Tony Lee: Media & Political Establishment Try to Rewrite '08 Election

Tony Lee deconstructs the Big Lie being pushed by the permanent political class and its media lapdogs that Sarah Palin was somehow responsible for John McCain's defeat in the 2008 presidential election:

Winston Churchill said “history is written by the victors.” But too often in politics, where professional tacticians want to preserve their permanent paychecks by deflecting their mistakes onto everyone but themselves, losers often desperately attempt to re-write history.

And that is exactly what GOP establishment operatives, aided and abetted by members of the mainstream media who want to preserve access to them, are now doing to the history of the 2008 presidential campaign, as they attempt to blame Palin--and, by association, non-establishment grassroots conservatives--for their own professional malpractice during that campaign.

In nearly every recent story written about Romney’s vice presidential selection process, a GOP operative is quoted saying something in the vein of “Palin’s shadow hangs over the selection process.”

For example, Sara Fagen, George W. Bush’s political director, told the Associated Press, “There's one thing the people in the Republican establishment agree on: There was clearly not a thorough thought process or vetting that went into the selection of Sarah Palin. They didn't ask the fundamental questions or spend enough time with her...”.

Bill Schneider, in a Politico opinion piece, wrote:

The Palin choice hangs over Romney like a sword of doom... Palin was probably the worst vice presidential choice in modern times. What was McCain thinking? Probably that he needed to shore up his conservative base, which distrusted McCain ever since he challenged conservatives’ ascendancy over the GOP in 2000. Remember McCain’s attack that year on Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance"?

The implication is that McCain lost the 2008 election because of Palin--that Palin was not qualified to be president and had no record of accomplishments. That narrative might help the résumés of the McCain handlers who mismanaged her, most notably Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace. However, it ignores certain key facts, such as how Palin enabled McCain to temporarily take the lead in the 2008 campaign, Palin’s record of reform as Alaska’s governor, and Steve Schmidt’s mismanagement of the McCain campaign -- especially his failure and/or refusal to fully vet candidate Obama.

Do they really believe Palin, who took McCain’s campaign off of life support and put it temporarily in the lead, was a worse vice presidential choice than Thomas Eagleton, Dan Quayle, or John Edwards? As Mark Levin said on his radio show, the establishment is trying to re-write history again because, if not for Palin, McCain would have been a bigger loser...

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Lee advises conservatives to follow Mark Levin's example and fight "this pro-establishment whitewashing of history." If they don't, he warns, what happened to Gov. Palin will befall "another conservative who dares to take on the establishment and the permanent political class." Actually, it already has, as Jeffrey Lord has chronicled here, here, and here. Rewriting history is no longer a tactic exclusive to the political left. Republicans have made it into something of an art form, not for use against the Democrats, but against their fellow Republicans. That's how they became known as The Stupid Party.

- JP