Top Ten Reasons Sarah Palin Has Gotta Hate Todd Purdum’s Vanity Fair Piece About Her:
10. ” [She] often seems proud of what she does not know.”
9. “No political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition.”
8. “Palin’s [gubernatorial] victory . . . was one of the flukiest successes in modern American politics.”
7. “The [Alaska] Frontiersman accused Palin of confusing her election with a ‘coronation.'”
6. “Several [Palin associates] told [Purdum], independent of one another, that they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ . . . and thought it fit her perfectly.”
5. “The surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game . . . gave her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives.”
4. “Some top [McCain] aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing post-partum depression?”
3. “Palin’s deep ignorance about most aspects of foreign and domestic policy provided her with a powerful political reason not to submit to interviews.”
2. “[If McCain] had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job.”
And the #1 reason Sarah Palin has gotta hate Todd Purdum’s Vanity Fair piece about her:
“She was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice presidency.”
Then again, at least Purdum didn’t call her a “slutty flight attendant.”
As juicy as the Vanity Fair piece is, even juicier is the GOP dustup it’s spawned, as Politico reports.
Main event: Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol vs. McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt.
Kristol accuses Schmidt of “trashing Palin’s mental state” with the post-partum depression speculation. Schmidt says the allegation is “categorically untrue” and “rises to the level of a slander.”
The Politico piece also includes a lot of back-and-forth about who anonymously whacked Palin as a “whack job” and a “diva” in the press, which led Schmidt to launch a “leak hunt in the campaign’s internal e-mail system,” which led another McCain adviser (and friend of Kristol) to accuse Schmidt of “acting in a manner of Iranian secret police.”
Remember McCain’s “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” moment? This is his “Shame shame shame, shame shame McCain” moment. Because in the end, he’s the one who picked Palin.
Campaign Outsider 
From The Weekly Standards Weblog
June 30, 2009
Kristol: Liberal Media and GOP Hacks vs. Palin
Lefty journalist Todd Purdum has a hit piece in the new Vanity Fair on Sarah Palin. You don’t have to be a big Palin fan to recognize the article is full of dubious claims, and is dependent on self-serving stories provided on background by some of the people who ran the McCain campaign into the ground.
Here’s a highlight of Purdum’s reporting: “More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–’a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy’–and thought it fit her perfectly.”
Is there any real chance that “several” Alaskans independently told Purdum that they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? I don’t believe it for a moment. I’ve (for better or worse) moved in pretty well-educated circles in my life, and I’ve gone decades without “several” people telling me they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. . . .
–Posted by William Kristol on June 30, 2009 12:17 PM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/06/kristol_liberal_media_and_gop.asp
From National Review’s “The Corner” Weblog
July 2, 2009
On Sarah Palin’s ‘Narcissistic Personality Disorder’
By Mark Hemingway
In Todd Purdum’s now infamous Vanity Fair profile, one of the more sensational accusations was this:
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy” — and thought it fit her perfectly.
Bill Kristol took to The Weekly Standard’s blog to declare that this accusation seems somewhat absurd:
Is there any real chance that “several” Alaskans independently told Purdum that they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? I don’t believe it for a moment. I’ve (for better or worse) moved in pretty well-educated circles in my life, and I’ve gone decades without “several” people telling me they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Even Eric Boehlert, of the lefty Media Matters for America, said he agreed with Kristol that Purdum’s claim “doesn’t pass the smell test.” So I thought some very rudimentary investigation was in order. It turns out that the idea that Palin had narcissistic personality disorder as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is something of a meme in liberal circles and has been long before Purdum’s VF profile.
To wit, a Google search of the Huffington Post for “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” and Sarah Palin returns some 752 results. Obviously, not all of those results are relevant but in just the first four pages of Google results I found five different comments from the website which reference Sarah Palin having narcissistic personality disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and all were written well before Purdum’s profile. See here, here, here, here and here. (It futher appears that one of those commenters has made the observation more than once.)
Again, these examples are from just the first few Google results on one liberal website. It appears this is a meme that gained currency among those on the far left who actively despise Palin and posess no special insight into her. Either Purdum is far too credulous and should have investigated the claim, or Purdum deliberately wrote up baseless claims of narcissistic personality disorder to make it sound like the diagnosis came from Alaska insiders and in the process made the claim far more salacious. Either way, I don’t think Purdum’s reporting is to be trusted.
–Posted 07/02 11:33 AM
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