That quote, that I used in the title was penned by a commenter named
"counterpoint" not actually Palin, who was reponding to this post. From it you will understand the relevence
of the title...

Memo to Media: The Palin Rape-Kit Story Has Not
Been 'Debunked'

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for
America
Posted on October 9, 2008, Printed on October 11,
2008
https://www.alternet.org/story/102327/

Gov. Sarah Palin's introduction onto the
national stage has ignited scores of Alaska-based narratives and mini-controversies as reporters and voters scrambled to learn
more about her political past.
But has any other Palin issue produced the
type of visceral response ignited by the revelation that while she was mayor of Wasilla, the town began charging rape victims or
their insurance companies for costly emergency-room rape kits and post-assault examinations?
The story remains woefully under-covered by
the mainstream media, where most outlets have shied away from tackling the
touchy topic as a straight news story about Palin's political past. But the
issue continues to generate all kinds of discussion in the opinion pages and
online. (AmericaBlog was among the first big-name liberal blogs to highlight the story.)
The persistent buzz, I think, stems from the
fact that the Wasilla story just seems so weird. What municipality would bill
rape victims for traumatic post-assault forensic exams? And especially in
Alaska, where the rape rate is twice the national average. And wouldn't charging the victims
or their insurance companies (assuming the victims were insured) simply drive
down the number of women who are willing to report sexual
attacks?
Having that story hover around Palin as she
introduced herself to the American people could not have helped the Republican
ticket. And I suspect that's why the conservative press and right-wing bloggers
have tried so hard to knock the story down, why they have been so quick to
condemn journalists who dared report the rape-kit story as being unethical and biased.
But facts are not a fungible commodity.
And the hurdle the GOP press simply cannot
clear in its debunking effort is that the policy did exist while Palin was
mayor. Boxed in by the obvious, overeager bloggers instead claim Palin didn't
"support" or even know about the policy and that Palin did not personally bill
the victims herself. (Strawman alert: Nobody ever suggested Palin went around
knocking on doors demanding payments.)
Sadly for Palin partisans, they got schooled
on the Wasilla specifics by a 20-year-old blogger and junior at George
Washington University who did what so many on the right can't quite pull off:
fact-based reporting.
He proved without a doubt that Palin, as
mayor, signed off on the initiative that forced rape victims or their insurance
companies to foot the bill for the post-assault exam kits.
It's important to highlight the deficiencies
of the so-called debunking of the rape-kit story so that reporters
don't continue to ignore the issue, which raises questions about Palin's
leadership. So they don't take seriously the conservative claims that the story
has been proven a "lie," a "smear," a "myth," and a "bunch of baloney."
The loud pronouncements by the right have
become almost a cult-like mantra online, and they seem to be effectively
scaring the press off the story.
For instance, The Washington Post has never written about the rape-kit story in its news pages, according to a
search of Nexis, nor has The New York Times, the Los Angeles
Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News,
The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baltimore Sun, The Boston
Globe, Newsweek, or Time.
Credit goes to USA Today for treating the issue seriously, while CNN.com posted a detailed investigation. And on the air, CNN seems to have
reported more on the issue than its cable competitors, which isn't saying much,
since its competitors have virtually ignored the story.
As for the news networks, there's been a
blackout on the rape-kit story. Journalists ought to be reporting the story and
asking Palin to give detailed, unambiguous answers, since the rape-kit issue
could offer some insights into how she governs.
Instead, the press has treated the story as
something of a taboo. And the loud, bogus claims about it being "debunked"
likely add to its untouchable status.
Trust me, nothing has been debunked.
"No truth to the rape kit lie. Doesn't
really matter. They just make the shit up," wrote conservative blogger Atlas Shrugs, blind to
the irony of making shit up while accusing others of making shit up. The blogger
was in search of a "retraction" from the media, which "deliberately obfuscates
and lies by omission."
Again, irony alert: Somebody deliberately
obfuscating the facts of the rape-kit story? That would be Atlas Shrugs.
Writing at National Review Online, Jim
Geraghty, setting out to "debunk" the story, claimed that "liberal bloggers have cited the story of Wasilla
charging victims for rape kits as evidence that as mayor, Sarah Palin backed
cruel and insensitive policies. But just about everything we know from initial
accounts of this controversy is wrong."
Indeed, according to NRO, the rape-kit
stories online and in the press represented "crimes on truth."
That's almost too silly for words. (Click here for a paragraph-by-paragraph evisceration of Geraghty's
rape-kit spin; and by a gossip website, Jezebel, no less.) The "initial
accounts" of the controversy were quite straightforward: Wasilla once had a
policy on the books -- publicly supported by Palin's hand-picked police chief --
that it would charge rape victims or their insurers to collect evidence of
sexual assaults. (Or to be more precise, the town would no longer pay for the
fees out of its own budget and would seek reimbursements.)
And while that policy was in effect, Palin
was mayor, and Palin approved the town budget. In 2000, though, that practice
was deemed so offensive that the Republican-leaning Alaska Legislature stepped
in and quickly passed a law so that towns like Wasilla could not charge victims.
And guess what? That's all still true.
(Where exactly do the "crimes of truth" come in to view?) Geraghty didn't even
try to disprove it. Instead, he got lost in the weeds reading minutes from
legislative hearings and became wildly impressed that the town of Wasilla never
came up in the hearings and that Wasilla wasn't the only town in Alaska to
charge for rape kits.
That somehow led him to the conclusion that
bloggers and the Obama campaign owed Palin "an apology." Why? Because Wasilla,
Geraghty stressed, was not the only town in Alaska that adopted the rape-kit
policy.
But so what? I mean that literally: So what
if Wasilla wasn't the only town that adopted the rape-test
policy?
The argument represented another straw-man
effort, so not surprisingly, conservative media critics at NewsBusters embraced
it as well. Throwing a temper tantrum after a Boston Globe editorial raised the same rape-kit question that everybody
else was asking (i.e. "Why?"), one NewsBusters writer complained, "It is absolutely untrue that the town of Wasilla
was the one town that caused the Alaska Legislature to ban the fees in
question."
That's all well and good, but the
Globe never claimed Wasilla was the "one town" that adopted the rape
kit policy. (Why would the Globe even care if Wasilla was the "one town"? It's
irrelevant.)
Fact: Wasilla is the "one town" that
adopted the rape-kit policy whose former mayor is currently running for vice
president. That's what made it a legitimate news story; that's
why it's deserves far more focus than the fleeting mainstream media attention
it's received so far.
Other so-called proof used to "debunk" the
story was equally lame. Confederate Yankee, a popular GOP site that took a lead
role in the pushback, pointed to a statement recently released by Palin in response to a 14-point
questionnaire submitted by her hometown newspaper. One of the questions asked
about the rape-kit story:

The entire
notion of making a victim of a crime pay for anything is crazy. I do not
believe, nor have I ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an
evidence-gathering test. As governor, I worked in a variety of ways to tackle
the problem of sexual assault and rape, including making domestic violence a
priority of my administration.

That's what's commonly referred to as a
non-denial denial; Palin said the idea was "crazy," but she never addressed the
newspaper's very specific question: "During your tenure as Mayor, what was the
police department and city's standard operating procedure in recovering costs of
rape kits?"
Palin avoided a direct response to the
direct question in favor of commenting on the "notion" at hand.
But for Confederate Yankee and many other
conservatives, Palin's elusive denial about a plainly embarrassing policy her
town adopted was all the proof they needed that the rape-kit story was false.
Palin said so!
Please note that as part of the same
newspaper questionnaire, Palin continued to insist that she had put an end to
the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere" ("I cancelled the project"), despite the fact
that numerous news and independent fact-checking organizations have pointed out
Palin's bridge claim is patently false. Knowing that her "Bridge to Nowhere"
questionnaire answer was not truthful, why should her vague denial regarding the
rape-kit story carry real weight?
But the bloggers had more proof the rape-kit
story was a smear: Wasilla town officials, including current police chief
Angella Long, recently announced that they could not find any records of the
police department ever billing a rape victim for a post-assault test. And with
that, Confederate Yankee announced, "If current Police Chief Long's information is
correct, then Mayor Palin didn't know that rape victims were charged for rape
kits, because none were."
Two holes in that logic are plainly
apparent. First, local hospitals
administered the post-assault examinations, which means hospitals likely
generated the bills sent to the victims or their insurance companies, not the
town of Wasilla. But it was the town of Wasilla that set the policy instructing
the hospital to bill the victim. (And naturally, the hospital/patient records in
question remain confidential.) So the fact that the town can't find any
collection records is not surprising since the hospital did the
collecting.
In other words, for years, the local
hospital billed the Wasilla police department when it brought in a rape victim
to be tested. After the town adopted a new policy, the Wasilla police instructed
the hospital to bill the victim or her insurance company instead.
But secondly and more important, whether the town actually billed anyone during
the relatively short time the policy was in place was secondary to the fact that
the policy was instituted while Palin was mayor. Or was the very small town of
Wasilla in the habit of adopting budgetary policies without the mayor's consent,
and Palin in the habit of signing off on city budget initiatives she disapproved
of?
Based on the annual budget documents she
signed off on, Palin either consented to the policy or signed documents she
hadn't bothered to read -- both issues that should get the media's
attention.
Oh, yeah: A third point regarding the claim
that the town never billed anyone. Here's what Palin's hand-picked police chief
told a reporter for the local newspaper, the Mat-Su Valley
Frontiersman, in 2000 after the state outlawed the practice of billing
victims for rape kits: "In the
past, we've charged the cost of the exams to the victim's insurance
company when possible" [emphasis added].
Yes, you read that correctly. Palin's own
police chief freely discussed how the town of Wasilla had charged "the victim's
insurance company" for the post-assault exam. (He opposed the new state law that
forced Wasilla to stop.)
So how did Confederate Yankee deal with the
large blemish on the rape-kit-story-is-a-smear meme? Easy: He ignored it. In his
September 22 post "debunking" the controversy, the blogger made no
mention of the damning Frontiersman article.
The NewsBusters writer took the same route
when he harangued The Boston Globe on October 2 for its rape-kit editorial. The article that
quoted Palin's police chief, in real time, acknowledging that the town had
charged victims' insurance companies and that he was disappointed the town could
not continue to do so was completely ignored in order to sustain the right-wing
claim that the rape-kit story had been completely concocted.
See how much easier it is to be indignant
when facts are ignored?
And yes, the police chief's 2000 quote
remains an enormous obstacle for conservatives who desperately want to debunk
the Wasilla story. Not surprisingly, some have even raised doubts about the
police chief's quote in the Frontiersman.
But ask yourself this: If the police
chief's comments in 2000 had been some kind of massive misunderstanding and were
being foolishly used to fuel the current rape-kit story, wouldn't the former
police chief clear the matter up? Wouldn't Palin be able to persuade her former
police chief to come forward and explain to the press how his comments in the
Frontiersman in 2000 were completely taken out of context and that no,
of course not, Wasilla never charged the insurance companies of rape victims
when Palin was mayor?
Instead, we've heard radio silence from the
former police chief, who seems to have no interest in walking back his rape-kit
comments from 2000, comments that frustrated bloggers just cannot make
disappear.
Stuck with a public statement that leaves no
room for ambiguity ("We've charged the cost of the exams to the victim's
insurance company when possible"), bloggers clung to the idea that Palin should
not be tarred by the rape-kit policy because she had been completely in the dark
about it as mayor.

• "She never supported" the policy, claimed Amanda Carpenter, a national political reporter for
  Townhall.com.

• "There's no evidence Mayor Palin knew about
  the policy," agreed an outragedBoston Herald columnist.

• "There is not yet any evidence generated
  that Palin was aware of this policy," announced NRO.

• "She wasn't even aware it was going on," stressed the NewsBusters writer.

Set aside the oddity of Palin's press
supporters pushing her candidacy by emphasizing that she apparently had no idea
what the town of Wasilla was doing in her name, and focus on this: Unless Palin
had no idea what was going on in her own city government and unless she signed
budget documents without actually reading them, the claim is plainly false. And
that's where conservatives got schooled by a GW junior named Jacob
Alperin-Sheriff. Writing for The Huffington Post's Off The Bus, and crossposting
at Daily Kos, Alperin-Sheriff posted by far the most specific and factual analysis of the rape-kit story
in terms of Palin's role as mayor and the final say she had over the budget.
Combing through Wasilla's budgetary
documents, which are posted online, Alperin-Sheriff showed that Palin had
clearly signed off on a fiscal-year budget that reduced by three-quarters the
amount of money the town set aside annually for rape-kit costs and that the
rape-kit reduction was spelled out before the fiscal-year 2000 budget was
approved by Mayor Sarah Palin on April 26, 1999.
This week's bottom line: No matter how many
times partisans in the GOP press announce the Palin rape-kit story has been
"debunked," the central, undisputed facts remain hidden in plain sight for all
to see.
It's time for the press to take a closer
look.

© 2008 Media Matters for America