Month: July 2009

Palin was partly Kristol's cynical ploy – so you'd expect some kind of response to further exposure of just how unqualified for any public office she is. But after an entire article detailing yet more loopy high-school lies, more derangement, more ignorance on the part of his protege, Kristol takes issue with just one fact:

All I can say is that the emails I've gotten making exactly this point over the past year are many. And many Alaskans, especially in the legislature, have long believed she is out of her tiny mind. I recall speaking to a very eminent physician in the campaign – among several leading obstetricians who found her pregnancy story highly implausible – who immediately noted that in his view, Palin was clinically delusional, narcissistic and unstable. I think her astonishing record of saying things that are demonstrably untrue – in small things and large – puts her into a clinical category. But Kristol cannot actually refute her absurd lies so he simply asserts that Purdum makes stuff up. Then Kristol gets his digs in on Steve Schmidt:

Pure innuendo, of course. But if I'd been Schmidt, I would have been searching around for some way to explain why his veep candidate was such a nut-case. (A little vetting beforehand might have helped, but McCain was too mavericky for that.) In any case, it seems to me that whoever raised the post-partum depression idea, Palin did not display symptoms of it, at least as it usually occurs. Go read the main symptoms here: "Sadness, Hopelessness, Low self-esteem, Guilt, Sleep and eating disturbances, Inability to be comforted, Exhaustion, Emptiness, Social withdrawal, Low or no energy". Does that sound like Miss YouBetcha last fall to you? She sure looked as if she had finally gotten what she had always wanted and was riding a wave of euphoria.

(To read the entire bizarre story of Palin's fifth pregnancy, the Dish's exhaustive one-post summary of all the facts compiled by the New York Times and the Anchorage Daily News is here. Try and make sense of it if you can.)

Yglesias pokes holes in one of Richard Posner's worse ideas.

Bill Kristol started it – but Steve Schmidt took him down:

Next up: Randy Scheuneman, neocon Palin sherpa, and old buddy of Kristol's:

Scheuneman, if you recall, went rogue with Palin on the campaign and was relieved of his duties at Schmidt's behest. Schmidt claims this is a reason for Scheuneman's current attack on him. Then it really gets nasty, and Jonathan Martin's day yesterday must have been quite a fun one. Here's Schmidt's subsequent unloading on Scheuneman:

“What this is about is a personal issue that happened late in the campaign relating to a close, personal friend of Bill Kristol and people at the Weekly Standard,” Schmidt said, refusing to use Scheunemann’s name. 

“At the end of the campaign there were a series of leaks that were so damaging that it was consuming the 24-hour cable news cycle. Leaks to reporters where Sarah Palin was called all manner of names. [McCain senior adviser] Rick Davis and I jointly felt that was outrageous. So we made an attempt for the first time in the campaign to try to ID who was leaking information that was so damaging and demoralizing to a campaign that was in very difficult circumstances. …

“What was discovered was an email from a very senior staff member to Bill Kristol that then entered into the news current and continued the negative in-fighting stories for an additional news cycles. I recommended tough medicine for that individual that was carried out,” Schmidt said, again referring to Scheunemann. “Bill Kristol might not have liked that decision, and he might be mad about what happened to his friend, but going all the way back he has been a part of this story and I’ve preserved his confidentiality in that until now. But his use of his public forums to take a personal fight and make character attacks is just simply dishonest and wrong.”

I could go on, but then it gets into Nicolle Wallace and whether she is or is not a "diva". It has to be one of the juiciest, gossipyest, nastiest stories of campaign politics I've read in ages. Make of it what you will.

What I make of it is that the selection of Sarah Palin was one of the most absurd, nutty, cynical and incompetent decisions in the modern history of American campaigning. And the Republican party, far from trying to understand how they made such a reckless decision, remains in total denial. Kristol and Barnes chief among them. The in-fighting is a function of both the chaotic management style of John McCain, the psycotic nature of Palin and the toujours l'audace mentality of the Kristol brigade. They all deserved each other – and the party and political tradition they have collectively destroyed.

Maybe in Japan. Elsewhere, not so much:

It's over, finally. Marie Diamond explains what it all means:

[Franken] will not make for a particularly crisp #60. Though no one wants to say it, it is not clear that Sen. Ted Kennedy will ever vote again in the Senate, given his medical condition. Massachusetts lawmakers are already quietly jockeying for his seat. A replacement senator in Massachusetts needs to be chosen by the electorate (the governor has no role), which could mean weeks, even months, for primary and general election campaigns to be conducted. Meanwhile, after a month in the hospital, Sen. Robert Byrd was released today to continue his recovery at home, but the 91-year-old remains in delicate health.

Even if senators always voted party-line, which they don’t, it takes 60 senators present and voting to vote cloture. Democrats aren’t there yet. While the verdict for Franken is a victory for Democrats, in many ways the GOP stall has had its intended effect. It is a public-relations accomplishment: They’ve managed to blur the likely result of the 2008 election, casting doubt on the circumstances under which Democrats have come to dominance in the Senate. That’s not a trivial accomplishment during these early months when a new president’s political capital is at its peak.

A moving report from the Jerusalem Post:

The sources also reported that a prominent cleric gave a speech to opposition protesters in Teheran earlier this week in which he publicly acknowledged that the very act of speaking at the gathering would likely cost him his life.

"Ayatollah Hadi Gafouri said that the Imam [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini] never wanted [current supreme Leader] Ali Khamenei to succeed him. He even went to say that the Islamic republic died the day the Imam did," one source said … Other criticisms from senior clerics over the regime's handling of the elections and subsequent protests included a report from a Persian news agency, which on Tuesday quoted a senior cleric from the city of Esfahan, Ayatollah Seyyed Jalaleddin Taheri-Esfahani, defending Mousavi against the regime's criticisms.

The ayatollah was quoted as saying: "Is it a case of justice to see that an honorable and modest Seyyed [a descendant of the household of the prophet Muhammad], who until the last moments of Khomeini's life was a dear and close companion of that grand leader, is now considered to be a rioter and an agent of arrogance who must be punished?"

The Post also reports brutal beatings of people in the streets, and six public hangings of Mousavi supporters in Mashad.

Alyssa Rosenberg discusses some under-reported points about prison management:

A reader writes:

[Update: not as far-fetched as recruiting "Arabs" for gathering intelligence in a non-Arab, Farsi-speaking country. Apologies for this email. I should have caught this.]