Palin family values

The Palin family is quite a bunch.

The Gawker has been reporting on Track Palin's arrest on Monday night the 18th (Jordan Sargent, Track Palin Was Arrested Last Night for Domestic Violence 01/19/2016). Sargent quotes the Wasilla police press release:

On 01/18/2016 at approximately 2204 hours, Wasilla Police responded to a residence for a disturbance. An investigation revealed Track Palin had committed a domestic violence assault on a female, interfered with her ability to report a crime of domestic violence, and possessed a firearm while intoxicated. Palin was arrested and charges of assault in the fourth degree (domestic violence), interfering with a domestic violence report, and misconduct involving weapons in the fourth degree were forwarded to the District Attorney’s Office. Palin was held without bail until arraignment.

Sargent writes in the article, "All three charges are misdemeanors."

Those are all misdemeanor charges in Alaska?

In another Gawker piece of the 19th, Sargent quotes the official police report itself, with the name of the complaining victim withheld, although she is identified as Track Palin's girlfriend. The police reported that when they found the girlfriend, she was “hiding and crying underneath a bed inside the residence.”

Sergeant Rader observed [redacted] to have bruising and swelling around her left eye. She complained of pain to that area as well as to her right knee. He observed a small red area near her knee. The involved firearm, an unloaded AR-15 rifle was located on the kitchen counter.

The report described the scene based on the complainant's information as follows:

She and her boyfriend of one year, Track Palin, left a different residence together and were arguing the whole way home. Once they got to his home they argued in the car, then in the driveway . They were screaming and he was calling her names. [Redacted] told Palin that she had called the cops even though she had not, in attempt to calm him down and to scare him away from “touching her”. Palin approached [Redacted] and struck her on the left side of her head near her eye with a closed fist. [Redacted] got on the ground in a fetal position because she didn’t know what else he would do. Palin then kicked [redacted] on the right knee. [Redacted]’s phone was sitting on the ground in front of her. Palin took her phone and threw it across the driveway. She retrieved the phone and went inside the house. Palin was already inside and holding onto a gun, yelling “do you think I’m a pussy?” and “do you think I won’t do it?” [Redacted] stated Palin “cocked the gun” and was holding the rifle out next to him with the his right hand near the trigger and his left hand near the barrel, with the barrel just away from his face pointed to the side. [Redacted] was concerned that he would shoot himself and ran outside and around the house. She didn’t see where Palin went, so she went inside and up the stairs, where she hid under a bed. Shortly after, she heard Palin walking around inside looking for her. Palin left after not locating her.

Domestic violence cases are notorious for being difficult to prosecute, with the victims often declining to cooperate with prosecutors. And in the legal system, Track Palin is entitled to a presumption of innocence in the courts.

Track's mother, devoted to Christian family values, endorsed Donald Trump for President on Tuesday. (Stephanie Condon and Rebecca Shabad, Sarah Palin backs Donald Trump's 2016 bid CBS News 01/19/2016)

Maybe Track can imitate Bristol and spend a few months giving lectures against domestic violence.

Conservatives under siege (in their own minds)

Digby recently reminded her readers of this useful essay by historian Rick Perlstein, Let's review The Big Con 09/04/2008, which discusses the long history of Republican conservatives cultivating a sense of themselves as "marginal and beleaguered". This is the sense that I often refer to as white people's whining. Frank Schaeffer refers to it as the Jesus Victim posture. The overlap between whiny conservative white folks and the Christian Right is very great.

Perlstein takes a bemused look at the phenemenon in this passage:

Conservatives are always beleaguered, always under siege. "I think we had better pull in our belts and buckle down to a long period of real impotence," National Review Publisher William Rusher wrote in a 1960 letter. "Hell, the catacombs were good enough for the Christians." Five years later, M. Stanton Evans wrote in The Liberal Establishment: "For decades Liberalism has ruled the government and opinions of the United States with little or no effective challenge to its pretensions."

Listen to conservatives now, and they're still in the catacombs. "Just because a rock song is about faith doesn't mean that it's conservative," National Review explains of U2's "Gloria." "But what about a rock song that's about faith and whose chorus is in Latin? That's beautifully reactionary." Note the tone of sturdy defiance: So few bold souls, these days, are brave enough to publicly profess that underground faith, Christianity.

Sarah Palin, who hopefully will fade quickly from the national celebrity news now that she's admitted she isn't running for President, just provided a new example, as she does virtually every time she speaks (Luke Johnson, Sarah Palin: Hank Williams Jr. Controversy Is An Illustration Of 'Hypocrisy On The Left' Huffington Post 10/07/2011). The occasion was Hank Williams Jr. being dropped from ESPN's Monday Night Football show after a seemingly drunken interview of FOX News in which he said, that President Obama playing golf with Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner "That would be like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu. Not hardly. In the shape this country is in?"

ESPN is a private company, not part of the gubment. I suppose we should pretend to be shocked that Palin would question the decision of important "job creators" like the folks at ESPN. But she did:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin defended Hank Williams Jr., the country singer known for his appearances on Monday Night Football, over the controversy surrounding his comments comparing President Barack Obama to Hitler Thursday.

"Hank Williams and what he is going through now, I think it's a very clear illustration of a greater societal problem and that is the hypocrisy on the left -- the liberals who can throw these stones at a conservative and they knowing that they’re not going to be held accountable," she said on Sean Hannity's radio show, according to Politico.

ESPN is "the left"? Good to know.

Tags: republican party, rick perlstein, sarah palin

Sarah Palin's bold moral leadership (yes, of course it's meant sarcastically)

Sarah Palin decided that she needed to make a longer statement than she initially did reflecting the general Republican line that they are going to keep saying any crazy things they like and if people get murdered occasionally by other who take their crazy talk to heart, well, so what?

The full text is in Sarah Palin's Arizona Shooting Statement Blasts Journalists & Pundits' 'Blood Libel' Huffington Post 01/12/2011. This is a key part:

President Reagan said, "We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions." Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle, not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies, not with those who proudly voted in the last election.

The last election was all about taking responsibility for our country's future. President Obama and I may not agree on everything, but I know he would join me in affirming the health of our democratic process. Two years ago his party was victorious. Last November, the other party won. In both elections the will of the American people was heard, and the peaceful transition of power proved yet again the enduring strength of our Republic.

But as Stephen Colbert and other have noticed, while she here seemingly denies that political rhetoric could have motivated the Tucson shooter in any way whatsoever, in the "blood libel" portion of her statement, the White Princess firmly insisted that political rhetoric (directed against her!) actually could produce violence:

Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions. And after the election, we shake hands and get back to work, and often both sides find common ground back in D.C. and elsewhere. If you don't like a person's vision for the country, you're free to debate that vision. If you don't like their ideas, you're free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible. [my emphasis]

As Susannah Heschel observes in Palin Cries 'Blood Libel': Can Words Harm Us? Religion Dispatches 01/12/2011:

Do words have consequences or not? For Palin, it seems, acts of criminality stand alone; yet in the very next sentence she goes on to assert the opposite: that the "journalists and pundits" who want our political rhetoric toned down, and who've criticized her image of Rep. Giffords and others caught in the "crosshairs," are themselves manufacturing a "blood libel" that may well "incite...violence." So language can manufacture a "blood libel" and incite violence yet she can be so sure that it played no role in motivating a gunman?

Despite that screaming contradiction, much of Palin's statement will sound plausible to a lot of people who have heard our TV pundits carrying on a superficial chatter about "civility" in politics. But her speech doesn't counteract the ugly trend on display in the assassination attack in Tucson last Saturday.

There are ways for politicians to tell people on "their side" to dial it back on rhetoric and actions that are wrong or counterproductive. In Oakland a couple of years ago when the young African-American man Oscar Grant by shot by the transit policeman Johannes Mehserle, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the case last year, even though Mehserle had the unarmed guy down on the ground and shot him in the back. There were protests in downtown Oakland immediately after the shooting and they escalated to breaking windows and scuffling with the police. Although there were no assassinations involved in that mini-riot, Oakland Mayor Rom Dellums, an African-American Democrat who had called himself a "socialist" when he was in Congress, publicly and clearly denounced the violence. He expressed his own concerns about Grant's death and Mehserle's conduct, clearly affirmed the right to protest over it, and worked with community leaders to channel future protests into non-violent avenues. In other words, a political leader who recognizes an ugly and dangerous trend can clearly condemn it and do something about it. Even when there might be a risk of angering some of his own constituency over it.

Sarah Palin isn't likely to be telling any rightwingers to dial it back, even after this latest in a series of escalating far-right political violence. It would take quite an imagination to read any such clear denunciation of political violence into Sarah Palin's "blood libel" statement. On the contrary, the part of her statement quoted above that begins "There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act ..." seems to be denying that political rhetoric can ever contribute to inciting violence. But given her long association with the Alaska Independence Party and other far-right political and extreme religious people, I have to assume that she knows very well the effect incendiary rhetoric and paranoid conspiracy theories have on some of the loose screws who are attracted to such groups.

It's really reached a bad state of affairs when political leaders like Palin can't say straightforwardly: there's no reason to murder people! And I don't condone such talk or actions in any way! Given that Republicans like Sharon Angle have been talking this past year about "Second Amendment solutions" against elected officials they don't like, even a general statement like that from Palin might have some positive effects. Even if she didn't cop to her mistakes in using explicit gun language and symbols in targeting Giffords last year.

For Democratic elected officials, I think they are being foolish about their own personal safety at this point if they frame the current problem of perceived liberals being targeted for deadly violence as coming from "both sides". But you would think Palin herself would show some practical concern in that regard. After all, the guys who shot George Wallace and President Reagan really were more the "lone nut" type without particular political views (unless we count Jodie Foster obsession as "political"). But they shot prominent conservatives. You have to wonder why she thought she had a Secret Service detail during the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Conservatives on this issue, including Palin and her good buddy Franklin Graham, are trying to treat the moral responsibility of leadership as though it were equivalent to legal responsibility for acts of violence. That won't prevent the rest of us from judging their leadership by how they've dealt with the Tucson assassination attack, which as you have noted here, is one in a series of such attacks directed at perceived liberals the last three years.

Joan Walsh, in an article that includes the overoptimistic hope expressed in its title, Sarah Palin will never be president Salon 01/11/2011, accurately characterizes Palin's "blood libel" statement on Wednesday:

The narcissism required, on a day the nation is commemorating the Arizona shooting victims, to put her own sense of victimhood front and center, is stunning. The "blood libel" idiocy may be the worst of it, especially given that Giffords herself is Jewish. But that's not the only thing wrong with her performance. Hilariously, after all the times she's mocked President Obama for using a teleprompter, you can see a teleprompter screen reflected in her eyeglasses throughout much of her Facebook chat. Seeing the flickering teleprompter in her eyes is eerie; it's where some flicker of her soul should be, but you don't see any. Looking into Palin's eyes, you see a blazing, self-pitying anger that's shocking, even for the self-described "pit bull in lipstick." [my emphasis]

You don't have to look into her eyes to see it. It's clear from the transcript, too.

Tags: domestic terrorism, radical right, sarah palin, terrorism

Stooping to Establishment press standards

I was really disappointed to see this article by Michelle Goldberg, who has done some excellent work in the past: Palin's Ego Trip The Daily Beast 11/18/09.

Because in it she indulges one of the worst habits of Beltway Village pundits, the amateur psychiatric diagnosis of politicians. And what may be an even worse sign, in the first two paragraphs she works in two references each to Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

Bob Somerby analyzes part of her article in the Daily Howler 11/23/09. And apparently intends to return to it tomorrow. So I'll refer you to him for the more detailed takedown.

I'll just add one point. After using a quotation from a psychiatry professor to buttress her dubious case, she writes:

Years ago, during the Goldwater campaign, so many psychiatrists publicly speculated about the Republican candidate’s psychology that the American Psychiatric Association adopted guidelines prohibiting such analysis.

Are we supposed to conclude that this means that while it's not ethical for psychiatrists, who have some relevant medical experience, it is ethical for journalists who don't?

I hope Michelle gets off this particular track, and fast.

Tags: establishment press, sarah palin

How quickly they change

Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich in their Sunday New York Times columns give two excellent examples of how smug dismissal of Sarah Palin can quickly turn into admiration. The Beltway Village during 2008 and mostly up until now was more concerned with Tina Fey's imitation of Palin than with what Palin and her supporters were about. Especially as that might be indicated by Palin's own neo-Confederate and theocratic ties.

Maureen Dowd is in her more liberal mode lately. Which is kind of hard to distinguish between her Bush-friendly mode. But her latest, Visceral Has Its Value New York Times 11/21/09, shows how the Village script of Palin as a ridiculous dummy can easily morph into appreciating her as the voice of Real Americans. And the Villagers all fancy themselves as in tune with Real Americans. You know, the ones for whom the federal budget deficit is the biggest problem the country has. (Yes, Village thinking is often quite bizarre and contradictory measured against normal standards of reality. But since they think the deficit is critical, they assume as always that the Little People think the same.)

MoDo, who likes to remind us that Obama is a girl (not a compliment in MoDo's gender obsessions), now admires Palin for "her visceral power," the inner energy she radiates (MoDo used a quotation to say that - I guess it sounded too New Agey to put in her own voice), her dynamism, her close contact with the grass roots, her exuberance, and "the good looks, the tabloid-perfect family, the Alaska quirkiness, the kids with the weird names." With a mixture of admiration and snotty condescension - who says in print that other people children have "weird names"? - MoDo manages to both pump up Palin's image and give cred to her the-elites-look-down-on-us-Real-Amurcans" schtick. Palin's neo-Confederate ties? Her theocratic, superstitious, extremist brand of Pentecostal Christianity? I suppose MoDo would find that sooo booo-oooring to write about. So instead she insults Palin's children's names.

Did I mention that MoDo is one of the star opinion "journalists" in what is still considered the leading "quality" paper in the United States?

She actually spends most of the column trashing Obama in various ways. Then at the end she kinda-sorta defends him. But does it in such a pitiful way all that she just reinforces the Republican and Broderian criticism of Obama being supposedly "indecisive".

Frank Rich, who often writes some atrocious stuff, too, and has been recently taking the Republicans' bait to ridicule the Party base and their heroes, in The Pit Bull in the China Shop 11/21/09 actually manages to criticize other Villagers for delivering their authoritative opinions on Palin's book without actually having read it! Criticizing fellow Villagers is so rare that he at least deserves one hand clapping for that. (I would just note, without detracting from his unconventional stance, that one can certainly form a reasonable opinion about well-reported portions of a book without having read it cover to cover.)

Rich claims to have actually read her book. And coming from a guy who just a few columns ago was chortling over how the Tea Partiers (aka, Palin fans) were leading the Republican Party to a new 1964 landslide defeat, statements like this are another wonderful illustration how sanctimonious Village ridicule can quickly become star-struck admiration: "Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves."

Rich goes on to focus on what are the important issues - in the eyes of our Village Pod Pundits. Palin's show-business acquaintances. Levi Johnston.

Neo-Confederate ties? Theocratic Christianism? Rich doesn't get into those, either. The Village script still calls for leaving those out. Even though they are highly relevant to understanding her politics and what the Republican Party has become. And it's understandable. Facing up to what today's Republican Party is would make the practice of High Broderism, with his idolatry of bipartisanship (on the part of Democrats) nearly impossible to practice. Later on, he cities some polls showing that Palin is a Republican favorite in the polls for the 2012 Presidential nomination just behind Mike Huckabee, he doesn't cite any polling data to support his assertion that Palin "the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama." If the polls he's using show Huckabee leading Palin among Republicans, wouldn't that make the Huck a more important brand at the moment?

Rich devotes a paragraph to pointless ridicule of a pious letter Palin wrote for her baby Trig that is reproduced in the book. He is ruffled that she worded the letter as a letter from God. Pop psychology, yes. Actual analysis of her theocratic religious ties? Not so much. The only exception is a really vague and speculative reference to Palin's "'rapture' theology" - to which Palin may or may not subscribe from anything we see in Rich's column.

Rich's utter helplessness is trying to actually analyze her appeal is illustrated by the following comment, which is correct: "The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause." But without understanding that in the context of the dominant Christian Right culture in the Republican Party, it tells us nothing. Except that Frank Rich is disturbed at the dumb masses he takes the Real Americans to be.

With all that fluff in his column, I do give Rich credit for at least mentioning the anti-gay position of the far-rightist Lynn Vincent who Palin chose for her ghost-writer.

And to top it all off, Rich manages to sing the praises of that greatest of all Mavericks, St. John McCain. Yes, that would be the St. McCain who made Sarah Palin a national figure by choosing her as his Vice Presidential nominee in 2008. Our pundits' love for the mavericky Maverick McCain is even greater than their love for Monica Lewinsky.

Maybe I'm getting a bit too deep into the weeds on this, too deep at least for my own comfort. But this David Sirota column that provides a refreshing trashing of Dean Broder and our Pod Pundits generally over the Afghanistan War, Intelligentsia against intelligence Salon, even he manages to embrace the notion that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are somehow harmless entertainment on the fringes of the Republican Party:

The trend is deeply disturbing. It's one thing for talk-show-host wannabe Sarah Palin or carnival-barking provocateur Glenn Beck to glamorize willful ignorance -- that's been the narcissistic act of celebrity court jesters since the dawn of history. But it's an entirely different thing when hostility to intelligence and to the basic process of thinking itself emanates from the very professional thinkers who lead the nation's intelligentsia. [my emphasis]

Our pundits, even supposedly solidly liberal ones like Frank Rich and David Sirota, are just having a hard time facing up to what the Republican Party has become.

Tags: frank rich, maureen dowd, sarah palin

Around the bend on Palin

Maureen Dowd provides an example of why Sarah Palin is not only a star within the Republican Party. She also has the potential for a wider appeal.

MoDo's Palin piece is Rogue American Woman New York Times 11/17/09. There are two basic problems with MoDo's article. It treats Palin as a pop-culture celebrity, not as a politician with a potentially huge effect on public policy.

And in treating Palin's ghost-written memoir as something to be ridiculed, MoDo neglects to mention that the ghost-writer, Lynn Vincent, is a white supremacist - at a minimum she co-authored a book with one (Robert Stacy McCain) - a fact which might have alerted her readers to the genuinely ugly side of Palin's appeal. Vincent also ghost-wrote the memoir of Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the theocrat who assured his Christian Right finds that he knew his God was bigger than the Muslims' God. She's also known for her hostility to gays and argues that Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War (and by extension the US) was "a hapless puppet" of Joe Stalin. (Palin - or one of her speechwriters - has also shown questionable judgment in choosing a source for a cutesy quote.)

MoDo actually spends more of her column looking for cutesy commonalities with Palin. Her column comes off like a Republican parody of a sneering poo-bah of the Liberal Press Conspiracy. MoDo apparently intended the following to be obvious mockery of Palin/Vincent:

Here is what the former Alaska governor censoriously writes about “shenanigans” in two capital cities: “Politically, Juneau always had a reputation for being a lot like Animal House: drinking and bowling, drunken brawls, countless affairs, and garden variety lunchtime trysts. It’s been known at times to be like a frat house filled with freshmen away from their parents for the very first time. At other times, the capital city’s underside was even darker: clandestine political liaisons and secret meetings, unethical deeds and downright illegal acts.”

She concludes: “In short, it was a lot like Washington, D.C.”

Sure, it's a stereotypical rube's description of the sinful Big City. But that's the Republicans' general posture, not just Palin's: they aren't the servants of greedy CEOs, they're the champions of the regular folks against the swells and scary minorities in the big cities and dirty ghettoes.

Is Washington "like a frat house filled with freshmen away from their parents for the very first time"? I don't have that particular impression myself. But that is the kind of impression I get of MoDo and her fellow celebrity pundits when I watch them on the Sunday morining talk shows, or on the 24/7 cable channels. MoDo has so little self-reflection on own conduct and her pundit cohort's that she seems unaware of how credible a description that might seem to a lot of people. And because of that, she provides a half-plausible illustration of Palin's far-right posturing against the dreaded Liberal Elite.

Here's more information on Lynn Vincent you won't get from MoDo's column:

Palin co-author Lynn Vincent's inflammatory record Media Matters 11/13/09

Charles Johnson (a recovering Islamophobe), Sarah Palin's Book Ghostwritten by Associate of White Supremacist [Robert Stacy] McCain Little Green Footballs 09/29/09

John Cook, Sarah Palin's Ghostwriter Pals Around With Racists and Wackos Gawker 09/30/09

David Weigel, Robert Stacy McCain Responds to Gawker, Defends Palin Collaborator Lynn Vincent Washington Independent 9/30/09

Tags: maureen dowd, radical right,sarah palin

Looking for Barry Goldwater - Democrats looking, that is

Barry Goldwater 1962

The references I'm seeing from liberals to the 1964 Goldwater movement are starting to worry me. Faced with an historic opportunity for progressive politics greater than any since 1965, some liberals and progressives seem to be getting stuck in the mud of decades past. On the one hand, there seems to be a fond illusion that the Tea Party movement represents a fringe crackpot movement that will bring electoral loss to the Republicans like in 1964. On the other, among some who recognize the potential majority appeal of a Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin, there's the panic that defending women's rights or the rule of law will make the Democrats lose on "culture war" grounds just like in 1968, or so that narrative goes. Maybe we're condemned to relive "the 60s" for decades more. But framing the present too strictly in terms of the past can be risky.

We saw Frank Rich doing this a couple of weeks ago, including a telltale quotation from Richard Hofstadter. Even Paul Krugman pulled out a Hofstadter quote in Paranoia Strikes Deep New York Times 11/09/09. His basic point is well taken. If the Republican Party nationally over the next four years shrinks to a chronically minority party, a rump party largely based on the votes of white Southern conservatives, they could adopt even more of a wrecker strategy than they currently follow. He uses California state government as an example of how that can happen, and how damaging that can be. But he also writes, "while the paranoid style [of politics] isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is." Krugman recognizes that even as a rump party, the Republicans can have a tremendously destructive effect, so he's not ready to indulge in Frank Rich's triumphalism. But he does accept the notion of the Sarah Palin/Tea Party types as a radical minority of a different kind than already runs the Republican Party.

Sarah Palin with her close ties to the neo-Confederate Alaska Independence Party and to "Third Wave" Pentecostalist theocratic religion does represent an intensification of the radicalization of the Republican Party. Max Blumenthal has a good piece on the appeal of Palin to the Christian Right base in How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party TomDispatch 11/15/09. The headline doesn't actually reflect his analysis. He writes, "If she doesn't prove to be the Party's future queen, she may have positioned herself to be its future king-maker - and potentially its destroyer." That is, unless conditions are such to make her an acceptable alternative on Presidential Election Day in 2012 or 2016.

Richard Kim and Betsy Reed in The Perils of Palinism The Nation 11/11/09 (11/30/09 issue) recognize that the Democrats are looking to Palin as the new "Goldwater":

In one way of looking at it, Sarah Palin is the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party.

Electorally, she is the GOP gift that keeps on giving. ...

With enemies like this, who needs friends? ...

It's tempting to cheer Sarah Barracuda on as she cannibalizes what remains of the Republican Party. The Going Rogue book tour, the 2010 targeting of moderates like Florida's Charlie Crist, a 2012 bid for the presidency--bring it on! While the percentage of Republican voters who say they would seriously consider voting for Palin for president stands at 65 percent, among all voters the figure is mired at 33 percent.

But they at least recognizes that in our current political culture - they don't mention the dysfunctional nature of our national press as a culprit - that some of Palin's most crackpot ideas get treated more seriously than their content deserves:

Those of us who reside in the parts of America Palin regards as unreal [i.e., not "real Americans"] may secretly enjoy watching the bubble bounce along, relishing her run-on sentences and looney-tunes lines. But the more we chuckle, the more indignant and impassioned the Palin army becomes. That's the bedeviling thing about Sarah Palin, and the secret to her success: neither the left nor the right can get enough of her.

Glenn Beck's current schtick also represents an intensification of the radicalization, with his promotion of outright John Birch Society style conspiracy theories, including those of the Bircher partisan Willard Cleon Skousen.

Greg Lewis in Following Limbaugh on his journey to the edge Media Matters 11/13/09 even suggests that Party chief Rush Limbaugh is going beyond what good loyal Republicans find acceptable! I would like to believe that is true.

The problem I see with all this is that while Palin and Beck may engage in a more crackpot form of marketing than we've seen previously, the radicalization of the Republican Party isn't new. Rush Limbaugh has been a commanding figure in the Party for two decades, even if his recent rhetoric is more rancid.

But, short of abolishing the Constitutional forms altogether, how much more radical can it get than the basic claims and many of the practices of the Cheney-Bush administration? Cheney's Unitary Executive theory was that the President can break any law and the Constitution itself as long as he claims it's for "national security" purposes. Their administration abandoned the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war, they instituted a blatantly criminal torture program, they set up a massive domestic surveillance program whose scope and nature we still don't really know, they instituted a pattern of partisan-political prosecutions, they invaded Iraq based on lies and in violation of international law and of the Congressional war resolution of October 2002. The Republican Party, including that bold Maverick John McCain and alleged "moderates" like Chuck Hagel and now-Democratic Arlen Specter, accepted a framework for authoritarian Party rule as well as the implementation of important elements of it during the Cheney-Bush years.

I want to repeat that because I don't mean it as hyperbole. Short of abolishing the Constitutional forms altogether, how much more radical can it get than the basic claims and many of the practices of the Cheney-Bush administration? Obviously, there are many worse things an administration can do to its own citizens than what happened during 2001-9. (Again the qualifier: we don't know the actual extent of the abuses.) But in terms of a theoretical/legal framework, and in terms of the Party accepting the authority of the Party above even the authority of the Constitution, how much more radical can it get?

Sarah Palin 2007

So Democrats and progressives should not be thinking or pretending to think that Palin and the Tea Partiers represent a radicalizing faction in a Party that is otherwise committed to democratic processes and concepts. Their version of the Party ideology would be a change in degree and in marketing, but not in kind. Even Beck's flirtation with isolationism doesn't change that. Old Right isolationism of the Beck/Bircher kind is just rabid nationalism and jingoism with different cosmetics.

In terms of understanding relevant political lessons of the 1960s, Frank Rich's triumphalist model based on a 1965 assumption of the political impotence of Goldwater-style "movement conservatism", is not a good one. Because the Republican resurgence began in earnest in mid-term elections of 1966, built on the basis of Goldwater's "movement conservatism". Not only did Republicans pick up impressive gains in Congress in 1966. Ronald Reagan also won the Governorship of California on a Goldwaterite platform, campaigning against rioting black people and stinking dirty hippies. One of his most Reagan and his "culture war" issues proved hard to ignore in the following years.

And neither Barry Goldwater nor Ronald Reagan espoused the Unitary Executive doctrine that is now the Republican template for Republican Presidents. Cheney and his faithful mouthpiece David Addington first elaborated that doctrine in the Republicans' minority report on the Iran-Contra Congressional investigating committee. The practice started as a major but isolated aspect of the Reagan administration's secret wars in Central America. But Reagan and his senior officials worried that he might actually be impeached and removed from office over the incident.

Today, the Republican Party is completely supportive of the Unitary Executive practice of the Presidency. We saw it during the Cheney-Bush administration where Iran-Contra was effectively the template for their entire foreign policy. A Sarah Palin-Liz Cheney administration taking office in 2013 will not have to worry about being impeached and removed from office for breaking the law if conditions remain the same as they are today.

Eric Boehlert in The GOP's looming (media) civil war Media Matters 11/10/09 makes a confusing argument. He argues that the FOXists and the OxyContin crowd are driving unable to nominate candidates who can win, using the recent example of Doug Hoffman in the New York 23rd district special Congressional election.

But he also points to John McCain's winning the Republican nomination in 2008 against the opposition of the most enthusiastic rightists as evidence that the FOXists are out of touch with the Republican base. But that doesn't set very well together with the other argument. After all, the supposedly less-rightist Republican base also nominated a candidate who lost.

He also mentions Barry Goldwater in 1964. Democrats in 1980 were also looking to the Republicans' 1964 fiasco for hope in the Reagan-Carter contest. Reagan had also been identified throughout his political career with the Goldwater wing of the Party. And he won the election.

Then we have Oliver Willis in Liberal Elitism? No. Some People Are, Sadly, Stupid Huffington Post 11/12/09 recognizing that radicalism doesn't mean that the Republican Party is doomed to disappear, arguing:

Far from the liberals in the '70s who were clearly not responsive enough to the middle class, leading to the rise of Nixon and resentment politics, today's left has gone to great lengths to be a big tent. So much so that some of our biggest fault lines are internal and don't involve the Republicans at all. But far from the pre-Clinton great society types, today's liberals understand that without blue collar people on our side we don't advance as a movement. ...

While the concerns of many white, middle-class people are worthy causes and should be addressed by liberals (and are), it is not elitism to treat this roving band of conspiracy nuts for the cretins they are or associate with. This would be akin to President Johnson in 1964 undertaking a federal committee to study the mind control powers of fluoridated water. That would be asinine.

Liberals have in the past allowed the ivory tower set to exert too much control over the Democratic party. [my emphasis]

All this sounds very Broderian and "sensible" by Beltway standards. But were Republican victories in 1966 and after because the Democrats were "not responsive enough to the middle class"? Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats got Medicare passed, which is one of the major government programs benefiting "the middle class" (a vague term in itself). Lyndon Johnson won his landslide victory in 1964 running against Goldwater primarily on two issues: support of civil rights for African-Americans and opposition to Goldwater's demands to escalate the Vietnam War.

It was probably inevitable in retrospect that there would be the famous "white backlash" against civil rights legislation. But if Johnson had withdrawn from Vietnam rather than escalated the war, the entire political scene would have looked different in both 1966 and especially 1968. I know this is "what-if" history. But Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey barely lost to Nixon. If it hadn't been for the war issue - or if Johnson had been willing to publicize what he knew about the Nixon campaign's interventions to delay the peace talks - it's very conceivable that Johnson could have won.

And when I see comments like, "But far from the pre-Clinton great society types, today's liberals understand that without blue collar people on our side we don't advance as a movement." If Oliver Willis thinks that Great Society "types", otherwise known as liberal, pro-labor Democrats were unaware of the need for blue collar voters or unresponsive to their economic needs, he needs to do more research. So far, the post-"great society types" in the Obama administration haven't been able to get health care reform passed, they are escalating a needless war in Afghanistan much like LBJ did in Vietnam, they're playing patty-cake with the fiscal hawks who want to phase out Social Security, and they are postponing (indefinitely?) fulfilling their pledge to Labor on the Employee Free Choice Act to facilitate union organizing and selling out women's rights to a handful of Blue Dog Democrats.

If there's a strategy by the Democrats that could make even Sarah Palin President in 2013, it would look a whole lot like this one of the post-"great society types". Willis sees that the new "Goldwaters" could threaten the Democrats. It's just his answer seems to be following policies that would toss independent voters into their laps.

My favorite media critic, Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby, seems to veer between taking civil-rights concerns seriously and worrying that they are a distraction from the important issues. This past week was a "bad hair week" for him in that regard. Scolding the hapless star pundit Ruth Marcus for just now noticing that the Republicans have been lying their hineys off about health care reform, he concludes:

Warning: If Marcus decides to address this disgrace, she’ll find herself with little help. Now that she is fully awake, she will see how much of our world is really about culture war - about looking away from corporate rule, about keeping us rubes entertained. [my emphasis]

Women's rights, immigrant rights and civil rights are not about "looking away from corporate rule". And if the Democrats want to build a long-term coalition that not only won't flinch at hearing the phrase "corporate rule" like our Blue Dogs would but actually do something to increase people's power against corporate rule, selling out the rights of women, Latinos and African-Americans - most of whom would count as "workers" by any reasonable definition and certainly as "middle class" and/or poor - isn't going to get them there.

I'm all for learning lessons from "the Sixties". But I prefer reality-based lessons, not Blue Dog ideology for keeping Republican policies dominant for decades to come.

Tags: democratic party, paranoid style, republican party, sarah palin

Sarah Palin and rightwing demagoguery

Juan Cole compares two famous politicians in Sarah Palin, meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Salon 08/03/09. He compares the style of the two politicians as examples of rightwing populism.

I tend to avoid the term "populism" for a couple of reasons. One is that the American press has made it such a broad term, it's often used in meaningless ways. Our celebrity press seems to think that it means any appeal by a politician that might discomfort some corporate CEO in any way. The other is that in Europe, "populism" tends to be understood as a political phenomenon of the right. The meaning has come a long way from William Jennings Bryan and the Populist Party of over a century ago.

Still, I like the article particularly for its warning that people shouldn't be complacent about the potential of rightwing demagoguery like Palin's:

Right-wing populism, rooted in the religion, culture and aspirations of the lower middle class, is often caricatured as insane by its critics. That judgment is unfair. But it is true that such movements often encourage a political style of exhibitionism, disregard for the facts as understood by the mainstream media, and exaltation of the values of people who feel themselves marginalized by the political system. Not all forms of protest, however, are healthy, even if the protesters have legitimate grievances. Right-wing populism is centered on a theory of media conspiracy, a "my country right or wrong" chauvinism, a fascination with an armed citizenry, an intolerance of dissent and a willingness to declare political opponents mere terrorists. It is cavalier in its disregard of elementary facts and arrogant about the self-evident rightness of its religious and political doctrines. It therefore holds dangers both for the country in which it grows up and for the international community. Palin is polling well at the moment against other Republican front-runners such as Mitt Romney, and so, astonishingly, is a plausible future president. At least Iranians only got Ahmadinejad because of rigged elections, and they had the decency to mount massive protests against the result. [my emphasis]

No conspiracy could be so inept as to produce what we have as a national political press today in the US. But the low quality of journalism produced by our celebrity reporters and pundits is facilitating Palin's appeal to her base by treating her as a throwaway comedy item and not reporting on the darker aspects of her political and religious extremism.

The Washington Post is excerpting the campaign book by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Today's piece, 'High Risk, High Reward' is on McCain's selection of Palin as his running mate in 2008. The excerpt is typical horse-race journalism, dripping with admiration for the great integrity of the bold Maverick McCain. We get a mention of "Troopergate" and Bristol Palin's pregnancy. But virtually no information about what she did as Governor or why the hard right found her so appealing. Much less anything about her neo-Confederate sympathies or her crackpot, authoritarian religious affiliations.

Maybe tomorrow's installment will get into that a bit more. Today's devoted too much space to the Great McCain's boldness and maverickness to get into that other stuff.

Tags: radical right, sarah palin

Jeb's Esquire interview

The text of the interview that our next Republican President former Florida government and current leading hope of the Bush dynasty, Jeb Bush, did for Esquire is now online: Jeb Bush: The Future of the Republican Party 07/08/09. The interviewer is conservative pundit Tucker Carlson.

Our next Republican President Jeb is pretty explicitly saying that he's trying to promote what another Bush dynasty member might have called a "compassionate conservative" marketing strategy for the same Predator State strategy his brother and Dick Cheney practiced for eight years. He basically says he's glad the OxyContin radio screamers are doing what they are doing, but he wants Republican elected officials to project a more restrained and dignified image in public places.

He's about as explicit as it gets in saying that the Republicans' electoral troubles are not in substance or policy but are rather a matter of packaging, messaging, marketing:

Conservatives can win, can draw people toward our cause with the proper language and the proper ideas. I don't think that conservatism has been rejected in the United States. I don't believe it. ...

I don't think all is lost. The country is a center-right country. The problem has been that conservatives in positions of responsibility, particularly in the Congress, lost their way. And in general conservatism has gotten a little nostalgic and less focused on the here and now, and on the future. I'm a huge Ronald Reagan fan. The Republican primary was almost all about Ronald Reagan: Who was the heir to Ronald Reagan? Well, I mean, Ronald Reagan would be talking about ideas, would be talking about broad principles, would be talking about issues, more than what we heard in the primaries. The world is radically different than it was in the 1980s, dramatically different. ...

I don't think there's any seismic shift. The Democrats have won on tactics. ... In fact, [Obama] basically won the tax debate, which is breathtaking if you think about it. Cutting taxes is generally considered a center-right idea, not a center-left or left idea. He made it appear like McCain was going to raise taxes, which was unfair, but there was no response back. When there was an ideological component, it was generally centrist or even center-right. Had he said what he was going to do as a candidate, [Obama] would have lost. [my emphasis]

That's the "compassionate conservative" posture that they famously compassionate George W. Bush used in his Presidential candidacy in 1999-2000. Say things like, "The world is radically different than it was in the 1980s, dramatically different," that your press admirers can pick up on to say, now here's a man with fresh ideas and a new vision. But for policy, stick to the same old boilerplate slogans like in this interview: "What's the alternative? The alternative is to take time-tested practices and convert them to the world we live in. Which means you're going to cut taxes and cut spending."

Got that? Our next Republican President Jeb understands that the world has changed radically in the three decades since Reagan successfully ran for President on a program of cutting taxes and cutting spending. And so we need a radically new message for these very changed circumstances: "cut taxes and cut spending."

Our next Republican President Jeb is also a climate change denier, like virtually all of his Party:

Barack Obama would not have gotten elected if he'd let us in on his secret plan prior to the election. He would not have gotten elected if he'd said, "... My idea is to create a massive cap-and-trade system [based on the idea] that CO2 is [a] pollutant and we need to tax it in a massive way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions." ...

[Q:]Do you believe global warming is primarily man-made?

I'm a skeptic. I'm not a scientist. I think the science has been politicized. I would be very wary of hollowing out our industrial base even further... It may be only partially man-made. It may not be warming by the way. The last six years we've actually had mean temperatures that are cooler. I think we need to be very cautious before we dramatically alter who we are as a nation because of it. [my emphasis in italics]

Media Matters has been addressing this particular talking point of the climate change deniers highlighted in bold, e.g., Media promote claims of global cooling despite overwhelming consensus to the contrary 03/30/09.

The global-warming-denial scam uses a similar approach to the industry-friendly Tobacco Institute, which presents research findings on the health effects of tobacco whose only purpose is to create an impression that the scientific/medical consensus on the matter is somehow "in dispute". Creationists use a similar method in opposing the entire concept of evolution, the existence of which is not in scientific dispute. But by raising pseudoscientific objections to it, the creationists try to leave the impression that a scientific controversy is there which doesn't exist. And this creation of phony controversies is accompanied by a denigration of science, framed as opposition to "dogmatic" science that defends elitist notions like evolution in some kind of more-or-less conspiratorial attempt to bamboozle the regular folks.

Our next Republican President Jeb plays directly to that brand of Republican Know-Nothingism in his comment, "I'm a skeptic. I'm not a scientist." The contrast between "scientist" and "skeptic" is a classic example of conservative up-is-down thinking. And also of the Christian fundamentalist outlook, which has always been obsessed with pitching their arguments against science in pseudoscientific terms and claiming that it's science and scientists who are the dogmatists taking things on blind faith, not their own form of the Christian faith and its practitioners .

This kind of pitch has a lot of appeal for the Republican base. And it's the kind of thing that our sad excuse for a national press can be persuaded represents plain-spokenness and a downhome touch. Time recently ran an article about Sarah Palin that shows how easily our press can turn their currently-prevailing Palin-is-a-dummy narrative into Palin-speaks-the-language-of-the-ordinary-people narrative. In fact, this Time piece adopts the latter approach and is downright adoring in tone. Their praise of Palin's Know-Nothingism could also apply to the type that Our next Republican President Jeb uses in his Esquire interview.

The Outsider: Where Is Sarah Palin Going Next? by David Von Drehle and Jay Newton-Small Time Online 07/09/09:

... Palin's unconventional step [announcing she will step down from the Alaska governorship] speaks to an ingrained frontier skepticism of authority — even one's own. Given the plunging credibility of institutions and élites, that's a mood that fits the Palin brand. Résumés ain't what they used to be; they count only with people who trust credentials — a dwindling breed. The mathematics Ph.D.s who dreamed up economy-killing derivatives have pretty impressive résumés. The leaders of congressional committees and executive agencies have decades of experience — at wallowing in red ink, mismanaging economic bubbles and botching covert intelligence.

If ever there has been a time to gamble on a flimsy résumé, ever a time for the ultimate outsider, this might be it. "We have so little trust in the character of the people we elected that most of us wouldn't invite them into our homes for dinner, let alone leave our children alone in their care," writes talk-show host Glenn Beck in his book Glenn Beck's Common Sense, a pox-on-all-their-houses fusillade at Washington. Dashed off in a fever of disillusionment with those in power, Beck's book is selling like vampire lit, with more than 1 million copies in print. [my emphasis]

I don't know exactly how Beck's book has been sold. But it's not unusual for the wingnut-welfare system of Republican foundations and think tanks to boost the early sales of favored conservative books by placing large initial orders and using the books as gifts, or returning some of them later to be remaindered. Also, can even Time reporters imagine that Beck's highly partisan, rightwing Republican schtick is a "pox-on-all-their-houses" posture?

But he also does his "compassionate conservative" feint to praise the value of expertise in the context of foreign policy:

I think it's okay to have a deeper understanding of things. I think it's okay to talk in three-syllable words. The world we're living in is incredibly complex. And simplifying things to the point where you're misunderstanding where we are as a nation isn't going to help people overcome their fears or give them hope that they can achieve great things. I don't get inspired by shameless populism.

Palin hits similar themes to those of our next Republican President Jeb; from the Time article:

Outside her family's Dillingham smokehouse, Palin lays out a robust indictment of the Obama agenda. "President Obama is growing government outrageously, and it's immoral and it's uneconomic," she says. "The debt that our nation is incurring, trillions of dollars that we're passing on to our kids, expecting them to pay off for us, is immoral and doesn't even make economic sense. So his growth-of-government agenda needs to be ratcheted back, and it's going to take good people who have the guts to stand up to him."

She continues. The cap-and-trade energy plan "is going to drive the cost of consumer goods and the cost of energy so extremely high." Democratic health-care proposals, she says, look increasingly like the ideas that McCain proposed during the campaign. [This characterization by the writers doesn't seem to reflect the Palin quote that immediately follows.] "One thing reporters aren't asking the Administration is — it's such a simple question, and people around here in the real world, outside of Washington, D.C., want reporters to ask — President Obama, how are you going to pay for this one- or two- or three-trillion-dollar health-care plan? How are you going to pay off the stimulus package, those borrowed dollars? How are you going to pay for so many things that you are proposing and you are implementing? Americans deserve to know."

Our next Republican President Jeb would apparently like to continue his brother's work in attempting to abolish Social Security and Medicare:

It was, to the extent that my brother was unable to get the Congress to go along with meaningful entitlement reform, although he tried, which by the way the Republicans were not supportive of. It was because we fought a war, and we had to build a homeland-defense structure that didn't exist. But I think my brother gets a bad rap about the general idea that there were massive amounts of spending beyond those two things.

National security, in his view, is endangered by Medicare:

The interest on the debt, and Medicare alone, will weaken our country to the point where we're not going to have the same influence that we need to have, or should have, or want to have in the world.

And in case anyone thinks that the Catholic former Governor of Florida is going to be less Chrisitianist than his brother as President, he spells out how the Republican Party has to deal with its sins. No, not the torture program, not unjust war, not the Katrina disaster, not reckless disregard of the needs of our citizens, but the sin of losing the 2008 election to the Democrats:

In this interim period, we have to pay for our sins and show some humility.

[Q:] What are those sins?
We didn't advocate our positions well enough to win.

We're all sinners under God's watchful eye. There's a road to redemption. But the road to redemption requires some humility and some patience. To campaign on these ideas is a good way to do it. It's not about a person's ambition. It's about the power of these ideas. And they need to be developed thoughtfully, with the input of a whole lot of people and the advice of a whole lot of people. It doesn't have to be in Washington. It can grow organically... I'm going to be involved as best I can.

A glimpse at the future envisioned for us by our next Republican President Jeb Bush.

Tags: jeb bush, republican party, republicans, sarah palin

Sarah Palin: the media needs to get beyond their "dumb" script

Being more-or-less hostile to Sarah Palin is one instance in which the dysfunctionality of our American press corps actually worked in the Democrats' favor. At least in the short term, during the last months of the 2008 Presidential campaign.

The media's many problems generally do more damage to the Democrats than to the Republicans. And so when one of their dysfunctional habits works in the Dems' favor, the Dems should be thinking of it along the lines of, "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"

The press corps sets up "scripts" for various public figures, e.g., John McCain is a Maverick, Al Gore is a big ole liar. Then they work hard to squeeze any information about that person into their consensus script. The results are not infrequently painful to behold. When Maverick McCain acts like a nasty old Republican rightwinger, which is most of the time, the media script has it that it deeply pains the Maverick to have to act that way because he's really a very honorable Maverick at heart and so someone must be forcing him to act that way.

Now, Sarah Palin certainly looked shockingly unfamiliar with the issues one could have expected to be part of the Presidential campaign. So the press corps fastened onto the notion that she's dumb. So, "news" shows treated Tina Fey's comedy routines about her as though they were the definitive political commentary on Palin's candidacy. But the one time I heard Tina talking on TV about Palin outside of her comedy routine, she actually made Palin sound like an appealing, engaging personality. As I recall, she said that Palin is "the real deal", and she clearly meant it as a compliment.

And, since fashion is one thing they like to focus on and it doesn't strain their minds too much, the press played up the issue about Palin's campaign clothing budget.

That freed them from pursuing more serious and relevant matters which were central to Palin's political identity: her reliance on cronyism in administration, disturbing irregularities in her conduct around the state trooper who was her former brother-in-law and still involved in legal battles with Palin's sister, Todd Palin's role in state administration, the involvement of both Palin's with the far-right neo-Confederate Alaska Independence Party, and her commitment to the Third Wave Pentecostal movement which involves strong authoritarian tendencies as well as a highly emotional and superstitious approach to Christianity. I'm afraid in some of those areas, she is the "real deal".

Geoffrey Dunn at the Huffington Post raises a new such question in Palin Pallin' Around with Scientologists: Todd & Sarah & John & Greta 03/21/09. His story also involves the close ties of FOX News specifically to the Republican Party.

Palin could still be a serious candidate for President in 2012, though her unexpected resignation as Alakan Governor has raised new doubts about that. She is obviously very popular among the Christian Right, the main voting base of the Republican Party. If our press corps were actually in the business of journalism instead of infotainment, they would have been taking Palin a little more seriously and investigating more substantial issues in her role as a public figure. And not trying to out-mock Tina Fey.

Tags: sarah palin

Palin: a "little shop of horrors"? Or too deep for our lightweight press corps to grasp?

The Republicans' White Princess, Sarah Palin

I can't say I'm thrilled with Todd Purdum's very critical Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin, It Came From Wasilla (Aug 2009 issue; accessed 06/30/09). There's plenty of complaints from McCain campaigns staffers on the record and off, and lots of focus on her personal quirks.

It can easily be a cheap shot to criticize what wasn't said. But sometimes it's not. But it's striking to me that this long article on the Alaska Governor's faults manages not to mention her and her husband's close association with the rightwing extremist, neo-Confederate Alaska Independence Party (AIP) or her deep involvement with the Christian nationalist Third Wave Pentecostal movement. Those aspects of her career are far more important than how many hours some senior staffer spent coaching her for her debate with Joe Biden. Purdum even managed to work Monica Lewinsky into the story! As Bob Somerby says of the press corps and Monica: they can't stop loving her.

Near the beginning of the piece, Purdum frames his story as follows:

What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded?

This is scarcely a new phenemenon in American politics. And it has been a characteristic of "movement conservative" electioneering on the national level since 1964. It's a valid question but not a novelty of Sarah Palin's admirers.

What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life?

It's certainly meaningful to ask how well Palin's particular experience had prepared her for national office in 2008, or later. But, again, how is that new? Neither Ronald Reagan nor Arnold Schwarzenegger had governmental experience before they were elected governor of the country's most populous state. Dick Cheney had long experience in the public sector when he ran for Vice President in 2000, and there's no one I can think of who should be kept farther away from public power than that man. How does Palin's situation pose that question any differently than every election does?

Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party - long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics - keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency?

Again, nothing new. See: Dick Cheney.

I can't help be struck by the Beltway Village tribal assumptions here. First of all, when Village journalists use a phrase like "long regarded as...", they typically mean that the national press corps regard things that way. The national Republican tickets lost the elections of 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2008. So just why would Purdum and his fellow Villagers regard them as "the more adroit team in presidential politics"?

Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics - with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor - ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

One thing John McCain clearly has accomplished in his political career: he managed to create a remarkable degree of admiration and adoration of himself among the addled crew who make up our national political press. On the face of it, this sounds suspiciously like a complaint from a McCain fanboy that she did their man wrong.

Don't get me wrong, here. I think Palin is a lightweight, and a hardline rightwinger. She would make a terrible President.

But Purdum's hit piece on her strikes me as shabby journalism. I would much rather see a prominent report on Palin look into her political and religious crackpot associates and affiliations and put those into some kind of realistic context. Instead, we get typical press corps reciting of favored scripts. Here is Purdum on the Great Statesman and Maverick again:

McCain has delivered his own postmortem on Palin with the patented brand of winking-and-nodding ironic detachment that he usually reserves for painful political questions, an approach that simultaneously seeks to confess his sin and presume absolution for it. In November, he told Jay Leno he was proud of Palin and did not blame her for his defeat, but by April, when Leno asked him about who was running the Republican Party, McCain declined to mention Palin: “We have, I’m happy to say, a lot of choices out there: Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty, Huntsman, Romney, Charlie Crist—there's a lot of governors out there who are young and dynamic.” McCain went on, “There’s a lot of good people out there, and I’ve left out somebody’s name and I’m going to hear about it.” When I ask Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime speechwriter and co-author, about that comment, he says simply, “McCain always talks unscripted,” and adds that he has heard “not one word of regret” about Palin ever pass McCain’s lips. McCain’s daughter Meghan, who has continued the blog she began on the campaign last year, has said that Palin is the one topic on which she will have no public comment. [my emphasis]

This kind of silliness is so common among McCain's press fan club that it's easy to overlook it. Purdum quotes McCain saying nothing at all about Palin in an April appearance on Jay Leno and describes his position as "an approach that simultaneously seeks to confess his sin and presume absolution for it." Since he didn't say anything in what Purdum gives of that quote about what Purdum regards as the "sin" in question - picking Palin as his running mate - this doesn't make any kind of sense. But for our star journalists, reciting the preferred press script about the greatness of the Great Maverick takes priority over event he most elemental reasoning or analysis.

There are a couple of especially egregious parts that stand out in a egregious article. Both involve malicious pop psychology:

Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression? (Palin’s youngest son was less than six months old.) Palin maintained only the barest level of civil discourse with Tucker Eskew, the veteran G.O.P. operative who had been made her chief minder. A third party had to shuttle between them to convey even the most rudimentary messages. "She started to hedge her bets," the same McCain friend says. "Frequently, she would be concerned about how something would play in Alaska. What? You’re worried about your backside in Alaska when there are hundreds of millions of dollars being spent?" One longtime McCain friend and frequent companion on the trail was heard to refer to Palin as "Little Shop of Horrors."

Giving people anonymity to spew insults is just tacky, but standard in the infotainment writing that our press corps today tries to pass off as journalism. Since presumably most readers will know as much about Tucker Eskew as I do, i.e., nothing beyond what I read in that paragraph, it's impossible to make any judgment about this. I've occasionally encountered people with whom the only really appropriate kind of discourse would be to smack them in the face. It's not hard for me to imagine that a "veteran G.O.P. operative" would be a real prick. Purdum here is just passing on gossip from some coward hiding behind anonymity. But this anonymous label of Palin as a "little shop of horrors" is played up in the article; in fact, at the main article link above it would appear to be the article's title. (The print version shows the title I used there.)

In a similar vein:

More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy” — and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.” [my emphasis]

This passage led Media Mattters' Eric Boehlert to express rare agreement with neocon pundit and Palin fan Bill Kristol, who is normally right less than the proverbial stopped clock (which is accurate at least twice a day): Hell freezes over: I agree with Bill Kristol's media critique 06/30/09. As Boehlert puts it, "this doesn't pass the smell test." If Purdum's reporting is technically accurate, that he heard this independently from several people, it would most likely be something people were getting from a common source, like a chain e-mail among McCain partisans. Any lay person who actually has looked at the DSM has probably quickly realized that it's difficult to distinguish one clinical condition from another without some more knowledge of their signs and symptoms than a non-medical person is likely to possess.

The DSM-IV is available online. The definition found there for narcissistic personality disorder reads as follows:

The symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder revolve around a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and sense of entitlement. Often individuals feel overly important and will exaggerate achievements and will accept, and often demand, praise and admiration despite worthy achievements. They may be overwhelmed with fantasies involving unlimited success, power, love, or beauty and feel that they can only be understood by others who are, like them, superior in some aspect of life.

There is a sense of entitlement, of being more deserving than others based solely on their superiority. These symptoms, however, are a result of an underlying sense of inferiority and are often seen as overcompensation. Because of this, they are often envious and even angry of others who have more, receive more respect or attention, or otherwise steal away the spotlight. [my emphasis]

The definition Purdum quotes says, "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy". Did Purdum get his quote directly from some version of the DSM? Or from a copy of some chain e-mail? Or from the mouth of some McCain partisan running down Palin? His paragraph certainly leaves the impression it's a quote from the DSM.

After extensively quoting her enemies on how inept she is as a campaigner, Purdum slips in this paragraph, which suggests a different set of possibilities, based on her actual career rather than backstage gossip from her critics:

Palin’s victory that November was one of the flukiest successes in modern American politics. Rebecca Braun, the publisher of the Alaska Budget Report, a respected nonpartisan newsletter, describes the result as something "far beyond anything you could explain in terms of intellect or training." But Palin had promised three big things, and with the help of Bitney, who became her liaison with the legislature, and Mike Tibbles, her chief of staff, she achieved them. She increased oil taxes; she won the legislative framework for a gas pipeline, though not the one Hickel wanted; and she signed significant ethics reforms. In all three efforts she won strong cooperation from Democrats. “She had an easy go of it,” says Larry Persily, a former editorial-page editor of the Anchorage Daily News, who went to work in Palin’s Washington office but is now a critic of the governor’s. “The Democrats were in love with her. She slew the oil-company Gorgon, and came in on the magic carpet of oil-tax reform and ethics. The Democrats were intoxicated because she wasn’t Frank Murkowski.” Rising oil prices provided an added lift. Palin was able to increase the annual distribution from the state’s Permanent Fund to about $3,000 per resident, almost double the amount received the previous year. She could be a fiscal conservative and a big spender all at the same time.

In other words, she has demonstrated a touch for the bipartisan appeal that press devotees of High Broderism worship.

This actually raises some questions that would be interesting and important in political journalism, but don't fit so well in the infotainment mode. How does her reported fight with the oil companies over raising their taxes and this supposed enthusiasm among Alaska's legislative Democrats square with the far-right approach of the Alaska Independence Party and the Third Wave Pentecostal theocrats? But since Purdum has "disappeared" her neo-Confederate and fanatical religious affiliations, that comparison wouldn't exactly fit.

That disappearing is a warning for Democrats. The frat boys and sorority girls of our press corps right now enjoying their script of Palin as a dumb beauty queen. But we've already had indications that this could easily flip into portraying her as a down-home tribune of the ordinary folks. Expensive dresses on the campaign's dime and bitchy clashes with staffers and former allies are celebrity gossip that can easily be reframed as charming eccentricities. The press corps fixates on fashion and style issues, so expensive dresses become a really significant item for them. But close association with a fringe neo-Confederate group like the AIP and deep involvement with a theocratic religious movement so out-there that the main Pentecostal denomination in the US, the Assemblies of God, formally considers it heresy, those are more substantial issues. And far more troubling. But they're too complicated to be easily covered in the space of a Twitter comment or two, so the press prefers to chase office gossip.

By the way, there are real journalists who actually cover this stuff, e.g., Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert, Meet Sarah Palin's radical right-wing pals Salon 10/10/08; Ruth at TalktoAction blog, Palin's churches and the Third Wave 09/05/08; Bruce Wilson, also of TalktoAction, Palin's Churches and the New Apostolic Reformation 09/05/08; Lisa Webster, Witches, Fine... Does Sarah Palin Believe in Religious Tolerance? Religious Dispatches 09/29/09.

A final point. Our alleged journalists enjoy pointing to Tina Fey's inspired spoofs of Palin as though they are some reflection on Palin herself. Purdum is no exception: "The swift journey from her knockout convention speech to Tina Fey’s dead-eyed incarnation of her as Dan Quayle with an updo played out in real time, no less for the bewildered McCain campaign than for the public at large."

But Tina Fey is a professional comedienne. She's supposed to be funny. Both Palin and McCain appeared with Tina Fey in her Palin role on Saturday Night Live. So presumably they didn't think her portrayal of Palin was insulting, inappropriate or damaging. In the SNL skit about the Biden-Palin debate, I actually laughed more at the portrayal of Biden, which cleverly captured his garrolous tendency to insert his foot into his mouth. And I saw an interview with Tina Fey herself that I thought was quite interesting. She talked about meeting Palin and how she actually found her an impressive person in that brief interaction. She said Palin was "the real deal", meaning that Palin's pleasant persona that she projects came off as genuine.

At least our comedians can still separate their portrayals of a character from that character's reality. Our so-called journalists have a hard time grasping that distinction.

Tags: sarah palin, todd purdum

They can't let it go, the Bill Ayers thing

They, in this case being Wolf Blitzer and Sarah Palin, as reported by Rachel Weiner in Palin Attacks Obama Over Ayers Yet Again On CNN Huffington Post 11/12/08. At the risk of sounding like I'm partially defending that rightwing fanatic neo-Confederate theocrat Palin, it's Blitzer who brings it up in the passage Weiner quotes:

BLITZER: Because, you know, during a campaign, every presidential campaign, things are said, it's tough, as you well know, it gets sometimes pretty fierce out there. And during the campaign, you said this, you said: "This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America."

And then you went on to say: "Someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

PALIN: Well, I still am concerned about that association with Bill Ayers. And if anybody still wants to talk about it, I will, because this is an unrepentant domestic terrorist who had campaigned to blow up, to destroy our Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol. That's an association that still bothers me.

And I think it's still fair to talk about it. However the campaign is over. That chapter is closed. Now is the time to move on and to, again, make sure that all of us are doing all that we can to progress this nation.

Keep us secure, get the economy back on the right track, and many of us do have some ideas on how to do that and hopefully we'll be able to put all of that wisdom and experience to good use together.

BLITZER: So looking back, you don't regret that tough language during the campaign?

PALIN: No, and I do not think that it is off-base nor mean-spirited, nor negative campaigning to call someone out on their associations and on their record. And that's why I did it. [my emphasis]

Right now, the media pod people are trashing Palin, although a competing narrative is already peeking its way through the cloud of scorn, saying that everybody is underestimating the White Princess' political talents.

It's important for Democrats not to let our unavoidable shadenfreude over seeing Palin ridiculed by the Pod Pundits who normally put most of their energy into trashing Democrats.

But it shouldn't distract us from the fact that our national political press is flat-on-its-face dysfunctional. The full transcript is available at CNN-The Situation Room Transcripts. But it's Wolf Blitzer who bring up Bill Ayers in the question.

She was happy to pick up the cue, because for the hard right, they love talking about Obama the Terrorists' Pal. But at least in the section quoted by Weiner, Palin shows her usual level of concern for facts.

But before getting into that, not only does Blitzer not challenge her on easily identifiable misstatements in response to his question. He and his Establishment cohorts generally have been unwilling to do the kind of serious investigations they needed to be doing into her association with radical, theocratic religious groups that encourage they supporters to deep their more theocratic beliefs secret in order to win power in secular institutions like the Republican Party. Nor did they provide the kind of focus needed on Palin's close public association right up into 2008 with the far-right, neo-Confederate, explicitly anti-American Alaskan Independence Party, an affiliate of the radical-Christianist Constitution Party. And, as Palin told Wolf, it isn't "off-base nor mean-spirited, nor negative campaigning to call someone out on their associations and on their record".

But the press has focused a lot of attention on her clothes. Maureen Dowd has so far devoted significant portions of three of her high-profile New York Times columns to that pressing topic.

For those who are interested, In These Times has published a post-election column by Bill Ayers himself addressing the controversy over his loose association with the President-elect, What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been 11/07/08. He states an obvious fact when he writes, "I became a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummeled." Most of his comments about the state of politics are pretty vague. Understandably so, since the Republicans, the Democrats and the press made him a national pariah this year. He probably doesn't want to embarrass anyone by too closely associating himself publicly with them. (By the way, he has his own blog. Doesn't everybody?)

It could also be he's just saying what he thinks. But he does mention someone, though not by name, that he has been "pallin' around with", as Palin put it:

My voicemail filled up with hate messages. They were mostly from men, all venting and sweating and breathing heavily. A few threats: "Watch out!” and “You deserve to be shot.” And some e-mails, like this one I got from satan@hell.com: “I’m coming to get you and when I do, I’ll water-board you.”

The police lieutenant who came to copy down those threats deadpanned that he hoped the guy who was going to shoot me got there before the guy who was going to water-board me, since it would be most foul to be tortured and then shot. (We have been pals ever since he was first assigned to investigate threats made against me in 1987, after I was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.) [my emphasis]

Which brings us to Palin's ongoing accusation that Blitzer solicited from her. So far as I'm aware, Bill Ayers has been a law-abiding citizen for at least the last 25 years or more. (See Thomas Frank, My Friend Bill Ayers Wall Street Journal 10/15/08.) I'm not certain whether Ayers' much-alluded-to comment about doing more refers to wishing he had done more bombing with the Weather Underground (WU). I have seen him say in a documentary that he wishes they had done more to stop the Vietnam War.

So maybe it's technically correct for Palin to call him an "unrepentant ... terrorist", though I don't really think it's fair.

But it's simply not true what Republicans - and at on at least one occasion, Hillary Clinton - said about him and the WU, that they killed Americans. Or what Palin says to Blitzer above, that they sought to "blow up, to destroy our Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol". They never attempted to blow up the entire Capitol or Pentagon, which is the literal meaning of Palin's claim to Blitzer. And it's not right, at least from my point of few, of falsely accusing someone of killing people.

You can think Ayers and the other members of the WU were ten kinds of scumbags when their group was active. And they did plant bombs in the Capitol building, the Pentagon, the State Department and other public buildings. But they were not trying to randomly kill people in those buildings, which is what the word "terrorism" most likely conjures to most Americans these days. On the contrary, they went out of their way to avoid injuring or killing anyone, setting their bombs to go off at night and issuing warnings before the blasts were timed to occur.

Could they have killed people? Sure. It was risky and in the eyes of virtually everyone in the US at the time, it was irresponsible and reckless. But the only people that were ever killed in the course of the WU's actions were two three of their own members who died when a bomb they were constructed unexpectedly detonated.

Ayers in his column also makes a pretty straightforward Jeffersonian observation about the kind of "culture war" pariah image they hung on him and tried to hang on Obama:

Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy’s heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others.

The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation. ...

In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders - and all of us - ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today. [my emphasis]

Which gets back to the point of why real journalism could have been valuable in reporting on the accusation involved Ayers. Reports that elaborated their actions accurately and described their political theory would have highlighted the fact that Obama has never involved himself with such an approach to politics. And I would be astonished if they could have found footage of even one Democratic member of Congress at the time expressing even remote sympathy for Weather Underground bombings.

Decent reports would have also described the fact that the Weather Underground, for all the attention they attracted, were a small group with minimal support even among those who were passionate antiwar activists. In fact, if the interviews in the documentary The Weather Underground (2003) convey an accurate picture, the group members themselves came to some kind of consensus in the mid-to-late 1970s that they had been mistaken in their approach of symbolic bombings. And that they had badly misread the political climate in America.

And, again assuming a fantasy world of competent professional journalism by our leading press outlets, such an approach to the story might have taught people something about terrorism. It would actually be interesting to hear what some of the former WU members have to say about the murderous Islamic terrorism of today. Who knows? They might actually have useful insights! And it would actually surprise me if they haven't had terrorism experts from government agencies attempt to talk to them about that very subject.

But our Wolf Blitzers think they have fulfilled their journalistic mission if they report what one side says and then what the other side says. And the "two sides" - more than that are very difficult for our reporters to manage - in this matter were Republicans and Democrats. Republicans had the incentive to make Bill Ayers sound as sinister as possible. While Democrats had an incentive to distance Obama from Ayers, not to encourage a fact-based discussion of the actual history involved. Because the latter could easily have been spun during the election as "defending" the WU's actions in the 1970s.

So to me, the real story here is not that rightwing fanatic Palin is still repeating her rightwing fanatic trash talk from the campaign. That's strictly "dog bites man" kind of news. The real story to which Democrats should be paying attention is the continuing dysfunction of the national press corps. A dysfunction that rarely helps the interests of Democrats more than those of Republicans.

Tags: bill ayers, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, sarah palin