Your Lengthy Guide To The Insane McCain-Palin Cold War
It is 1945 all over again. A major historical War for the White House has ended forever, and the liberals won. The liberals do not usually win these things because they are scared of fighting, so who knows how this happened. Whatever. They can "govern" till the cows come home. The real story now is the new post-election Cold War that's rapidly developing between McCain aides, Palin aides, conservative bloggers, conservative teevee hosts, conservative columnists... basically any GOP operative with a half-decent Rolodex and a certain moral flexibility. They areallshitting on each other. This is the greatest Cold War we've ever had the pleasure of covering. Let's try to make some sense of it.
There are a few underlying factors here that set the narrative in motion.
Sometime in October, everyone connected to the McCain-Palin campaign realized that Obama would win in comical blowout fashion. This set off the frenzy of operatives/consultants/aides/etc. trying to save their careers.
An easy way to save one's career is to shit all over a colleague.
Anonymously.
To the media.
Who will publish anything you tell them.
For many campaign aides, the easiest person to shit on was Sarah Palin. The Cold War truly started the week revelations about Palin's fancy clothes came out. It was an unusually retarded thing, that all that money was spent on lower-level staffers' credit cards and for the entire Palin family, and no one involved with the campaign wanted the blame.
So all staffers and GOP operatives -- whether they knew anything or not -- immediately rushed to their bakeries in Arlington, hid under tables in dark corners, and called Politico .
Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.
"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
[...]
"These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, the sometimes painful content of which the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.
"A number of Gov. Palin's staff have not had her best interests at heart, and they have not had the campaign's best interests at heart," the McCain insider fumed, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign.
This "McCain insider" who was yelling at Nicolle Wallace must have also reached Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard , who went on Fox News a couple of days later to declare that Nicolle Wallace, in fact, was the harlot spawn of Lucifer. Someone in the campaign had told him, personally!
Then, in an interview with Ana Marie Cox, Nicolle Wallace stated that she doesn't mind being thrown under the bus if the particular bus happens to be filled with a bunch of talentless loser pervs. And as the anti-Palin Kathleen Parker of National Review had already explained, it is a true fact that any male who defends Sarah Palin really just wants to bang her at some point. Parker's revelation caused much distress to her terribly annoying colleague, Kathyrn Jean Lopez.
Sarah Palin continued to make a fool of herself every hour for the rest of the campaign. She talked to a Canadian cartoon version of Nicolas Sarkozy who asked her dirty questions for a number of minutes, on the radio. This was greenlit by her foreign policy adviser, Steve Biegun, and no one else was informed. She openly talked about her 2012 ambitions. She did a whole bunch of other things that we cannot remember, but they were all terribly embarrassing for both the campaign and America. This meant many more anonymous calls to the journalistic reporters. One adviser told a reporter that Sarah Palin was a "whack job." This important information was disseminated in record time. A billion advisers also contacted Marc Ambinder to fling yet more poo about how Sarah Palin is a death monster who can be blamed for everything.
This is when McCain's foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, randomlylost his mindon the record in response to Ambinder's post:
Just read your post. This is on the record. This is cleared by HQ. It is a fact that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorists. It was a fact before Governor Palin said it in a fully vetted speech and it is fact today. It is bullshit to claim or write anything else.
This guy really liked Palin, huh?? Felt a touch... defensive?
Perhaps they bonded while preparing for her debate, weeks earlier:
The trees, the creek, the romance...
Oh Jesus, Randy Scheunemann totally fell in love with Sarah Palin at John McCain's ranch during debate prep!
Wait a sec... RANDY SCHEUNEMANN WAS THE SECRET "MCCAIN INSIDER" ALL ALONG!! From yesterday:
Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain, was fired from the Arizona senator's campaign last week for what one aide called "trashing" the campaign staff, three senior McCain advisers tell CNN.
One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading "disinformation" about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials.
"He was positioning himself with Palin at the expense of John McCain's campaign message," said one of the aides.
Wait! No! Not fired -- much,much worse: THEY SHUT DOWN HIS BLACKBERRY.
Goldfarb did concede that Scheunemann's campaign e-mail was cut off, and his blackberry was taken away late Friday. Goldfarb admits that senior McCain aides were mad at Scheunemann, and wanted to fire him, but he insists they stopped short of that, and instead simply turned off his campaign communication.
Chilling. Why not just throw him against the wall and shoot him?
This post is about 10 million words right now, and there is more drama every which way. Carl Cameron from Fox News is revealing hilarious anonymous stories hourly about Palin not knowing what Africa is. RedState is literally creating a list of advisers to kill. Newsweek has a book's worth of amazing anonymous crap that it will slowly release in chapters. This will go on forever. John McCain will grill ribs.
And so at last we come to the point: Bill Kristol is responsible for all of this, ha ha ha. Here he is angrily whining about life on Fox News this morning.
UPDATE: Why'd we write all of that when this one sentence sums up everything that's happening: Freepers have called for a boycott of Fox News.
...the hell are they going to watch instead?
Tensions between McCain and Palin camps come to light [LAT]
Internal battles divide McCain, Palin camps [NYT]
Palin allies report rising camp tension [Politico]
Yet More On The Breakup [TNR]