Having Palin weigh in is no way to win points

Man oh man, there’s just no ignoring this loathsome story, as everyone gets in on the act:

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS/AP) – Nikki Haley took to the airwaves Monday afternoon to “emphatically” deny a political blogger and former Sanford aide’s claim that he had a romantic relationship with the Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2007….
… The Columbia Free Times has “been investigating a story involving an alleged affair between Haley and Folks for several weeks,” and on Monday cited an unnamed source who claimed Folks privately admitted the affair in 2009. “Furthermore, the source … says former Haley staffer B.J. Boling told him Haley had confided in him about the affair around the time Boling was working on her House reelection campaign in 2008,” the Free Times reported.

State Republican Party Chairwoman Karen Floyd criticized the media for covering the story at all, saying in a statement, “South Carolinians deserve a higher level of political discourse than this, and they frankly deserve a press corps that focuses on real, substantive issues rather than on Internet rumor mongering.” Palin also lambasted the “lamestream media” as she defended Haley on Facebook Monday afternoon.

“I’ve been there,” Palin wrote. “Any lies told about you will strengthen your resolve to clean up political and media corruption. You and your supporters will grow stronger through things like this.”

Clue for Sarah Palin: The Free Times is NOT the MSM. It may be a lot of things, good and bad, but it’s not that. I suppose she’s color-blind in that range. But then, she doesn’t read a lot, I hear…

7 thoughts on “Having Palin weigh in is no way to win points

  1. Matt

    Personally I think having Palin weigh in IS a way to win points. It helps bolster and lends credibility to Haley’s side of the story to have someone as respected as Palin (maybe not by you, but by the average SCGOP primary voter) rush to Haley’s defense.

    And I don’t know why one would think Palin was referring simply to the Free Times and the Hutchins junk that a lot of us know to read with a grain of salt. All the MSM in South Carolina is reporting on this. Actually, they seem to be reporting on the reporting on this. You’ve got to wonder–how would newspapers stay in business if it wasn’t for bloggers giving them things to “report” on?
    🙂

  2. Brad

    Yeah, I almost reworded that, but then decided to stick with it. After all, a blog expresses MY opinion, and with me, that’s no way to win points.

    As for the points about the MSM — this kind of nasty-rumor stuff was never the province of the MSM, and now it finds itself in the extremely uncomfortable position of dealing with unconfirmed, he-said-she-said garbage that it would not report on pre-blogosphere. But now that there are no barriers to putting something on the record, and any maladjusted person with a laptop can publish to the world without any standards of proof or perspective or respect for relevance whatsoever, the MSM has to deal with it. And doesn’t deal with it well, probably because there’s no way for a professional with a sense of propriety to deal well with this sort of situation. It’s just a clusterf… I mean, an untenable situation for editors to deal with when they’re trying to publish a family newspaper…

  3. Kathryn Fenner

    Look, it’s not a “family world”–bad stuff happens, and if it has an impact on events, it should be reported. Rumors have apparently been swirling for at least a year, according to reporters, and no one went with it–but when it went hard, it became news.

    and Nikki got a huge bump from Palin in the polls, so Palin’s backing is worth a lot!

  4. York Durden

    Palin is the Moosiah. I will do whatsoever she says, believe whatsoever she believes.

  5. jfx

    Palin’s involvement reflects poorly on both of them.

    The facts aren’t known…so if this thing tilts toward ‘true’, Palin looks ridiculous and gullible, and completely inept at assessing the character of her endorsees. Furthermore, with her immediate knee-jerk hyper-ideological counter-attack, Palin attracted the very mainstream and national media interest that will turn this into Sanford redux. Nice going, Sarah and Todd! Rubes.

    As for Haley, it’s so unflattering that she would seem to need Sarah Palin to swoop in and stick up for her. I can’t believe that Sarah would have taken that action independently. It must have been the Haley campaign in full damage control mode making the call and initiating that action. One serious speedbump and she’s gotta call in Sarah America for a bailout? What happens when Haley’s governor and times get tough? Will she let Sarah guest-govern during the nasty bits? It seems strange and sad that this is Haley’s crisis, and Sarah Palin is somehow the (unnecessary, unwanted) face of it.

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