An old axiom in the legal realm:  If you can’t win on the law, hit the facts.  If you can’t win on the facts, hit the law.  If you can’t win on the facts or the law, hit the table.  Not if you’re Sarah Palin, though.  Half-term governor and failed realty TeeVee star who also failed at her fallback career again Sarah Palin is attempting to revive her defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, which at one point mistakenly linked her campaign to the shooting of then-Democratic Arizona Senator Gabby Giffords, by claiming the required malice standard upheld by the courts doesn’t matter.

According to Politico, the goal is to bring a case–perhaps this one from Palin–to the Supreme Court to overturn the Sullivan standard for defamation in the media, a move that is meant to cripple establishment, mainstream media outlets by assaulting them with thousands of defamation suits in the age of social media, real-time posts by reporters.  A decision removing the requirement for the plaintiff to show the media outlet knew the information was incorrect but printed it to harm the plaintiff has been the cornerstone requirement for defamation suits by celebrities since the Sullivan decision.

While Palin’s lawyer argued the standard was now outdated, the judges from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals told the lawyer that the case is likely going nowhere because the lower court ruling was binding and lower courts are bound to adhere to precedent.  She’d have a better shot at arguing she was never really a person of any import.