Month: November 2009

Palin’s Brain Speaks

Kristol thinks McCain will win re-election:

I predict that Palin will come to Arizona next summer to campaign for McCain, will make an impassioned case for him, and will help him win. She will thereby repay McCain for his confidence in picking her last year, help keep McCain as a crucial voice in the Senate for a strong foreign policy, and get credit for being a different kind of populist conservative—a Reaganite, not a Buchananite, populist—than the immigration-obsessed, voter-alienating (he was ousted in 2006 in a Republican district) Hayworth.

Predict? This is obviously a way to prevent the McCain-Palin camps' civil war from escalating so that the full details of the chaotic 2008 campaign remain under wraps.

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XXXV: Ambushing Piper

A key part of Sarah Palin's work of magical realism is her victimization at the hands of the evil librul media. So this part of "Going Rogue" is par for the course. Peter Hamby:

"In one early press conference we noticed that our local reporters were flanked by a couple of reporters from the Lower 48 who'd been hanging out around Juneau in search of material for their own Sarah Palin book," Palin writes. "We never shut our doors to anyone, so people of all kinds attended these press availabilities. But glancing along the side wall, I recognized these particular folks as the same ones who had cornered Piper on her walk home from Harborview Elementary School and talked to her for who knows how long about who knows what."… According to Palin, Piper returned home [after a press conference] and told her mother: "Mom, remember those reporters who came on the campaign plane with us? You know, the ones Nicolle [Wallace] said didn't like us very much? They just interviewed me on the sidewalk." Palin adds after the incident, Piper was no longer allowed to walk to or from school by herself.

Both the reporters (one of whom worked for Fox News in the campaign) and Wallace deny the story outright.

Conroy and Walshe said in a statement Tuesday that in the course of

reporting for their book, they conducted 190 interviews, including sit-downs with Palin's parents and her husband Todd.

"We did not, however, interview Piper Palin, nor did we corner her on her way home from school," Conroy and Walshe told CNN in a statement. "Contrary to Governor Palin's recollection of having seen us both at a press conference, Scott has never attended a press conference in Alaska."

Wallace, who advised Palin on media strategy during the campaign but fell out favor with the candidate, also rejected Palin's version of the story. She said it would have been impossible for Piper to have used her by name in a discussion about the campaign reporters in question, because Wallace never spoke to Piper about them.

"I have never met Shushannah and Scott and had never seen Shushannah until I saw her on TV yesterday," Wallace said in an e-mail to CNN. "Couldn't have picked either of them out of a line up and never heard their names or had any idea who they were until after the campaign ended."

I put this in the odd lies category because the fact that Scott Conroy never attended any press conferences in Alaska is an empirical fact that makes Palin's story, like so many others she has told, empirically untrue. From Conroy's and Walshe's account, Piper liked them and bumped into them once in Juneau and told them how excited she was to be back in Alaska. For some reason, Palin is extremely defensive about even pleasant interactions of her kids with anyone in the press outside her control. She burst into Bristol's lone TV interview by herself halfway through. 

Palin Witness Fact Check IV

In one part of her work of magical realism, Palin goes off on the press's alleged recklessness and bias in wondering whether her extraordinary stories about her fifth pregnancy were, er, accurate. Here's the passage from Going Rogue:

Formerly reputable outlets like the Atlantic ran with the loony conspiracy theory that I was not Trig's mother – perhaps it was Bristol or Willow, they suggested. Even the Anchorage Daily News reporters, who knew better, couldn't get enough of the story.

I'm not going to go over all this again, but suffice it to say that Palin is right that I certainly thought that the stories in the public record were fantastic and merited probing further and asked the campaign itself to issue some medical records to nip the crazy – but not quite impossible – rumor in the bud. They reacted with outrage that the question was even askable. Alas, the only objective evidence we ever got in the end was a one-page, general statement from her doctor, issued a few hours before polling opened last November. So I'm guilty for treating this as a genuine factual question – rather than as a self-evident absurdity to be dismissed. I'll take my lumps for that (and have). But I haven't "run with" any alternative to the most likely fact that Trig is indeed Sarah's biological child. I just refuse to lie about my own skepticism of everything Palin says without proof. As for Willow being Trig's mother, I have to say that has never occurred to me for an instant and the Dish has no such reference. Maybe Palin is thinking of some other outlet.

But the attack on the Anchorage Daily News is much more unfair. 

The ADN's editor, Pat Dougherty, did not run a single story on this in the campaign. It was only after the campaign that the ADN attempted to do a follow-up to destroy for ever what editor Pat Dougherty believed was a nutty but weirdly resilient rumor. The ADN did not "know better," in other words, or else they wouldn't have tried to do a story (which never ran) at all. All they wanted was to dispel the rumors – long after the campaign was over – as a matter of house-keeping. But instead of Palin offering an easily found medical record or birth certificate or some such, she went off the wall with an email exchange with the editor that remains a high point of Palin drama and defensiveness:

[I]s your paper really still pursuing the sensational lie that I am not Trig's mother? Is it true you have a reporter still bothering my state office, my very busy doctor (who's already set the record straight for you), and the school district, in pursuit of your ridiculous conspiracy?

Read the whole email exchange between Palin and Dougherty and make your own mind up.

Just One Republican

The GOP is trying to get voters to forget their fiscal recklessness over the last eight years. And the conservative media – which is sadly far too often just a partisan mouthpiece – is helping the amnesia along. One of the few principled fiscal conservatives in the Bush-Cheney years. Bruce Bartlett, is refusing to forget. He tells a classic tale of one Republican, Trent Franks of Arizona. Here is what Franks is now saying about the health insurance reform in the Congress:

"I would remind my Democratic colleagues that their children, and every generation thereafter, will bear the burden caused by this bill. They will be the ones asked to pay off the incredible debt," Franks declared on Nov. 7.

So what was Franks' position on Medicare D? He voted for it, after some of the most egregious Congressional arm-twisting in memory (so egregious Rove et al extended debate for three hours and turned off the C-Span cameras). What is the difference between Medicare D and the current health insurance proposal? You guessed it:

The Medicare drug benefit was a pure giveaway with a gross cost greater than either the House or Senate health reform bills how being considered. Together the new bills would cost roughly $900 billion over the next 10 years, while Medicare Part D will cost $1 trillion.

Moreover, there is a critical distinction–the drug benefit had no dedicated financing, no offsets and no revenue-raisers; 100% of the cost simply added to the federal budget deficit, whereas the health reform measures now being debated will be paid for with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, adding nothing to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (See here for the Senate bill estimate and here for the House bill.)

The fantastic hypocrisy of today's Republicans – their refusal to come to terms with their own responsibility for the current fiscal crisis, their attempt to project their own profligacy onto a new administration struggling with one of the toughest economic legacies of any White House since Reagan – makes me ill. And how a man like Karl Rove can go on television complaining about the debt boggles the mind.

Well: it doesn't boggle the mind as long as you accept that he is a principle-free, ends-over-means tool.

Heads I Lose, Tails You Win

A few days ago, many Republican bloggers thought KSM didn't deserve a trial. Now they are calling the civilian trial a "show trial" because it is possible that the government could continue to detain KSM in the unlikely instance he gets off. Allahpundit:

Not only will we be right back where we started, it will expose the federal trial as nothing more than a show trial.  Show trials are conducted by despots and dictators to give only a thin veneer of legality to political detentions and executions.  If the state isn’t prepared to abide by the decision of the court, including dismissals and acquittals, then the use of the trial system is worse than useless.  It demeans the federal system needed for Americans to seek unbiased justice.

Drum makes an obvious counter-point:

I'm not categorically opposed to using military tribunals in cases like this, but that's hardly an option anymore thanks to the Bush administration's contemptuous efforts to turn them into obvious kangaroo courts.  Hell, even military lawyers couldn't stomach them.  As for an international court, that would be fine too except that conservatives have blocked every attempt to make the United States a party to them.  The only real choice left, if you want ensure something within shouting distance of a fair trial, is a civilian court.

I'm just delighted and amazed that anyone on the right now cares about "show trials". Where were they during the Bush administration's disgustingly rigged "military tribunals"? Oh, yes, I remember – where the tea-partiers were when Bush added $5 trillion to the debt. Way up their own posteriors.

Hockey Mom With A Glass Jaw

Jessica Valenti describes how Palin is trying to have it both ways when it comes to gender:

In her widely watched Oprah appearance, for example, Palin said that she resented people questioning her ability to serve as vice-president while being a mother to five children – something a man would never be asked. But Palin also complained that in her interview with Couric, she thought she would be speaking to the reporter "working mom [to] working mom" and that she was annoyed with "her badgering and questions". In other words, Palin thought that because Couric was a woman, she wouldn't take her job as a journalist seriously. Palin expected a puff piece instead of pesky questions about economics, abortion and Palin's policies – you know, things a "working mom" couldn't possibly be bothered with.

If one started a list of things that Palin wants both ways, it would exceed the list of her 34 documented odd lies.