Month: November 2009

Denver, Colorado, 7.18 am

David Benjamin:

There are no lies in Sarah's book; nor in her life, nor in her heart. Utterances that seem untrue are not lies, because Sarah believes them true. If she says one thing, then later forgets what she said and says the opposite, Sarah Palin is neither lying nor mistaken, nor forgetful, because at each moment, she believes what she has said. And a minute later, she will believe something else, if she says it. Whatever she says, if she says it, will be true. But if it's not, so what? It's words, only words.

Sooner or later, words fail everyone. This goes double for Sarah and her faithful. Sarah Palin is the voice – and the embodiment – of the inarticulate.

Douthat applauds the pro-life movement's gradual acceptance of women in the workplace:

During the ‘08 election, you’d often hear media types buzzing about how Palin was a bad mother for putting her political ambitions ahead of her family; you’d almost never hear that from pro-lifers. Some of this reflects partisan biases, obviously — but some of it reflects a real sea change in how religious conservatives view women in the workplace.

Indeed, you might say that the pro-life movement has done an impressive job of embracing, albeit slowly, the positive achievements of the feminist revolution, while remaining steadfast in its opposition to that revolution’s darker consequences. (Well, O.K., you might not say that, but I probably would.)

Matt Taibbi shares the Dish's desire to have politics be about arguments about solutions to emergent problems. He's not unaware that the culture war has helped prevent this, which is the core reason I supported Obama in 2007. But Taibbi sees Palin as a kind of anti-matter to Obama's matter. And he's dead on:

Rush [Limbaugh] is no Einstein, but the man does research. It may be fallacious and completely dishonest research, but he does it all the same. His battlefield is world politics and most of the time the relevant action is taking place in Washington. As good as he is at what he does, he still has to travel to the action; he himself isn’t the action.

Sarah Palin’s battlefield, on the other hand, is whatever is happening five feet in front of her face. She is building a political career around the little interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding her sawdust-filled head. 

And in the process she connects with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America on a plane that’s far more elemental than the mega-ditto schtick. Most normal people cannot connect on an emotional level with Rush’s meanderings on how Harry Reid is buying off Mary Landrieu with pork in the health care bill. They can, however, connect with stories about how top McCain strategist and Karl Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt told poor Sarah to shut her pie-hole on election day, or how her supposed allies in the McCain campaign stabbed her in the back by leaking gossip about her to reporters, how Schmidt used the word “fuck” in front of her daughter, or even with the strange tales about Schmidt ordering Sarah to consult with a nutritionist to improve her campaign endurance when she herself knew she just needed to get out in the fresh air and run (If there’s one thing Sarah Palin knows, it’s herself!).

A People reader asks Palin, "How is your daughter Bristol doing as a young mother?" She replies:

She's spectacular. She's amazing. Still doesn't get a lot of sleep because Tripp is a light sleeper through the night and Bristol's got him all the time. But she's going to college, she's working and taking care of the baby. She's got her hands full. But very, very strong, very optimistic. She teaches me good lessons through all of this, too. She keeps things in perspective. She is realizing that her good decisions today will bear fruit, perhaps years down the road, but she's seeing now that it's worth it to take the high road when it comes to the [custody] controversy with Levi [Johnston] and him doing his porn stuff [posing for Playgirl]. It's all about the baby, it's all about what he is going to grow up with, and she knows she has to pull even more weight to make sure Tripp has a good upbringing.

More unprompted attacks on the father of her grandson – "doing his porn stuff". And more inconsistency:

note how she both accuses Levi of not being a good father and also criticizes him for seeking legal custody of his son, Tripp. Again, there is no logic here and no behavior that would comport with a mother seeking the best for her family. Something else is going on here between Levi and Sarah, some game of chicken in which Palin keeps goading, placating and then attacking the father of her grandson. And the father of her grandson, a mere 19 year old, is clearly unintimidated. Why unintimidated? In his words:

I just look at her in disgust. … It's almost funny, that she's like, 46 years old, and she's battling a 19 year old, and I'm winning. And I'm telling the truth. She's lying and losing. … If you look at her face, she's got — she's really — you can tell her mind's going 100 miles an hour when Oprah asked her those Levi questions. … I've got a lot more knowledge and credibility than she gives me credit for.

It's a war of nerves right now behind this world-famous politician-celebrity and a 19 year old from Wasilla. and Levi seems the only one not even beginning to buy her constant b.s.

(Photo: Sarah Palin with child, Trig, at a book tour in Grand Rapids. Michigan. By Bill Pugliano/Getty).

The finalists are in. Few literary hounds are surprised by this entry:

The Pulitzer prize-winning [Philip] Roth makes the line-up for The Humbling, in which the ageing actor Simon converts Pegeen, a lesbian, to heterosexuality. The Literary Review singled out a scene in which Simon and Pegeen pick up a girl from a bar and convince her to take part in a threesome. Simon looks on as Pegeen uses her green dildo to great effect.

"This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be."

Hitch reviewed Roth's Exit Ghost a few years back and similarly gagged.

Bella DePaulo gets it too:

From my post as an outside observer, it seems to me that Sarah Palin doesn’t care much about the truth. In that way, she is a very special liar. Instead, Palin seems to love the effect her disingenuous pronouncements have on her audiences and so she just runs with them. Her fans adore her claims about “death panels” and about Obama supposedly “palling around with terrorists” and all the rest. Look at how they roar with approval and fervor when she tosses that red, bloody moose meat to them – how can the mere (non) truth-value of what she is saying ever compete with that? Plus, the fact that her taunts drive her detractors over the edge – well, that just adds to the fun!

Sarah Palin seems to relish the reaction she gets to her claims and complaints. Among her core fan base, the theme that the mean media and the full-of-themselves campaign staffers were unfair to noble, authentic, small-town Sarah seems to be a winner. Whether it is really true is almost irrelevant.

I do love the irony of Palin flaunting her authenticity with lies.

All the best one-liners from Roger Sterling.

The 100 greatest quotes from the show (NSFW and spoilers).

Researchers are trying to create microchips that function like neurons:

“Energy efficiency isn’t just a matter of elegance. It fundamentally limits what we can do with computers,” [Kwabena Boahen, a Stanford scientist] says. Despite the amazing progress in electronics technology—today’s transistors are 1/100,000 the size that they were a half century ago, and computer chips are 10 million times faster—we still have not made meaningful progress on the energy front. And if we do not, we can forget about truly intelligent humanlike machines and all the other dreams of radically more powerful computers…Most modern supercomputers are the size of a refrigerator and devour $100,000 to $1 million of electricity per year. Boahen’s Neurogrid will fit in a briefcase, run on the equivalent of a few D batteries, and yet, if all goes well, come close to keeping up with these Goliaths.