Newsweek offers special assist with new Palin smear

A Newsweek story ("Newsweek Web Exclusive") from Tuesday perpetuates the Smear-a-thon being held in honor of John McCain's vice-presidential pick, Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

The reporter, Mark Hosenball , reveals in his Web exclusive that a judge hearing the custody case involving Palin's sister ordered the family not to disparage the ex, Mark Wooten. Somehow Hosenball is able to overlook the fact that the order seems almost certainly limited to comments made around the children involved in the custody case.

Court records obtained by NEWSWEEK show that during the course of divorce hearings three years ago, Judge John Suddock heard testimony from an official of the Alaska State Troopers' union about how Sarah Palin—then a private citizen—and members of her family, including her father and daughter, lodged up to a dozen complaints against Wooten with the state police. The union official told the judge that he had never before been asked to appear as a divorce-case witness, that the union believed family complaints against Wooten were "not job-related," and that Wooten was being "harassed" by Palin and other family members.

Court documents show that Judge Suddock was disturbed by the alleged attacks by Palin and her family members on Wooten's behavior and character. "Disparaging will not be tolerated—it is a form of child abuse," the judge told a settlement hearing in October 2005, according to typed notes of the proceedings. The judge added: "Relatives cannot disparage either. If occurs [sic] the parent needs to set boundaries for their relatives."
(bold emphasis added)

Fortunately for the denizens of the leftward Fever Swamp, Hosenball was able to connect the barred disparagement to criticisms the Palin family have registered to various adults apparently well out of the hearing of the children. Hence the juxtaposition of the two paragraphs quoted above where the former deals with Palin's attacks on Wooten's fitness for duty with law enforcement. On the second page (Web), Hosenball makes a more direct effort to establish the connection in the reader's mind:

At the heart of the continuing "Troopergate" flap is evidence that despite Judge Suddock's warnings back in 2005 and 2006, Palin and her husband continued to make disparaging allegations against Wooten, even after she went to the statehouse.

I can only hope that I'm the first to say that Hosenball and his editor have demonstrated an incredible degree of incompetence. The story offers no reasonable indication that Judge Suddock was doing anything other than barring the Palins from disparaging Wooten in front of his children. If the judge ordered anything broader than what Hosenball quoted then somebody should have had the sense to put it in the story.

As expected, the Newsweek pratfall led a parade of followers from the left blogosphere.
This version from TPM Muckraker (with Zachary Roth as composer) concentrates the faulty inference into a taut little assertion that Palin defied the judge:

Newsweek reports that in 2005, a judge warned Sarah Palin and her family to stop disparaging Mike Wooten, the state trooper who at the time was undergoing a bitter divorce from Palin's sister and is at the heart of the ongoing Trooper-Gate investigation.

According to court records of the divorce proceedings obtained by the magazine, Judge John Suddock called the attacks on Wooten by the family "a form of child abuse." And an official with the troopers' union told the judge that he had received up to a dozen family complaints against Wooten. The official said he believed the complaints were "not job-related" and that Wooten was being "harassed" by his estranged wife's family.

Unless Alaska's ex-public safety commissioner, Walter Monegan, is unusually young it is difficult to imagine how making him listen to criticisms of Wooten amount to child abuse.

Though perhaps Christy Hardin Smith of FireDogLake can explain it to me since she apparently sees the legitimacy of the Hosenball Inference:

No idea what the underlying reasons for divorce were, but it is a huge concern that the family court judge warned Palin's family -- repeatedly -- to stop making unfounded accusations and trying to poison the well about Wooten. Judges only put material like that on the record where they perceive a real and present problem -- and those warnings could not have been more clear.

And yet Palin continued well after those multiple warnings in her first meetings with the head of the AK state police and the public safety chief after she was elected governor. Seems to me that she was fairly single-minded in her intent to continue with multiple people in authority over her former brother-in-law, despite a judge's order to cease and desist.

Her next paragraph implies that Smith is a lawyer, for what it's worth.

On the other hand, BigTentDemocrat over at TalkLeft seems to have at least one foot planted in Sanesville:

Here's my bottom line politically - let this alone Democrats. The facts are bad on this and the actions (or likely inactions now) of Judge Suddock are impossible to defend. But I await instruction from family law practitioners here to lecture me how Alaska family law court orders trump the First Amendment.

BTD buys into the notion that the judge's order went far beyond comments made within the hearing of the children. But at least he recognizes the nutty implications that result from that type of order.

Matt Volz, writing for the AP, appears to regard the Hosenball Inference with skepticism, as he goes no further than offering the same type of juxtaposition that Hosenball produced. Volz makes no attempt to effect a clear logical/literary transition between the judge's order and complaints about Wooten made known to adults out of the hearing of the children.

But with a little luck the reader will reach the unstated conclusion?

It is difficult to conceive that this type of journalistic idiocy could come from a mainstream media not sold out for Obama.