NYT Publishes 3,000-word Palin Hit Piece On Sunday's Front Page

You want to know how scared the liberal media are of John McCain's explosion in the polls since naming Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate?

On Sunday, the New York Times will publish a 3100-word, front page hit piece about the Republican vice presidential nominee.

Entitled "Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes," the article, now available at the paper's website, attacked Palin early and often (emphasis added, h/t Jennifer Rubin):

Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages. [...]

But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials. [...]

In Wasilla, a builder said he complained to Mayor Palin when the city attorney put a stop-work order on his housing project. She responded, he said, by engineering the attorney’s firing.

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

And that was just the beginning, as the hits kept coming according to Jennifer Rubin of Commentary Magazine:

The New York Times does the all-so predictable Sarah Palin bill of indictment for its Sunday front page...But what is so remarkable is how little there is in the page after page of minutiae thrown against the wall by the Times.

Readers are encouraged to review her entire analysis while they consider what former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told NewsBusters during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul:

I think no one on the right should underestimate the level of threat [Palin] poses to the elite media, and therefore, the level of frenzy you're going to get.

I'd say this front page hit piece qualifies as a frenzy.

How 'bout you?