Sarah Palin autobiography "silences" Andrew Sullivan

Jotman was one of the first bloggers to seriously consider the possibility of Palin being picked as a VP candidate.   Back in August 2008, when Sarah was still an obscure state governor, I wrote:

I don't think this is going to fly, but here is the case for the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, to serve as McCain's VP choice. . . . The problem, of course, is that Palin appears to have had no foreign policy experience whatsoever.

JOTMAN.COM would later become home to the world's most comprehensive timeline of Sarah Palin scandals, the color-coded Palin Scandal Timeline.

Other bloggers have also been relentless in holding Palin accountable -- Andrew Sullivan being the most widely read of these.   Today Sullivan announced that he has decided to stop blogging while he and his small team take the time to comb through Palin's recently published bio, Going Rogue.   Sullivan maintains that Sarah Palin is a "delusional fantasist."  He blogs:

There are so many fabrications and delusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it - and comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality she has previously provided - is a bewildering task. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. . . .

There is a possibility here of such a huge scandal that we would be crazy not to take our time either to debunk it or move it forward for further examination.

I commend Sullivan for his work debunking Sarah Palin.

Taking on Sarah Palin has at times been a thankless job.  Many of my own readers have questioned why Palin matters. ("She's an idiot. End of story.")  But it's not really about her.  It's about the fact that it has been left to  bloggers and blog-readers -- going back to the announcement of Palin as McCain's pick -- to do hard work that the mainstream journalists ought to have done.    In other words, asking questions, digging, piecing together all the scandals.

What is the deeper significance of the various Palin scandals?  It is that the mainstream American news media has, by and large, all throughout the election campaign and beyond, conveyed Sarah Palin's entirely fanciful interpretations of reality as if her views were potentially valid, plausible, and reasonable:  "On one hand Palin says X, on the other hand, her critics say Y."  That's what passes for balanced reporting in the United States today.  The American public is left none the wiser.

The exposure of the ineffectiveness of the mainstream news media's approach to the candidacy of  Sarah Palin reveals the real Palin scandal.

UPDATE:  More over Augustine.   A prime example of how the US media has made it possible for Sarah Palin to present herself as a "serious person" is a US News and World Report blog post, "Sarah Palin's Going Rogue as Christian literature."  Typical of many mainstream media reports about Palin, this summary of Palin's religious outlook might well have been written by Palin herself.