William Kristol, Whoring For Sarah Palin

Since the McCain campaign settled on the strategy of keeping Sarah Palin from any member of the media not safely in the back pocket of the Republican Party, they have only let her speak to carefully chosen people. And today's recipient of the whoring-for-Palin award goes to William Kristol of the New York Times. Kristol's mission? To assist in the McCain campaign's strategy to swift boat Barack Obama.

It seems that Kristol just happened to chat with Sarah Palin on the phone and gosh, you betcha that she thinks saying that Obama "pals around with terrorists" is fair game, never mind that it's not true. And never mind that Palin herself has a very personal association with the America-hating Alaska Secessionist Party (AIP)...a group whose founder damned America and cursed the flag, and was later murdered in a "plastic explosives sale gone bad." But instead of asking about that, Kristol wondered if Jeremiah Wright should be an issue. Well, you betcha. Palin told Kristol:

I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character.

Naturally Kristol didn't mention that Obama wasn't present for the incendiary sermons by Wright, nor did he ask Palin why she didn't have the character to get up and walk out during this sermon by Thomas Muthee:

...where he said:

The second area whereby God wants us, wants to penetrate in our society is in the economic area. The Bible says that the wealth of the wicked is stored up for the righteous. It's high time that we have top Christian businessmen, businesswomen, bankers, you know, who are men and women of integrity running the economics of our nations. That's what we are waiting for. That's part and parcel of transformation. If you look at the -- you know -- if you look at the Israelites, that's how they work. And that's how they are, even today.

Not only did Palin not get up and leave, she joined Muthee on stage (7:10 in) so he could pray over her. And by the way, Palin later credited Muthee's prayer with helping her win the governorship of Alaska.

But Kristol wasn't interested in asking Palin about her associations with the AIP or the anti-Semitic Thomas Muthee. That wasn't his job.

Of course it should be noted that back in April, when the North Carolina Republican Party planned an ad about Wright, McCain said:

“There’s no place for that kind of campaigning, the American people don’t want it, period,” Mr. McCain told reporters on his bus this morning. He said he had not seen the ad and hoped that he wouldn’t, but that he had been given a description of it.

“I understand that it moves numbers, negative ads do all that, but that doesn’t mean it’s right,” Mr. McCain said.

But now that McCain is losing, doing what's right doesn't matter to him.