The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XXXV: Ambushing Piper

A key part of Sarah Palin's work of magical realism is her victimization at the hands of the evil librul media. So this part of "Going Rogue" is par for the course. Peter Hamby:

"In one early press conference we noticed that our local reporters were flanked by a couple of reporters from the Lower 48 who'd been hanging out around Juneau in search of material for their own Sarah Palin book," Palin writes. "We never shut our doors to anyone, so people of all kinds attended these press availabilities. But glancing along the side wall, I recognized these particular folks as the same ones who had cornered Piper on her walk home from Harborview Elementary School and talked to her for who knows how long about who knows what."... According to Palin, Piper returned home [after a press conference] and told her mother: "Mom, remember those reporters who came on the campaign plane with us? You know, the ones Nicolle [Wallace] said didn't like us very much? They just interviewed me on the sidewalk." Palin adds after the incident, Piper was no longer allowed to walk to or from school by herself.

Both the reporters (one of whom worked for Fox News in the campaign) and Wallace deny the story outright.

Conroy and Walshe said in a statement Tuesday that in the course of reporting for their book, they conducted 190 interviews, including sit-downs with Palin's parents and her husband Todd.

"We did not, however, interview Piper Palin, nor did we corner her on her way home from school," Conroy and Walshe told CNN in a statement. "Contrary to Governor Palin's recollection of having seen us both at a press conference, Scott has never attended a press conference in Alaska."

Wallace, who advised Palin on media strategy during the campaign but fell out favor with the candidate, also rejected Palin's version of the story. She said it would have been impossible for Piper to have used her by name in a discussion about the campaign reporters in question, because Wallace never spoke to Piper about them.

"I have never met Shushannah and Scott and had never seen Shushannah until I saw her on TV yesterday," Wallace said in an e-mail to CNN. "Couldn't have picked either of them out of a line up and never heard their names or had any idea who they were until after the campaign ended."

I put this in the odd lies category because the fact that Scott Conroy never attended any press conferences in Alaska is an empirical fact that makes Palin's story, like so many others she has told, empirically untrue. From Conroy's and Walshe's account, Piper liked them and bumped into them once in Juneau and told them how excited she was to be back in Alaska. For some reason, Palin is extremely defensive about even pleasant interactions of her kids with anyone in the press outside her control. She burst into Bristol's lone TV interview by herself halfway through.