Few know better than I do about all the annoying things Sarah Palin has said since she left Wasilla to “squat” – apparently permanently – in our TV sets. After all, I spent 28 days and nights in my pajamas writing a book about her.
Yes, in my pajamas. I’ll say it loud and I’ll say it proud: I’m a blogger in my pajamas. In one of the more insidious of the cornucopia of interviews that Palin has been conducting this week, she told the fawning, hyperventilating Greta Van Susteren (Fox News) that her bad press was the result of “some blogger, probably sitting there in their parents' basement, wearing pajamas, blogging some kind of gossip, or a lie".
Way to go, Sarah! In your ubiquitous campaign of political rehabilitation and self-redemption, be sure to slag off bloggers. That’ll improve their attitude towards you. Dis people who work from home. After all, since you play Governor from your home in Wasilla instead of Alaska’s capital city Juneau, you know all about it. Criticize other people's clothes – you know, those schmucks who don’t shop for their nighties at Neiman Marcus.
Go ahead and infantilize bloggers while showing off your total misunderstanding of what blogging is. No, it isn’t like some meth lab that requires a hidden basement room. We do it in the comfort of our office, coffee shop or library.
Here’s the short clip:
Palin didn’t come up with the pajama-clad-blogger image on her own, surprise, surprise. I easily found multiple such references while surfing around in my pj’s. For example, the Columbia Journalism Review (Motto: Strong Press, Strong Democracy) mentioned this remark from the judge in the 2005 Judith Miller source confidentiality case.
“In the course of the case, Judge Sentelle raised a hypothetical question from the bench: “Does this privilege [to keep a source’s identity secret] also protect the proprietor of a Web log, the stereotypical ‘blogger’ sitting in his pajamas at his personal computer posting on the World Wide Web?”
In fact, this attempt to connect sloth with disinformation is such a cliché that one pan-European group fights back by holding an “Annual Satin Pajama Awards, celebrating the best of the European blogosphere.”
Whatever I can tell you about this attempt of Palin to diminish us bloggers, nothing will match Rachel Maddow’s response last night on her 9:00 news show on MSNBC:
What does she think of authors who write entire books in their bathrobes, then? Obviously not to be trusted!
Joan Price
author of Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty (http://www.joanprice.com/BetterThanExpected.htm)
Join us -- we're talking about ageless sexuality (in our bathrobes) at http://www.betterthanieverexpected.blogspot.com
Posted by: Joan Price | 13 November 2008 at 20:24