Desperate. That’s what critics and detractors of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin are getting, and she hasn’t even announced she’s running for president yet. Can you believe these people are playing, of all things, the Glen Rice card? Here’s how this bit of non-news got started. Author Joe McGinniss wrote a book entitled “The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin.” It’s supposed to be an expose of the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate.
In the book, McGinniss claims that Palin had an affair with one of her husband’s business partners. According to various news reports, both Palin and the business partner have denied that allegation.
McGinniss also claimed that in 1987, when Palin was Sarah Heath and a sports reporter for an Alaska television station, she had a one-night stand with Glen Rice, then a star player for the University of Michigan. (The Wolverines hoops squad was in Alaska for a basketball tourney called the Great Alaska Shootout at the time.)
So McGinniss had to go back 24 years, to a time when both Sarah Heath and Rice were consenting adults, to dig up what he considers “dirt” on the woman now known as Sarah Palin?
As I said, it’s an act of desperation. But Palin-bashers are lapping it up. Here are just a few comments I found on Facebook:
“She’s a cheap slut.”
“No wonder she’s always so nasty; she’s missing Mr. Big Stuff! LOL!”
“You don’t want that trash after you. God knows what she’s got. She certainly doesn’t have any sense of birth control.” (The translation of this comment, from liberal-ese to regular, down-home English, is that Palin doesn’t believe in sucking unborn children down a tube.)
So Palin is a “slut” and “trash.” Ah, the civility of those on the left. Don’t you just love it?
It occurs to me that it wasn’t too long ago when one of their guys — that would be former President Clinton — was found to have committed certain sexual acts with a certain intern in the White House. Nobody on the left ever called him “trash.” If anything, he became more popular with those on the left.
Liberals and lefties tend to ratchet up their standards when it comes to conservatives and Republicans. Rice is a black man, so the revelation that Palin had a one-night stand with him meant those on the left couldn’t fall back on their old reliable standby: that everybody on the right is racist.
So they had to whip out their “slut-trash” card, forgetting all about that business of Clinton inserting a cigar into one of Monica Lewinsky’s orifices when he was the nation’s chief executive.
This outrageous hypocrisy and double standard has even been noted way up in Canada. CBC commentator Rex Murphy wrote a Sept. 17 piece for the National Post highlighting the difference in how most of the American media treated Barack Obama during his 2008 candidacy and Palin:
“Much of the Obama coverage was orchestrated sycophancy,” Murphy wrote. “They glided past his pretensions. … They ignored his arrogance. And they averted from his every gaffe — such as the admission that he didn’t speak ‘Austrian.’
“The media walked right past the decades-long association of Obama with the weird and racist pastor Jeremiah Wright. … The media trashed Hillary [Clinton]. They burned Republicans. They ransacked Sarah Palin and her family.”
The media, Murphy continued, “turned Rottweiler” on Palin. They considered Obama “sacred, classy, intellectual and cosmopolitan,” while they considered Palin “malevolent, trashy, dumb and pure backwoods-ignorant.”
I’m betting Murphy never read that Facebook comment about Palin being “trash.” And I’m also betting that he knows the American mind better than most of Palin’s detractors do.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
