I wrote that, now that we know Palin isn't running, "we can stop worrying about the threat she posed to this country." Pejman crosses this fingers:
So that means no more obsessive Palin-blogging? That means Sullivan will hang it up and call it a career as an Internet gynecologist and obstetrician?
This meme on the right – simply equating genuine, real, empirical questions about the insane stories made up by Palin about her last pregnancy with some kind of creepy fascination with vaginas – is one more dodge from the Palin partisans. Trust me: I am the last man on the Internet with an interest in gynecology. I am, however, duty bound, as I see it, to say when a leading politician is saying something obviously nuts or, at the very least, wildly implausible, and asking for empirical proof. That used to be called journalism, until "deference" became the norm.
There are many individuals in the world nutty enough to make up stories about pregnancies, and this blog covers none of them. Indeed, I couldn't care less if someone capable of such a thing walks around in a free country. All I ever cared about was that someone who was incapable of understanding reality, who was, in my view, clinically disturbed, intellectually incapable and emotionally crippled, should not be foisted on the world as a potential US president because John McCain had a temper tantrum.
The record shows I had an open mind in the first blissfully data-free minutes I absorbed her candidacy. I had no desire to spend hours on a story out of a movie-of-the-week. But as a blogger, I owe my readers honesty. I could not disguise the fact that I did not believe her on Trig, and that if the worst were true, we had a fullscale nutjob potentially in line for global power. What was I supposed to do? I took a day off when it dawned on me I shouldn't lie, and yet knew I would be pilloried for airing the question. That day off was entirely my own choice, and I used it to try and think skeptically about what was in my head and to pray for the right response. The obloquy and ridicule from my fellow hacks was close to universal, and I put awful strains on my colleagues at the Dish. The only reason I did this was that I simply didn't believe her. None of it made sense to me. I regard it as a sacred rule of this blog that I will not bullshit you. So I didn't. Fuck the consequences.
If her loss of power leads to some kind of resolution to some of the mysteries, the Dish will cover it. And in so far as a child with Down Syndrome may have been tossed into the scarring chaos of Palin life, one should simply pray for him. But that's it. At some point, history will have its say. Or we will never know (one reason, I suspect, she quit while she was ahead). But there's no need any more to even think, let alone blog, about her. I did what I could to expose her and the corrupt system – in politics and the media – that made her possible. And she's over. Mission, as they say, accomplished.
Cue the music from "Jaws".
(Images: an email from Palin trying to get paid for the two days she allegedly spent in hospital having a premature child with Down Syndrome; an extract from Palin's own letter to her family and friends, in the voice of the Almighty, miraculously predicting a premature birth she would subsequently describe as a total shock – "It's far too early.")
The Dish 