John McCain is outspoken about a number of things, but he typically lets conversation about his former running mate Sarah Palin go across the plate without much comment.
News from the past month that Palin and her family were somehow involved in a “drunken brawl” at a birthday party in Anchorage, Alaska, has held on longer than expected. The initial gossip column reports turned into police report releases, which then turned into Facebook posts from Palin herself, then audio of police interviews getting leaked. When segments of that audio were played for the public on news outlets like CNN and others, people were shocked to hear long passages of censored language from Bristol Palin.
One news anchor found ridiculously long censored bits funny, and commented so to her audience. That reaction, as well as other commentary that the Palin kids’ behavior was a bit bizarre, was then characterized as an attack on conservative women.
Bristol Palin challenged that no one was paying attention to Hunter Biden’s discharge from the Naval Reserve — though many news stories were written about it — and no one cared that Chelsea Clinton’s father-in-law had a criminal record.
Sarah Palin backed her play with an appearance on Fox Business Network decrying liberals who engage in the “politics of personal destruction,” saying, “they want to crush us.”
John McCain admits that he knows little about what happened that night in Anchorage.
“I think these family affairs are — I don’t know much of the details about it,” McCain said. “Things happen in people’s families and I’m not excusing it, I’m not condemning it.”
But he says he thinks that liberals have not given Palin a fair shake in the media.
“I just know that the kind of coverage that this got, in my view, is in keeping with the kind of coverage the liberals have accorded to Sarah Palin for a number of years, which in my view, is biased and unfair and sometimes unacceptable,” McCain said.
McCain did not characterize this as a media attack against all conservative women, just Sarah Palin.
When Palin spoke to Fox Business Network, she hinted that she would like to run for office again someday. McCain said what a lot of people have said before him: it does not help her cause that she quit the last job she had.
“She didn’t ask my advice, but I had hoped she wouldn’t have stepped down when she did as governor of Alaska,” McCain said.