MSNBC retracts false Palin story; others duped — As much as a few of the editors here disliked Palin, this BS about her thinking Africa was a country was never posted. 
It didn’t make any real sense that she was that dumb since she would have to see African dignitaries in Alaska. People wanted her to be that dumb so they took the bait. Meanwhile, Bill Maher ranted about it relentlessly as did many on MSNBC. These people’s lack of skepticism is frightening. This is the media at work. Even the LA Times was duped. The fact was, she denied saying it. Nobody had it on tape and there was no confirming source. Cripes, how hard is it to get things right?
The hoax was limited to the identity of the source in the story about Palin — not the Fox News story itself. While Palin has denied that she mistook Africa for a country, the veracity of that report was not put in question by the revelation that Eisenstadt is a phony.
Eisenstadt’s “work” had been quoted and debunked before. The Huffington Post said it had cited Eisenstadt in July on a story regarding the Hilton family and McCain.
Among the other victims were political blogs for the Los Angeles Times and The New Republic, each of which referenced false material from Eisenstadt’s blog.
Found by Roger Strukhof.
>> Max Bell said
>> It WAS possible to dislike her because she was republican AND because she was ignorant and lazy.
Don’t forget mean.
Man, she really showed that side of her personality in this race.
#28 Mustard, “The facts remain: Dumbya was a deserter, and Palin is a dummy.”
And, Obama is a lying, homophobic, hate-mongering, rights stealer.
Cool!
This just in to our newsroom:
When asked to name their favorite and least favorite campaign journalist or commentator, Bill O’Reilly was named most frequently as the favorite – and as the least favorite. O’Reilly was named by 5% as their favorite journalist or commentator, while 3% each named Tom Brokaw and Sean Hannity. However, fully half could not name anyone as their favorite.
When asked to name their least favorite journalist or news commentator who covered the campaign this year, 60% offered no response. Among those who did name someone, O’Reilly also topped the list (at 6%). Katie Couric of CBS News was named by 5% of the public as their least favorite campaign journalist. In addition, 3% named each of the following: the Fox News Channel, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, and Sean Hannity.
Source: Pew
>> bhavekost said,
>> Who said that they were visiting all 57 states to a rally of supporters?
It was a JOKE. Watch the video. It was obviously a JOKE!
For the love of all that’s good — OF COURSE OBAMA KNOWS THERE ARE 50 STATES!!!!!!!!
I honestly have to question the intelligence of people who keep spreading this “57 states” nonsense.
How dumb do you have to be in order to honestly believe that someone who graduated AT THE TOP OF ONE OF THE BEST SCHOOLS IN THE WORLD doesn’t know there are 50 states?
# 34 Greg Allen said, “How dumb do you have to be in order to honestly believe that someone who graduated AT THE TOP OF ONE OF THE BEST SCHOOLS IN THE WORLD doesn’t know there are 50 states?”
I don’t know. As dumb as someone who believes that increasing taxes on SMBs will cause them to create more jobs?
Cripes, how hard is it to get things right?
Its not hard, REAL journalism is DEAD & BURIED. Facts? Who needs’em? “Reputable” journalists are now openly of the mind that they can just make sh*t up and everyone will (they hope) believe it. Truth is optional these days. In the past, truth was a tainted version of it from the “just the facts” media.
LONG LIVE THE ALTERNATIVE MEDIA and let the old guard media continue to hang themselves with their own lies.
I confess. Given how stupid Sarah Palin is, I did believe the story. It seemed to make sense along with not knowing the countries in NAFTA (there are only 3).
So, I just figured that since she couldn’t see Africa or Mexico from her house, they were both likely true.
Silly me.
It seemed like a completely plausible story when it first came out.
Shoddy reporting? Sure, but have you ever heard her say anything intelligent? It sounds like somebody is trying to do some damage control.
Regardless of whether or not its true, I hope this whole ordeal keeps her out of national politics in the future. The last thing we need is a creationist bimbo running the country or writing laws.
#34 Read it and weep. Obama is not only an intellectual – he’s an elitist.
The Danger Of Overrating ‘Intellectuals’
By THOMAS SOWELL | Posted Tuesday, November 11, 2008 4:30 PM PT – Investor’s Business Daily
Among the many wonders to be expected from an Obama administration, if Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times is to be believed, is ending “the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.”
He cited Adlai Stevenson, the suave and debonair governor of Illinois, who twice ran for president against Eisenhower in the 1950s, as an example of an intellectual in politics.
Stevenson the ‘intellectual,’ left, could happily go years without picking up a book. Truman the bumpkin devoured Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin.
Stevenson the ‘intellectual,’ left, could happily go years without picking up a book. Truman the bumpkin devoured Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin.
Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are “interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity,” people who “read the classics.”
It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
Adlai Stevenson was certainly regarded as an intellectual by intellectuals in the 1950s. But half a century later, facts paint a very different picture.
Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson “could go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book.” But Stevenson had the airs of an intellectual — the form, rather than the substance.
What is more telling, form was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed, though apparently not to Mr. Kristof.
That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.
As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Fred Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.
Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.
Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.
The intellectual levels of politicians are just one of the many things that intellectuals have grossly misjudged for years on end.
During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model — all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.
New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear — that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.
After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.
More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about 6 million people had died in that famine — about the same number as the people killed in Hitler’s Holocaust.
In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Hitler and urged Western disarmament.
It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century — far more so than ordinary people.
History fully vindicates the late William F. Buckley’s view that he would rather be ruled by people represented by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.
How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable — or even expert — within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation.
But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance, and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking.
Some guy, who has an obvious interest in making her look like an idiot, says that Palin doesn’t know Africa is a continent. No tape, no other witnesses, nothing.
The Obama nuts attacked the credibility of the McCain camp but now you all just believe this, which comes out of the McCain camp.
Just checking in. Yep, she’s still a dumbass.
#39 – brendal,
I have no idea what your point has to do with the topic at hand which is that Sarah Palin is genuinely a blithering idiot.
That said, in response to this:
More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about 6 million people had died in that famine — about the same number as the people killed in Hitler’s Holocaust.
A) Godwin’s Law: You lose.
B) You should check how many people died in the holocaust. 6 million was the number of Jews. There were 12 million exterminated in his concentration camps. But, what’s a factor of two between friends (or enemies)?
brendel, while I was reading I thought you were talking about George W Bush. You know, born with silver spoon in his mouth, Yale and Harvard, child of the intellectual right, etc.
#43 QB, you think GWB is an “intellectual”?
#32 – Paddy-RAMBO
>>And, Obama is a lying, homophobic, hate-mongering,
>>rights stealer.
In your dreams, RAMBO. Only in your dreams.
Also, note how the liberals just can’t stop talking about Palin. All she has to do is an interview here or a press conference there and she’s the headline, not Obama.
That’s a pretty smart, and powerful, position to be in. Hopefully she plays it into a Senate run and doesn’t hold out hope for ’12. By then the Blue Bloods in the GOP will have another candidate chosen, and will put their money behind him.
# 45 Mister Mustard said, “In your dreams, RAMBO. Only in your dreams.”
This is according to YOU. Not me…
Why is MSNBC retracting this when it was Fox News that reported it? It is like the Wall Street Journal retracting a story from the New York Times.
And why isn’t Fox News the one in hot water over their false reporting?
The fact is… Palin is dumb as a stick. That’s *why* the great red base love her. That’s their precondition for loving anybody…
# 48 Christopher said, “Why is MSNBC retracting this when it was Fox News that reported it? It is like the Wall Street Journal retracting a story from the New York Times.”
Because, Fox just reported that a source that refused to be named, made unsubstantiated allegations. Nothing false in that story.
MSNBC reported something that was false.
See the difference?
What Dan Rather reported about Bush’s doctor’s testimony was true — it’s just that the document that gave him the lead was forged.
Same deal here. The report of her idiocy did happen — it’s just that this guy was not the original source.
It’s amazing how slim the pickings are for Republicans when it comes to looking for scandals.
Meanwhile, on another side of the coin, we have a President who lied his way into a war that caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents… Spying on Americans without warrants… The right has so many major atrocities in its lap, we’re supposed to just take them as natural phenomena….
#47 – O’Furniture,
Well, when you want to make a point, you could always post a link. You know what a link is right?
So, consider posting a link to some article that shows that Obama has lied, is homophobic, is a hate-monger, or has stolen anyone’s rights.
C’mon, it’ll make you look a tad more intelligent than W or McCain or Palin if you can figure out how to post a link.
So now is John going to admit he has reported this story falsely?
Is he going to hold himself to his own standards and admit that the MSNBC retraction does not have any bearing on the truth of the original story?
I doubt it. John rants about the “media” not correcting their mistakes; but he never corrects his own.
# 53 Misanthropic Scott said, “Well, when you want to make a point, you could always post a link. You know what a link is right?”
The person I responded to knows where he said those things…
You can look up where he has called opponents to gay marriage homophobic & where he said Obama lied to get elected…
Do you believe someone denying gay marriage is denying basic civil rights?
Paddy-O, not elite.
me tipe guud again. No he’s a rich, privileged, connected, ivy league elite.
# 56 QB said, “Paddy-O, not elite.”
d: a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence .
#55 – Paddy-O-Furniture,
Do you believe someone denying gay marriage is denying basic civil rights?
Yes.
I still want the link. Denying gay marriage does not necessarily make one a homophobe. It makes one a politician, a different kind of asshole entirely.
Not fighting for the rights of people does not make someone the one who stole them. It doesn’t win any points with me. But, it’s not the same as fighting to remove rights that are already protected, as the neocons do.
So, your neocon crap just doesn’t cut it with me.
And, I still don’t believe you know how to post a link. Let me know if you want me to teach you. It might help with your internet debating skills, which are sorely lacking.
# 59 Misanthropic Scott said, “Yes.”
Good. So, Obama is FOR denying those “rights” that you believe in.
Thanks.
#60 – O’Pinocchio
Sorry, Pinocch. But your lying is overtaking your RAMBO-like threat to start “piling up liberal bodies”, so you’re downgraded back to prevaricating puppet.
>>Good. So, Obama is FOR denying those “rights” that
>>you believe in.
Uh, you did see Scottie’s request for LINKS, right? You do know what links are, right? And how to post them?
Show a link to where Obama seeks to deny “rights” that all fair-hearted folk believe in. Or else STFU.