Though the report doesn't dwell on it, this particular public safety commissioner was badly in need of firing. In the midst of the Palin family's formal complaints about state trooper and former Palin brother-in-law Mike Wooten for threatening her family, drinking on the job, and Tasering Palin's nephew, the public safety commission asked the governor to sign a photo of a state trooper, in uniform, saluting the flag for the purpose of turning the photo into a poster. The trooper chosen for this photo was none other than ⦠Mike Wooten! 39
But the report also accused Palin of âabuse by inactionâ for not preventing her husband from complaining about Wooten. Notwithstanding Palin's stated fear of the trooper, the report concluded that this was not a genuine fear because according to the geniuses on the investigating panel, getting Wooten fired would not make him any less dangerous. âOnthe contrary,â the report advised, âit might just precipitate some retaliatory conduct on his part.â
So whatever you do, do not complain about abusive cops: They might retaliate! Though I still think it might make them a little less dangerous to take away their badges and guns.
Out of more than forty newspaper and wire stories on the legislature's report the day after it was released, most with banner headlines declaring Palin GUILTY, only twenty documents even mentioned that the trooper in question had Tasered his ten-year-old stepson. The
New York Times
was not among them.
Instead,
Times
reporter Serge F. Kovaleski described the Palin family's interest in the trooper as resulting from âa harsh divorce and child-custody battleâ with Palin's sister. 40 This would be like describing Justin Volpe's sodomitic broomstick attack on Abner Louima as an âenhanced interrogation.â
One imagines a normal person trying to grasp what happened after reading the
New York Times
version of the story:
NORMAL PERSON: Why was Palin trying to fire this guy?
REPORTER: Because she's a horrible person.
NORMAL PERSON: Yeah, but what was her reason? She must have had a reason.
REPORTER: Don't worry, it's not important.
NORMAL PERSON: If you don't tell me, I'm going online to find
out.
REPORTER: He Tasered her ten-year-old nephew, threatened to
kill his father-in-law, and drank on the job, but anyway,
she's a horrible person!
NORMAL PERSON: HE WHAT!
No wonder the establishment media are so frustrated with the Internet.
In any other connection, a woman going through a divorce from a cop who had made threats against her father and Tasered her son would be a Lifetime TV (for women) movie. The media had to do a highly unusual 180-degree turn on cops to make Sarah Palin the villainin this story. My own position is that sometimes cops are innocent and sometimes they are guilty, but I need to know the facts. It's good to know that the Left's new default position is: âWe always believe the cop.â That represents a major policy shift.
The smear tactics used by the media against McCain and Palin show the absurdity of the Left's claims of perpetual victimization at the hands of the Republican Attack Machine. While Republican âattacksâ went out on little Web videos and in campaign stump speechesâjust like the Democratic attacks on Republicansâliberal attacks on McCain and Palin went out in AP wire reports,
Saturday Night Live
sketches, and CBS News interviews.
Again: it wasn't the Democrats who started calling Sarah Palin a racist: It was the media. On October 5, the objective, nonpartisan Associated Press reported that Palin's statement that Obama was âpalling around with terroristsââreferring to the white, privileged, cretinous member of the Weather Underground Bill Ayersââwas unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.â 41 The following week, Democratic politicians joined the media bandwagon, when