Fact Free Punditry

Oklahoman blogger, Red S. Tater, cut-n-pasted a complete article by Amanda Platelle from the UK mail online. Her headline compares Palin to Lady Di and her article makes further comparisons of Palin to Madonna, the Pope, deemed her epic, heroic, astonishing and carrying the hopes of a nation on her shoulders.

Okay, fine, it is understandable to cheerlead for your candidate, but the idolatry here is a tad strong. The problem I have are several completely false statements Amanda makes and Red parrots. Here are just a few:

And here (Palin) is a campaigner who next week will man the barricades at a public protest against Iran's President Ahmadinejad.

False. This was posted over at Politico two days before your article, and was indeed widely known to everyone awake:

The organizers of an anti-Iran rally Monday rescinded their invitation to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin after Democrats protested that her presence would turn the event into a political rally, McCain campaign and Jewish community sources said.

But the real whopper in the whole article is this one:

Women are traditionally more likely to vote than men. And recent polls show most women prefer the McCain/Palin ticket by a margin of anything up to 20 per cent.

One explanation is the Hillary factor. Disgruntled by Obama's rejection of Mrs Clinton, many of Hillary's female supporters, especially the swing voters, are switching to Palin.

Hillary had 10 million women vote for her in the Democratic primaries. There's a lot to play for - and Palin is playing them like a maestro.

Amanda has made a sweeping claim, backed up by "recent polls" that she fails to cite. It brings to mind the belief that "80 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot." A recent poll conducted by CBS/NYT suggest the exact opposite of what Amanda claims. Before McCain picked Palin to be his running mate, McCain enjoyed a 7-point lead among white women. After the Palin pick Obama closed the 7-point gap and pulled ahead by 2 points with white women and leads by an impressive 16 points among all women.

The Red's and Amanda's of the world love to parade around making claims that "the left" and "liberal elitists" hate and despise Governor Palin without citing a single example. It is a typical rightwing ploy of feigned victimization and mock outrage to distract from the actual records of their leaders. And the records of John McCain and Sarah Palin are simply unworthy of support.