Month: November 2009

The Insecurity Of The Palinites

TNC confesses:

There are times, in this business, when I am incredibly aware that I'm the black dude in the room. One of those moments is whenever I hear  conservative writers announcing that Sarah Palin has been persecuted, or that one of her virtues is that she annoys liberals. You see that sort of thing and it occurs to you that Palin attachment, has little to do with Palin, and a lot to do with intellectual insecurity.

I feel like I've stepped into someone else's fight, like I'm watching people who couldn't win the respect of their Harvard professors, or couldn't cut it on the Yale debate team, exact a quixotic revenge. It's in all the rhetoric–Palin represents "real America." Obama represents effete, Merlot-sipping braniac "elites."

They are as insecure as she is. For good reason.

Weekly Standard, Palin’s Mouthpiece

Alex Knepper reviews Continetti's new book:

Continetti repeatedly equates left-wing bloggers with “the elite media.” Blog post after blog post is cited, especially from writers for the Huffington Post. Using this bizarre methodology, one could quote from RedState and WorldNetDaily, seeking quotes to show that there was a “media persecution campaign” against Barack Obama, alleging all sorts of crazy things, and even questioning his citizenship!

Leave Sarah Alone! Ctd

A reader writes:

In response to your other reader emails requesting that you leave Sarah alone, let me say – don't leave her alone!  I am currently living overseas in Sydney and let me tell you, she is the international face of the Republican party.  Unlike parliamentary systems of government where there is a clear opposition leader, in the US there is no clear leader.  So for whatever reason (I'll leave that analysis up to the experts) Sarah Palin has become the international de facto face of the opposition.  No one in Sydney knows who John Boehner is.  No one knows who Mitch McConnell is.  Yes, they know John McCain, but he is old news.  Whenever you read or hear a story down here about political opposition to any of Obama's policy initiatives it is always Sarah Palin that is quoted. 

Like it or not, she is the current face of the GOP. That's why it is necessary that she be treated as a serious politician and not simply as a celebrity.

Exactly. If you disagree, by all means email. But if you really disagree, read someone else. I'm in this till it's over and I get some answers – not because of Palin, but because of what Palin has revealed about the sick state of the American media and political elite.

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XXXIV: Pulling Out Of Michigan

Here we go again. Yesterday, Sarah Palin said the following to Oprah Winfrey on the air:

WINFREY: Didn’t several times they say to you when actually you mentioned, when you were talking about pulling out of Michigan and you said I wished we’d stayed in Michigan. Weren’t you told then, Sarah just stay on script?

PALIN: Right, told after wards and that, that was always puzzling to me because if I were to respond to a reporter’s questions very candidly, honestly, for instance, they say, “what do you think about the campaign pulling out of Michigan” and I think, “darn I wish we weren’t. Every vote matters, I can’t wait to get back to Michigan” and then told afterwards that, “oh, you screwed up. You went rogue on us Sarah, you’re not supposed to be.” And my reminder to the campaign was, I didn’t know we pulled out of Michigan. My entire VP team, we didn’t know that we had pulled out. I’m sorry, I apologize, but speaking candidly to a reporter.

This was a lie. And we know it was a lie the way we know that 33 other statements by Palin are lies – because objective reality proves it so. On October 3, as Matt Corley explains, Palin told Carl Cameron that she disagreed with the decision to pull out of Michigan. How can she have disagreed with something that she now says she didn't know at the time? Here's the money section of the Cameron interview:

CAMERON: Thanks very much, Governor. I'm going get the hook. I have one quick political question for you that if I don't ask you, I would be (INAUDIBLE).

Yesterday, just before the debate it was announced that the campaign was going to withdraw some of its exercises in Michigan, essentially leave Michigan for Obama to win. What's going on there?

PALIN: Well, that's not a surprise because the polls are showing we're not doing as well there, evidently, as we would like to. But, I (INAUDIBLE) up this morning, also. I fired a quick e-mail and said, oh, come on. Do we have to call it there? Todd and I would happy to get to Michigan and walk through those plants where car manufacturers [sic].

We'd be so happy to get to speak with the people there in Michigan, who are hurting because the economy is hurting. Whatever we can do and whatever Todd and I can do in realizing what their challenges in that state are, as we can relate to them and connect with them and promise

them that we won't let them down in the administration. I want to get

back to Michigan and I want to try.

And then the smoking gun, via Walshe and Conroy:

The e-mail that Palin sent was, in fact, essentially how she described it to Cameron. She wrote to her traveling staff and top McCain advisers, “If there’s any time, Todd and I would love a quick return to Michigan-we’d tour the plants, etc. . . . If it does McC any good. I know you have a plan, but I hate to see us leave Michigan. We’ll do whatever we had [sic] to do there to give it a 2nd effort.”

A senior aide replied, “Michigan is out of reach unless something drastic happens. We must win oh and hopefully pa.”

Palin replied that she “got it,” but her subsequent interview with Cameron had shown that she hadn’t. She acknowledged as much in a post-interview e-mail to senior staff, writing, “Oops-I mentioned something about that to Carl Cameron and it’s now recorded that I’d love to give Michigan the ol’ college try.”

So she wants both to insist that she was a team-player and to insist that she was going rogue. Only in Sarah Palin's mind can those two realities be simultaneously true.

So here's a challenge for the MSM. Who will be the first interviewer to ask Palin why she lied twice to Oprah's face?

Why Palin Will Run

Nate Silver makes his case:

Until she runs for office again…Palin's role is basically that of a celebrity on her own behalf, and a rabble-rouser on behalf of the GOP. Although each of those things can occupy a goodly amount of one’s time, the media is likely to tire of Palin if she’s not actually making news, and Palin herself may grow tired of not being the center of attention. Moreover, there’s not any evidence that laying low seems to help Palin’s standing with the public; on the contrary, her numbers seemed to have have declined a lot during the past several months, a period during which (until recently) she was not making much news.

The reason I suspect this may be the case is because Palin’s popularity seems to stem not from any particular attributes that she possesses as a candidate, but rather from the reactions that she seems to induce from other people. Only by being in the spotlight can Palin induce liberal pundits to say rude things about her, fellow candidates to behave awkwardly around her, etc. Only in this way can she be the martyr and the underdog, qualities that conceal some of her potential inadequacies.

I get the sense from the beginning of this tour that Palin may consciously want this and intend this, but is unconsciously seeking her own self-destruction. Her actions, as always, are not strategic. They are a function of emotion, paranoia, delusions of reality and some kind of professional death-wish. The question is simply how long she can continue before this whole thing implodes.

But then I've thought she was on the verge of self-destruction from Day One. I didn't think she'd be on the ticket by election day, remember. So what do I know?

Chart Of The Day

Chart-palin-CBS

Brian Montopoli reports:

Just 23 percent of those surveyed in a new CBS News poll have a favorable view of the former Alaska governor. That matches her favorable rating in July, when Palin announced she was resigning from her job as governor. Thirty-eight percent, meanwhile, have an unfavorable view of Palin — also roughly matching her July rating. […]

Among independents, Palin has a net negative rating, with 21 percent viewing her favorably and 36 percent viewing her unfavorably. Most Americans do not want to see Palin run for president in 2012. Two in three say they don't want to see a Palin run, while 24 percent say they would like to see her jump into the race.

Finally A President Not Governed By Fear

James Joyner argues against a civilian trial for KSM:

[T]hese men are not citizens of the United States.  Second, they’re accused war criminals.  They simply should not be tried in U.S. civilian courts.  Rather, they should either be held accountable in a Nuremberg-style international forum or treated as war criminals by a U.S. military tribunal under the mechanisms provided by Congress and approved by the Supreme Court. Aside from the virtual certainty that the trial will devolve into a media circus, there’s an incredibly good chance that Mohammed and his comrades will go free.  The fact that KSM was repeatedly waterboarded would seem to taint any subsequent evidence, including his own confession.

I think it's a potentially brilliant move. I do not believe for one moment that this case was brought in a civilian court without sufficient evidence to convict KSM of criminality to put him away for good. But what an open civilian case will also do – and it's why a war criminal like John Yoo is so apoplectic – is reveal the extent to which the brutal torture of KSM was unnecessary, and led to the government's inability to prosecute him to the full extent of the law.

It will be a civic lesson to America and the world. It will show the evil of terrorism and the futility and danger of torture. It will be a way in which Cheney's torture regime can be revealed in all its grotesque excess at the same time as KSM's vile religious extremism is exposed for its murderous nihilism. That all this will take place in New York – close to where the mass murder took place – is a particularly smart touch.

This will, then, be a Nuremberg-style event – because it will pit Qaeda barbarism against the cooling, calm and resolute nature of real Western justice in the clear light of history. But it does one more critical thing. It reveals a new confidence in ourselves and the Western way of life.

When you listen to the Fox News right speak about this, they reveal amazing levels of fear. They have been truly spooked by these men with long beards and chilling eyes. They are so scared of them they are willing to drop any and all legal principles that the West has historically used with respect to mass murderers. Their fear brought them to institute torture, and to engage in mass brutality against prisoners of war in every theater of combat in a manner that will tragically taint the honor of the US military for a very long time. It led them to establish Gitmo, to create for the world a reverse symbol of the Statue of Liberty, and imprint it on the minds and in the consciences of an entire generation of human beings, whose view of America will never be the same.

It made speedy prosecution of any of those who allegedly plotted and planned 9/11 impossible – and will make actual prosecution of any of them extremely hard. It turns out, then, that the primary (if not the only) thing we had to fear – was fear itself. It was our fear that gave al Qaeda so many propaganda victories. 

And it is the refusal to be afraid that reflects the decision to bring this fanatic mass murderer back to the scene of the crime, to remind the world, all these years later, of why he is on trial, to restore a patriotic pride in the system we have, a system which it is al Qaeda's goal to destroy.

I believe this is the best symbolic answer to 9/11: a trial, with due process, after tempers have calmed somewhat, that exposes this evil for all it truly was. And also reveals the tragedy of an American government that lost its nerve and has now, under a new president, regained it.