I wish I could have had a similar job to that of Alex Spillius, Washington correspondent of the UK Daily Telegraph. He gets up, shaves, showers, has his breakfast, reads the New York Times and Washington Post, watches MSNBC and CNN, e mails a couple of journolists, pens a few hundred words by rejigging what he has heard and read that morning, sends his piece to the Telegraph and gets paid a three figure salary.
Unfair?
Not if you read this snarky little hit piece. It has the fingerprints of the Beltway GOP Stop Palin cabal all over it – and every buzzword from the Karl Rove lexicon…
Divisive, racial politics, DWTS vote rigging, TV Reality show…..you begin to wonder if Mona Charen is not our Alex in drag.
In leaked extracts of her new book, Mrs Palin delves into the minefield of racial politics, arguing that the first African American US president is among those who regarded the conservative tea party movement as racially prejudiced and who thinks that “America is a fundamentally unjust and unequal country”.
As proof, she dredged up a quote from a 2008 campaign speech in which Mrs Obama said “for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country”.
Naturally our fearless hack uses no shoeleather to find out if there is any justification to the governor’s alleged remarks (Spillius has not read the book, of course, just selective leaks from left wing websites) and I’m afraid that is par for the course for this third rate scribbler. Throughout 2008 he and his Telegraph colleague Toby Harnden made no attempt to investigate Obama’s connections to Rev Jeremiah Wright or the Chicago Machine. They made little or no comment about his lack of any executive experience or the questionable nature of Michelle Obama’s employment and remuneration.
Nor has Spillius brought to the attention of his UK readers any of the controversies about his administration’s suspiciously biased handling of the Black Panthers voter intimidation case. Indeed it is only in recent months that he has begun to report about the growing realisation among the Beltway elite that the man that they all (including Spillius) claimed was Zeus has transformed into Ozymandias. But naturally nothing about the fact that it was Spillius and his fellow hacks who oversold the Obama brand in the first place.
But then what can one expect from the so called right wing Telegraph. Stripped of it’s best writers by the Barclay Brothers and their axemen it has devolved into a bland lifestyle gossip rag with little understanding of the grassroots resurgence of conservatism fired up by the big government agenda of an incompetent and inexperienced machine hack and his blundering henchmen – no wonder it was the left/liberal Guardian which attracted the hip and cool talk radio Palin friendly Tammy Bruce to write a regular column. Alex Spillius and his Beltway chums would regard her with withering disdain – which is why his meaningless musings about Palin should always be filed under F for forgettable…
Or, as the inimitable Dan Riehl has written over a similar put down
If Sarah Palin has a secret weapon, it’s how distasteful and classless are so many of the GOP establishment types lined-up against her. If they were nearly as smart as they fancy themselves to be, they’d probably just shut-up and let the chips fall where they may.
UPDATE
The Spillius pump has just thrown up two more squirts of Palinphobia making it clear that he is the hack of choice for the GOP Beltway suits as their main transatlantic pipeline to feed the “Derail Palin” message onto the marmalade and toast laden breakfast tables of the Telegraph’s Tory middle class readership. As our feisty friend Cubachi points out she gets more respect from Vice President Biden than she does from the Republican establishment.
But hey – she’d be great serving the coffee…..
