Move On's (And Other) Rumor Mongering - UPDATED

A few days ago, I printed an email Move On sent out with a number of "dangerous" positions Gov. Palin allegedly holds or actions in which she engaged. A number of them were flat out wrong. It is exactly this kind of "Swiftboating" we all decried when it happened to Kerry. I am all for disagreeing with another's political position, but it needs to be REALITY based, and not conjecture, rumor, or innuendo. Below are some of the main ones Move On mentioned, and the truth:

Buchanan: Move On claimed that Palin supported this "right-wing extremist" who is, they claim, a Nazi sympathizer. Palin supported Forbes in 2000, and worked on his campaign. She wore a Buchanan button when Buchanan came to visit as a sign of respect. For what it's worth, this "right wing extremist" is supporting OBAMA. (HERE’S the UPDATE: There are some who are debating the validity of this claim. After Obama’s speech, Buchanan said this:

“I stand with Obama(emphasis mine)! It was a genuinely outstanding speech, it was magnificent. I saw Cuomo’s speech, I saw Kennedy in ‘80, I even saw Douglas MacArthur, I saw MLK; this is the greatest convention speech and probably the most important because unlike Cuomo and the others, this was an acceptance speech, this came out of the heart of America, and he went right at the heart of America. This wasn’t a liberal speech at all. This is a deeply, deeply centrist speech. It had wit, it had humor, and when he used the needle on McCain, he stuck it into McCain and it was funny. It was Kennedy’s speech in ‘80. I laughed with Kennedy when he was needling Ronald Reagan.”

Make of it what you will. He may be making positive remarks about Sarah Palin now, but this is what he said right after Obama’s speech.

And Charles Martin, who has been debunking Palin rumors left and right and has an EXCELLENT list (he's at 71 now), has this at #24:

No, Buchanan doesn’t support her now; in fact he’s supporting Obama. (Buchanan did think her speech was amazing, but then so do 80 percent of the people who saw it.) Or maybe not. Buchanan sure doesn’t like McCain though.

Creationism: she does not want to teach creationism in school. She said if it comes up in a classroom discussion, then people should be able to discuss it.

Abortion: Palin believes in birth control as a way to prevent unwanted pregnancies. And she believes in abortion for the sake of the mother's life.

Just for comparison, how many of you are aware that Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is anti-choice? He is the most powerful Democrat in Congress. There are a NUMBER of anti-choice Democrats in Congress. To attack Palin on this one point repeatedly is hypocritical when so many Dems hold a similar, and in some cases, even MORE conservative positions. The bottom line is, a Pres. or VP, cannot take away a law. It is one that has been upheld repeatedly by the Supreme Court.

Then there's Sen. Bob Casey of PA, a HUGE supporter of Barack Obama's. We've heard all about him and his pro-life stance.

Environment: she does acknowledge that we need to make changes in energy, and has said clearly that we need to look into geothermal and wind energies. As far as the wolves go, and I say this as someone who has LONG been a member of "Defenders of Wildlife," she supports culling the packs from the air because they kill so many caribou and moose, which people need to be able to hunt to survive.

Move On also slams Governor Palin for only being a governor of Alaska for 1.5 months. She was inaugurated in December, 2006. Since that time, and it is more like 1.75 years, Move On, she has enacted a number of reforms, as well as run a state the NY Times said is harder to govern than other states in the Continental US:

That said, by other measures, Alaska is harder to govern than a smaller, more settled realm in the Lower 48. With vast distances, large numbers of indigenous peoples and a narrowly based extraction economy — with a handful of giant multinational oil corporations dominating the game — some economists say a country like Nigeria might be an apter comparison.

“Alaska really is a colonial place,” said Stephen Haycox, a professor of history at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. “One third of the economic base is oil; another third is federal spending. The economy is extremely narrow and highly dependent. It’s not to say that Alaska is a beggar state, but it certainly is true that Alaska is dependent on decisions made outside it, and over which Alaskans don’t have great control.”

Add to that a sense that Alaskan governors are more accessible to their people:

Overlaid across all of that is a distinctly informal Alaskan style. At the annual governor’s picnic, usually held in July, the governor is expected to turn the brats and burgers on the grill — something Ms. Palin has done with gusto — with cabinet members in aprons rounding out the kitchen staff.

The article continues with information about Alaska I sure didn't know, and which is important to consider when belittling Palin's experience:

Alaska also came of political age recently, which has meant two crucial things to Ms. Palin’s rise and experience as governor.

First, the State Constitution concentrates power in the governor’s office more thoroughly than in almost any other state — a legacy of the late 1950s, historians say, when statehood and a simultaneous trend all over the country toward elevating executive authority coincided.

Alaskan governors can edit legislation and their vetoes are tougher for lawmakers to overcome. In the numerical scale of power devised by Thad Beyle, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, only Massachusetts’ governor has a mightier tool kit.

Second, inch-deep history has meant that the leading lights of statehood are not mere names in history books but are in many cases still around and even still in power, like Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young, both Republicans with decades under their belts in Washington. That old guard is still revered by some Alaskans, but it is disdained by others who have been on the lookout for fresh Republican faces.

It is in that densely layered Alaskan mix that Ms. Palin rose, governed and must be understood, academics and people in both parties say — not as merely a governor, or a woman, but as an Alaskan.

“The frontier mentality, whether myth or not, is still alive,” said Donald Linky, director of the Program on the Governor, at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

Huh. Apparently being the Governor of Alaska actually counts for something after all!

And here's a good one. This just goes to show what strange bedfellows Politics makes. It turns out that the reports of Gov. Palin moving to ban a bunch of books is bogus - yet another rumor concocted to demean her. We cannot stoop to these kinds of Swiftboat levels. So, I am being FORCED to use sources like Michelle Malkin. What the hell is the world coming to?!? But, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Ahem. Ms. Malkin had this article yesterday (and honestly, she has been debunking a lot of Palin smears, so it is worth a trip to her site to see what else is being said):

The Bogus Sarah Palin Banned Books List (Michelle Malkin debunks yet another Palin smear), MichelleMalkin.com

Palin Derangement Syndrome strikes again. This time it’s hysterical librarians and their readers on the Internet disseminating a bogus list of books Gov. Sarah Palin supposedly banned in 1996. Looks like some of these library people failed reading comprehension. Take a look at the list below and you’ll find books Gov. Palin supposedly tried to ban…that hadn’t even been published yet. Example: The Harry Potter books, the first of which wasn’t published until 1998.

The smear merchants who continue to circulate the list also failed to do a simple Google search, which would have showed them that the bogus Sarah Palin Banned Book List is almost an exact copy-and-paste reproduction of a generic list of “Books Banned at One Time or Another in the United States” that has been floating around the Internet for years. STACLU notes that the official Obama campaign website is also perpetuating the fraud. And it’s spread to craigslist, where some unhinged user is posting images likening Palin to Hitler. Here it is again.

The person who first spread the Palin smear is identified as “Andrew Aucoin,” a commenter on the blog of librarian Jessamyn West. West has done the right thing in keeping the bogus comment up and pointing out in her main post that “there appears to be no truth to the claim made by the commenter, and no further documentation or support for this has turned up.”

It’s a fake. Not true. Total B.S. A lie.

If it gets sent to you by a moonbat friend or family member, set ‘em all straight. Fight the smears. They’ve only just begun.

The bogus Sarah Palin Banned Books List(can be found) HERE.

From the Anchorage Daily News story that inflamed P.D.S.:
Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so.
According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn’t fully support her and had to go.

Emmons had been city librarian for seven years and was well liked. After a wave of public support for her, Palin relented and let Emmons keep her job.

It all happened 12 years ago and the controversy long ago disappeared into musty files. Until this week. Under intense national scrutiny, the issue has returned to dog her. It has been mentioned in news stories in Time Magazine and The New York Times and is spreading like a virus through the blogosphere.

The stories are all suggestive, but facts are hard to come by. Did Palin actually ban books at the Wasilla Public Library?

…Were any books censored banned? June Pinell-Stephens, chairwoman of the Alaska Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee since 1984, checked her files Wednesday and came up empty-handed.

Pinell-Stephens also had no record of any phone conversations with Emmons about the issue back then. Emmons was president of the Alaska Library Association at the time.

Amazing the rumors that are coming out, and the lengths to which organizations will go to fabricate stories about Governor Palin. There seems to be no care for the damage these falsehoods will do the organizations' own reputation in their haste to discredit this woman. It is remarkable. And remarkably stupid. It makes people like me question how in the world I was ever even a MEMBER of Move On. It lowers the level of discourse to ducking mud slinging all around. We can do better than that. I'd like to think we are BETTER than that. So, come out with the facts - let's take a look, form our opinions, and have some honest discussion, not this constant smearing with any crackpot rumor that comes down the pike. Just a thought.