Joe McGinniss 1942 - 2014

Joe McGinniss, around 1968, from the cover of "The Selling of the President"

By Patrick

Today we woke up to incredibly sad news. Joe McGinniss has passed away. This came unexpected, despite the knowledge that he was suffering from prostate cancer. It reminds us that we are not invincible.

We got to know Joe McGinniss as a remarkable and straightforward man who was not easily fooled by the public appearance of certain people. One of his main desires was to look beneath the surface, in order to find truth. His goal was to present a "real" view on people and events, as I would call it. 

I cannot claim to be an expert regarding every fact surrounding the life of Joe McGinniss. There are many other people who followed his career for decades, and who knew him much better. However, I was lucky to have some communications with him since he got interested in Sarah Palin, and looking back at the email exchanges, I realized that I had almost forgotten that I exchanged quite a number of emails with him particularly in 2009 and 2010. 

Afterwards, there was rare, if any, contact, which however didn't feel odd at all. There still remained a certain "bond", and he mentioned Politicalgates for example in a very appreciative way on his blog in August 2011, for which we were very grateful. Also, a number of facts which originally were presented first at "Palingates" later found their way into his book "The Rogue", for example Todd's and Sarah's revealing "airport encounter."

Initially, the contact between us intensified in 2009 when I sent him results of our research regarding Sarah Palin's fake bus tour, which in fact turned out to be a "private plane tour." The story originally broke on "Palingates", as some of you will remember, and Joe McGinniss then wrote an article about it at "The Daily Beast." Back then, "Huffington Post" took note and in addition duly reported how Sarah Palin and Harper Collins defended themselves with weak arguments. It was a nice result, and we were thankful to Joe McGinniss that he was willing take on the woman who in 2009 still appeared to be a serious politician and possible future presidential candidate, and that he was willing to cooperate with the "blogs" which sometimes were able to discover very interesting and new facts.

In almost every email communication I had with Joe McGinniss, he made a remark like 

"Patrick, this is off the record, a private communication from me to you." (May 2, 2010),

and I certainly won't publish anything now which he would have regarded as private or inappropriate. But there are some things I can say. 

In an email message from December 2009, Joe McGinniss wondered why Sarah Palin has the habit of sometimes drawing attention to her secrets and scandals through her own actions or words, and added:

"Like serial killers, non-violent psychopaths have the repressed desire to be caught."

To which I responded:

"Yes, Sarah is very, very stupid, and predictable. We know she is mentally ill. It might actually be that just like a criminal, she subconciously wants the truth to come out - so that everything is "finally over"...I absolutely agree with you!!"

Joe McGinniss realized very early that Sarah Palin is a deeply disturbed person. Unfortunately, many other journalists are apparently even today still at loss to understand that Sarah Palin is not your ordinary "right-wing politician", but a mentally ill person. It is incredibly disappointing to read the various obituaries regarding Joe's death today, as almost none of them does justice to his book "The Rogue." 

I read the weirdest things in these obituaries, I don't even want to link to them. I have read that this book was "strange", that it had "little impact", and most of the journalists only seem to remember that he rented the house next to the house of the Palin family. Have they even read the book? I have, and in a weird coincidence only about two weeks ago I began to read it again, on my Kindle App (note: you don't need to buy a "Kindle" if you own a smartphone).

The book is brilliant. Nobody else managed to capture the essence of Sarah Palin, her world, her life and her secrets like Joe McGinniss in "The Rogue." Today, it is still confusing to see that the one person who presented a realistic view of Sarah Palin to the public was being vilified for it.

Only very few journalists managed to keep a clear head as far as Sarah Palin is concerned, and one of them is of course Andrew Sullivan, who wrote today about Joe McGinniss:

But what I truly treasured about Joe – and I came to love him even though we only met a couple of times – was his dogged imperviousness to his peers or to establishment opinion. If he smelled a story, he would dig in, obsessively recovering its human truth. If others thought the story was irrelevant or non-existent, it wouldn’t affect him. His motivation, as it was with his first book, was to peel back the layers of image and propaganda and spin to reveal the reality. He did this with Jeffrey McDonald. And he did it with Sarah Palin.

Of course, we bonded over the former half-term governor. He reached out to me when I was wildly exposed among journalists for refusing to believe her stories at face value. And what we bonded over was not a mutual revulsion at her politics. What we bonded over was the abject failure of the American press to say what had to be said about this preposterous, delusional maniac plucked from deserved obscurity by John McCain to be a heartbeat away from a potential presidency.

Her candidacy was a total farce; a disgrace; an outrage to American democracy; an appalling act of cynicism. Joe saw the creation of this media figure as a continuation of the Ailes recipe for optic politics, and he was appalled as so many mainstream outlets nonetheless insisted on taking this joke seriously.

So he went to do what others wouldn’t: to find the real truth about Palin, and he came closer than almost anyone.

I don’t see his last book as some kind of aberration, though it was obviously not in the same league as The Selling Of The President or Fatal Vision. I saw them all as a continuing crusade for a journalism that takes a stand, that welcomes obloquy if that’s what it takes to get to the truth, and that cares about our democracy. He would never have aimed for the “view from nowhere” or the facile mantra that one leading Washington journalist gave me when asked to explain why they hadn’t sought any proof for the fantastic Trig story that Palin spun: “Why ask questions when you know you won’t get an answer?” For Joe that was pathetic. As indeed it was.

We couldn't have said it any better: As far as the truth about Sarah Palin is concerned, "he came closer than almost anyone."

Also, he was not shy to talk about it, calling Sarah Palin for example "an utter fraud":

There is an interesting parallel to the case of the documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who also went to Alaska in order to find the "real" Sarah Palin. He had a similar strategy, went to Alaska, talked to various people who knew her very well, and apparently came to similar conclusions. However, his documentary was also not received very well, despite being totally "spot on" and also very gripping to watch, because the critics obviously had real difficulties in understanding that the "public life" of Sarah Palin is just a false, fraudulent misrepresentation.

The "big lie" theory worked well for Sarah: Only a few people obviously could imagine that somebody is bold enough to present one lie after the other to the world, always insisting that the lies are the absolute truth. As no intelligent person would ever do such a thing, Sarah Palin got away with it - and Joe McGinniss and Nick Broomfield simply were wrong. They had to be. They were "strange."

Nick Broomfield's documentary "You Betcha" feels almost like "the film to the book of Joe McGinniss":

)

This is certainly not the last time we will talk about Joe McGinniss. Finally, I have actually a little "anecdote" to tell from our email conversations, without breaching the privacy. 

On May 1, 2010, I said to him in an email conversation:

"By the way, I was delighted to find your name in a book I was reading recently - "Lost Over Laos" - in connection with Henri Huet. Long time ago, isn't it!"

This book is a thorough examination of the tragic helicopter crash in Laos in 1971 in which four war photographers were killed - amongst them the famous war photographers Henri Huet and Larry Burrows (they were 43 and 44 years old when they died).

Joe McGinniss was touched by my remark, responded and explained that

"Henri (Huet) was a great friend to me in Vietnam in '67, and in the early '70's both to Nancy Doherty, the photographer who later became my wife, and to me."

It is not very well known that Joe McGinniss spent quite a while in Vietnam as a journalist. Joe explained in the email that he had actually met Henri Huet earlier on the day Henri died, and said:

"That night, back at Quang Tri, having spent a full day at Khe Sanh, we looked for Henri so we could have dinner with him. I don't remember exactly who told us, or in what context--it probably was an AP reporter--that Henri's chopper had been shot down and that there were no survivors."

Joe added:

  "Roll of the dice. A fine man lost. Like so many others."

The same could be said of Joe, and even though he reached the age of 71, we lost him far too early.

The new confusion surrounding Sarah Palin: Is she "back", or is she an "irrelevant hockey mom?" In any case, she does not like to be investigated, and her communications skills are in the toilet!

Photo credit: Marc Nozell, Flickr, Creative Commons License

By Patrick

What a mystery this woman is! Even after so many years, she is full of surprises. One day she appears together with America's latest "Dr. Evil", Senator Ted Cruz, giving her support to those Tea Party Republicans like Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee who tried very hard to severely damage the reputation of the USA by trying to force the USA to default. Then, just a few days later, Sarah Palin claims in a new facebook post that she apparently is an "irrelevant hockey mom", in a thinly veiled attempt to deter the media from investigating her.

Sarah Palin wrote on October 22:

Here’s the deal: all politics is local. And personal. Let me personalize this. It is UNBELIEVABLE that the press would investigate every nook and cranny of my life; send gullible reporters to my little town to kick over every rock any family member ever tread underfoot; scour every email I’ve written; research every Palin campaign disclosure like junkyard dogs; sic 12 AP reporters to fact check my book; breathlessly report about my wardrobe and an old used tanning bed I bought to get some sun during Alaskan winters as if these were vital national news stories; hound friends, personal doctors, strangers, and just downright strange people, etc., etc., etc., to know everything we do (and they still get the story wrong!). They blew and still blow all those resources “investigating” the irrelevant hockey mom from Wasilla. Meanwhile our government goes to hell in a hand basket right before the “elite media’s” closed eyes, and it took my friend Peter Schweizer to slap you upside the head to see any of this corruption? Good God. Be ashamed, media, be very ashamed.

Well, everyone knows by now that Sarah Palin hates to be investigated, because she has more skeletons in her closet than most people (and journalists) would be able to imagine in their wildest dreams. But this little rant still comes as a surprise, because: What is Sarah Palin afraid of right now? This really is an interesting question. After all, Sarah Palin over time turned from a more or less serious political contender into the "wet dream" of the Democrats: If the Democrats want to win an election, all they need is Sarah Palin.

These days, she is the "kiss of death" to the political ambitions of any candidate who is stupid enough to ask Sarah Palin for support. Nothing energizes Democratic voters more than having Sarah Palin as the "adversary." She is the Democrats' secret weapon, highly effective and free of charge. Republican candidate Steve Lonnegan recently had to learn this the hard way as well.

October 13, 2013: The irrelevant hockey mom goes to Washington

At the same time, she turned into pure political poison for the GOP, and she continues to slam the "GOP establishment", the "permanent political class" at any given opportunity. So maybe there are attacks in the works which actually come from the direction of the GOP? This would hardly be surprising, as she surely is a real thorn in the side of Karl Rove and colleagues.

This of course is speculation, but in my opinion, one thing is certain: Sarah Palin is starting to "crack." That something is really wrong with her, even above the usual standard of craziness she used to display during the previous years, recently also became obvious during Sarah Palin's confused and unhinged rant on Megyn Kelly's show at Fox News:

At this point in time, we can witness these unhinged outbursts by Sarah Palin virtually every day. The facebook post quoted above is another example, because apart from Sarah Palin's brain, who would think that an "irrelevant hockey mom" would have a political PAC, would appear prominently with somebody like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, would give political speeches quite frequently and would appear on TV as a political hard right-wing pundit for Fox News on a regular basis?

Well, not many people. But Sarah Palin is not the only person who is confused, as it appears. The unwillingness of Sarah Palin to "go away" now gave CNN's political reporter Peter Hamby the weird idea that she is actually "back." In the best tradition of unbelievably naive mainstream reporting about Sarah Palin, Peter Hamby breathlessly reports at CNN that Sarah Palin has "returned" and that she apparently still will be a big player in the upcoming primaries and elections. He somehow forgets to mention, however, that Sarah Palin is not only America's biggest political joke, but also a huge liability for the GOP. Peter Hamby became a victim to Sarah Palin's own propaganda. She just loves to present herself as a big mover and shaker, and also loves to play fast and loose with the facts about her "endorsement record", a record which is actually not impressive at all.

CNN spotted a mirage: A "returning" Sarah Palin

CNN also broadcast this report about the story:

Peter Hamby really needs to wake up. He apparently still believes we are living in 2010.

The "cracking" Sarah Palin also gave an "impressive" appearance when she yesterday starting a totally insane feud with Piers Morgan, who, refreshingly, made it clear that he is not afraid of the notoriously combative Sarah Palin. You don't have to love Piers Morgan, but I really wished that more journalists would take on Sarah Palin like that. Piers Morgan, who dared to anger Sarah Palin on Twitter, received the biggest possible retaliation in return - an insulting facebook rant by Sarah Palin, including a tasteless photo with which she somehow tries to insinuate that she really, really likes dead things:

She wrote:

Oh dear Piers, thank you so much for all your invitations to appear on your shambolic show, including the adoring message you sent. But is it still any wonder why I've politely responded that I'm too busy doing, um, er... pretty much anything to accept the invite? (At least I didn't tell you to "get stuffed".) And to all our British friends: we ask, what did your friends across the pond ever do to you to deserve your Piers? :-)

By the way, Sarah Palin is wrong: She has no "British friends." Whoever told her that was lying. :-)

Very sorry, Sarah, but the British think that you are a dangerous, uninformed idiot

So, what comes next? The next "shocker" cannot be far away, as Sarah Palin's communication skills really are in the toilet these days.

Refreshingly, Piers Morgan was not scared off by mean girl Sarah Palin and tweeted:

What surprised me most about the new story at CNN is that some journalists apparently still have no idea who Sarah Palin really is. Some years ago, most journalists thought that she is just a "politician", and reported accordingly. But a politician (usually) employs reason, logical thinking, intelligence, ideally empathy as well. These were never Sarah Palin's strong points. But most importantly, Sarah Palin is in the first place a narcissistic and deeply disturbed woman who first and foremost wants three things: She wants to be famous, she wants to be rich, and she wants to fight against her perceived "enemies."

Also, she is a huge fraud, whether the media acknowledges it or not.

Sarah Palin's real character has long been exposed. Andrew Sullivan for example wrote at the Daily Dish in March 2012:

Anyone with even the faintest grasp of Palin's reality – including former close aides like Frank Bailey – understands that she is emotionally unstable, paranoid, vindictive, self-destructive, religiously fanatical and clinically deluded. Her "wonderful mothering" led her to take a tiny child with Down Syndrome and parade him in front of the cameras as a political prop, and later hauling him out half-naked at night to show off to fans on her book tour. None of her children has made it to college; one was a teenage vandal, another a teen mom. A man who lived in her house, says her children had to raise themselves. She quit office in mid-term because her vanity and rapacity were more important to her than public service. The victims of her vicious career lie strewn all over Alaska. Anyone faintly aware of reality also knows that John McCain was as cynical, brutal and expedient a figure as anyone to run for president – and that Palin's selection was an act of such grotesque vanity and cynicism that it instantly disqualified him from the presidency.

I suspect the real truth about how this deranged, comic, vicious ignoramus nearly became a heartbeat away from the presidency will only be absorbed in the future, when we are not so close to the embarrassment.

Liberals are restrained from really laying out the truth for fear of further attacks from the Palinite right. Establishment conservatives cannot bring themselves to understand what they did – although Steve Schmidt has admirably copped to intense and abiding remorse for his part in the process. The far right, which Palin helped bring to further heights of lunacy, has continued to debase any prospect of a sane two-party system in the US. Palin's legacy lives on to damage the country.

Of course, Game Change was not The Rogue. And Hollywood is neither. The truth was far more interesting and infinitely darker.

These days it seems certain that the "irrelevant hockey mom" Sarah Palin, who begs not to be investigated, will show more and more cracks. Where is this all going to end? God knows!

To complete this "roundup" of the latest Palin-related events: It comes as no surprise of course that Sarah Palin, who once thought that it was a good idea to investigate Barack Obama's birth certificate, again shows her willingness to promote a conspiracy theory and suggested on facebook that the Democrats could have staged the "fainting pregnant lady":

Whether accurate or not, for some reason I found this hilarious! Am I out of bounds for cracking up when I saw this take on a nauseated Obama fan, her absentminded pal, and our President's heroics this week? If so, penance paying I'll accept. With the Obama White House’s total lack of transparency, it’s no wonder that some will ask whether they staged even a fainting lady in the Rose Garden. What was once a major leap in logic has become a single step because President Obama has lied so often and so blatantly ("If you like your health care plan, you can keep your plan" comes to mind!).

This from a woman who faked a pregnancy and then used the baby for political gain - a fact which the media (at least officially) refuses to believe, but which is actually just the "tip of the iceberg", as far as Sarah Palin is concerned.

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Bonus - Part 1:

At the last post, I left the following comment - it's probably worth to repeat it here, and I have nothing else to add to it:

Hi guys, there is one "secret" to share - I didn't mention it so far, well, due to the "old standard" of Palingates/Politicalgates that we only make claims which we can "back up" with additional evidence...

Ok, to make a long story short, a story for which we have no "hard proof": We know from a very good Alaskan source already for quite a while that Sarah did not shoot the caribou on her reality show. It turned out that she was not hitting anything while shooting, so a guide from Alaska (who accompanied the film team), whose name we unfortunately do not know, finally shot the caribou, and then the footage was edited accordingly (with the caribou in the "crosshairs"...).

Well, I thought long about writing a post about it, however, it's difficult. I myself of course know that the source is excellent, but I cannot "prove" it to the outside. So I now throw this little piece of information out there. Just for you. For your entertainment. The world doesn't "believe" us anyway. :-)

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Bonus - Part 2:

In case you haven't seen it yet - Miley Cyrus took part at SNL in a totally awesome must-see GOP-shutdown parody clip, in which her own totally awful "We Can't Stop" video clip was appropriately ridiculed as well - there is hope for Miley Cyrus! :-)

(h/t Kathleen)

(Original link to the video here)

Here are the lyrics to this SNL-parody song called "We Did Stop":

It’s our party

We can do what we want

It’s our party

We can say what we want

It’s our party

We can stop what we want

We can vote how we want

Defund what we want

Red states and sweaty bodies everywhere

Bill’s in the house like we don’t care

‘cause we came to shut it all down now

No government around now

If you’re not ready for health care

Can I get a “HELL, NO!”

‘Cause we’re gonna keep it out shut down

D.C.is a closed town all-round

So la da di da di

Republican Party

Repping G.O.P.

Doing whatever we want

This is our house

This is our rules

And we did stop (the government)

Yeah, we did stop (shut it down)

Can’t you see it’s we

Who are right?

Can’t you see it’s we

Who ‘bout that life?

To my government workers on the furlough

Even though you’re already paid low

Remember only God can judge us

Forget the haters ‘cause somebody elected us

And everyone in line for early childcare

Anyone who planned to see a grizzly bear

We are all shut down here

Getting so shut down, yeah, yeah

So la da di da di

Republican Party

Repping G.O.P.

Doing whatever we want

This is our house

This is our rules

And we did stop

Yeah, we did stop

Can’t you see it’s we

Who are the right?

Can’t you see it’s we

Who ‘bout that life?

It’s our party

We can do what we want

It’s our party

We can say what we want

It’s our party

We can stop what we want

We can vote how we want

Defund what we want

Shut it down.

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Have  a nice weekend, everyone!

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UPDATE:

I very much like the following headline and the photo beneath it at the "Guardian":

Playing Hardball: How to stop the #BoehnerShutdown tomorrow - UPDATES: The roots of the current constitutional crisis in the USA

By Blueberry Tart

I admit from the outset that neither President Obama nor Senator Reid has contacted me to ask my advice about how to stop the government shutdown, but I’ll give it to them anyway. ;-)

Tell Speaker Boehner that he has 24 hours to put the “clean CR” already passed by the Senate up for a vote in the House.  If he does not do so, introduce a new resolution that restores the funding that was cut by the sequester.

This accomplishes several aims. First, it sets a “deadline” for the House to act on the “clean CR,” rather than leaving that open-ended, as is now the case. Second, it highlights the (not well understood) fact that the Dems have already compromised by voting for a CR that maintains the sequester cuts that they don’t like. Third, if the Speaker does not bring the “clean CR” up for a vote, it allows the Senate to reinstate funding that was cut due to the sequester, which is damaging the economy and hurting many of our most vulnerable citizens.

I understand that the Democrats fear that the Republicans will accuse them of introducing new conditions into the situation and blame them for perpetuating the government shutdown.  The realities are that the Republicans are blaming them anyway, while the GOP is introducing new "poison pill" conditions daily.

So, let’s play hardball.  Batter up!

The clean bill is already a huge compromise

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Bonus (by Patrick):

During these sad and troubled times, a clear thinker like Andrew Sullivan brings things to the point (h/t mellybel):

I’ve long argued that you have to see the bigger cultural and religious picture when analyzing what has happened to American conservatism these past two decades or so.

The bewildering economic and social and demographic changes have created a cultural and existential panic among those most heavily concentrated in those districts whose members are threatening to tear down the global economy as revenge for losing two presidential elections in a row. They feel they have already lost and have nothing to gain from any constructive engagement with a president they regard as pretty close to the anti-Christ of parasitic minorities. They feel isolated in a more multi-cultural country. They feel spied upon and condescended to. They have shut out any news sources apart from Fox. It does not occur to them, for example, that Obamacare might actually help them. And you get no actual specifics on policies they like or dislike. It is all abstractions based on impressions.

More to the point, the bulk of these Republicans no longer believe in the Republican party. They identify more strongly with the Tea Party or Evangelical groups or Fox News than the GOP. On social issues, the defining issue is homosexuality – not abortion. That intransigence will alienate them them even further from the future mainstream. Their next big issue: denying climate change. Right now, I see no way to integrate these groups and people into the broader body politic or conversation. Their alienation is so deep it is close to unbridgeable. And further defeats will make their isolation worse, not better, their anger more, not less, intense.

This is the deeper crisis we face – and without strong economic growth, it is hard to see how it can be ameliorated in the near future. Perhaps if moderate Republicans – a mere quarter of the whole – jumped ship to the Democrats, then the electoral losses would be so great as to demand some kind of reform. But the center is not holding. And I fear it will get even worse than this until it gets better.

Except it’s hard to imagine political dysfunction getting worse than risking the first ever default by the Treasury of the United States because a key minority feels “disrespected.”

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UPDATE:

In a new article at New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait examines the roots of the current American constitutional crisis:

In a merciful twist of fate, Juan Linz did not quite live to see his prophecy of the demise of American democracy borne out. Linz, the Spanish political scientist who died last week, argued that the presidential system, with its separate elections for legislature and chief executive, was inherently unstable. In a famous 1990 essay, Linz observed, “All such systems are based on dual democratic legitimacy: No democratic principle exists to resolve disputes between the executive and the legislature about which of the two actually represents the will of the people.” Presidential systems veered ultimately toward collapse everywhere they were tried, as legislators and executives vied for supremacy. There was only one notable exception: the United States of America.

Linz attributed our puzzling, anomalous stability to “the uniquely diffuse character of American political parties.” The Republicans had loads of moderates, and conservative whites in the South still clung to the Democratic Party. At the time he wrote that, the two parties were already sorting themselves into more ideologically pure versions, leaving us where we stand today: with one racially and economically polyglot party of center-left technocracy and one ethnically homogenous reactionary party. The latter is currently attempting to impose its program by threat upon the former. The events in Washington have given us a peek into the Linzian nightmare.

Traditionally, when American politics encountered the problem of divided government—when, say, Nixon and Eisenhower encountered Democratic Congresses, or Bill Clinton a Republican one—one of two things happened. Either both sides found enough incentives to work together despite their differences, or there was what we used to recognize as the only alternative: gridlock. Gridlock is what most of us expected after the last election produced a Democratic president and Republican House. Washington would drudge on; it would be hard to get anything done, but also hard to undo anything. Days after the election, John Boehner, no doubt anticipating things would carry on as always, said, “Obamacare is the law of the land.”

Instead, to the slowly unfolding horror of the Obama administration and even some segments of the Republican Party, the GOP decided that the alternative to finding common ground with the president did not have to be mere gridlock. It could force the president to enact its agenda. In January, Boehner told his colleagues he’d abandon all policy negotiations with the White House. Later that spring, House Republicans extended the freeze-out to the Democratic-­majority Senate, which has since issued (as of press time) eighteen futile pleas for budget negotiations. Their plan has been to carry out their agenda by using what they call “leverage” or “forcing events” to threaten economic and social harm and thereby extract concessions from President Obama without needing to make any policy concessions in return.

Paul Ryan offered the most candid admission of his party’s determined use of non-electoral power: “The reason this debt-limit fight is different is we don’t have an election around the corner where we feel we are going to win and fix it ourselves,” he said at the end of September. “We are stuck with this government another three years.”

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UPDATE 2:

Cheeriogirl found an excellent article in the Australian newspaper "The Age" which explains further the reasons for the current political crisis in the USA:

This week's farce has its roots in 2010 when Republicans swept their way to majorities in both houses of Congress. It was a stunning return from exile, after Democrats had banished them from every limb of the government in 2008. But then Republicans tried to entrench their position through a colossal gerrymander. Several Republican-controlled states proceeded to redraw their electoral boundaries to make Democrat success nigh on impossible. And it worked. By 2012, results in the House of Representatives were so skewed that the Republicans comfortably maintained their majority despite Democrat candidates receiving more than a million more votes.

Take Pennsylvania, where Democrats won nearly 51 per cent of the vote, but Republicans won 13 seats to five. Or Michigan where the Democrat vote was nearly 53 per cent while Republicans took almost twice as many seats. North Carolina: 51-49 to the Democrats but nine Republican seats to a paltry four. And on it goes. That sort of result landed in at least 10 states - only one of which was rigged to favour the Democrats. To get a sense of the scale of it, consider that in the seven states redrawn by Republicans, near parity voting (16.7 million votes to 16.4 million) delivered 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats.

That's a clear perversion of democracy and it's no accident. Indeed the Republican State Leadership Committee made it explicit. They ran a $30 million project called Redmap, aimed at winning key seats at the state level, which would give them the power to draw electoral boundaries. What's more, they planned to do this in a census year so they could draw with precision - 2010 was exactly such a year.

So the plan worked. They played the system. But now the system is playing them. Sure, Republicans look set to control the House well into the future. But in the American system, the political contest doesn't simply vanish. It shifts to the primaries. Now if you're a Republican House member, your greatest threat comes not from Democrats, but from other Republican challengers hungry for your seat. The result is that Republicans are talking more and more to their own base, and less and less to everyone else. It's the rational thing for a politician to do. Even if that base is becoming increasingly irrational.

Old-school Republicans might shake their heads at the rising rabidity of their Tea Party colleagues, but the truth is they're currently no match for them. The last thing aspiring congressional Republicans need is a well-funded lobby group running campaigns lacerating them as closet socialists. Freed from the need to defeat any meaningful Democrat challenge, Republican politics is now such that everyone's racing to outbid each other for the mantle of true believer. It's a classic case of a closed system encouraging ever more radical posturing.

Sarah Palin's "pregnancy" with Trig: Revealing email exchanges with two liberal journalists

Both pictures in high-resolution (click below):
Photo March 26, 2008
Photo April 13, 2008

By Patrick

Time for a short, but also informative weekend post! Yes, it again concerns one of our favourite issues, the faked pregnancy of master-fraudster and Ex-Gov and Ex-VP candidate Sarah Palin! We just cannot get enough of it! It is so addictive to write about a subject that virtually the whole media has chosen to ignore. Maybe the media has chosen this path so that their audience won't be overly concerned about the integrity of the political class! (snark)

I recently had email exchanges with two very well know liberal journalists about Sarah Palin's "pregnancy" with Trig. You all know these two journalists. I won't reveal their names or give any hints, and please do not start to guess in the comments. It is not the first time that I posted quotes from email conversations with a journalist about the pregnancy, without revealing the identity of the journalist, of course.

The identities of these two journalists, who both are prominent and have a national audience, is not important, but the content of their messages is incredibly revealing indeed.

Therefore I would like to present a few quotes from these recent exchanges.

"Journalist No 1" wrote the following to me, after I explained to the journalist what our blog is all about:

Thanks for your very candid response. To be equally candid, I am in the opposite camp and think this kind of theory is hurtful to liberals in that it does place the left in the wacky conspiracy column. I don't doubt your sincerity, though, but you are also talking about something that is six years old and no longer relevant; Palin, herself, has lost relevancy. Given how it is such a narrow niche and so old, I'm not sure why you would want your site to have the ongoing association when the news, and the world, has moved on from Palin.

I like this response pretty much (don't agree with it, of course), as it is a great example of the attitude of the liberal media towards the "Trig question" - an attitude that Andrew Sullivan, the "most prominent Trig doubter", according to "Salon", heavily criticized in the past: "This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen: totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever."

So let's move on to the second exchange ("Journalist No 1" was not in the mood for further conversation, by the way). The quotes from the second exchange are a real "shocker." Too bad that the American public does not know what their journalists DO know!

"Journalist No 2:"

Everybody knows that pregnancy was faked.

That Salon story was RIDICULOUS.

Haha - I had to take a deep breath after I received this email!

"Journalist No 2" of course referred to the infamous "definite debunker", written by Justin Elliott, which appeared at "Salon" in 2011.

I then asked the journalist to clarify who "everybody" is.

"Journalist No 2" answered:

Everyone *I know* knows that baby is not Palin's.

If this is not educational, I do not know what is!

Too bad that no investigative journalist had the balls to fully expose the fraudster Sarah Palin. Of course we do not want to forget to mention that Andrew Sullivan and Joe McGinniss came close to exposing her, and that Professor Brad Scharlott did everything he could to push the issue into the mainstream.

The exchange with "journalist No 2" showed that Sarah Palin actually hasn't fully gotten away with her fraud, but that many journalists are in fact aware of it - but won't talk about it in public. The exchange gave me a lot of confidence that it would be virtually impossible for Sarah Palin to run for any kind of office again and to avoid the "Trig question" at the same time.

I would like to conclude this post with some screenshots of recent comments at "Conservatives4Palin", where some commenters "boldly" exposed a long-time member of the C4P-community as a potential "Trig Truther" - it was a hoot! The "exposed member" dared to ask in 2011 at Greta Van Susteren's blog in a comment why Sarah Palin won't provide the birth certificate for Trig! This of course constituted "high treason", and the Palin-fans were up in arms after the "discovery."

Here is the comment in question which "AmazedOne1" left on Greta's website in 2011:

"AmazedOne1" is a "regular" at C4P, as the statistics prove:

Screenshots from C4P after the "exposure" of commented AmazedOne1:

Particularly interesting is this response by "AmazedOne1":

"Well, over a year and half ago, it seemed that it would be an easy and blatantly quick way for her to put the rumours to rest while sticking it in their faces. However, Sarah clearly kniows what she's doing, and has handled it differently than I would have if people were saying thinks like that about me. Instead, she successfully dispels the critics by laughing at them. It works!"

It is interesting to see this type of "rationalization" of Sarah Palin's refusal to provide Trig's birth certificate on a rabid pro-Palin website. In fact, Sarah Palin even once wrongfully claimed to have provided Trig's birth certificate (apparently in an act of desperation) - but this would be too difficult to process for the obsessive Palin-fans who are living in a world of selectively chosen reality.

It would also too difficult to process for them that the notion that Sarah "successfully dispels the critics by laughing at them", which "works", is evidently wrong. Such an idea ignores the basic fact that Sarah Palin even went so far as to send a six-page attorney letter to Northern Kentucky University, the employer of "Trig Truther" Professor Brad Scharlott, as Politicalgates revealed in December 2012. Enclosed to this long, rambling letter were about 100 pages of documents - but crucially, no copy of a birth certificate.

So, if it "works" for her, why does Sarah Palin spent hundreds, if not thousands on dollars on such an excessive lawyer letter? 

The only thing that "works" for Sarah Palin is the refusal of the US media to expose her fraud.

The truth, as we had to learn the hard way, is a precious, delicate and rare flower.

+++

Palin-biographer Joe McGinniss: "I think the Politicalgates archives are the best single available resource for anyone wondering why questions are still being asked about Sarah really being Trig’s birth mother." (from August 28, 2011)

Kathleen Baker, editor of Politicalgates, writes in the UK "Guardian" about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy: "Sarah Palin, unreliable narrator"

Read all posts at Politicalgates about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy with Trig - FOR THE COLLECTION, CLICK HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE AND HERE.

Download the research paper regarding Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy and the role of the media, written by Brad Scharlott, Associate Professor for Journalism at Northern Kentucky University - CLICK HERE.

Brad Scharlott's revised version of the paper has also been published by "Business Insider."

Read the old post at Palingates about the faked pregnancy with the pictures still intact in hardcopy HERE.

Read the old posts at Palingates online HERE (useful also for watching the video clips which were published with the posts).

Listen to Sarah Palin's own description of her unbelievable "Wild Ride" from Texas to Alaska, which happened on April 17, 2008: Sarah explains how she decided to make the trip, despite of the fact that her "water broke" the night before.

In addition, please don't hesitate to watch the excellent video-documentaries about "babygate" which our reader Lidia17 created - HERE, HERE and HERE.

We break the "Spiral of Silence" - Read the details about the "biggest hoax in American political history!"

Andrew Sullivan and John McCain believe that Sarah Palin has a chance to beat Obama in 2012 - Palin causing major stir at "Rolling Thunder" (PHOTOS)

By Patrick

If America wants it or not, she is "back." The force of the Palin-propaganda machine is just about to hit the country, and John McCain already appears to rate her as a serious contender. Today on "Fox News Sunday", he said, according to "The Hill":

The GOP’s standard-bearer in 2008 also shrugged off his former running mate’s poor standing in many polls, saying she would have the opportunity to turn that around if she did make a bid for the White House.

“That’s what campaigns are all about,” McCain said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I’ve never seen anyone as mercilessly and relentlessly attacked as I have seen Sarah Palin in the last couple of years,” the Arizona senator added. “But she also inspires great passion, particularly among the Republican faithful.”

So, she "inspires great passion", and she could "turn that around." Thank you, John McCain! Also for unleashing Queen Esther onto the world, we are incredibly grateful, thank you so much, John. She's just what the world has been waiting for. A warmongering, lying, deceitful, demagogic politician whose main argument is that if you are against her, you are against women and against real American values.

Andrew Sullivan is one of the few journalists who have taken the threat that Sarah Palin poses seriously, and of course he has been ridiculed many times, because she is such a joke, isn't she! Who could possibly take her seriously!

This weekend, he was not afraid to defend his position on the Chris Matthews Show at MSNBC:

From the exchange:

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Does anybody here really, does anybody imagine Sarah Palin being elected President of the United States?

ANDREW SULLIVAN, DAILY BEAST: Yes.

MATTHEWS: You can.

SULLIVAN: Yes, because…

[LAUGHTER]

GLORIA BORGER, CNN: Uh oh, here it comes.

SULLIVAN: …not because of her apparent virtues, not because of Obama’s weakness, but because of unforeseen events. I do think that if for example we have a collapse in the markets because of a debt ceiling crisis, if we have a second recession…

MATTHEWS: You’re talking Armageddon.

SULLIVAN: If we have another terrorist attack…

BORGER: Sorry.

SULLIVAN: No, I’m just saying we shouldn’t rule out things.

MATTHEWS: Okay, okay, let’s go…

JOE KLEIN, TIME MAGAZINE: You were around, you were around in ’79 and ’80 as I was. Did you see many people in the Carter administration think that Ronald Reagan could beat Jimmy Carter?

MATTHEWS: Okay, let’s imagine that short of an Armageddon moment like the capture of 80 hostages and the humiliation of the United States for year-long and inflation and unemployment like Carter had.

Well, we’ve got the soaring gas and food prices as well as the unemployment. Apparently Obama gives Matthews too much of a thrill up his leg to notice.

Regardless, a few minutes later, the discussion came back to Palin:

MATTHEWS: Okay, let’s go to Palin. Lot of fun here. Palin, you love Palin. In some strange way you’re fascinated by her, Andrew.

SULLIVAN: As I said on the show many times, she started running the day after the 2008 election ended, and there’s no reason to believe she isn’t running.

MATTHEWS: Did she take a smart break the last three or four months so that the Newts and the Trumps make fools of themselves more or less?

SULLIVAN: Her position has been formerly if no one else will represent this grassroots movement of cutting government down to size and standing up for America abroad, then I will have to go in.

MATTHEWS. Anger. She’ll be the anger candidate.

SULLIVAN: Not just the angry candidate. She’ll be the principled candidate against what she will describe as the free…

MATTHEWS: Are you getting her into this race? Are you escorting her into this race?

SULLIVAN: No, no, no, no, no. I’m too terrified for the country to do such a thing. But I don’t, I do think Washington has misread her, underestimated her, and doesn’t see the…

MATTHEWS: Okay, can Palin and Bachmann run both on the right?

KLEIN: Sure they can both run, but I don’t know that either of them can win. But one thing you have to say about Palin: she doesn’t know anything about policy, but she’s got skills. She knows how to be a standup politician.

MATTHEWS: I agree. Great on the stage.

KLEIN: Yeah.

BORGER: But I believe in the end she’s so relentlessly negative that the, the American people don’t like relentlessly negative politicians. Look at Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was optimistic, positive…

SULLIVAN: But “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” is the most – I know it’s completely phony – but it’s very optimistic. This whole “Triumph of the Will” movie she’s putting out there, two hours of total upbeat, optimistic stuff. She, she knows this, and she’s going to work around it.

The right-wingers surely are mightily upset that Andrew Sullivan compared Sarah Palin's upcoming propaganda piece to Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will", but so be it. "The Undefeated" will be pure propaganda, and even if it's packed with lies, just as "Going Rogue" was, her fanatical fans will love it, because they want to believe in her. This has nothing to do with rational thinking. What we have is a populist who is willing to use every lie imaginable in order to impress her fans - and the potential voters. This should scare anyone, it's no laughing matter - but I believe that large parts of the media will be very happy to play the "Palin media game", again. She will give them the sound bites, and they will happy to pick them up, because Sarah Palin sells. It would help if the media started to take her seriously. So far, not many people in the media seem to do so, which I believe is a great mistake. Sarah Palin is ruthless, and she is determined. Virtually every move she has made after she resigned as Governor is directed to prepare her upcoming presidential campaign. Therefore, nobody should be surprised, and Americans need to realize what's heading towards them.

Sarah Palin's embarrassing interviews have been around since 2008. But journalists have no excuse any more, when it comes to simply repeating Sarah Palin's lies about her record. They are now in a position to educate themselves, as Geoffrey Dunn's book "The Lies of Sarah Palin" and Frank Bailey's book "Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin" are packed with facts which are damning.

I was very happy to see that Jack Cafferty highly praised Geoffrey Dunn's book on CNN, saying that it "ought to be required reading for anybody considering supporting a Presidential run by this woman":

Now, I do hope that neither the journalists nor the voters will forget Sarah Palin's disastrous appearances during the 2008 campaign - because one thing is for sure: There will be no more interviews with critical journalists, as Sarah Palin recently announced on Hannity. It will only be propaganda, propaganda, propaganda.

Is the USA prepared for that? I surely hope so, because otherwise we will all be in big, big trouble.

Let's finish this post with Sarah Palin's "Greatest Hits" - we can never see them often enough:

+++

UPDATE:

A new report by the "Washington Post" describes how the appearance of Sarah Palin caused a major stir at the "Rolling Thunder motorcycle ride." Palin did a great job of hijacking the event:

Participants in the annual Rolling Thunder motorcycle ride Sunday expressed mixed feelings about the involvement of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (R).

Palin, along with husband Todd and daughters Bristol and Piper, joined the hundreds of thousands of riders who gather in D.C. every year to raise awareness for prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action.

Palin’s arrival at the event around 11:30 a.m. caused a huge commotion that event organizers struggled to contain. Photographers swarmed her; young men in suits hung around the press pack asking Palin to sign copies of her books. Rolling Thunder security yelled at press and fans not to touch the expensive bikes.

“I’m very not appreciative of the way she came in here,” Ted Shpak, Rolling Thunder’s national legislative director, said of Palin’s arrival. The former governor came in the front of the Pentagon’s north parking lot, where event staff and press were assembled. “If she wanted to come on the ride, she should have come in the back.”

The ride goes from the Pentagon, past the Vietnam Memorial, to the National Mall. From there, Palin plans to head to the National Archives to see the Constitution. It’s the beginning of a week-long tour of historic sites in the Northeast.

But many riders said politics has no place in the event.

“It intimidates our people if we’re pro or con any particular candidate,” said Wayne Kirkpatrick, chairman of the board of an Illinois chapter of Rolling Thunder. “And until national says there's a candidate we’re and supporting them, we don’t want to feel because the president of this chapter is pro-tea party, ‘Gee, I have to be our else I better get out of this organization.”

While many riders said they were fans of Palin, they still did not want her to bring politics to the ride. “Don’t come here and try to make a political point out of it,” said Joe Clark of Pennsylvania. “If she’s just here backing the cause of the entire run, that’s fine. If she’s just trying to get votes, she should just stay out of it.”

Also, we have the first pictures of Sarah Palin at Rolling Thunder ride, thanks to one of our readers (click to enlarge):

The inevitable "hand":

+++

UPDATE 2:

Major screech alert - Fox News interviews Sarah Palin at the ride - hide your dogs before you watch the video (it's just once sentence, though). Sarah Palin says that she

"loves the smell of the emissions."

I am sure that the Koch Brothers will be happy to hear that!

+++

UPDATE 3:

Many Americans will not be fooled by Sarah Palin's show, and others are certainly not fooled as well. The UK Daily Mail published a good, also very balanced, article, with lots of pictures and additional information, as well as scathing captions, such as:

"Parade time: Ms Palin waves to the crowd, from the back of a hog...

where she sat for a few minutes"

The Daily Mail writes:

Jim Roddey, chairman of the Allegheny County Republican Committee in Pittsburgh, said: 'Overall, most of us feel she could be an important force in the party, but I would hope she would not run for president.

'I don’t think she has the intellectual capacity or the depth of knowledge to be president.'

She has also been criticised by Maryland’s 2010 GOP gubernatorial nominee, Robert Ehrlich, who called her a quitter and said: 'If you look at the categories of potential nominees, most people do not mention her as a tier-one candidate.'
Palin's problem in the north east is the predominance of suburban swing voters, who are not impressed by her social conservatism and anti-intellectual posturing.
Mr Madonna said: 'The overall style, her manner, her approach, doesn’t sit well with college educated, independent-minded women.

'They’re looking for a different persona in their candidate.'

+++

UPDATE 4:

Super-LOL! The Taiwanese are at it again! Especially the depiction of RAM is simply brilliant:



+++

UPDATE 5:

Last for today - raw video of Palin at the ride:

PalinPalooza reloaded: Palin "recycles" bus from "Sarah Palin's Alaska", "crashes" Rolling Thunder (or did she?), Lawrence O'Donnell's bizarre rant

By Patrick

The good old Sarah Palin madness started again, although some people are still in denial. But let me thank our brilliant readers first: The collection of links and stories in our comments is simply invaluable. Poor Kathleen went to bed already several hours again with a bad migraine, and when I came home today after a tiring working week, I was so glad (as usual) to see all the collected links, news and facts in our comments. This makes it so much easier for us to prepare new posts. Thank you, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Sarah Palin's bus tour starts with a propaganda blast and the usual Palinesque chaos which in the end makes her appear a "victim", as usual, as always, as it was to be expected.

SarahPAC today released this propaganda video for the bus tour - fodder for her gullible fans:

Then there is the usual chaos surrounding this tour, but don't expect that it will make Sarah look bad, because it's so totally not her fault, it's just the others who always get their facts wrong, you betcha.

Andrea Mitchell interviewed Ted Shpak, spokesman of "Rolling Thunder", who said that Sarah Palin was "not invited", that the organizers heard "yesterday through a press release" that she was coming, that the event is not political and that he considers Sarah Palin to be a "big distraction":

Even Ben Smith from Politico, who is known to be incredibly careful in his criticism of Sarah Palin, smelled the blunder and felt compelled to declare:

"Palin invited herself to motorcycle rally"

But he should have known that Sarah Palin makes no mistakes. It's always the others who get it wrong. She is the victim. Do you get it, Ben?

Oh yes, he did - just about one hour later:

"Palin had invite to bike rally"

She had an invite from Alaska! She is the victim. How could the lamestream interview a spokesman who clearly had no idea what he was talking about. How mean of Andrea Mitchell! Sarah, they are all picking on you for no reason as usual!

It's not very difficult to predict that similar "confusions" will probably happen a gazillion times in Sarah Palin's "sphere" during the next 12+ months - and that the "lamestream" will dutifully report each other's "mistakes" as far as Sarah Palin is concerned.

But we have a real discovery, and strangely enough, a Palinbot made it: Sarah Palin uses exactly the same tour bus for her upcoming "One Nation" bus tour that she used for her reality show "Sarah Palin's Alaska!"

A right-winger posted this picture on twitter (click to enlarge):

The busses are not only identical - in fact, even the number plates are the same! It's the same bus, without any doubt.

So what the heck does that mean? On the bus, there now is a huge sign with says:

"Paid for by SARAHPAC"

Is everything paid by SarahPAC, including the bus? Who is the owner of the bus? Who paid for it when it was used for her reality show "Sarah Palin's Alaska?" Did SarahPAC secretly finance parts of the reality show as well?

So many questions - so few answers. This would also be a good title for a Sarah Palin biography. ;-)

In the meantime, Lawrence O'Donnell doesn't believe that Sarah Palin will run for President:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Lawrence O'Donnell is certainly entitled to believe that, and he received much praise for his stance for example in the comments at Huffington Post, and I believe that a number of our readers will agree as well. But I don't agree at all, and I find it quite painful to watch how Lawrence O'Donnell mocks the New York Times because they chose to take Sarah Palin seriously.

His comparison to Donald Trump is as flawed as it can get. Sarah Palin has prepared her run for President for years, and everybody who has closely followed her story also should know that she is virtually been eaten up by her desperation to become President. She is much cleverer than Lawrence O'Donnell realizes: She doesn't need to follow the "usual script" for a presidential candidate - because she always got away with doing it "the other way." Giving speeches to enthusiastic fans, hiding behind facebook and twitter, producing a reality show, produce additional propaganda through more staged events like the bus tour, giving interviews to pro-Palin journalists - that's her dream, and she is just about to live it. Because she is allowed to do it, by the people she despises, by the "lamestream." At some point, they might wake up, but until then, Sarah Palin will be able to do a lot of damage.

Thankfully, the New York Times understands as well that the comparison to Trump is flawed:

But Mr. Trump’s was a brief dalliance with presidential politics that almost appeared to have been done on a whim. Ms. Palin, by contrast, has been moving slowly and methodically for several years. Aides have said for months that she wanted to be in a position to run for president if that’s what she decided to do.

Ms. Palin and her aides revealed few clues on Thursday, which leaves a lot of people in Washington and around the country guessing.

Yeah, but I am not guessing. Please don't look for sanity or logic in Sarah Palin's actions. She is a mad cow on the lose. That's really all one needs to know.

Just in: The Washington Post makes fun of Sarah Palin's upcoming movie and publishes an imaginary script:

MORGAN FREEMAN (voice-over)

Ahem. My name is Sarah Palin. I was born and raised in a small town called Wasilla, Alaska. I’ve spent my whole life trying to escape it, and the rest of the world has spent its whole life trying to return me there, like a package with insufficient postage (chuckles). I wanted a reality TV show. They said, “Fine. Go back to Alaska.” I wanted to govern a whole state. They said, “Fine. Go back to Alaska.” I wanted to be Miss Alaska. They said, “Sorry, that’s just not happening.”

EXT. SOMEWHERE ELSE IN ALASKA – DAY

Sarah stands with Todd. We can only see her feet, because the camera is hidden in some bushes.

SARAH

I’m not going to be engaging in too much of that fictitiousness that I’ve been hearing about, in regards to that stuff in the chitchat, that I’m running with regard to hoping for the attention and the fiscal value and not feeling that good belly-fire. But in the unmortal words of Ronald Reagan, “Give me liberty or give me death, and Sarah Palin should be the President in the future, not of the future, or, as some amongst us say in regards to the future, ‘winning,’ but with and amongst, amongst the all-Americans.” Joe here knows what I’m talking about, don’t ya ,Joe?

TODD

I support you, Sarah, but I’m not sure what you just said actually makes any sense.

Bristol salsas past the camera.

BRISTOL

I’m here too! I’m shy and withdrawn, just like my new chin.

Andrew Sullivan received harsh criticism from right-wing websites for his comparison of Sarah Palin's upcoming propaganda piece "The Undefeated" to Leni Riefenstahl's infamous propaganda masterpiece "Triumph of the Will":

Andrew Sullivan's vendetta against Sarah Palin reached a new milestone on Friday after he insinuated that the former Alaska governor was somehow akin to Adolf Hitler. Sullivan referenced Leni Riefenstahl's infamous pro-Nazi movie after quoting a former Palin spokeswoman on what he labeled "the upcoming propaganda movie, 'Triumph Of The Will' 'The Undefeated.'"

Having watched "Triumph of the Will" (click for youtube), I am sure that there couldn't be a better comparison to Sarah's upcoming concoction, but then, Sarah Palin doesn't have a moustache, and therefore it's a proven scientific fact that she cannot be Adolf Hitler.

But there is something which I have been asking myself. We all know that Sarah Palin hates to give interviews to anyone who cannot be considered to be a faithful supporter - but did Adolf Hitler actually give interviews to the press?

I originally thought that he didn't. However, I was only half-right. Interestingly, there is a very fascinating story on the record about an attempt to interview Adolf Hitler - in 1931, by an American journalist. The story was published in 1936 in Harper's Magazine and can be read here.

The encounter was Hitler wasn't a success - but it surely was expensive:

Hitler’s secretary, a nervous little man who clattered like a teletype, introduced me. Herr Hitler paced back and forth in an almost unfurnished room. He wore black, which set off rosy cheeks against a dead white face. A lock of hair over his forehead frequently got in his way and he pushed it carefully aside. In civilian clothes he appeared far slimmer than in pictures in uniform.

The secretary read to him from my list of questions. None of them was particularly provocative. Hitler answered like a man who has lost all conversational tones. Everything was double or triple forte except the greeting and the farewell. Er brillt, as the Germans say.

“A Fascist government in France and a Nazi government in Germany – then the two nations would understand each other. . . .

“The Jews? Can you shoot flies with machine guns? By the way, you aren’t Jewish, are you? Your name is the same as that of the Jew police commissioner here. . . .

“Put the unemployed on the marginal land. . . .

“Between Germany and the United States there should be nothing but increasingly good relations. . . .”

The secretary said softly, “That was your last question.”

“Thank you.”

“Auf wiedersehen!”

I added. “I shall write this and send it over for your signature.”

“Certainly. With pleasure.”

I sent a copy of the interview and felt satisfied. Hitler had said nothing startling but it was the first interview he had given for many months.

Four hours later a messenger brought me an envelope. In it were the pages of the interview. Every line and every paragraph was crossed out, not neatly but savagely, with many blurs and blots. One line remained: “Between Germany and the United States there should be nothing but increasingly good relations.” Signed, Adolf Hitler. For that astounding fact I had paid two hundred marks. Possibly some of the things said did look brusque on paper but I had written them as they were spoken.

So here we have another politician who didn't like to have his words twisted by repeating them verbatim. Certainly "Triumph of the Will" (1934) was much more enjoyable from his point of view.

How to end on a more humorous note? After all, we can have so much fun with Sarah as well.

Twitter came to the rescue, where I just spotted the following clips from 2008 - have a relaxing Friday evening, everybody!

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Please re-tweet:

http://twitter.com/#!/politicalgates/status/74281299195604992

http://twitter.com/#!/politicalgates/status/74281766013239297

http://twitter.com/#!/politicalgates/status/74281926063685632

http://twitter.com/#!/politicalgates/status/74282294642352128

http://twitter.com/#!/politicalgates/status/74282690605621248

http://twitter.com/#!/politicalgates/status/74282971175190528