Palin leaker reveals himself: Update: It's a hoax.

UPDATE: It's a hoax. And a pretty well done one. Read the whole blog if you wish.

Something tells me this unknown blogger and former McCain campaign advisor is about to get a lot of traffic.

So yes, to be clear, last week I was the one who leaked those things to a producer at Fox News who works with Cameron. Carl and his producers are good guys, and I don’t want them to have to worry about protecting their sources (and going through the wringer ala Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) on something like this.

As you know, I was one of the foreign policy advisers on the McCain campaign who worked with Randy Scheunemann to help prep Sarah on her debate with Joe Biden. Did we outright give her a geography quiz when we started the prep? No, of course not. But yes, in the context of the prep, it slowly became apparent that her grasp of basic geo-political knowledge had major gaps. Could she have passed a multiple choice test about South Africa or NAFTA. Probably. But it was clear that she simply didn’t have the ease of knowledge that we come to expect from a major party political candidate. Other slights came up, too: Not knowing the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas. Or the difference between the Shiites and Suni. Or when it came to international terrorist organizations, knowing that the IRA was in Northern Ireland, and ETA in Spain.

The real thing we had to constantly remind her was to never, ever compare herself in any way to Hillary Clinton, as she had at her announcement speech. We had it on good authority that Biden was prepping to unleash the inevitable line, “I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine. And Sarah, you’re no Hillary Clinton.” Alas, Biden would have been right.

Video: Frum defends the Cuda ... kinda

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Why taking Rev. Wright off the table was dumb

Here's a behind-the-scenes story from the McCain camp that clearly illustrates how McCain's decision not to bring up Rev. Wright handcuffed his campaign and made his surrogates look like idiots sometimes.

In an appearance with Rick Sanchez on CNN in the final days of the campaign, Goldfarb had accused Obama of hanging out with anti-American and anti-Semitic figures and cited PLO sympathizer Rashid Khalidi as an example. Sanchez wanted more.

SANCHEZ: Can you name one other person besides Khalidi who he hangs around who is anti-Semitic?

GOLDFARB: Yes, he pals around with William Ayers who is an unrepentant domestic terrorist.

SANCHEZ: No, no, the question I asked you is can you name one other person who he hangs around with who is anti-Semitic? Because that is what you said.

GOLDFARB: Look, we all know there are people who Barack Obama has been in hot water--

SANCHEZ: Michael, I asked you to name one person. One.

GOLDFARB: Rick, we both--

SANCHEZ: You said he hangs around with people who are anti-Semitic. Okay. We got Khalidi on the table. Give me number two. Who's the other anti-Semitic person that he hangs around with that we quote, "All know about"?

GOLDFARB: Rick, we both know who number two is.

SANCHEZ: Who? Would you tell us?

GOLDFARB: No, Rick, I think we all know who we're talking about here.

SANCHEZ: Somebody who is anti-Semitic that he hangs around with?

GOLDFARB: Absolutely.

SANCHEZ: Well, say it.

GOLDFARB: I think we all know who we are talking about, Rick.

Goldfarb had done the interview from a studio at the campaign headquarters in Crystal City, in suburban Virginia outside Washington, D.C. His exchange rocketed around the Internet and quickly became a favorite of left-wing bloggers--who alternately accused him of playing dirty by making charges he couldn't back up and wimping out by refusing to name a second anti-Semite. Others wondered whom Goldfarb was talking about.

If it wasn't obvious to them, the identity of "number two" was clear to those inside McCain headquarters: Reverend Jeremiah Wright. McCain had pledged last spring that he wouldn't use Wright's hate-filled sermons against Obama, who had listened to them for 20 years in the pews of Wright's church. But virtually no one on McCain's staff agreed with the candidate's restraint. Goldfarb had joked before the appearance that he was going to "go rogue" and bring up Wright's name in the interview. He didn't--barely--thereby preserving his job at the cost of looking a bit ridiculous. But when he walked into the campaign's common area after his exchange with Sanchez, his colleagues gave him a standing ovation.

Michael Malone on his 15 minutes

Read the whole thing

Two weeks ago, in my ABCNews.com column, I took off on a brief tangent from my usual technology and business orientation to instead discuss what I saw as shocking bias by the mainstream media - in particular, television network news, newspapers and newsmagazines - in its coverage of the Presidential campaign.

What happened next is, I think, an interesting glimpse into the dynamics of the traditional and digital media now, nearly a decade into the new century, and a dozen years after the widespread cultural adoption of the Internet.

Peggy Noonan says she voted for McCain but ....

She's absolutely gushing about Obama.

For me, this whole Obama craze is a just a way for 60s boomers to relive their childhood. The 60s didn't die last week because the last Vietnam era presidential candidate lost.

To quote Noonan.

For me, at the end of the evening, looking at live shots of the throngs in Chicago's Grant Park, I flashed back to 1960 and how it felt, as a child, to see that the grown-ups had elected a Catholic president. I can't say we stood taller—we were Irish, we already stood tall—but yes, there was a wave of feeling: "What a country," "What a development!" The other day, when I said that to the writer Henry Louis Gates, head of African American studies at Harvard, he told me he'd grown up in a Catholic neighborhood and had celebrated that night with his neighbors because he thought he was one of them. That struck me as a very American anecdote.

P.J. O'RINO: Pisses Every Republican Off

Peaked in the first Bush administration.

Here's some highlights from his latest confusing rant for The Weekly Standard.

First off, O'Rourke accuses the GOP of being racist.

There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie's electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.

On illegal immigration

Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren't after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross.

On the War on Terror, O'Rourke shows he has no understanding of radical Islam.

Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we'd forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world's rich people make and keep their money?

O'Rourke just doesn't get it. For a conservative he sure believes a lot of liberal memes. Nobody becomes a suicide bomber (or, as P.J. puts it, stuff dynamite down their pants) because their electricity grind ain't working.

If so, there would have been no need to rescue people after Hurricane Katrina as they would have blown themselves up before General Honre got to town with his choppers.

O'Rourke should stick to his witty observations about the inefficiencies of the postal system or first-person 5,000-word accounts on privatizing sidewalks mixed in with a liberal amount of references to Clinton being a horn dog and Madonna being a slut.

On Going Rogue

Rich Lowry says "a former McCain aide" has denied a Newsweek story alleging that Sarah Palin went rogue and accused Barack Obama of "palling around" with William Ayers without the approval of the McCain campaign.

According to Newsweek's embedded election story:

There was grumbling that Palin had jumped the gun by bringing up Ayers at her rallies before the campaign could properly do the groundwork with a rollout strategy and ads. (At one rally, she had talked about Obama "palling around with terrorists.") Palin was mad at her handlers. Reportedly, she felt that Wallace and Schmidt had poorly coached and advised her. One adviser later speculated that she impulsively talked about Ayers because she felt thwarted—she had really wanted to bring up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Actually, Palin was feeling hurt and angry over the tabloid treatment of her 17-year-old daughter Bristol, and decided—on her own—that Ayers should be fair game. McCain's advisers were working on a strategy that would launch an Ayers attack the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and Salter was resisting.)

However, this story was debunked immediately by Randy Scheunemann, McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, who emailed Marc Ambinder after he first reported the palling-around line had not been vetted by HQ.

The question is, why exactly is someone in McCain's campaign falsely accusing Palin of being the one to bring William Ayers up?

On the surface, bringing up Ayers doesn't really hurt Palin with the base, who had been screaming at McCain to get tougher and raise Obama's associations.

What it does, however, is protect McCain, who had been compared, unfairly, by John Lewis to George Wallace.

These litany of lies being anonymously leaked to the media are designed not only to damage Sarah Palin, but to restore McCain's reputation. These smears are not random, but are fully part of the McCain campaign's exit strategy -- blame Palin for the loss and restore Senator Maverick in good favour with the MSM and his Democratic friends, such as Lewis.

Back to that Newsweek story, here's an account of what happened when McCain discovered the Lewis remarks:

McCain was on his bus, about to board a plane in Moline, Ill., when he read the remarks on an aide's BlackBerry. He was so dumbfounded that he held the plane on the tarmac while he considered how to respond. Salter, who had penned the chapter on Lewis, urged McCain to remain more dignified than Lewis had been in his remarks. But Schmidt called in from headquarters brimming with outrage. "Sir," said Schmidt, "he called you a racist. It must be responded to." Nicolle Wallace agreed. Salter was not so sure. He was "very pained" over the incident, Schmidt later recalled about Salter, but his instinct told him not to get his boss into a name-calling fight with a martyr of the civil-rights movement. McCain decided to go with Schmidt and put out a strong statement calling on Obama to "immediately and personally repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments." (Obama left it to a spokesman to blandly state, "Senator Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies.")

According to several aides, McCain had trouble shaking his sadness over Lewis's statement. To the reporters traveling with McCain, the candidate seemed uncertain, as if he was not quite sure what he had gotten himself into

That was fundamentally McCain's problem and why he was a terrible candidate. Someone unfairly compares him to a racist and McCain and his long-time aide Salter's reaction is to feel sad about it. Normal people would be outraged.