Journolist Founder Ezra Klein Defended Sarah Palin, Called Her a ‘Wonderful Mother’

Glynnis MacNicol noted that yesterday’s daily Daily Caller Journolist leak deviated from previous entries, in that it was simply a “dump” of emails on the subject of Trig Palin, with no accompanying editorial content. While the posting drew a sharp rebuke from Sarah Palin, it made me wonder why Daily Caller wouldn’t have hyped these more, since assaults on Trig figure to outrage pretty much everyone. A cynical person might say it was to avoid a headline like this.

The previous Journolist posts have all featured varying degrees of the hard sell, with headlines that didn’t quite deliver on their promise. The most “incriminating” emails have been from avowed partisans, yet are all lumped together as a mainstream media conspiracy.

Why, then, would you bury truly outrageous emails that, in some cases, made veiled incest references, in a dump of raw emails? Certainly, this could be explained as a way to highlight the sheer volume of them, but it would also have been impossible to cherry-pick the bad ones, without also including the many Journolisters who gave no quarter to the Trig conspiracy. Chief among these was Journolist founder Ezra Klein:

Aug 30, 2008, 10:15am

Seriously, folks? Best case scenario, what’s your outcome here: Her daughter, hounded by the tabloids, breaks down that it was her child, and her mother heroically took on the burden and welcomed the disabled boy as one of her own? Palin’s relationship with her children — however they may have come to her — strikes me as pretty far out of bounds. By all accounts she’s a wonderful mother, and devoted to her fifth son. Leave this be.

Credit Daily Caller for not just cherry-picking the worst, of which there are plenty, but I think it’s a shame they didn’t offer a fuller analysis of this batch. They could have certainly had their fun with the many J-listers who either bought into the story, or even when pooh-poohing it, couldn’t resist speculating on what would happen if it was true, while also pointing out that there are decent people on both ends of the political spectrum.

There are also assholes on both sides, and this email dump has plenty of them to go around. Aside from completely spoiling the ending to Chinatown (you are warned), I felt especially queasy at this:

Brad DeLong
Aug 30, 2008, 8:12pm

Which is why I think the balance of probabilities is that it is her kid–unless Trig has not Down but fetal alcohol syndrome, in which the balance shifts back the other way.

No human being could fault Sarah Palin for being revolted by that kind of talk, but I hope someone takes the time to point out to her (I wouldn’t expect her to wade through them herself) that there were many on the list who clearly defended her. You can add me to the list of people who think that no parent should ever have to read such cold, cruel things about their own child.

Update: Since I wrote this, Daily Caller has published a “Heroes of Journolist” entry, which makes no mention of the Trig emails, but does dole out some praise to a few select J-listers.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.