Playing the Media Game, and Winning

When the Democrat National Committee named Celtic Diva of Blue Oasis as their official Alaska blogger, little did they know that they inadvertently created an environment ripe for hundreds of conservative blogs which would sprout up quickly following the 2008 election. Conservatives might have been beaten and down after that fateful day in November, but when the loudmouths of the left continued their vicious assaults, particularly on Sarah Palin, conservatives responded. The cyber battlefield stage was set and activists who were rising up on the right were about to get the most politically active they have ever been in their life.

When President Obama talked about "hand to hand combat" in the halls of Congress which would follow huge Republican gains in November, it reminded this blogger about the keyboard to keyboard combat that we have been watching in the blogosphere for the last two years.

The liberals easily owned the right in cyberspace prior to Obama's election. Conservatives and Republicans were the silent majority who had jobs, families and lives. They didn't see a need to blog. They assumed that most Americans saw it the way they did - as grown ups.

But that changed the day the Alaska bloggers and the bloggers who post over on the Daily Kos went overboard. The Tea Party movement was picking up steam and the hundreds of thousands who attended Sarah Palin rallies when she was on the trail with McCain became part of the movement and eventually watched as their leader became a prominent player in the grassroots backlash to the liberal policies of the Obama administration. Sarah Palin was vilified. The Tea Party was vilified. The Alaska bloggers and their counterparts in the lower 48 were getting free coverage by a mainstream media that was all but glad to run with stories about Tea partiers spewing racial epithets and Sarah Palin being under federal indictment.

But the tide has turned.

Today there are hundreds of conservative blogs which are energized by articulate people who have become politically active out of necessity. There is a country to save.

The liberal blogs still spew their hate, but it is regurgitated hate now. They've run out of ammo. They may have even run out of things to make up. They were the masters of cyberspace two years ago. Today, they are overshadowed by the focus on the facts that has become the acid that burns the written products of their relentless lying.

With strokes of the keyboard and clicks of the mouse, Sarah Palin leads her minions from her Facebook page. Palinistas debunk liberal myths and clang their swords of words with the left, always softening the battlefield for the wielding of the rhetorical Excalibur from Alaska that mainfests itself in a tweet or a Facebook posting that finishes the job.

Sarah Palin is a case study in how to beat the smear machine. Most people would have been destroyed by the relentless battering she has taken. Dan Quayle, Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush can attest to that. Although, Gingrich is making a comeback, the rise and fall of a great Speakership was contingent on the dissatisfaction of the mainstream media with a conservative revival that threatened its elitist hold on the electorate.

When that happened again, the media unsheathed their swords and politically bloodied one of the greatest warriors to appear in the arena since Ronald Reagan. That warrior tended to her wounds and came out stronger, faster, more savvy than ever. She was big in 2008. She's even bigger now. She will be even bigger in 2012.

They can't stop her now. They've tried everything and it doesn't work anymore.

Sarah Palin is not only a survivor of the media smear campaign. She is a teacher as well. Today, she advises political candidates, particularly women, how to survive the media beatings. She has helped the likes of Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, Nikki Haley and Christine O'Donnell.

Sean Hannity asked Sarah Palin "what advice do you give -- you have lived under fire -- to those candidates that now are going to be the victims of these smears?" Palin responded:

Yes, well, remember, what they are doing. This is coming from Obama's presidential campaign book, which goes back to Alinsky's campaign book, "Rules for Radicals," which Obama and Michelle Obama have quoted from. And that is, the politics of personal destruction perhaps will be the only thing that you have on your opponent so you make things up about them.

You lie, you spin, you do whatever you can and you use a complicit media to assist you in this, a left-wing media to assist you in this. So these candidates just need to be prepared for those rules of radical to be applied to them. They need to stay on message, they need to stay optimistic. They need to remind the American public what the time-tested truths are that created this great nation.

This is music to the ears of conservative bloggers who have been researching and exposing the media lies and conspiracies.

Liberal bloggers no longer have their vile reported on mainstream media outlets unchallenged.

The one who they have tried to destroy is now stronger than ever. With her stilleto heel firmly on the throat of the "lamestream media," Palin has gone from being the hunted to being the hunter.

The truth is powerful once effectively articulated. Sarah Palin has become a modern day great communicator. Facts and truth are more potent weapons than lies and smears. And she wields these weapons with surgical precision.