The Left Fears Sarah Palin Like No Other GOP Candidate

If Palin were, as some on the right tell us, a "joke" of a candidate, it hardly explains the desperation with which the professional propagandists -- ranging from John Podesta's Center for American Progress to Markos Moulitsas -- attack her.

On 2 September 2008, I reported on an information warfare operation launched against the McCain-Palin campaign. Just hours after John McCain had selected Sarah Palin as his VP candidate, proxies for candidate Obama launched a massive astroturfing operation.

The same lengthy message -- reportedly authored by a feminist in Alaska -- was posted in hundreds of discussion boards across the Internet in a matter of hours. This type of operation, of course, would have required a significant amount of work -- prepping messages and creating pre-positioned sock-puppet accounts.

Later that same month, The Jawa Report noted that several federal election laws appeared to have been broken in a series of similar incidents and implicated David Axelrod (who else?) in the morass. Dan Riehl offered a powerful executive summary of the research.

Extensive research was conducted by the Jawa Report to determine the source of smears directed toward Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Those smears included false allegations that she belonged to a secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American views.

Our research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors about Sarah Palin that were known to be false. These rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.

Go read the whole thing at Doug Ross' Journal.