By now you've all heard about, and possibly read, this month's Vanity Fair piece about Sarah Palin by Todd S. Purdum, It Came from Wasilla. (If you haven't, go read it!) It's an expose about the train wreck that was the McCain-Palin campaign in the final few months. But this time, we hear a bit more than leaks about Sarah Palin being a "whack job," a "diva," or "going rogue." My favorite revelation? Apparently Palin's handlers started calling her the "Little Shop of Horrors" within a week.
There's a nice follow up article in Politico today about the Republican infighting generated by the Vanity Fair piece. Bill Kristol, an adviser to the McCain campaign and someone rumored to have been responsible for McCain's selection of Palin as a running mate, started off the bitch fest with a post on The Weekly Standard's blog criticizing the Vanity Fair article. Since then, he and Steve Schmidt, McCain's campaign manager, have basically traded school yard insults, dragging in Randy Scheunemann, a McCain foreign policy adviser. Keep it up, boys. We really don't care who leaked all the stuff about Palin during the campaign or whether one of you suggested she might have post-partum depression. It's all good for the Democrats!
Here's a sampling of the pissing match:
“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.
Man, it doesn't get much better than this.
Finish reading Sarah Palin: When Reality is Irrelevant on MOMocrats....
