During the Atlanta campaign W. T. Sherman used flanking maneuver after flanking maneuver to push Joe Johnson back through Georgia. The one exception was Kennesaw Mountain where his frontal assaults were repulsed. After that defeat, he went back to the flanking tactic that took To paraphrase Ken Burns from The Civil War “Sherman never admitted it was a mistake but never did it again”. Like Sherman in the early days of the campaign Sarah Palin made some mistakes dealing with the media, also like Sherman, she didn’t let those early defeats stop her demonstrating why she is invaluable to conservatives.
When the media attacks Palin doesn’t sit and take it, or play under their rules, she counterattacks:
Yesterday, PolitiFact.com fact-checked my statement about the coming $3.8 trillion Obama tax hike – the largest tax increase in history. They did such a bad job of it, however, that I feel compelled to fact-check the fact-checkers.
And because her primary method of counterattack is Facebook that means she can answer on her terms. Try and twist a soundbite out of that:
Unfortunately for PolitiFact, no such proposal exists. They admit as much, by the way, when they state that “There are no formal congressional proposals yet to keep the Bush tax cuts in place, so we don’t have precise estimates from official sources like the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.” That doesn’t stop them, though, from claiming I “confuse the issue” by “using numbers that assume all the tax cuts are going away. That is not the Democratic plan nor is it President Obama’s plan.”
Plan? What plan? There is no plan. All we have is smoke and mirrors based on an old Obama campaign pledge.
Defense? Never heard of it. It’s really something what a pol can do when the McCain Campaign isn’t managing how they respond. If only every republican was willing to fight back on their own terms.
Read the whole post it is devastating as is the challenge at the end:
PolitiFact doesn’t dispute the $3.8 trillion estimate of the cost of repeal of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. It admits that “Palin’s estimate of $3.8 trillion over 10 years is within a reasonable range, if you’re talking about all taxpayers.” And yet somehow it continues to argue that I’m wrong, based on a proposal it admits doesn’t exist which in turn is based on a phantom campaign pledge which Democrats have already broken anyway. I call that a “Pants on Fire” statement.
To prevent PolitiFact from making similar mistakes in future, it would be helpful if the White House and the Democratic Congressional leadership finally mustered the courage to table their plans to let the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire. Mr. President, publish your proposals, and we’ll duke it out. You can argue in favor of a multi-trillion dollar tax hike in an age of economic uncertainty and mass unemployment, and we’ll argue for fiscal sanity combined with serious spending cuts. I for one look forward to such a debate.
If sure the White House is dying to have that debate, I know congress wants that debate so badly that democrats are rethinking taxes.
How many Republicans do you know if the same spot would have played “Duck and Cover”? Now if the Poli”fact” (and yes after this I put the “fact” in quotes) is reported so must her response, and if it is NOT then the question becomes: Why?
What would we do without her?
