Monk

"I’m sorry Fox cancelled all my scheduled interviews tonight because I sure wanted to take the opportunity on the air to highlight Senator John McCain’s positive contributions to America, to honor him, and to reflect on what a biased media unfairly put him through four years ago tonight. Granted, our honored and esteemed war hero has gone through much more than the liberal media can ever do to him in their efforts to harm this patriot. I look forward to hearing his words to his fellow Americans tonight more than any of the other convention speeches. God bless John McCain. Thank you for everything. And happy birthday, my friend."

-- Sarah Palin, the 2008 vice-presidential nominee for the Republican Party, via Facebook

Ouch, it looks like Sarah Palin is being drastically brought down to size and humbled. Maybe the movie "Game Change" on the 2008 election, dramatizing vividly to the popular audience how dingy and flakey she is, that forced this move. The Republicans are apparently doing what they can to fix their image as the dingy reality-TV Party. Maybe it won't be long before we stop hearing anything from her, as she sort of disappears from history. Unfortunately for the Party and for the country, their dingy problem runs much deeper than Sarah, who was just an attractive front-person for that element of the country.

"You know what man? I am going to literally — if she gets elected president, I am going to hang out on the grassy knoll all the time, just loaded and ready — because you know what? It’s for my country. It’s for my country. If I got to sacrifice myself, it’s for my country."

-- Christopher Titus

It's about Sarah Palin, and before anyone gets too excited, she is not the president, at least not yet anyway, and Titus is apparently a comic, and I just love the use of the grassy knoll bit, and, yeah, although I find Sarah very entertaining and even MILFy, I find it depressing that she could be a contender for the presidency.

The only hint of a policy beyond trumpeting American supremacy? "Big tax cuts" - as we face record deficits. The obvious theme: she is championing a "Fundamental Restoration of America" versus what she will call a "Fundamental Transformation of America" under Obama. That's all she really needs for a purely cultural campaign to eject the anomalous black Muslim Kenyan from the White House. And the kind of dedication and fanaticism from the Palin base can be seen everywhere.

-- Andrew Sullivan



(Former U.S. Vice presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin rides on a motorcycle before participating in 'Rolling Thunder' rally May 29, 2011 in Arlington, Virginia. Although not an official guest, former U.S. Vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin is expected to participate in today's motorcycle parade from the Pentagon to the National Mall. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

“The threshold question, not usually asked, but it’s in everyone’s mind in a presidential election. ‘Should we give this person nuclear weapons?’ And the answer [in Palin's case], answers itself.”

-- George Will


"Sarah Palin is telegenic–and she clearly requites the camera’s love a thousand-fold. We don’t care; such behavior is no longer unseemly. Far more important than her potential to be the first female president is her potential to be the first reality-show subject to become president. At this point it must be conceded she’s underestimated. ... Sarah knows something we don’t. And she appears to be shameless. I wish it were a movie. Then I could laugh."

-- Dennis Dale

I don't know. I'm starting to find that the idea warms the very sickness in my heart.

Ah, there's a new kiss-and-tell book out on Sarah Palin. I doubt there are any revelations that will shock many of us who trudge along in the reality-based community, and no doubt her base of supporters will denounce this as part of a liberal conspiracy, if not an act of Satan. Still it's good to get more facts on the table:

Frank Bailey joined Sarah Palin’s campaign for governor of Alaska in its earliest days, showing up at her shabby headquarters in Anchorage with a paintbrush, toilet bowl cleaner and hammer in November 2005 and becoming part of her “Rag Tag Team,” as she fondly dubbed her original inner circle. He’d grown up poor in Kodiak and worked as an airline baggage handler and middle manager. In Palin he found a leader who elegantly fused faith and politics. She exuded charm, energy and idealism, and, most important, she inspired trust. Bailey was politically smitten: “In my mind, God had chosen her, and this was His will.”

But God had his own plan for Frank Bailey. The political novice spent nearly four years at Palin’s side only to wind up disillusioned by his “Ronald Reagan in high heels.” In “Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin,” his political kiss-and-tell based on more than 50,000 Yahoo! account e-mails that he wrote or received as a campaign and administration staffer, Bailey paints a portrait of an erratic, vindictive, unethical politician. Palin emerges as a woman far more interested in power, fame and fortune than in the day-to-day grind of governing. “I am convinced,” Bailey writes, “that her priorities and personality are not only ill suited to head a political party or occupy national office, but would lead to a disaster of, well, biblical proportions.”

...

Bailey was also dismayed by the chasm between Palin’s professed Christian ideals and her treatment of others, including supporters. During her race for governor, a highly decorated 86-year-old veteran who saw Palin as the state’s savior assembled more than 200 signs and walked house to house planting them in supporters’ yards. Bailey repeatedly asked Palin to pay the old gent a quick visit at his home, but she couldn’t be bothered. According to Bailey, she was dismissive of those who helped catapult her to success. Several other elderly volunteers donated 10-hour days and earned Palin’s belittling characterization as the “crazy old men’s club.” One of the men, thrilled by her victory, presented her with his lucky fedora festooned with campaign buttons. “Rather than being touched by the gesture,” Bailey writes, “Sarah quickly tossed the beloved hat in the trash, explaining to me that it was ‘icky.’ ”

It is good timing. Palin has been singing to the media about having the fire in her belly to run for the presidency and get America back on track with God and free markets. She doesn't seem to be regarded as a fear any longer, having been fairly marginalized in political circles, but, on the other hand, the Republicans are having a hard time fielding a commanding group of candidates. I don't know about a rapture, but I'm still looking out for the apocalypse, myself.

Sarah Palin is so precious,
the people behind her, so wiley and ballsy.

She chides her opponents
with making irresponsible statements
for condemning her gun 'em down rhetoric.

Talk about the classic playground comeback:

"I am made of rubber
and you are made of glue,
whatever you say bounces off me
and sticks to you."

We can only depend on the intelligence of the
average American voter.

So, we're fucked.

Actually, it's probably worse.

The people are smart,
and assailing liberals is just not such an evil
as far as they are concerned.

A lot of them probably love this double game
of speaking violence
and blaming the other side
for the violence.

You gotta love it.

It's not up there with Nero
yachting with his whores as Rome burns
and blaming others,
but it's the same game.

They may get better at it
and top him yet.

Sarah Palin is getting e-hit hard
on the Arizona shooting,

but she is probably too simple-minded
to be truly culpable.

LJ

.......

I join one of our discussions.

Jeff makes a clever comparison between
the censorship of entertainment and
the uproar of liberals over the right-wing's
use of gun-language in their politics.

I agree with free speech naturally,
but argue that our leaders should hold themeselves
to a higher standard.

No minds were changed.

LJ

......

A little something from Sully.

Robert Reich has drawn up the fullest Palinapocalypse story that I've come across. It can seem silly being worked up already for the 2012 presidential election, and about an outside chance like Palin, who even if she runs may actually prove a spoiler for the Republicans and give Obama something he probably doesn't deserve, a second term. But who doesn't like a good scary movie, something that gives you chills and nightmares. In my own case, I also feel a sick thrill at the prospect of a Palin presidency. Why read about dystopias when you can live in one?

( The Palinapocalypse )

"I seldom read fiction-- and I tend to regard autobiographies as fiction."

-- Thomas Sowell

If anyone thought that Sarah Palin’s fifteen minutes of fame were about up with the fall of the McCain candidacy last year, just a pretty footnote in history, as I blithely assumed, we have certainly been shown up. One probably should have seen the writing on the wall when those ‘tea parties’ got rolling last summer, which pretty much had the same heady admixture of visceral contempt for Barack Hussein Obama and rah-rah patriotism for Republican Americanism that Palin’s campaigning exuded.

And now she comes out with this autobiography, “Going Rogue”, that has become a publishing phenomenon, albeit written by an other, naturally, since she can give people the idea that English is only her second language, as though she might be more comfortable speaking in tongues.

Googling around the Net for more information, I wanted to see what the Amazon reviewers had to say about “Going Rogue”, and I enjoyed a good chuckle, seeing vividly that familiar refrain being played out again: people either lover her or hate her. 319 readers gave the book Amazon’s most exalted rating of five stars, while 205 readers went to the other extreme and gave her one star, with only about sixty readers split fairly evenly in rating the book between two and four stars. It is funny to see that bar graph, with those two long colored bars far extended at the top and bottom, and those three colored bars in the middle just barely existent.

Of the professional (and politically interested) reviews, Andrew Sullivan serves up a dish more to my liking, coming from a perspective which sees Palin, with perhaps only a little exaggeration, as being one of the greatest threats to America, a woman who would make George W. Bush look like a brilliant and diplomatic statesman and a veritable Pericles:

"Going Rogue" is such a postmodern book that treating it as some kind of factual narrative to check (as I began to), or comparing its version of events with her previous versions of the same events (as I have), and comparing all those versions with what we know is empirical reality (so many lies, so little time) is just a dizzying task. The lies and truths and half-truths and the facts and non-facts are all blurred together in a pious puree of such ghastly prose that, in the end, the book can only really be read as a some kind of chapter in a cheap nineteenth century edition of "Lives of the Saints." But as autobiography.

It is a religious book, full of myths and parables. And yet it is also crafted politically, with every single "detail" of the narrative honed carefully for specific constituencies. It is also some kind of manifesto - but not in the usual sense of a collection of policy proposals. It is a manifesto for the imagined life of an imagined Sarah Palin as a leader for all those who identify with the image and background she relentlessly claims to represent.

In this, the book is emblematic of late degenerate Republicanism, which is based not on actual policies, but on slogans now so exhausted by over-use they retain no real meaning: free enterprise is great, God loves us all, America is fabulous, foreigners are suspect, we need to be tough, we can't dither, we must always cut taxes, government is bad, liberals are socialists, the media hates you, etc etc.

And it is not like Sully is a Christian-basher who would be repulsed by a person’s religiosity. Rather, he is a faithful Catholic who, I suppose, sees Palin’s politics as being actually un-Christian, being uncharitable to the poor and to minorities, including gays. Sully is the one who coined the term “Christianist”, which is something of a parallel to “Islamist”, and it refers to those with a narrowly fundamentalist and aggressively politicized conception of Christianity. For example, think of those fundamentalists who do not believe in evolution and insist on having creationism taught in public classrooms! Palin may be characterized as one of these Christianists.

Since I do not read the right-wing blogosphere, I have only come upon one positive book review, which was given by Stanley Fish in his New York Times column. You can tell by his opening that he knows he is swimming against a riptide current:

When I walked into the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan last week, I headed straight for the bright young thing who wore an “Ask Me” button, and asked her to point me to the section of the store where I might find Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” She looked at me as if I had requested a copy of “Mein Kampf” signed in blood by the author, and directed me to the nearest Barnes and Noble, where, presumably, readers of dubious taste and sensibility could find what they wanted.

In his review, though, Mr. Fish eschews the whole fact-checking business, saying that such may be fair game for a biography, but an autobiography is a different game, in which the truth that the writer is trying to convey is the truth about herself and the kind of person she is, and she only needs to convey this truth in an artful way, and one gathers that Fish regards autobiography as being much more art than fact, for what is the truth of any person, really? Autobiography is more like poetry, trying to capture the ineffable self. And he judges that Palin succeeds well in this personal journey.

Perhaps. I only hope that her journey will not include the White House, except maybe as a guest, and even that is a little too close to power for my own peace of mind.

We are often assured that there is little chance that she will ever be president, and polls are cited showing how an overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe that Palin is qualified to be president of the United States. Even some conservatives who feel she is still a contender will say that it will not happen in 2012, not until she becomes more steeped in policy and better exudes gravitas.

But I do not feel assured. The campaign for the American presidency seems too much like a Reality-TV show these days, and I do not think that Americans really want to vote Sarah off the island, whatever they may say in polls today. She may not be intellectually gifted by either nature or nurture, but she does give off that all-American aura and she looks good with the flag draped around her body.


I don't see any horns, do you?

Sarah Palin quit her governor's seat over the weekend. There was some happy talk that she was getting out of politics altogether, that she finally realized that she has no business assuming a leadership post, and she needed to get out of the over-heated kitchen. But it has only become clearer that she actually wants to focus exclusively on running for president. As she puts it, she has "a higher calling". So did Damien.

I wonder if she picked this time to resign in the hopes that the news would be eclipsed by Michael Jackson's death. That would explain why her big announcement was so poorly composed and executed, like something opportunistically rushed. If this is the case, she underestimated our fascination for her, as well as our fears of her, for it still made a big story - and about as strange as much of Michael Jackson's life. The episode certainly motivated Maureen Dowd to bring out her silver quiver to mark the occasion.

( Dowd )