Month: September 2008

A reader writes:

Regarding the "odd lies" of Sarah Palin. I grew up in a deeply evangelical family, and through the lens of evangelical thinking the world is magical, populated with demons and angels, devils and gods. You are taught not to believe your eyes or your senses, that the wisdom of man is foolishness to god. That belief is Truth.  That belief is Truth before reality is truth.  What comes out of this is what I’ll call magical thinking. 

You feel the presence of God, feel Him talking to you, feel the mission of your life, the purpose the plan the direction given to you by God. So everything becomes like a mythic fairy tale. You get in the habit of fitting the day to day realities into a ‘story’ the life story of God’s purpose in your life.

This is how Sarah becoming Governor is destiny.

Her memory is constantly rewriting the reality to fit her proscribed vision within an evangelical Christianity that has direct contact with god. If you see all of her ‘lies’ through this lens they begin to make perfect sense.

Thought I would share: I can totally feel what she is feeling. And if you look at those leaked emails, the prayer talk, and faith talk and god talk, it completely fills your thoughts every moment of every day.

The question is simply whether this magical thinking is what we need to address the financial crisis, the terror war and the Iraq occupation. If you want a president who doesn’t believe in empirical reality, you know who to vote for.

Firstread:

If we really [are] back to the pre-convention numbers, this is not a good development for McCain going into the debates. He needed the tie to hold until the debates. The last thing he needs is for the debates to be another moment where he has to catch up rather than solidify his lead. Because after the debates, there really are no more chances to move the race.

The last three weeks have been the most surreal I can remember in any campaign, centered, of course, on the on-going farce of the Palin candidacy. But if you had been on another planet for the past month and had been asked to predict it, you would have guessed two convention bounces almost identical to the ones we have seen and the race returning back to a small but clear Obama lead. I think white racism means that Obama needs more than a small but clear lead to win. But still: from afar, no real change after the last month. Advantage: Obama.

Judge Judy has a great aphorism: "If it doesn’t make sense, it isn’t true." I couldn’t help thinking of Judge Judy – who is now the only person I really want to cross examine Sarah Palin – when reading this:

HANNITY: One last question that I didn’t ask you: Did you watch Tina Fey on "Saturday Night Live"?

PALIN: I watched with the volume all the way down and I thought it was hilarious, she was spot on.

HANNITY: Do you think you could play her one day?

PALIN: Oh absolutely. It was hilarious. Again, I didn’t hear a word she said, but the visual was spot on.

Do you believe a word this person says? I guess it’s obvious that at this point, I don’t.Increasngly, she seems like a character in a Ricky Gervais comedy: caught in endless confabulations and not skilled enough to get away with them.

It now seems indisputable: John McCain doesn’t know who the prime minister of Spain is and thinks he’s some anti-American leftist in South America. Now imagine if Obama made that kind of gaffe.

Kerry Howley tackles Ross. It’s an orgy! I cover my eyes.

I’ve got a stock tip for you. Trust financial mags the way you would anything Sarah Palin says:

In December, Fortune magazine admitted it had been remiss naming insurance giant AIG one of its "10 Stocks To Buy Now" before a yearlong 18 percent decline. "We… didn’t expect [the] mortgage unit to be such an albatross," editors wrote. To correct the error, the magazine had a fresh list of "The Best Stocks For 2008" — including Merrill Lynch.

Wyatt Andrews explores:

It’s one of the most explosive and important political charges of the election: "He wants to tax your health benefits," Barack Obama said.

Obama’s charge was that that John McCain wants to tax the health insurance benefits Americans buy through employers. "That’s a $3.6 trillion tax potentially increase on middle class families," Obama said. "That will eventually leave tens of millions of you paying higher taxes."

It’s a little complicated and Obama slips in that "potentially" to avoid a Palin-style lie, but it’s still clearly fear-mongering and unfair.

Jake Tapper nails Barack on this one. Equating McCain and Limbaugh on the issue of immigration is crude and stupid. McCain has always been far less hostile to the plight of illegal immigrants than Rush Limbaugh – even though he has moved toward the Kaus position in the past several months – and the Limbaugh quotes appear out of context. Playing racial politics this way is not what Obama promised to do. Cut it out.

That is what Alan Dershowitz proposes:

Torture warrants, Dershowitz insists, are one way to shine law’s light on this darkness, especially if one believes there are times when torture should be permitted. Many will be horrified that Dershowitz even allows himself to think such thoughts…[But] Even those who believe in an absolute prohibition against torture would be well advised to ponder the legal paradigm shift that Dershowitz says has occurred and that so worries him. If torture is inevitably going to take place in a preventive state, should we be content to allow it to exist outside the law? At the end of his new book, Dershowitz warns: “We need to develop a jurisprudence for the emerging preventive state. … Black holes in the law are anathema to democracy, accountability, human rights and the rule of law.”

Horrifying – but less horrifying, perhaps, than the total lawlessness of Bush-Cheney.

Larison sums up the financial mess.