WSJ Asks McCain to Demonstrate Honor Toward His Own VP Candidate

John McCain should call in the bizarre finger-pointing campaign his functionary/operatives in his recent campaign have been waging against Sarah Palin. The crapola comments emitted by the loser crew for McCain against Palin reflect the discredited MSM [the NYT loses over a thousand readers per week on a consistent basis] campaign to denigrate and slander a REAL conservative who lives her own family life and isn't a gaffe-a-matic buffoon like Joe Biden, whose silly comments finally consigned him to a penalty box for the last month of the Obama campaign. Obama, of course, says hardly anything and has no reporters vetting his possible illegalities with Rezko and his associations with unrepentant terrorists.

Instead it's a phony wardrobe scam that this fake-news brigade pushes forward because McCain aides are angry that she drew the crowds while J-Mack actually turned off conservatives.

The Rasmussen Poll says 62% of Republicans support her, with Romney & Huckabee & Jindal close to single digits. McCain was the candidate of the MSM, which then mousetrapped him with phony pieces in the soon-to-be-defunct NYT about Vickie Iseman & his wife----classy stuff & none of it true, just like the wardrobe hoax generated by former CBS newsie & current McCain advisor Nicolle {LNU] & her partners in disinformation Murphy & Noonan. The WSJ wing that favors illegal immigration got their boy Johnny as the Repub candidate, but couldn't stand a real conservative like Palin, who owns one house and has five kids & her first husband. The MSM females rarely have any husbands except the Ellen DeGeneres variety. No wonder they hate a good-looking smart female [who's been jumped on by the MSM while serial dunce Biden got a free pass]. But the WSJ now has the good sense to give Bill McGurn space in today's op-ed for a slam-down of the Rollins/Nicolle/Murphy/Noonan cabal seeking to discredit Palin;

Two weeks or so before the campaign was over, the first round of McCain campaign rumors alleged that Mrs. Palin was a "whack job," and characterized her clothes-shopping as "hillbillies looting Neiman-Marcus from coast to coast." More recently, she has been alleged to know as little about geography as Barack Obama knows about the number of states in the union (at one point, he put it at 57).

The unmistakable message here has nothing to do with Africa, the North American Free Trade Agreement or bathrobes. It is the campaign team's cry, "It's not our fault. How could we ever win with this woman on the ticket?"

The first point to make here is the most obvious: This is the language of losers.


Associated Press
This whole display calls to mind those embarrassing codas to each episode of "The Apprentice," when the losing team would sit before Donald Trump in the boardroom and then start blaming everyone but themselves for their failures. The apparent eagerness of Team McCain to indulge in this kind of fingerpointing is similarly unprofessional, and it raises an interesting question.

We are asked to believe that Mrs. Palin was not ready for a national campaign. On what evidence from any part of this election are we to conclude that anyone on the McCain campaign team was ready for a national campaign?

Let's stipulate that Mrs. Palin was not perfect. Regardless whose idea the Katie Couric interview was, it went badly and left some damage. The phone call she took from a comedian pretending to be French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy didn't help. Neither did her assignment as campaign attack dog, the traditional role for any vice presidential candidate.

Yet there are other, more salient points. In the treatment of Mrs. Palin by some of the McCain staff, there is the clear whiff of condescension. That's something a sitting American governor might understandably find hard to stomach coming from a bunch of young professional Republicans who have never themselves run for office.

Ultimately, of course, this will all pass. And if Mrs. Palin goes back and continues to do a good job as governor of Alaska, these attacks will likely only reinforce her outside-the-Beltway credentials to rank-and-file Republicans.

Let's remember too that the only time Mr. McCain surged ahead -- in the polls, in the volunteers, in the mojo -- was when he picked Mrs. Palin. Before that he and his staff had been flying solo, and they were losing. When the contest returned to the top of the ticket, as presidential campaigns inevitably do, Mr. McCain and his team drove their lead into the ground.

It wasn't Mrs. Palin who dramatically flew to Washington promising a legislative answer to the most important economic issue of our day -- and then, in the words of a New York Times campaign profile, "came off more like a stymied bystander than a leader who could make a difference."

And what does it say when the campaign team of a man who has spent decades in the U.S. Senate cannot agree on (much less present) a coherent answer to why he should be elected president of the United States -- except that he's not Barack Obama?

Good questions, Bill. Especially in light of the perp/perv ultra-left loon squads on the blogosphere like Handy Andy Sullivan trying to justify their slanders of Palin 24/7. Methinks the girly-men doth protest too much.

In summing up, McGurn notes McCain's characteristic nice-guy approach to his Dem opponent while his wrecking crew trashes Palin. McCain had little in his national campaign to say that was positive about Repubs and should probably start a party of two with Lieberman. But here's McGurn's sum-up:

In Mr. McCain's moving concession speech, he wished "godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president." He asked his fellow Americans to join him in helping President-elect Obama bridge our differences and build a better, more hopeful nation.

It will be instructive to see whether Mr. McCain will now extend the same level of graciousness to Mrs. Palin that he has to Mr. Obama, by giving a public slapdown to the very public smears emanating from his own campaign team. We have no idea what Mr. McCain will do when he sits down with Mr. Leno tonight.

But there's no doubt what a man of honor would do.