Newsweek's Eleanor Clift disclosed on the McLaughlin Group -- seemingly without any compunction for how she was outing her fellow journalists as behaving the same way as Barack Obama's campaign staff, but I suppose we already knew that intuitively -- that John McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for VP was greeted by “literally laughter” in “very many newsrooms.”
From the show taped on Friday at Washington, DC's CBS affiliate and airing at various times over the weekend around the nation, mostly on PBS stations:
ELEANOR CLIFT: This is not a serious choice. It makes it look like a made for TV movie. If the media reaction is anything, it's been literally laughter in many places across news-
JOHN McLAUGHLIN, TALKING OVER CLIFT: Where is that? See that?
CLIFT: In very, very many newsrooms.
Audio: MP3 clip which matches the video (13 seconds, 80 Kb)
Earlier, Clift had more fully elucidated on her disdain for Palin, including the ultimate liberal media insult of comparing Palin negatively to Dan Quayle:
She doesn't meet the initial threshold of being seen as a credible President should the need arise for her to step into that position. She's been in the Governor's office since 2006 and before that, her elective experience was in the Wasilla City Council where she then became Mayor. Population five thousand, five-hundred and five. I guess that's where she learned about the budget. It seems to me this is a blatant attempt to woo disaffected Hillary voters and it is such a misreading of what women care about.
....
This is a pick on the par of Dan Quayle where the first President Bush went for the youth vote. And Dan Quayle had a lot more experience on the national stage than this woman does. Now maybe she'll perform fine, but I thought the verbal factor was pretty high this morning and she doesn't apparently know very much about foreign policy or most domestic issues.