This was really simple and some of you figured it out. Hat tip to Shelby in Manhattan and sckitty. It was Sean Hannity who was the major source of the Palin talking points although there was a tip that Hannity's tutoring of Palin went beyond the on-air coaching.
First, please review my diary of yesterday. You will find that Palin parroted virtually every point I mentioned on subjects brought up. Also review the audio interview that Sean Hannity had with Sarah Palin on Tuesday. You will find that almost everything Palin was saying last night was the EXACT SAME THING WORD FOR WORD SPOON FED TO HER BY HANNITY.
Here's what happened.
Sean Hannity has been coordinating with the McCain campaign to coach/tutor Sarah Palin. Hannity and Palin have been in constant contact with each other over the past few days.
Palin did a 2nd interview with Hannity on radio where Hannity was directed to give Palin final talking points. Hannity's questions were not about Palin's answers but were about giving Palin words that she should use and lines of attack in the debate. It was coordinated with the McCain camp. It was a cram session.
The cram sessions were not just limited to the on air conversations. Hannity was prepping her OFF the air and in coordination with the McCain campaign. Basically, Hannity was acting as Palin's tutor. She was using his talking points WORD FOR WORD. Most of the info I got from Hannity's show, some of it was what got said off the air.
Palin was horrible in last night's debate. She was just trying to string together a bunch of disjointed sound bites and hope that her concoctions of run-on sentences would make some semblance of sense. She had a bunch of sound bites that Hannity drilled into her in their tutoring sessions and it was as if Palin was a robot who would simply parrot one of those talking points and then parrot another talking point. At times it was so obvious that Palin was merely a puppet.
Sarah Palin is an extremist. The fact that she's hanging around with a nutcase right wing talk show host named Sean Hannity who is on record as saying that he enjoys seeing skeletons of mass graves, who defended the torture of Abner Louima, who calls babies raised by lesbians "turkey baster babies," who supports Jesse Lee Peterson's beliefs that Hitler was heaven sent and blacks turn everything into ghettos, who once said that preventing Nancy Pelosi from being speaker of the House is worth dying for, and who openly supported a neo Nazi like Hal Turner and a racist like Bob Grant who once called for executing every gay or lesbian who attended a parade and who once said that all African American men should be sterilized demonstrates once again that Palin is even a bigger joke.
What Hannity did here was unethical and if a person working for CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, or any mainstream radio or TV station in America was providing private and public debate prep to a vice presidential candidate, he or she would be fired on the spot. Then again, Hannity is doing such a great job of sinking McCain, Palin, and the entire Republican Party that part of me wants him to continue to have the profile that he does.