Norah’s pretty all right, but she’s a dog—a pit bull—when it comes to getting in the face of a 17-year-old girl, a high school student from Michigan waiting in line to have a copy of Going Rogue signed by Sarah Palin.
Happily, in the Age of the Internet, that girl can give her side of the story, where she explains how O’Donnell ambushed her.
Read the girl’s post for yourself. But a few highlights:
1. O’Donnell’s “gotcha” quote that Palin supported the TARP bailout is a real yawner, even by MSNBC standards. Was Palin really supposed to oppose the position of the man on the top if her ticket? And we’ve come a long way from the initial financial bailout to Obama’s moves to consume whole industries — not to mention that one could have supported, in the initial crisis, a bailout of some financial firms in crisis and not endorse the perversion of public trust it has since become.
2. As the girl notes, O’Donnell — after seeing the girl’s shirt — got on her Blackberry to have the precise quote Palin uttered in support of McCain’s position on hand. She plays it, however, as if she knew it all along — and berates a 17-year-old girl for not having O’Donnell’s resources to get the “facts.” Pathetic.
3. Did I mention O’Donnell’s target of attack was a high school kid waiting in line to have a book signed? In other contexts — meaning the adulation of Barack Obama — O’Donnell’s attitude toward school kids is quite different.
Nice work, Norah. I always thought you were an elitist airhead with an inflated sense of your journalistic competence when we were colleagues covering the Bush re-election campaign in 2004. I’ve seen little evidence over the years to suggest that my perception was wrong.
—Jim Lakely