Jack Stuef, the Wonkette writer behind the “Trig is retarded” piece which ended up costing Wonkette the entirety of  its advertisers (Blogads remains because they have to: they co-own the turkey but can only get the Clintonista astroturf ads nowadays) is out.

Writes Stuef:

All Wonkette editors leave you eventually. Today, it is my turn. So this is my last post ever. What a ride, etc.! I’ve enjoyed making fun of politics for this dumb little blog. But now it is time to move on. I came to this site a 21-year-old kid.

[...]

I live in New York now, and I came here to get back into stand-up comedy and take a shot at writing for television, but I just haven’t had the time.

Yeah, that’s what it is … time.

But get ready, because there’s a shooting-star-the-more-you-know moment in here that actually may be a gem in the rough:

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In their ongoing crusade to target and silence decent, everyday Americans as racists, some in the MSM love to use the term “dog-whistle” in order to ascribe racial motives to words like, say,  “basketball.” Well, lately I’ve been hearing a dog-whistle of my own — a dog-whistle of the journ-o-list variety that tells me that in their relentless campaign to destroy Sarah Palin and undercut her as a serious political force, the MSM is preparing to up the ante when it comes to using the Governor’s own family and children as a political weapon against her.

First, a little background…

Why the Media Whips Up the Palin-Fury

Watching the MSM react to Governor Palin over the last few years has been an illuminating crash course in Alinsky 101. Like elite, elbow-patched community organizers, the media collectively targets, polarizes, demonizes and intentionally creates a perpetual storm of personal drama around the Governor in the hopes of exhausting even those of us who support her. I call it whipping up the Palin-Fury.

This is a common tactic from the Left, but one we usually see played out in the streets with the idea being to so toxify the atmosphere that decent people give up the fight and go home just to get away from the awfulness of it all. The last few months of ugly and relentless pro-union protests in Wisconsin — though a failure for the left — were a textbook example of this. However, when it comes to Governor Palin, what we’re seeing is this tactic practiced by almost every so-called “objective” news outlet in America.

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***Updated

Remember Vanity Fair (you know–the stale, old magazine that no one buys unless they are on the cover or they are wishing they were, like Joy Behar)?  The recent hit piece on Sarah Palin by Michael Joseph Gross reveals that they must be as desperate as the rest of the MSM for sales/ratings, because they have lost all credibility, if they ever had any.

Reading his tripe was excruciating.  Some 90% of the hard accusations are attributed to anonymous “sources.”   This is billed as a profile piece, not exactly Watergate.  You have to do better than attributing everything to an anonymous “Deep Throat.”

I have read a lot of MSM slime over the years, but never, ever have I felt subjected to a more jealous, petty, sophomoric, disturbed piece of ragslime than I do after reading this latest on Sarah Palin.   Gross left nothing alone.  He attacked her beauty, intelligence, marriage, parents, friends, family, children, ability, sincerity, honesty, faith, state, husband, home, shoes, speeches, pastor, book, job, cooking, hunting skills, supporters, church, weight, undergarments… the list goes on.  I honestly cannot think of anything about her that he did not attack.

Sarah Palin doesn’t need me, or anyone else to defend her.  She is strong, self assured, and she has heard all of this unoriginal slime before now. The only thing new in his story is the new depth of utter disregard for professionalism in journalism. Here is an excerpt:

“When …Piper Palin turns around, she sees her parents thronged by admirers, and the crowd rolling toward her and the baby, her brother Trig, born with Down syndrome in 2008.  Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, bend down and give a moment to the children; a woman, perhaps a nanny, whisks the boy away; and Todd hands Sarah her speech and walks her to the stage.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Gross, it happens that I shared the stage with Sarah Palin at that event.  I announced my BUYcott of Arizona that day, and I remember it well. (more…)

For everyone who read the above headline and said, “not bloody likely,”  give yourself two points.   The silence is frightening.

People Magazine’s latest piece on that rapidly dimming Northern Light known as Levi Johnston is no surprise to people who know and respect Sarah Palin.  The only ones astonished to discover that a 17-year-old boy lied in order to get famous are the professional journalists who would rather interview Tina Fey pretending Sarah Palin than to be forced to actually speak with the former vice-presidential candidate herself.

It was a pretty good ride for Levi Johnston. After surfing the wave of celebrity that was primarily fueled by a willingness to lie about almost everything about Sarah, Todd and Bristol Palin, Levi has finally come clean in the pages of People, admitting; “”I publicly said things about the Palins that were not completely true.”

Not completely true?  As in, you lied, Levi?   You lied about the impending divorce of Sarah and Todd?  How about the story you told claiming the former Governor joked about her Down Syndrome baby, referring to the child as “retarded?”  What about the whoppers told on the CBS Morning Show, The Today Show, or Tyra Banks show? (more…)

Leave it to Andrew Sullivan.  It’s been 24 hours since I offered $100,000 for the full list and contents of the Ezra Klein’s four-year experiment in political-journalist editorial collusion — the on line progressive jazz fusion station known as JournoList.  A natural free for all of death-wishing upon their political enemies and other such innocuous scribblings.

It took 24 hours for Sullivan to proclaim that all the rules now were broken.

When Andrew Breitbart offers $100,000 for a private email list-serv archive, essentially all bets are off. Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning: your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private life, cull your email in-tray, and use whatever material they have to unleash the moronic hounds of today’s right-wing base.

Yes, the Economist was right. This is not about transparency, or hypocrisy. It’s about power. And when you are Andrew Breitbart, power is all that matters. There is not a whit of thoughtfulness about this, not an iota of pretense that it might actually advance the conversation about how to deal with, say, a world still perilously close to a second Great Depression, a government that is bankrupt, two wars that have been or are being lost, an energy crisis that is also threatening our planet’s ecosystem, and a media increasingly incapable of holding the powerful accountable.

In fact, when one of the progressives on this list outed Dave Weigel, the actual rules were broken.  That leaker who destroyed Weigel’s career had agreed to the off-the-record nature of the 400-strong list; the minute the leaker went public with the material the story was no longer about Weigel but about the JournoList itself. (more…)