'The Wasilla Whack-Job' Reads My Blog!

Sarah Palin's threat of a libel suit goes a bit awry
By Marie Morris,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 15, 2009 4:14 PM CST
'The Wasilla Whack-Job' Reads My Blog!
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin reads a letter handed to her Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008 during a rally in Ohio at the Canton Memorial Field House.   (AP Photo /Bob Rossiter, Pool)

Back in the day, public figures were cautioned not to pick fights with people who bought ink by the barrel—namely, newspaper publishers. In the age of the blogger, it's more important to guard against fueling your antagonists with the 21st-century version of ink: attention. Paging Sarah Palin: "The Wasilla whack-job was an obsessive reader of this blog," crows Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic.

Sullivan spent a good chunk of the 2008 campaign speculating that the mother of Palin's younger son, Trig, was actually her eldest daughter, Bristol—as he puts it, the blog "dared to ask factual questions about her past that could be easily answered." Palin "considered pursuing a libel suit against" Sullivan but decided not to "because of the publicity it would bring," the Wall Street Journal reports. Bullet dodged!
(More Sarah Palin stories.)

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