While the left
jumps up in down in delight at Palin's pallid performance last night, and the
right wrings their hands (and perhaps even Sarah-Smile's advisors' necks... Mr.
Rove, is that you again?), I would like to assign the class further reading.
The following
is excerpted at somewhat hefty length from an even longer, fangs-bared,
rightfully-biting-back article that I assume Rolling Stone carried
first; at this site it's noted as having been first posted September 27, 2008,
or last Saturday. (This time I am fixing up the occasionally rough punctuation,
etc.) And once more I stick my neck out legally by reprinting these words
without permission... but will back off immediately if requested officially:
AlterNet's a
new one on me (even-further-left firebrand Spartacus forwarded me the link),
and I find some of their advertisers and focus very much at odds with certain
particulars for which I stand firm and value (e.g., I find rather offensive a
man (or woman, for that matter) sneering at a woman's pregnancy). Nor can I
condone the original article's vocabulary (in particular with the objectionable
words being gratuitous or at least unneedful). But in all, let me state that
the author's writing style and knock-you-over intensity are otherwise exactly
what twenty-first century political journalism has to be about, particularly
from the left. And I say that as the son of a (now-retired) professional
journalist, and someone who himself has engaged in (albeit on a far more minor
scale) hearty journalism.
Biased?
Arguably. (Please NB, however, AlterNet's disclaimer: AlterNet
is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The
opinions expressed by its writers are their own.) But the author's money here
is where his mouth/keyboard is: he certainly does seem to have engaged in far
more research, and presents demonstrable hard facts and figures, than one might
see from, say, the right (e.g., FoxNoise), nor is there anything merely
superficial knee-jerk / innuendic about it.
Read on.
Mad-Dog Palin
The
scariest thing about John McCain's running mate isn't how unqualified she is --
it's what her candidacy says about America.
Matt Taibibi
The defining
moment for me [at
the Republican convention] came shortly after Palin and her family stepped down from the
stage to uproarious applause, looking happy enough to throw a whole library
full of books into a sewer....
Sarah Palin is a
symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a
representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy,
the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than
that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the
total surrender of our political power.
Not only is Sarah
Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-[butt]ed fraud imaginable, twenty floors below the lowest common
denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – and this country is
going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most
Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow
ourselves to be [pleasured] by the calculating thieves who
run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.
Until the Alaska
governor actually ascended to the podium that night, I was convinced that John
McCain had made one of the all-time campaign-season blunders, that he had acted
impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political
neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher
section at Fenway Park. It even crossed my mind that there was an element of
weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain's decision to cave in to his party's
right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being
ordered by party elders away from a tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like
Joe Lieberman – reportedly his real preference – by picking the most obviously
unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-thumping buffoon. As in: You want
me to rally the base? Fine, I'll rally the base. Here, I'll choose this
rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose-killer who thinks God lobbies for oil
pipelines. Happy now?...
The candidate
sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker – and immediately
launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in
between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake
husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be the
innocent targets of a communist- (and probably also homosexual-) media
conspiracy. It was a virtuoso performance. She appeared to be completely
without shame and utterly full of [crap],
awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly sweet line about the
high-school-flame-turned-hubby who, "five children later" is
"still my guy." It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag....
Right-wingers of
the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their
failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the
genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image
of the suburban American supermom. It's the perfect cover, for there is almost
nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant. Palin
herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her
seminal crack about the "difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull:
lipstick," blurring once and for all [time]
the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the
Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as
understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranchhouse den
dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his
truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government
cheese....
Sarah Palin is
something new. She's all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose
positions on individual issues are poll-losers almost across the board, her
shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It's just designed to
sell her. The thing was as much as admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan
speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that
Palin wasn't the most qualified candidate, that the party "went for this,
excuse me, political [BS] about
narratives."...
Sure, there was
politics in the Palin speech, but it was all either silly lies or merely
incidental fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance. A classic example
of what was at work here came when Palin proudly introduced her Down-syndrome
baby, Trig, then stared into the camera and somberly promised parents of
special-needs kids that they would "have a friend and advocate in the
White House." This was about a half-hour before she raised her hands in
triumph with McCain, a man who voted against increasing funding for
special-needs education.
Palin's charge
that "government is too big" and that Obama "wants to grow
it" was similarly preposterous. Not only did her party just preside over
the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a
typical Bush-era Republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means. Her great
legacy as mayor of Wasilla was the construction of a $14.7 million hockey arena
in a city with an annual budget of $20 million; Palin okayed a bond issue for
the project before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal
mess that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the original
market price for property [that]
the city ended up having to seize from a private citizen using eminent domain.
Better yet, Palin ended up paying for the [blasted] thing with a 25-percent increase in the city sales tax. But in
her speech, of course, Palin presented herself as the enemy of tax increases,
righteously bemoaning that "taxes are too high," and Obama "wants
to raise them."
Palin hasn't been
too worried about federal taxes as governor of a state that ranks number-one in
the nation in federal spending per resident ($13,950), even as it sits just
18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434). That means all us tax-paying
non-Alaskans spend $8,500 a year on each and every resident of Palin's paradise
of rugged self-sufficiency. Not that this sworn enemy of taxes doesn't collect
from her own: Alaska currently collects the most taxes per resident of any state
in the nation....
[Her] incessant grousing about the
media was likewise par for the course, red meat for those tens of millions of
patriotic flag-waving Americans whose first instinct when things get rough is
to whine like [spoiled
little wen]ches
and blame other people – reporters, the French, those ungrateful blacks soaking
up tax money eating big prison meals, whomever – for their failures.
Add to this the
usual lies about Democrats wanting to "forfeit" to our enemies abroad
and coddle terrorists, and you had a very run-of-the-mill, almost-boring,
Republican speech from a substance standpoint. What made it exceptional was its
utter hypocrisy, its total disregard for reality, its absolute unrelation to
the facts of our current political situation. After eight years of
unprecedented corruption, incompetence, waste, and greed, the party of Karl
Rove understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to any of
these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to [thoroughly drool] over....
[I]n the end it won't matter that
she's got an unmarried teenage kid with a bun in the oven. Of course, if the
daughter of a black candidate like Barack Obama showed up at his convention
with a five-month bump and some sideways-cap wearing, junior-grade Curtis
Jackson holding her hand, the defenders of Traditional Morality would be up in
arms. But the thing about being in the reality-making business is that you
don't need to worry much about vetting; there are no facts in your candidate's
bio that cannot be ignored or overcome....
Pretty much
anyone with an Internet connection knows by now that Palin was originally for
the "Bridge to Nowhere" before she opposed it (she actually endorsed
the plan in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign), that even after the project was
defeated she kept the money, that she didn't actually sell the Alaska
governor's state luxury jet on eBay but instead sold it at a $600,000 loss to a
campaign contributor (who is now seeking $50,000 in taxpayer money to pay
maintenance costs).
Then there are
the salacious tales of Palin's swinging-meat-cleaver management style, many of
which seem to have a common thread: In addition to being ensconced in a messy
ethics investigation over her firing of the chief of the Alaska state troopers
(dismissed after refusing to sack her sister's ex-husband), Palin also
reportedly fired a key campaign aide for having an affair with a friend's wife.
More ominously, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to fire the town librarian,
Mary Ellen Emmons, after Emmons resisted pressure to censor books Palin found
objectionable.
Then there's the
God stuff: Palin belongs to a church whose pastor, Ed Kalnins, believes that
all criticisms of George Bush "come from hell," and wondered aloud if
people who voted for John Kerry could be saved. Kalnins, looming as the answer
to Obama's Jeremiah Wright, claims that Alaska is going to be a "refuge
state" for Christians in the last days, last days which he sometimes
speaks of in the present tense. Palin herself has been captured on video
mouthing the inevitable born-again idiocies, such as the idea that a recent
oil-pipeline deal was "God's will." She also described the Iraq War
as a "task that is from God" and part of a heavenly
"plan."...
All of which
tells you about what you'd expect from a raise-the-base choice like Palin:
She's a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs who had to be
educated as to the fact that the Constitution did not exactly envision
government executives' firing librarians. Judging from the importance
progressive critics seem to attach to these revelations, you'd think that these
were actually negatives in modern American politics. But Americans like
politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They
like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules.
Which is why
Palin has only seemed to grow in popularity as more and more of these
revelations have come out. The same goes for the most damning aspect of her
biography, her total lack of big-game experience. As governor of Alaska, Palin
presides over a state whose entire population is barely the size of Memphis.
This kind of thing might matter in a country that actually worried about
whether its leader was prepared for his job – but not in America....
Sure, Barack
Obama might be every bit as much a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin.
The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents
tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and
negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face – all
qualities we're actually going to need in government if we're going to get out
of this huge mess we're in.
Here's what Sarah
Palin represents: being a fat, [repulsive] pig who pins "Country First" buttons on his man-[cleavage] and chants "U-S-A!
U-S-A!" at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and [the] Saudis buy up all the
mortgages in Kansas.
The truly
disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a
religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own
daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up
earmark-millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her
is what she says about us: that you can [rape us viciously] for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your
trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to [rub] us in the right spot for a few
hours around election time.
Democracy doesn't
require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires
taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and
what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking
stock of what your real interests are.
This is a very different thing
from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day
long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a Southern-Style
Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing "I'm Lovin' It!" during the
commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it
doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness, or shame: All you have
to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey
the next. And the next. And the next....
