The case is pretty straightforward.

A New York Times piece wrongly revived the false claim that Palin’s electoral ‘target’ map had anything to do with a deranged man shooting and killing a Republican judge and wounding a Democrat, former Rep. Gabby Giffords. This was a smear widely spread by the media which never had a gram of basis to it.

The Times was equipped to know that, instead it chose to revive the smear. Was that malice?

What should have been a straightforward case was repeatedly tainted by the behavior of a New York legal system (sound familiar?) and a Clinton judge. There was essentially zero chance that Palin would get justice or that the case would even be considered on its merits. Now the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and its Republican-appointed judges have revived the case after it was previously sunk by Judge Jed Rakoff in NYC.

Much of the debate revolves around legal technicalities, but the meat of it is that the court violated rules in order to help the New York Times and suppressed and disregarded evidence that the paper’s figures were well aware that the Palin smear had been previously discredited even in an article hyperlinked during the process and in previous op-eds.

Part II isn’t likely to go any better for Palin because it still means fighting this case in enemy territory.

Furthermore, while my sympathies are with Palin, I don’t want to see the barrier for libel lowered much. Being able to attack political figures is part of America’s free speech tradition and changing the Sullivan precedent would simply empower the Left to suppress speech even further. The Palin case shows why speech laws will never be enforced or implemented equally.

Compare Palin’s travails to the voting machine company lawsuits against conservative media outlets. And that’s with the Sullivan precedent. Now imagine if the Supreme Court went ahead and gave Palin what she wanted and dismantled the Sullivan precedent. At that point, a weaponized leftist legal system shuts down every conservative media outlet and Twitter account within a year.