TNcon

What if all this business about Sarah Palin being an Alaskan big game hunter was an elaborate lie? It would shake the foundation of her credibility and call into question the very core of her image and personal narrative for many Americans.

Such is one claim in a recent Vanity Fair article, and now elaborated upon and spread by Left wing bloggers.

Malia Litman is a blogger in Dallas, Texas, and the author of a home-spun book critical of Palin titled “Rebuttal to the Rogue.” According to Litman, if Sarah Palin is not a hunter, she “has deceived everyone who has bought her book, listened to one of her speeches, or read an article about the woman she purports to be.”

Adolf Hitler said that if you are going to lie: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” Palin told a big lie. It was simple. We have heard about her hunting for two years. People believe that she is a hunter.

And how do we know Palin lied? Well, because Litman is a former “Senior Trial Partner with a major law firm” and trial attorney who “was used to presenting facts and letting the jury decide the outcome.” Now she’s asking a candid world to consider these facts:

On Monday, September 13, 2010 Palin was in Kansas City giving another speech. It was the specific comments in that speech that alerted me to the deception that Palin has promoted throughout the last two years. She mentioned that she had “recently gone hunting in Alaska, and still had caribou blood under her fingernails.["] Furthering the deception, Palin said “We eat, therefore we hunt.” The idea that [Palin] would appear for a speech with her hair and make-up done, with blood under her beautifully manicured nails, was too hard to believe. [Palin] had gone too far! Palin was either lying when she made this comment, or she was announcing from her podium that she had violated Alaska’s hunting laws.

Litman establishes that Sarah Palin was at the Restoring Honor rally in Washington, D.C. on August 28. She finds this problematic because:

On Saturday, Aug. 28th the Alaska Fish and Game Department announced that it would close the Fortymile caribou herd hunt after a single day. The reason for the decision to close the hunt after one day was that last year in just three days, hunters killed 870 caribou. Given the declining numbers of caribou, the Alaskan Fish and Game Department announced that hunting of caribou would cease at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 29th.

Litman determines that Palin couldn’t have made it back to Alaska in time to hunt caribou prior to the season’s emergency close. Furthermore, she says Palin gave an interview to Fox News on the evening of Aug. 31 (the video was actually uploaded by Fox Business on Aug. 30, which would actually make Litman’s case stronger), “wearing a pink suit” and showing “no indication from that interview that she had been out hunting or that she had encountered any difficulty removing any caribou blood from her hands, face, or body.”

In addition, Litman claims that the Alaska Fish and Game Department had “no record of a hunting license” for Palin and that she also “had not held a license for 2008 or 2009,” either. Without a license, Litman continues, Palin would not have been eligible to participate in a lottery “to determine which hunters will be allowed to hunt” during the following season.

Thus, Litman concludes, only two possibilities exist: “Either Palin lied in Kansas when she said she had been hunting caribou in Alaska and had blood under her fingernails, or Palin hunted in violation of Alaska law, and without a license. In either case, Palin is dishonest.”

Blogger Sarah Jones piles on at Politicususa, saying, “This is a quandary we often find ourselves in when reporting on Palin. There are so many little lies which buttress the big lie, that one can be lost. But in the end, the glaring fact of Palin’s perpetual dishonesty is always apparent.”

I became aware of this controversy through Grant Smith, a freelance journalist and data analyst who works with the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee. Smith recently helped break a huge story in which the CA discovered that legendary civil rights photographer Ernest Withers had been working with the FBI and secretly feeding them information about Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders of the movement.

So it came with some authority when Smith wrote, “Turns out Sarah Palin isn’t much of a hunter after all. She either lied or hunted illegally.”

Sadly, we must now question Smith’s credibility as an investigative journalist, as well as that of Litman, who encourages readers to “Consider the facts… and you be the judge.”

Here are just a few of the facts they failed to locate or observe:

1. The season closed after only one day for the Fortymile caribou herd hunt. However, “There are three zones for hunt, each with its own quota.” Fortymile is only one of the three herds, meaning caribou hunting would continue until “season quotas are met” in each of these zones.
2. The Fortymile hunt reopened on Saturday, September 4 at 12:01 a.m.
3. The Alaska hunting regulations guide is 128 pages long and offers many different rules and regulations for hunting caribou and other big game, depending on many factors, such as age, residency and geographic zone. One would need to be familiar with the specifics of when, where and how Palin was hunting in order to make a sufficient claim of illegality.
4. We do know roughly when Palin was hunting, and it wasn’t on August 28th. Palin’s daughter Bristol appeared on Jay Leno on September 3rd and said that her mother was hunting “right now,” and that she was in fact hunting for caribou. Being unfamiliar with Leno’s taping schedule, I don’t know if Bristol might have meant “now” as in “during this interview” or if perhaps it meant “during this broadcast.” We also don’t know if this meant Palin was actually in the active process of tracking game, or if she was merely traveling to the hunting area, etc.
5. Depending on the exact meaning of (4), Palin could have been hunting in the Fortymile zone, as described in (2).
6. Palin wasn’t the first to tell an audience that she “had caribou blood under her fingernails.” On September 11, according to the LA Times, Glenn Beck twice invoked “an image of Palin with caribou blood under her fingernails” before a “near-capacity crowd of more than 4,000″ in Alaska, where he had been introduced by Palin. Beck said this roughly one week after Bristol’s statement in (4). Palin repeated this line in Kansas City two days later.
7. It’s unclear if Beck and Palin were being literal about Palin’s blood-stained fingernails. It is likely that this comment was figurative. Without video evidence, the tone of these statements is lost. Both speakers, however, frequently use figures of speech and decorative language to season their messages and keep audiences entertained, so it’s not beyond reason that this claim was delivered in a casual or semi-humorous way.
8. The Vanity Fair author got many things very wrong.

In summary, Sarah Palin’s statement, if taken literally (and that’s an “if”), is supported publicly by two known witnesses. We also know the action was quite possible, given the full facts about the caribou herds, hunting seasons, and zone re-opening. And, furthermore, we have no reason to believe Sarah personally shot any animals on this hunt, and apparently hasn’t made any such claim, and therefore wouldn’t require a license or a tag, regardless of the particular rules and regulations in the zone and time period during which she went hunting.

So much for Litman’s vaunted abilities as a fact-gathering trial attorney, and of Smith’s assumed journalistic neutrality and investigative and analytical skills.

The irony is that many who are not Palin supporters are driven to the defense of candidates like her because of the Left’s relentless, baseless attacks. They only hurt their own cause.

UPDATE: We figured out the when, now we know more about the where. During her speech in Des Moines, Iowa yesterday, Sarah Palin said she was hunting caribou last week “near ANWR.” The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is in the northeast corner of the state, a good distance from the Palins’ home in Wasilla, Alaska, which is near Anchorage around the center of the state’s southern coastline.

UPDATE II: See also Texas for Sarah Palin’s commentary.

UPDATE III: Litman doubles down on the hunting illegally charge, although she’s now abandoned the argument that Palin couldn’t have been hunting legally because caribou season was over (given that her “facts” were obviously all wrong). But this revised criticism will hold up just as well, right?

UPDATE IV: Lindsey Turner at Theogeo snorts, “What’s cute is that Mick Wright thinks she had any credibility at any point up until now. Amazing.” No, what’s cute is that Lindsey evidently made this judgment after reading only 1 1/2 sentences of my post. If she had continued reading, she would have discovered that I was making an objective statement about Palin’s credibility among “many Americans,” not a subjective statement concerning my own view of her. Unfortunately, it is typical rather than “amazing” when members of the professional media fail to observe such distinctions.

UPDATE V: And now that there’s video evidence of the hunt, any chance Lindsey Turner, Grant Smith, Malia Litman, et. al. will apologize, correct their errors, and reconsider their views? I won’t hold my breath.