Month: July 2009

Another Theory

This one makes some kind of sense as well:

Palin wrote (or free-associated) the resignation speech her bigself in a snit over the Trig photoshops and the tidbits Schmidt and Team McCain were leaking in the news … the speech was a very bad, jesus-take-the-wheel moment when she said she prayed on the decision, use of the royal “we”, rambling disjointed, resentful and angry.

What if … McCain or Schmidt or someone told her to step down or they would go public with the whole epic fail of Palin’s campaign performance? I believe there is a whole lot more we haven’t heard. That speech had the whole, my way, and you be damned, and ima do an end run around Team McCain and build my own GOP constituency flavor.

Plausible. Something precipitated the sudden meltdown. And it was sudden. All we know is that Palin is unable to tell the truth about it and the MSM has no interest in finding out. Maybe we'll find out one day. Despite the MSM, not because of it.

The Reason She Matters

I'm getting lots of emails telling me to move on. I will. But I want to explain why I think the Palin drama is actually important. It's not because of her: she's a delusional, narcissistic and disturbed person who would be voted off a reality show in the first rounds. It's because of John McCain, the Republican establishment and the mainstream media. What happened last fall was a warning sign to all of us about how corrupt and cynical the GOP, McCain and the MSM are. They colluded in such a way that this unstable, erratic, know-nothing beauty queen could actually have been president of the United States. What matters is that all those in on this scam be exposed and their way of conducting themselves be reformed until they stop risking the fate of the country and the world on their own vanities and cowardice.

McCain knew full well that Palin was unqualified to be commander-in-chief at this period of time; and he knew there was no way she could ever learn enough to do the job. So his decision to pick her was pure cynicism and irresponsibility. The MSM knew full well that there were very serious questions about this unknown person's background, lies, mental stability, and secrecy – but they were so terrified of being called biased they refused to do the proper vetting.

The Republican establishment has long condescended to the pro-life, anti-gay, de facto soclialist, de iure capitalist heartland voters – and they cynically believed they had found a formula to get them to vote for McCain on ground of pure class resentment and sex appeal to older white males. Even sane decent people like Matt Scully and Mark MacKinnon signed up. Peggy Noonan was caught lying on national television. The convention was a surreal implosion. I agree with Richard Cohen this morning:

Naming Palin to the GOP ticket — a top-down choice by McCain — was the most reckless decision any national politician has made in the longest time, and while it certainly says something about McCain, it says even more about his party. It has lost its mind.

The reason we need to get to the truth of what happened is that these people nearly took this country off a cliff. They need to be held accountable. They need to be removed from their positions of power. We cannot move on until they are. And John McCain should retire from public life. After that decision, nothing he says can be taken seriously on the national or international stage.

Appliance Protest

Iranian twitterers are claiming victory in a coordinated series of blackouts during Ahmadinejad’s televised speech yesterday:

The protesters had earlier pre-arranged a call for Iranians to plug in heavy power load household devices such as dryers, irons and toasters at 9:45pm local time, as Ahmadinejad’s speech began. Online Twitter feeds claimed blackouts were achieved in East Tehran, Sari, Tabriz, Isfehan, Rodehen, Saghez, Lavasan, Ahvaz, Khoramshahr, Dezfol, Jahrom, Khomini Shahr, Shahin Shar, Folad Shahr, Kashan and some of Rasht.

Some sample tweets:

Iron Tactic tonight: Call for Black Out During Ahmadinejad Live at TV , Tehran Time 21.30…

Yes It Worked!

Ghazvin went in Black Out, People Chanting” Death to Dictator” on the roofs in many cities…

Smaller And Smaller?

Ben Casnocha reviews Tyler Cowen's new book:

[W]hen culture is free and a click away, as it is on blogs and Twitter and the broader Internet, we sample broadly and consume it in smaller chunks: "When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces," writes Cowen. "The current trend–as it has been running for decades–is that a lot of our culture is coming in shorter and smaller bits." Think 30-second YouTube clips instead of a full movie, iTunes singles instead of complete albums, two paragraph blog posts instead of an entire essay. And now the 140-character limit on Twitter instead of a blog-style free-form text box.

And yet we also discover this. The web has indeed given life back to shorts; but it is far too soon to see it as the death-knell for longer video. It depends on the context. At a desk at work, you want three minutes max. At home, you can watch a downloaded hour-long documentary later that evening.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"She quit. Say what you want, for all his supposed faults and perhaps mis-steps, former president Bush never quit on Iraq, Afghanistan, or the war against terror, though he could have easily rationalized the decision given the political realities. Whether Palin quit because she marches to a different drum, or not, the fact remains, she left the field of battle of her own accord. A state governorship is too important a position to permit one to do that and dismiss it because the opposition was simply so outrageous. … I believe she is a fine person with much to give to and do for America and conservatism. But I hope it isn't about running for president in 2012. I simply can't judge her ready for that given everything we've seen. I wish it were possible to reach a different conclusion. Unfortunately, right now I can't," – extreme right blogger, Dan Riehl.

Douthat’s Nixonian Delusions

Some helpful factual testing of Ross's wishful thinking that Sarah Palin is the Evita for the right, ushering in a new era of criminalized abortion, closeted gays, federally subsidized churches, and lots of subsidies for "real Americans". Mark Blumenthal analyzes her Christianist base here; Charles Franklin shows why everyone else is slack-jawed.

Rove With A Rosary

"I could understand if Ross were hostile to certain structural elements of meritocracy (e.g. credentialism or an overly rigid hierarchy), but Ross goes further and exhibits a general hostility to merit itself. The case against Sarah Palin really emphatically is not that she failed to go to the right schools or summer in the right coastal hamlets. Rather, the case against Sarah Palin is that she has proven herself to be a deeply ignorant, incurious and dishonest person.

If Ross disagrees, he should rebut that case rather than gesture vaguely at some inchoate dream of having a president who went to a junior college. He needs to show us that Sarah Palin has some merit at her core, then we can maybe go back to explaining away the deficiencies, if any, in her credentials," – a commenter at the American Scene.

Ross's passivity in the face of the Palin outrage is related to a fantasy, a dream of a Nixon party that can finally destroy all those liberal elites who allegedly look down on Palin, and all those allegedly pseudo-meritocrats who despise her. But Nixonianism with starbursts is still Nixonianism: an attitude disguised as a politics. And it is the enemy of intelligent governing conservatism – it invariably leads to bigger and bigger government to placate a class and identity-based coalition. It is the mirror image of the corrupt identity-politics liberalism of the 1970s and 1980s. Stoking resentment even further won't work.