Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

The behavior of the press, certain bloggers, and the Dem Party have been reprehensible about Palin.  Not everyone at The Atlantic is bad: 

The other good news for the McCain campaign is that many Democrats are mishandling the issue as badly as they mishandled the nomination in the first place. There is a tone of exultation over the Palin family’s difficulties that will strike many centrists, and decent people regardless of ideology, as repellent. Again, to his enormous credit, Obama himself was the exception. What a class act he is. He reminded reporters that he is the son of an unmarried mother, said the families of candidates and especially their children should be off-limits, and told the press to drop the story. It won’t of course: it will mine it for all it is worth. But Obama said the right thing and gave every sign of meaning it.

While I am complaining about the odious instincts of my profession, let me mention in passing the bid that Campbell Brown is making to supplant Lou Dobbs as the most objectionable broadcast bloviator, thereby securing the top two slots for CNN’s “best political team on television”. On Sunday I watched amazed as her supposed interview of a McCain spokesman on the Palin pick degenerated into a laughing, contemptuous harangue. Her evident disgust at the choice was not to be appeased. Then on Monday she demanded of another McCain surrogate to know whether Palin could be a good mother since she had knowingly thrust her daughter into the spotlight. But who, for heaven’s sake, is directing that spotlight? This is like the mugger who tells his victim he regrets what’s happening, “but why were you so stupid as to walk up this dark alley?” Others might be entitled to make that point, but it is nauseating to hear it from the regretful self-righteous mugger herself.

http://clivecrook.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/the_palin_nomination.php

And memo to Andrew--you disappoint me. 

And credit to Barack Obama for showing some class.  I think he really means it.  Too bad many of his supporters have no class.

Since the link about doesn’t work, try out this one:

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0908/Breaking_Phone_book_reveals_Palin_phone_number.html

in which Ben Smith takes RedState to task for making assumptions, like Bainbridge has above, about this non-story.

You will seriously have to do better.

I’m a McCain supporter, didn’t see the Campbell Brown bit, but I may agree with what she may be getting at.  If it were me and I were trying to settle the rumor/slime campaign about parentage of Trig, I’d have shown something proving he was my child.  Why use the fact of your daughter’s pregnancy as the item to disprove that question?  That does nothing but drag her further into the limelight.  Seems unnecessary to me is all.  (Not that I would’ve chosen to respond at all necessarily, but she did choose to do so.)
I noticed the Politico link no longer works.  Perhaps they were forced to remove the home info, hopefully out of shame.

For those of you who won’t let your fingers do the walking, here’s the Politico piece:

Breaking: Phone book reveals Palin phone number

RedState’s Erick Erickson has a fevered take on our story on Tony Knowles’ two-year-old opposition research book on Sarah Palin under the heading “Democrats Release Sarah Palin’s Social Security Number.”

His item is so wildly misleading that it’s hard to know where to start, but the headline seems like a good place.

First, if he knows that Democrats released it, he has better sources than I do.

Second, the Social Security umber is missing its last four digits. That is, it’s already been redacted, in an apparent excess of caution by whoever prepared it from public record. You can’t get very far with a five-digit Social Security number. (Similarly redacted Social Security numbers are available for a small fee on such sinister tools as Lexis-Nexis.)

The item’s first sentence is also inaccurate. “The Politico has received an opposition research file from the Alaska Democrats.”

The notion that we received the file from the Alaska Democrats appears to come from sources inside Erickson’s head.

Finally, Drudge is teasing the story with the news that Palin’s home phone number has been released. You can find the same number in any online telephone book.

Erickson concludes:

It is atrocious that the Democrats would not only seek out Sarah Palin’s Social Security number, but release it in opposition research to the press.

We need to know who did this. We also need to know what happened. We also need to know if it was used to bolster the Democrats’ opposition research.

We also need to know what we’re talking about before we get all breathless on the blogs.

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“breathless on the blogs” that would be you, Prof.