Palin back in the news AGAIN.. Feud between the McCain and Palin camps is coming to a head..

A hard-hitting piece on Sarah Palin in the new Vanity Fair has touched off a blistering exchange of insults among high-profile Republicans over last year’s GOP ticket – tearing open fresh wounds about leaks surrounding Palin and revealing for the first time some of the internal wars that paralyzed the campaign in its final days.

Rival factions close to the McCain campaign have been feuding since last fall over Palin, usually waging the battle in the shadows with anonymous quotes. Now, however, some of the most well-known names in Republican politics are going on-the-record with personal attacks and blame-casting.

William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and at times an informal adviser to Sen. John McCain, touched off the latest back-and-forth Tuesday morning with a post on his magazine’s blog criticizing the Todd Purdum-authored Palin story and pointing a finger at Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager.

Kristol cited a passage in Purdum’s piece in which “some top aides” were said to worry about the Alaska governor’s “mental state” and the prospect that the Alaska governor may be suffering from post-partum depression following the birth of her son Trig. “In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote.

Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an e-mail: “I'm sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”

“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”

Asked directly in a telephone interview if he brought up the prospect of Palin suffering from post-partum depression, Schmidt said: “His allegation that I was defaming Palin by alleging post-partum depression at the campaign headquarters is categorically untrue. In fact, I think it rises to the level of a slander because it’s about the worst thing you can say about somebody who does what I do for a living.”

But Kristol’s charge was seconded by Randy Scheunemann, a longtime foreign policy adviser to McCain who is also close to the Standard editor and was thought to be a Palin ally within the campaign.

“Steve Schmidt has a congenital aversion to the truth,” Scheunemann said. “On two separate and distinct occasions, he speculated about about Governor Palin having post-partum depression, and on the second he threatened that if more negative publicity about the handling of Governor Palin emerged that he would leak his speculation [about post-partum depression] to the press. It was like meeting Tony Soprano.”

Schmidt said Scheunemann’s charges were “categorically untrue.”

“It is inappropriate for me to discuss personnel issues from the campaign,” Schmidt continued. “But suffice it to say Randy is saying these things not because they’re true but because he wants to damage my reputation because of consequences he faced for actions he took.”

Schmidt is alluding, without saying so directly, to the stories that emerged after the campaign that Scheunemann had been fired.

Scheunemann said Schmidt did try to fire him but added: “I’ve got a pay stub through November 15th.”

The questions about Scheunemann being terminated are central to the larger battle about who was trashing Palin, something that quickly came to the surface in the back and forth between Schmidt and Kristol on Tuesday.

The vitriol also suggests the degree to which Palin remains a Rorschach test not simply to Republicans nationally but within a tight circle of elite operatives and commentators, many of whom seem ready to carry their arguments in 2012. Was Palin a fresh talent whose debut was mishandled by self-serving campaign insiders, or an eccentric “diva” who had no business on the national stage? Going forward, does she offer a conservative and charismatic face for a demoralized and star-less party? Or is she a loose cannon who should be consigned to the tabloids where she can reside in perpetuity with other flash-in-the-pan sensations?

Schmidt, who has returned to his California-based political and public affairs consulting business, said that he “worked incredibly hard during the campaign to defend Sarah Palin and her family against a lot of attacks that I thought then and think today were very unfair.”

And he got in a dig at Kristol, who frequently offered unvarnished assessments of McCain’s campaign from his perch at the Standard, on Fox News, where he is a contributor, and in his then-New York Times column.

“Bill Kristol, going back to the time of the campaign, has taken a lot of cheap shots at the campaign without ever offering a plausible path to victory,” Schmidt said. “He’s in the business of ad hominem insults and criticism.”

Responding to Schmidt’s counterattack, Kristol directly fingered Schmidt: “It’s simply a fact that when the going got tough, Steve Schmidt trashed Sarah Palin, both within the campaign and (on background) to journalists. This was after Steve took credit for the Palin pick when, at first, he thought it made him look good. John McCain deserved better.”

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Pretty much old news... Sounds like the bit players want in on the action and make a little money on the book and rag circuit..

Lucas McCain wrote:

Pretty much old news... Sounds like the bit players want in on the action and make a little money on the book and rag circuit..

It seems to me that it's time for the media to drop the Palin ball. She's old news and most of us wish she'd just go govern her state and drop out of the spotlight. If she doesn't, she's only going to damage her political chances even more. She needs to keep her mouth shut and so do her buddies and let things cool down.

^ I take it by the title that this thread was about the recent reported "shots" and Palin from someone in the McCain camp.
For some reason most everyone (Liberals, democrats, main stream media and some GOP) are obviously threatened in some way or another by Palin.........she is very smart, a very sucsessful leader and administrator, pro ife, pro 2nd amendment/NRA, is all about family and can relate to the common man/real America better than any other in olffice now or in recent memory amoung many other of her admirable qualities. "Admirable" qualities are what some cannot deal with.

What may be the best thing about any of this Palin bashing (and there is really not anything good about it) is ....
Where are all the feminst groups? I believe all of then femionist groups silence on al the Palin bashing really tells what they really are all about..............."Liberal" femnist only.

Bashing Sarah Palin is really getting to old.....is that all that some (in the media) have got???

I'm sorry, but I can't get past "hard-hitting piece in Vanity Fair". No offense, but when I think of cutting edge journalism, Vanity Fair is not what jumps to mind.

Then again, reading another article hammering Sarah Palin, who I could care less about, is not something I'd call cutting edge either.

Roy Rogers wrote:

I'm sorry, but I can't get past "hard-hitting piece in Vanity Fair". No offense, but when I think of cutting edge journalism, Vanity Fair is not what jumps to mind.

Then again, reading another article hammering Sarah Palin, who I could care less about, is not something I'd call cutting edge either.

So true. I wish they'd just drop it and quit giving her the spotlight that she so desperately longs for. I'd be happy if I never saw her name in the news again but that's just wishful thinking.