John McCain’s Campaign Staffers Unload on Sarah Palin

POLITICS DAILY – DAVID KNOWLES

“Diva”, “whack job”, a one-woman “Little Shop of Horrors” — those are just a few of the choice descriptions that some of John McCain’s former campaign staffers have used to describe Sarah Palin, McCain’s ex-running mate. Vanity Fair’s Todd S. Purdum spoke with several of the disgruntled McCain people (all of whom requested anonymity), and lays out a compelling chronology for the acrimony:

As Palin piled misstep on top of misstep, the senior members of McCain’s campaign team have undergone a painful odyssey of their own. In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be.

THE CRYPTKEEPER AND HIS MOOSE HUNTING PIT BULL

THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES OF THE [PAST] FUTURE

WAJAHAT ALI

9/5/08

McCain and company unveiled a ghoulish and predictable narrative from their crypt this week: a boilerplate and intellectually vapid narrative catering to base, knee jerk emotions. One that also shamelessly and hypocritically plays the divisive, “Culture –War” card to elicit orgasmic glee from a Convention audience so White that I had to increase the Contrast just to see some color.

McCain had criticized earmarks from Palin

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-earmarks3-2008sep03,0,284198.story

From the Los Angeles Times

Three times in recent years, the Arizona senator’s lists of ‘objectionable’ pork spending have included earmarks requested by his new running mate.

By Tom Hamburger, Richard Simon and Janet Hook
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

September 3, 2008

WASILLA, ALASKA — For much of his long career in Washington, John McCain has been throwing darts at the special spending system known as earmarking, through which powerful members of Congress can deliver federal cash for pet projects back home with little or no public scrutiny. He’s even gone so far as to publish “pork lists” detailing these financial favors.

Three times in recent years, McCain’s catalogs of “objectionable” spending have included earmarks for this small Alaska town, requested by its mayor at the time — Sarah Palin.

McCain Unleashes a Cougar for the PUMAs

WAJAHAT ALI

Sarah Palin, a good looking, former beauty queen, hockey mom who reads “Guns N’ Ammo,” was announced as John McCain’s Vice Presidential running mate yesterday. “Tina Fey with an AK-47” exploded on the international political scene shocking everyone – except those of us who predicted it last week – as the second ever-female VP candidate since Geraldine Ferraro. The second year Alaskan governor, former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska [home to a whopping population of 8,500] and PTA mom brings a staunch social conservative record to the table: vociferously anti-abortion, anti same sex marriage, pro gun rights, pro free market, and solid supporter of teaching creationism in elementary schools. Her “MILF-Cougar” hotness doesn’t hurt with the polls and Internet chat rooms either. Although her values cement her popularity with the Republicans, her gender strategically caters to a very vocal, disenchanted “female first” Hillary fan base.