Palin steps down as governor of Alaska
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Palin saga continues:
Palin story sparks GOP family feud - Yahoo! News
Palin story sparks GOP family feud
AP – This photo provided by the U.S. Navy shows Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, left, and her husband Todd, addressing …
Jonathan Martin Jonathan Martin – Tue Jun 30, 10:06 pm ET
A hard-hitting piece on Sarah Palin in the new Vanity Fair has touched off a blistering exchange of insults among high-profile Republicans over last year’s GOP ticket – tearing open fresh wounds about leaks surrounding Palin and revealing for the first time some of the internal wars that paralyzed the campaign in its final days.
Rival factions close to the McCain campaign have been feuding since last fall over Palin, usually waging the battle in the shadows with anonymous quotes. Now, however, some of the most well-known names in Republican politics are going on-the-record with personal attacks and blame-casting.
William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and at times an informal adviser to Sen. John McCain, touched off the latest back-and-forth Tuesday morning with a post on his magazine’s blog criticizing the Todd Purdum-authored Palin story and pointing a finger at Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager.
Kristol cited a passage in Purdum’s piece in which “some top aides” were said to worry about the Alaska governor’s “mental state” and the prospect that the Alaska governor may be suffering from post-partum depression following the birth of her son Trig. “In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote.
Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an e-mail: “I'm sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”
“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”
Asked directly in a telephone interview if he brought up the prospect of Palin suffering from post-partum depression, Schmidt said: “His allegation that I was defaming Palin by alleging post-partum depression at the campaign headquarters is categorically untrue. In fact, I think it rises to the level of a slander because it’s about the worst thing you can say about somebody who does what I do for a living.”
But Kristol’s charge was seconded by Randy Scheunemann, a longtime foreign policy adviser to McCain who is also close to the Standard editor and was thought to be a Palin ally within the campaign.
“Steve Schmidt has a congenital aversion to the truth,” Scheunemann said. “On two separate and distinct occasions, he speculated about about Governor Palin having post-partum depression, and on the second he threatened that if more negative publicity about the handling of Governor Palin emerged that he would leak his speculation [about post-partum depression] to the press. It was like meeting Tony Soprano.”
Schmidt said Scheunemann’s charges were “categorically untrue.”
“It is inappropriate for me to discuss personnel issues from the campaign,” Schmidt continued. “But suffice it to say Randy is saying these things not because they’re true but because he wants to damage my reputation because of consequences he faced for actions he took.”
Schmidt is alluding, without saying so directly, to the stories that emerged after the campaign that Scheunemann had been fired.
Scheunemann said Schmidt did try to fire him but added: “I’ve got a pay stub through November 15th.”
The questions about Scheunemann being terminated are central to the larger battle about who was trashing Palin, something that quickly came to the surface in the back and forth between Schmidt and Kristol on Tuesday.
The vitriol also suggests the degree to which Palin remains a Rorschach test not simply to Republicans nationally but within a tight circle of elite operatives and commentators, many of whom seem ready to carry their arguments in 2012. Was Palin a fresh talent whose debut was mishandled by self-serving campaign insiders, or an eccentric “diva” who had no business on the national stage? Going forward, does she offer a conservative and charismatic face for a demoralized and star-less party? Or is she a loose cannon who should be consigned to the tabloids where she can reside in perpetuity with other flash-in-the-pan sensations?
Schmidt, who has returned to his California-based political and public affairs consulting business, said that he “worked incredibly hard during the campaign to defend Sarah Palin and her family against a lot of attacks that I thought then and think today were very unfair.”
And he got in a dig at Kristol, who frequently offered unvarnished assessments of McCain’s campaign from his perch at the Standard, on Fox News, where he is a contributor, and in his then-New York Times column.
“Bill Kristol, going back to the time of the campaign, has taken a lot of cheap shots at the campaign without ever offering a plausible path to victory,” Schmidt said. “He’s in the business of ad hominem insults and criticism.”
Responding to Schmidt’s counterattack, Kristol directly fingered Schmidt: “It’s simply a fact that when the going got tough, Steve Schmidt trashed Sarah Palin, both within the campaign and (on background) to journalists. This was after Steve took credit for the Palin pick when, at first, he thought it made him look good. John McCain deserved better.”
At this, Schmidt unloaded in a lengthy telephone interview, suggesting that Kristol was carrying out a personal vendetta based out of anger over the attempt to fire Scheunemann in the final days of the campaign.
In doing so, Schmidt revealed what has been whispered about for months following the campaign: that he and another top aide had ordered a leak hunt in the campaign’s internal e-mail system.
“What this is about is a personal issue that happened late in the campaign relating to a close, personal friend of Bill Kristol and people at The Weekly Standard,” Schmidt said, refusing to use Scheunemann’s name.
“At the end of the campaign there were a series of leaks that were so damaging that it was consuming the 24-hour cable news cycle. Leaks to reporters where Sarah Palin was called all manner of names. [McCain senior adviser] Rick Davis and I jointly felt that was outrageous. So we made an attempt for the first time in the campaign to try to ID who was leaking information that was so damaging and demoralizing to a campaign that was in very difficult circumstances,” Schmidt said, noting that an IT professional executed a system-wide search by keyword.
“What was discovered was an e-mail from a very senior staff member to Bill Kristol that then entered into the news current and continued the negative in-fighting stories for an additional news cycles. I recommended tough medicine for that individual that was carried out,” Schmidt said, again referring to Scheunemann. “Bill Kristol might not have liked that decision, and he might be mad about what happened to his friend, but going all the way back he has been a part of this story and I’ve preserved his confidentiality in that until now. But his use of his public forums to take a personal fight and make character attacks is just simply dishonest and wrong.”
Scheunemann, confirming that his e-mail had been searched, accused Schmidt of “acting in a manner of Iranian secret police” in going to his account.
The foreign policy hand said what was discovered was a message from Kristol inquiring who was the source in the campaign of the “diva” leak, the now-famous complaint from a senior McCain campaign official to CNN’s Dana Bash that Palin was acting like a spoiled and selfish celebrity.
Schmidt suggested that Scheunemann had fingered Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain adviser who helped work with Palin, to Kristol in the message.
“It led to a whole another round of speculation, including Fred Barnes the next night attacking Nicolle Wallace on the air,” Schmidt said, suggesting without saying directly that was why an effort was made to terminate Scheunemann. Barnes, another Weekly Standard editor and Fox News contributor, accused Wallace on Fox News in late October of being “a coward” for running up tens of thousands of dollars in high-end clothes for Palin and then letting the governor take the blame for the purchases. After Wallace denied she had purchased the clothes, Barnes apologized on the air the following night.
But Scheunemann said the clothes controversy was an entirely separate issue and one which he made no mention of in his e-mail to Kristol.
Asked directly if he accused Nicolle Wallace of being the source behind the “diva” leak in his message to Kristol, Scheunemann said: “My e-mail did not accuse Nicolle Wallace. It said something very disparaging about Nicolle but it did not accuse her of being the leak.”
A source familiar with the contents of the e-mail said that Scheunemann actually accused Nicolle Wallace’s husband, Mark Wallace, of being the source of the leak.
When Kristol questioned the likelihood of a male like Mark Wallace using such a gossipy term as diva, this source said, Scheunemann wrote back that Mark Wallace knows something about divas because he’s married to a diva.
Asked about the e-mail, Nicolle Wallace said: “I did not have any knowledge of this. This is all news to me.”
As for being called a “diva,” Wallace laughed for a few seconds.
“I don’t have anything to say on that,” she said.
Mark Wallace, taking the phone from his wife, also laughed about the diva accusation but wouldn’t respond when asked whether he had been the source of the “diva” leak. He explained that he had followed a "zero talk policy with the press" regarding the campaign and wanted to honor that.
But, after an early version of this story was posted on-line, he made an exception and offered a flat denial: "No, never. I don't think Sarah Palin is a diva."
The leak-hunting, Scheunemann said, began after POLITICO’s Ben Smith wrote a story in late October suggesting that Palin had ”gone rogue” and began ignoring the advice of her campaign handlers.
“So after that, they went nuclear with ‘diva’ the next day,” Scheunemann said, referring to the Palin-bashing done to CNN’s Bash the day after the POLITICO story. “But did anybody search Mark or Nicolle Wallace’s e-mails for leaks to Dana Bash?”
Schmidt said Kristol was driven by a personal vendetta over the attempted termination of his decades-long friend, Scheunemann.
“Nonsense,” Kristol replied. “My post today was (self-evidently) triggered by the Todd Purdum article that appeared today, which had Schmidt’s fingerprints all over it. I hadn’t thought about Schmidt in months, and will be happy now to return to more pressing issues, like the presidency of Barack Obama.”
As for the charges of being a sunshine soldier with regard to Palin, Schmidt said: “Nonsense. I’m a team player. That’s a reflection of [Kristol’s] values. He’s the Washington, D.C., talking head and glitterati. I live in Northern California and I really don’t give a s--- about that stuff.”
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Palin story sparks GOP family feud - Yahoo! News
Palin story sparks GOP family feud
AP – This photo provided by the U.S. Navy shows Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, left, and her husband Todd, addressing … 
Jonathan Martin Jonathan Martin – Tue Jun 30, 10:06 pm ET
A hard-hitting piece on Sarah Palin in the new Vanity Fair has touched off a blistering exchange of insults among high-profile Republicans over last year’s GOP ticket – tearing open fresh wounds about leaks surrounding Palin and revealing for the first time some of the internal wars that paralyzed the campaign in its final days.
Rival factions close to the McCain campaign have been feuding since last fall over Palin, usually waging the battle in the shadows with anonymous quotes. Now, however, some of the most well-known names in Republican politics are going on-the-record with personal attacks and blame-casting.
William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and at times an informal adviser to Sen. John McCain, touched off the latest back-and-forth Tuesday morning with a post on his magazine’s blog criticizing the Todd Purdum-authored Palin story and pointing a finger at Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager.
Kristol cited a passage in Purdum’s piece in which “some top aides” were said to worry about the Alaska governor’s “mental state” and the prospect that the Alaska governor may be suffering from post-partum depression following the birth of her son Trig. “In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote.
Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an e-mail: “I'm sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”
“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”
Asked directly in a telephone interview if he brought up the prospect of Palin suffering from post-partum depression, Schmidt said: “His allegation that I was defaming Palin by alleging post-partum depression at the campaign headquarters is categorically untrue. In fact, I think it rises to the level of a slander because it’s about the worst thing you can say about somebody who does what I do for a living.”
But Kristol’s charge was seconded by Randy Scheunemann, a longtime foreign policy adviser to McCain who is also close to the Standard editor and was thought to be a Palin ally within the campaign.
“Steve Schmidt has a congenital aversion to the truth,” Scheunemann said. “On two separate and distinct occasions, he speculated about about Governor Palin having post-partum depression, and on the second he threatened that if more negative publicity about the handling of Governor Palin emerged that he would leak his speculation [about post-partum depression] to the press. It was like meeting Tony Soprano.”
Schmidt said Scheunemann’s charges were “categorically untrue.”
“It is inappropriate for me to discuss personnel issues from the campaign,” Schmidt continued. “But suffice it to say Randy is saying these things not because they’re true but because he wants to damage my reputation because of consequences he faced for actions he took.”
Schmidt is alluding, without saying so directly, to the stories that emerged after the campaign that Scheunemann had been fired.
Scheunemann said Schmidt did try to fire him but added: “I’ve got a pay stub through November 15th.”
The questions about Scheunemann being terminated are central to the larger battle about who was trashing Palin, something that quickly came to the surface in the back and forth between Schmidt and Kristol on Tuesday.
The vitriol also suggests the degree to which Palin remains a Rorschach test not simply to Republicans nationally but within a tight circle of elite operatives and commentators, many of whom seem ready to carry their arguments in 2012. Was Palin a fresh talent whose debut was mishandled by self-serving campaign insiders, or an eccentric “diva” who had no business on the national stage? Going forward, does she offer a conservative and charismatic face for a demoralized and star-less party? Or is she a loose cannon who should be consigned to the tabloids where she can reside in perpetuity with other flash-in-the-pan sensations?
Schmidt, who has returned to his California-based political and public affairs consulting business, said that he “worked incredibly hard during the campaign to defend Sarah Palin and her family against a lot of attacks that I thought then and think today were very unfair.”
And he got in a dig at Kristol, who frequently offered unvarnished assessments of McCain’s campaign from his perch at the Standard, on Fox News, where he is a contributor, and in his then-New York Times column.
“Bill Kristol, going back to the time of the campaign, has taken a lot of cheap shots at the campaign without ever offering a plausible path to victory,” Schmidt said. “He’s in the business of ad hominem insults and criticism.”
Responding to Schmidt’s counterattack, Kristol directly fingered Schmidt: “It’s simply a fact that when the going got tough, Steve Schmidt trashed Sarah Palin, both within the campaign and (on background) to journalists. This was after Steve took credit for the Palin pick when, at first, he thought it made him look good. John McCain deserved better.”
At this, Schmidt unloaded in a lengthy telephone interview, suggesting that Kristol was carrying out a personal vendetta based out of anger over the attempt to fire Scheunemann in the final days of the campaign.
In doing so, Schmidt revealed what has been whispered about for months following the campaign: that he and another top aide had ordered a leak hunt in the campaign’s internal e-mail system.
“What this is about is a personal issue that happened late in the campaign relating to a close, personal friend of Bill Kristol and people at The Weekly Standard,” Schmidt said, refusing to use Scheunemann’s name.
“At the end of the campaign there were a series of leaks that were so damaging that it was consuming the 24-hour cable news cycle. Leaks to reporters where Sarah Palin was called all manner of names. [McCain senior adviser] Rick Davis and I jointly felt that was outrageous. So we made an attempt for the first time in the campaign to try to ID who was leaking information that was so damaging and demoralizing to a campaign that was in very difficult circumstances,” Schmidt said, noting that an IT professional executed a system-wide search by keyword.
“What was discovered was an e-mail from a very senior staff member to Bill Kristol that then entered into the news current and continued the negative in-fighting stories for an additional news cycles. I recommended tough medicine for that individual that was carried out,” Schmidt said, again referring to Scheunemann. “Bill Kristol might not have liked that decision, and he might be mad about what happened to his friend, but going all the way back he has been a part of this story and I’ve preserved his confidentiality in that until now. But his use of his public forums to take a personal fight and make character attacks is just simply dishonest and wrong.”
Scheunemann, confirming that his e-mail had been searched, accused Schmidt of “acting in a manner of Iranian secret police” in going to his account.
The foreign policy hand said what was discovered was a message from Kristol inquiring who was the source in the campaign of the “diva” leak, the now-famous complaint from a senior McCain campaign official to CNN’s Dana Bash that Palin was acting like a spoiled and selfish celebrity.
Schmidt suggested that Scheunemann had fingered Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain adviser who helped work with Palin, to Kristol in the message.
“It led to a whole another round of speculation, including Fred Barnes the next night attacking Nicolle Wallace on the air,” Schmidt said, suggesting without saying directly that was why an effort was made to terminate Scheunemann. Barnes, another Weekly Standard editor and Fox News contributor, accused Wallace on Fox News in late October of being “a coward” for running up tens of thousands of dollars in high-end clothes for Palin and then letting the governor take the blame for the purchases. After Wallace denied she had purchased the clothes, Barnes apologized on the air the following night.
But Scheunemann said the clothes controversy was an entirely separate issue and one which he made no mention of in his e-mail to Kristol.
Asked directly if he accused Nicolle Wallace of being the source behind the “diva” leak in his message to Kristol, Scheunemann said: “My e-mail did not accuse Nicolle Wallace. It said something very disparaging about Nicolle but it did not accuse her of being the leak.”
A source familiar with the contents of the e-mail said that Scheunemann actually accused Nicolle Wallace’s husband, Mark Wallace, of being the source of the leak.
When Kristol questioned the likelihood of a male like Mark Wallace using such a gossipy term as diva, this source said, Scheunemann wrote back that Mark Wallace knows something about divas because he’s married to a diva.
Asked about the e-mail, Nicolle Wallace said: “I did not have any knowledge of this. This is all news to me.”
As for being called a “diva,” Wallace laughed for a few seconds.
“I don’t have anything to say on that,” she said.
Mark Wallace, taking the phone from his wife, also laughed about the diva accusation but wouldn’t respond when asked whether he had been the source of the “diva” leak. He explained that he had followed a "zero talk policy with the press" regarding the campaign and wanted to honor that.
But, after an early version of this story was posted on-line, he made an exception and offered a flat denial: "No, never. I don't think Sarah Palin is a diva."
The leak-hunting, Scheunemann said, began after POLITICO’s Ben Smith wrote a story in late October suggesting that Palin had ”gone rogue” and began ignoring the advice of her campaign handlers.
“So after that, they went nuclear with ‘diva’ the next day,” Scheunemann said, referring to the Palin-bashing done to CNN’s Bash the day after the POLITICO story. “But did anybody search Mark or Nicolle Wallace’s e-mails for leaks to Dana Bash?”
Schmidt said Kristol was driven by a personal vendetta over the attempted termination of his decades-long friend, Scheunemann.
“Nonsense,” Kristol replied. “My post today was (self-evidently) triggered by the Todd Purdum article that appeared today, which had Schmidt’s fingerprints all over it. I hadn’t thought about Schmidt in months, and will be happy now to return to more pressing issues, like the presidency of Barack Obama.”
As for the charges of being a sunshine soldier with regard to Palin, Schmidt said: “Nonsense. I’m a team player. That’s a reflection of [Kristol’s] values. He’s the Washington, D.C., talking head and glitterati. I live in Northern California and I really don’t give a s--- about that stuff.”
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Palin may be hot but in all my years of observing USA politics, I have never seen anyone get laughed at as much as her.
Cannuck: you gotta get new glasses. Great news for the late night talk show hosts. The only politician even dumber than junior.
Scary thing is, many voters would be more than happy to hand over the keys to the US nuclear arsenal to a sexy face and body over a heart and mind.
Even McCain believes she is not up to the task of being a USA leader, let alone a world leader of any kind.
Even McCain believes she is not up to the task of being a USA leader, let alone a world leader of any kind.
Up to just a couple of years ago it was thought that the Republican party was invincible and that its reign would last forever. Today, many from that party are resigning their seats and others are not running again for office. This is because at long last the public has awakened to its sterility and stupidity. It is a party of sterile archaic ideas and one that never intended to promote the public good. Its support of terrorism overseas, its warmongering, and its religious hypocrisy has finally hit home. This is why they continue to lose candidate after candidate and office after office.
She is sooo hot.
And politics is a blood sport rooted in style not substance.
And what does intellect have to do with anything?
How about a Palin, Shwarzenegger ticket.
Followed perhaps by some kind of public mating ritual.
Think of the TV ratings.
The price of the advertising slots.
Its a win win.
Trex
And politics is a blood sport rooted in style not substance.
And what does intellect have to do with anything?
How about a Palin, Shwarzenegger ticket.
Followed perhaps by some kind of public mating ritual.
Think of the TV ratings.
The price of the advertising slots.
Its a win win.
Trex
Professional politicians have never been really smart, just have to know how to play the system. If we were close to a election now, I would fear her potential. She seemed to have learned from a few of her blunders of the past, if indeed they were blunders. They at least got her noticed on the political stage.
Sorry, Shwarzenegger can never be President.
Sorry, Shwarzenegger can never be President.
I'm afraid you're right. If George Is-our-children-learning Bush can win two consecutive victories, I'm sure Sarah you-can-see-Russia-from-Alaska Palin could too. I do give her credit though for being more articulate than Bush. Even she would be a step up from him.
Shwarzenegger can never be President or Vice-President I'd assume due
to his place of birth being Austria (and not the U.S. of A). I don't even pretend
to be up on the finer details of American Politics.
California isn't doing too well financially at this point from what I understand, &
how much of that can be attributed to the Governator is most likely irrelevant,
but it's happening while he's at the top of the pile. I don't know where Arnold's
popularity would stand with California...or outside of California Federally....
Could Mr. Shwarzenegger hold a high level cabinet post in a Republican run
Palin Presidency, being born outside of the USA???
Sarah, Again?
**************************************
Political IQ?
Collgiate IQ?
Unknown.
Unsought.
Enough said.
What was Palin's Batchelors Degree in (from 6 different schools over how many years?)- Journalism with a television marketing minor?
Sarah wanted to be- and did become a "talking head", but never dreaming it would be on a larger stage, this large. Articulate... hmmm... possibly, but uninformed, definitely!
You folks had her for a neighbor, would you seriously want her as the President of the United States?
Pray for us!:toothy9:
**************************************
Political IQ?
Collgiate IQ?
Unknown.
Unsought.
Enough said.
What was Palin's Batchelors Degree in (from 6 different schools over how many years?)- Journalism with a television marketing minor?
Sarah wanted to be- and did become a "talking head", but never dreaming it would be on a larger stage, this large. Articulate... hmmm... possibly, but uninformed, definitely!
You folks had her for a neighbor, would you seriously want her as the President of the United States?
Pray for us!:toothy9:
I've been reading that California is in deep, deep crap re: their financial capacity. In part, it seems that part of their problem is based on the state electoral practices. The situation has morphed to the point where the state doesn't have enough free cawsh to pay their bills, taxes are going up and there are a number (significant) of companies fleeing SoCal or Nevada.
A sad case indeed.
A sad case indeed.
Sarah wanted to be- and did become a "talking head", but never dreaming it would be on a larger stage, this large. Articulate... hmmm... possibly, but uninformed, definitely!
I suspect that you would not have to worry that much about Palin's intimate understanding of all important presidential portfolios. Certainly she'd heed to be informed and fluent, however, the policy that is developed is really done through the advisors that are chosen.
I'm from Alberta (western canada) and our province was run by a former media personality (Ralph Klein)... In retrospect, one of the first things that he did was to surround himself with knowledgable advisors from both gvt and private sector.
He did remarkably well and served as the provincial premier for multiple terms. Infact, despite his initial actions upon being first elected, he cut services to the bone, but he was able to effectively communicate why it had to be done and the population accepted it without too much groaning.
In the end, Alberta morphed into one of the few provinces to have no provincial deficit an dpaid-offthe provincial debt in less than 15 years.
I suspect that you would not have to worry that much about Palin's intimate understanding of all important presidential portfolios. Certainly she'd heed to be informed and fluent, however, the policy that is developed is really done through the advisors that are chosen.
I'm from Alberta (western canada) and our province was run by a former media personality (Ralph Klein)... In retrospect, one of the first things that he did was to surround himself with knowledgable advisors from both gvt and private sector.
He did remarkably well and served as the provincial premier for multiple terms. Infact, despite his initial actions upon being first elected, he cut services to the bone, but he was able to effectively communicate why it had to be done and the population accepted it without too much groaning.
In the end, Alberta morphed into one of the few provinces to have no provincial deficit an dpaid-offthe provincial debt in less than 15 years.
Would it have mattered if she'd had a Master's degree from Harvard? After all, that's what Dubya had, and it didn't stop him from saying things like "Is our children learning?" and "Childrens do learn!" Seriously now, 'children' is already a double plural(normally not permissible in English grammar as it is), the first plural being the ending -er, followed by -en, contracted to -ren, and then Bush insists on making it a triple plural!8O
Oh, Harvard must be proud of him!
As for Palin's being articulate, I am comparing her to Bush of course. And she should take that as a compliment seeing that he has a Master's degree from such a renouned institution as Harvard. Hey, you want to learn English well, Harvard is definitely the place to go!:lol:
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