Chasing Sarah Palin chasing the news
*It is no longer possible to hide the decline of a once great newspaper, no longer possible to hide the decline of the paper that broke the Watergate story, but is now hanging itself on the Climategate story,” writes James Romm of the Center for American Progress in Politico’s Arena, regarding the Washington Post’s decision to publish an extended version of Sarah Palin’s Facebook notes as an op-ed, in which she (and/or her ghostwriter) calls on President Obama to boycott the Copenhagen talks, and expounds on her view that climate change is an exagerated phenomenon. (Of course, she doesn’t use them kinda big, long-head words, for she is Sarah Palin.) The Post is being roundly panned for the decision to allow the obsessed D.C. press corps’ version of Perez Hilton to appear on its vaunted pages, where once Woodward and Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal, and for appearing to pretend that there is still a serious debate over whether climate change is in fact real.
Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic chimes in, saying, “Once again, the Washington Post has given Sarah Palin the chance to harness herself to the political story of the hour.” And that, in the end, is what Palin is about. Whatever’s in the news, she Facebooks about it, and the credulous media comes a-runnin’. After all, what could be more illuminating than the views of someone who knows absolutely nothing about science, and who thinks the earth is 6,000 years old, on climate change? (Ambinder helpfully annotates the ex-half-term governor’s silly missive, for the non-Palinites out there, who after all, are the ones who know what “annotates” means…)
Ironically, the formerly venerated Washington paper of record, now crumbling under the weight of “the Internets,” might in another era be chasing down the real scandal of the so-called “Climategate” emails: the fact that someone with an interest in debunking the notion of climate change hacked into scientists’ emails and published them, for reasons that one can only surmise have something to do with oil and gas. From some news organizations and even blogs, who are not busying themselves chasing Sarah Palin’s constantly waggin’ tail, courtesy of The Week:
As the Copenhagen summit kicks off today in Denmark, speculation swirls over who’s responsible for leaking the hacked ‘Climategate’ emails from the University of East Anglia. A new report by the Daily Mail reveals that the emails were originally released from a server in Siberia. The British press, in particular, has jumped on the story, with many asking: Did Russia’s secret service, the FSB, engineer Climategate to derail Copenhagen?
A Russian-engineered climate scandal makes sense:With “much of Russia’s vast oil and gas reserves” rendered nearly inaccessible during the winter months, says Shaun Walker in The Independent, Russia has good reason to wish for a warmer Earth. Add to that the “vast sums of money” required for Russia to modernize its “aging factories,” and it’s easy to see why the FSB might be tasked with finding a way to make Copenhagen fail.
“Was Russian secret service behind leak of climate-change emails?”Russian or not, the hackers were professionals: “I don’t know if Russia was responsible,”says Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, “but this has never looked like a simple case of computerized vandalism.” Whoever carried out this “sophisticated operation” was obviously careful to release “the most incriminating” information, “specifically to sabotage the Copenhagen summit” — solid evidence that the break-in was the work of professionals.
“Was Russia behind the stolen CRU emails?”
Meanwhile, for their next act, the Washington Post editorial board will publish Sarah Palin’s thoughts on how to cure the swine flu, also…
Double meanwhile, faced with a possible primary challenge from his right flank, Sister Sarah’s former running-mate becomes a climate change denier, too (and an increasingly bitter partisan, even for the perpetually peeved Arizonan) So just how old IS the earth, Senator McCain? Just wondering where you stand on that these days…
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