Monday April 25, 2011

BRODERISM 2.0. Kenneth Vogel has this long story at Politico about an "anti-Palin movement," which he portrays as massive and important and strongly tied to Trig Trutherism (the belief that Sarah Palin only pretended to give birth to the special needs child). This section kinda sums it up:

The members of this loose network have had their spats and rifts. Moore and Devon, for instance, reject Trig Trutherism, while the founder of Palingates asked Patrick and his partner to leave the blog after he posted an item about a massage therapist who had been implicated in a prostitution sting and with whom the National Enquirer tabloid alleged Palin’s husband, Todd, had a dalliance — a report the Anchorage police pushed back against.

But they have nonetheless found common cause in their shared belief that Palin is not what she purports to be and that the mainstream media, for the most part, have miserably failed to expose her.

This is like saying that, though Tim Pawlenty rejects birtherism, he and the birthers share a common mission of exposing the truth about Barack Obama. Which is to say, technically accurate but suggestive and misleading.

Maybe they're just looking for hits, but this story tracks with Politico's recent articles in response to an alarming poll showing birtherism strong among Republicans (for which, I may add, no Democrats/Trig Truthers equivalent exists). First Ben Smith told us that birthers are only kidding ("a way to express reflexive hostility"); then he reminded us that 51 percent of Democrats in a 2006 Scripps-Howard poll showed alarming trutheristic tendencies -- the 9/11 kind, not the Trig kind.

Smith neglected to mention that the Democrats in that poll were actually not so far ahead of their fellow countrymen: 36 percent of all respondents answered the same questions affirmatively. Maybe that would have harshed the Broderrific overall message that Republicans and Democrats say crazy things sometimes but they're really just blowing off steam. For a growing political media empire, I guess, there's no percentage in saying that a disturbing number of people say crazy things because they are in fact crazy.