From Slate V, of course.

Back in September, I sent this article by the AP around to several friends, with a “whoa, the AP wrote this?” comment attached.  I obviously agreed with the conclusions presented in the new organization’s fact-check of Palin’s Convention speech, but the article was clearly more analysis than purely factual.  That made it totally not what the AP is known for–and this had a way of persuading readers that the analysis was fact.  Here was a completely objective, straight and unspun source saying “Palin is a liar.”  If the AP said it, it must have been true.

Now there’s a piece in tomorrow’s WaPo about how the AP has gotten deeply into the analysis game during this election cycle.  “One AP reporter described the new style more as ‘calling [expletive] when you see it.’”  That’s a totally different ballgame.  And it leaves this consumer of news wondering: If the AP is no longer the go-to source for “just the facts,” who is?

Katha Pollitt’s latest, on (what else?) Sarah Palin:

John McCain chose the supremely under-qualified Sarah Palin as his running mate partly because she is a woman. If you have a problem with that, you’re a sexist. She talks incessantly about being a mother of five and uses her newborn, Trig, who has Down syndrome, as a campaign prop. If you wonder how she’ll handle all those kids and the Veep job too, you’re a super-sexist. “When do they ever ask a man that question?” charges that fiery feminist Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, Palin, who went back to work when Trig was three days old, gets nothing but praise from Phyllis Schlafly, James Dobson and the folks at National Review, who usually blame all the ills of modern America on those neurotic, harried, selfish, frustrated, child-neglecting, husband-castrating working mothers. Even stranger, her five-months-pregnant 17-year-old, Bristol, gets nothing but compassion and respect from Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and others who have spent their careers slut-shaming teens for having sex–and blaming their parents for letting it happen. [...]

The Republicans bashed Barack Obama as a “celebrity,” but now they’ve got a star of their own, so naturally the rules have changed. Nothing would suit them better than for the media to spend the next two months spellbound by the wacky carnival on ice that is the Palin family….  Fretting over the work/family issue alone should take up enough column inches to employ all the female journalists in America from now to next Mother’s Day. And don’t forget that op-ed staple, What Does This Mean for Feminism?

Well, I’m not playing. I don’t care about Sarah Palin’s family. I don’t care if she’s a good mother. I don’t care if she’s happily married, or who shops and who vacuums, or who takes care of the kids while both parents are at work. I don’t want her recipe for caribou hot dogs, either. Life chez Sarah and Todd might make an adorable sitcom (Leave It to Jesus?) or a scathing tell-all a decade or so down the road (Governor Dearest?). Either way, so what? This is an election, not The View. As for feminism’s meaning, what can you say after you’ve said that her career shows that even right-wing fundamentalist women have taken in feminism’s message of empowerment and that’s good, but that Palin’s example suggests women can do it all without support from society and that’s bad?

She closes with a few questions any reasonable journalist covering, you know, a presidential election campaign should ask.  Speaking of which, Diane Rehm offered Palin the opportunity to come on her very civilized, very smart NPR call-in show, on the air the other day.  I wish there was even the slightest chance the governor would take her up on it.

I think Chuck Spinney might be right.  We do seem to have reached a point where McCain and Palin continue to repeat the same misleading lines (even outright lies) despite being directly confronted by the people they’re repeating them to. They’re being called out, over and over again, by Charlie Gibson, by Norah O’Donnell, by the NY Times, by the ladies on the View–by anyone and everyone who is not a total Republican party hack.  And they are both beginning to look ridiculous.

Now you can almost feel the tide turning and the media coverage cresting. Obama has an opening.  If this month’s fundraising numbers wind up being huge–despite the sense that McCain has had the momentum–the entire story will change in his favor.  I hope he’s as strategic and talented as Spinney thinks–that he sees all of this happening and is prepared to take advantage of it.  Fifty-two days to go.

Spinney’s thoughts:

I am beginning to sense that McCain behavior is destroying himself and that Obama has the good sense or instinct to take a deep step back and let McCain dig a hole so deep he can not get out.

After all, McCain has spent years branding himself as a straight talker of truth who puts country ahead of self … it was always a phony image, but now he is aggressively destroying that brand name and replacing it with the opposite Rovian brand. [...]

Maybe Obama’s behavior is akin to subtly waving the red cape to lure McCain into reinforcing the rebranding operation.  I think Obama did a capejob on Hillary, and she ended up up with the immoral alternative of either having to destroy the democratic party inorder to win its nomination or quitting.  I think (hope?) Obama is doing a similar thing with McCain, and McCain is walking into the trap. [...]

In the end, this election is a battle that takes place within an overarching moral context, and as Boyd showed, you can not isolate your opponent in moral warfare… Your opponent has to morally isolate himself,  and he does that by destroying legs of the moral triangle, and in so doing, exhibits behavior that promotes his own well being by violating the codes of conduct or standards of behavior he professes to uphold and others expect him to uphold.

I have this vague sense that Obama’s goal (maybe instinct is a better word) may be to create an atmosphere (perhaps by looking weak, iter alia)  that encourages McCain to reinforce this self destructive behavior and thereby make his hypocrisy obvious to a majority of the undecided voters.  But then maybe I am seeing visions in cloud formations.