the media and the left should not let McCain and others intimidate them away from the truth.