Month: July 2010

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Weigel wrote, "Were Sarah Palin to become president and everything the Trig Truthers believed to be proven right, it wouldn't matter at all."

She is a politician, and she has placed her son squarely at the core of her political identity. She makes Trig matter.  Think of it this way: remember Al Gore's story about his son's accident – how he looked into his child's lifeless eyes and everything changed that day?  Gore told that story many, many times in front of a national audience – as a metaphor for the direction the United States was headed, as a reason to vote for him.  You cannot tell me that you wouldn't care if it turned out that that fundamental, life-altering story turned out to be full of lies.

Another writes:

It's about credibility. Sarah Palin is the only candidate from the 2008 presidential election who never released her medical records. She is the only candidate who never gave an open press conference. And the insane story of her son's birth is obviously a lie, and she used this lie repeatedly throughout the campaign, and used her special-needs baby as a stage prop during campaign stops, in order to WIN VOTES.

This woman, who has blocked-out the press entirely, and who has been caught in numerous lies for which the press never holds her accountable, could conceivably become the leader of the Free World. How can you possibly say her credibility isn't important?

Another:

I'm sure you've already had an avalanche of emails regarding Mr. Weigel's posts on Trig Birtherism, but I'd like to add my thoughts to the spectrum of perspective, as it were.

Trig does matter, very much, because of the public identity Sarah Palin constructed for herself during the campaign, one which she seems to be re-outfitting for another run now. The image she is trying to sell to the public is one of a woman who believes so strongly in the pro-life movement that she carried to term a Downs Syndrome child knowing the risks and consequences, and continues to care for him today. This is a woman who is supposed to be a Mama Bear, tough as nails, willing to do anything for her family, and willing to go to bat for the country with the same kind of grit and determination – a candidate with a hunting rifle on one hip and an infant on the other.

Narratives like the story about Trig's birth are what help candidates build empathy with their voters, just as Obama's memories of watching his mother battle with insurance companies even in the hospital bed brought a personal and human element into the Health Care debate. A candidate who goes into labor in the middle of a convention, sticks it out, and flies back home to give birth, gee, she's gotta be really damn tough, right? And any woman who has given birth is supposed to be able to empathize with that, and look up to her because of the personal strength it would take to hold together that long.

The fundamental problem with the story isn't that it's physically improbable, though. It isn't even that it may not be true. It's that either way, it does more to discredit her than help her. It's possible that somehow, someway, she managed to leak amniotic fluid and undergo contractions with enough stealth that the assembled convention-goers and later airline staff did not cotton on that the professedly pregnant governor was in fact giving birth to a high-risk baby. If it's true, though, she was doing herself no favors. It makes no sense to act the way she did if she was in labor, none whatsoever. Does acting stupidly automatically mean the story's false? No. But it does mean she put herself and her unborn child in inexcusable risk, in a situation that demanded that critical decisions be made quickly and calmly.

Was she deliberately choosing to put her unborn child in danger? Was she simply not thinking? Either way, her decisions, as she related them, make her look like a poor person to have making important decisions in a high-stakes environment. If she was indeed so careless and thoughtless with the safety of her own baby, how can we, the voters, believe that she would be any more cautious with the nation?

It almost becomes less damning for her to be lying about her in-labor-jet-setting adventures.  I'd rather she was simply exaggerating, trying to spin a tall tale about her nerves of steel to wow the other moms. Even so, if the Republicans ran with Kerry's purple hearts in 2004 and dredged up the swiftboaters to discredit him, for them to cry foul over scrutiny of Palin's flimsy story is about as believable as the Dutch forwards rolling and weeping in the World Cup. Litbrit made an excellent comparison of the Trig Birth Tale to a war story, and I think that's dead-on.

More importantly, if Sarah Palin continues to cite that story, to utilize it to sell her image to voters and build her Mommy Street Cred, then we have every right to examine, prod, and criticize her decisions and the believability of the story. She cannot be afforded the luxury of "I believe because it is absurd" on the grounds that it involves her family or that it doesn't affect her as a potential candidate. She is the one who brings her family into the debate for one thing, and moreover – as a candidate, the Trig story means she's at best an exaggerator, and at worst an outright liar, rash and stubborn to the point that she'd endanger her baby to deliver him where she wanted to, or a wretched decision-maker under considerable pressure. If that doesn't impact her candidacy, I don't know what does. And if anyone thinks she isn't going to make another run at something, they're deluding themselves as much as she is.

That's all, from a future voter. Have a good afternoon, gentlemen, and thank you for staffing the Dish while Mr. Sullivan is on his hilariously ill-timed vacation. Serendipity, indeed.

(Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty)

by Dave Weigel

Ben Smith points to Gallup's new polling on the current vice president and his two predecessors, which finds that Al Gore — while still more popular than Dick Cheney — is the only one Americans are growing more sour on.

The July 8-11 Gallup poll, finding 44% of Americans viewing Gore favorably and 49% unfavorably, was conducted after the announcement that he and his wife were separating, and amid a police investigation into allegations that he committed sexual assault in 2006. Gallup last measured Gore's image in October 2007, after he was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, when 58% of Americans had a favorable view of him.

Two things here. First: Wow, what a victory for the "undernews."* When the news first broke that the Gores were divorcing, the Responsible Media published thoughtful pieces about how the marriage was never going to work anyway. It took the National Enquirer to jumpstart discussion of Gore's alleged assault of masseuse, which jogged the Oregonian into publishing what its reporters knew. (By the way, JournoList fans — one of the final threads there was about the ridiculousness of the press not covering l'affaire Gore, so there goes the "liberal narrative factory" theory.) No National Enquirer story, no attention for this scandal.

Second: Forty-four percent isn't the worst approval rating for a pol in the year 2010, but if you're an environmentalist, and you've spent two decades waiting for comprehensive energy legislation to pass, how much does it hurt to have your most powerful advocate knocked on the mat (by his own punch) with a few short months left to pass that legislation?

*I'll give the credit for this phrase to Mickey Kaus unless someone else wants to take credit.

by David Frum

Yesterday, just as predicted, the radio host Mark Levin vituperatively exploded on his Facebook page in response to Conor Friedersdorf and me. He called me "FrumBum." Ouch. Ow.

What will happen today? 

Yesterday afternoon, Conor tweeted a link to another item on Levin's FB page. An hour before deploying his famous wit against me, Levin had also written the following:

In radio and TV you find hosts who claim to be the first to do this or that. It is an effort to persuade their listeners and viewers that they have had the intelligence and courage to take on Obama and these powers before anyone. The problem is that, for the most part, it's not true. Most radio hosts and cable hosts tend to be followers, or they hope to seize on a concept developed by another, to claim credibility and draw attention to themselves.

In my case, all my commentary, whether on radio or in my books, is original or gives credit to those who generated the thoughts first. I believe it is very important that radio hosts, like writers or even students, have the grace, class, and ethics to play by the rules. Perversely, this sometimes is said to evoke jealousy. It has nothing to do with jealousy and everything to do with integrity. In any event, I have taken lots and lots of heat for characterizing Obama as a socialist and Marxist when I first did so well over a year ago. If you care, here's a clip from my June 15, 2009 radio program:

There are others which date earlier, but this will suffice.

You may wonder: Why would anyone boast of having been the first to introduce a noxious falsehood into American life? Why take credit for ugly and stupid propaganda?

But human vanity is an amazing thing. There is always someone who wishes to be known as the person who ate the most hot dogs. Back in medieval York, I'm sure there was considerable scuffling over who was the first to think of accusing the Jews of grinding up Christian babies to make matzah.

In the Levin case, though, there is at least entertainment potential. Levin's paranoid accusations may be nasty, but at least the thin-skinned host's distinctive combination of vanity and vulnerability offers Conor an unendingly promising hobby. And the next time Levin calls Conor "Friedersdork," Conor should reply with John Cleese of Monty Python: "Be quiet or I shall taunt you some more!" 

by David Frum

James Capretta explains why Obamacare won't bend the cost curve:

American health care has many virtues, but it is highly inefficient because it is so fragmented. Physicians, hospitals, clinics, labs, and pharmacies are all financially independent of one another. They all send separate bills when they render services; what’s worse, there’s very little coordination among them when they are taking care of patients, which leads to a disastrous level of duplicative services and low-quality care.

At the heart of this dysfunction is Medicare — and, more precisely, Medicare’s dominant fee-for-service (FFS) insurance structure.

For FFS insurance to make economic sense, the patients must pay some of the cost when they receive care. In the vast majority of cases, though, FFS enrollees face no additional cost when they use more services — and health-care providers earn more by providing more services and billing the program. Not surprisingly, Medicare has suffered for years from an explosion in the volume of services used by FFS participants.

FFS compounds this by stifling much-needed service-delivery innovation through its use of outdated and inefficient payment rules. The result is that today’s fragmented and dysfunctional system is virtually frozen in place — for everyone, not just Medicare beneficiaries.

The new health law attempts to address these problems through a top-down payment-reform program, with the federal government using the leverage of Medicare reimbursements to essentially build new, provider-run, managed-care entities.

But the federal government has never shown any capacity to build such a network, despite many attempts in the past. Politicians and regulators have found it impossible to withstand the political pressure that comes when they try to make distinctions among hospitals and physician groups based on quality measures that are themselves subject to dispute.

Instead, Congress and Medicare’s regulators have cut costs in the past with payment-rate reductions that apply to every licensed provider, without regard to any measures of quality or efficient performance. Tellingly, that’s exactly how the recent health law achieves most of its Medicare budget cuts.

From Nate Silver:

There are now about 250 million people worldwide living in jurisdictions which provide for marriage equity, as this colorful chart will help to demonstrate. The big spike you see in 2008 is California recognizing gay marriage through the courts, and then un-recognizing it through the passage of Proposition 8.

by David Frum

On the FrumForum site, Dr Jean Howard-Hill of the National African American Republican Caucus points out the dysfunctional asymmetry of the Republican Party's relationship to the Tea Party. Yesterday the RNC issued a statement absolving the Tea Party of racism and praising them as wishing nothing more than a return to the principles of the Constitution.

Recent statements claiming the Tea Party movement is racist are not only destructive, they are not true. Tea Party activists are your mom or dad, your local grocer, banker, hairdresser or doctor. They are a diverse group of passionate Americans who want to ensure that our nation returns to founding principles that honor the Constitution, limit government’s role in our lives, and support policies that empower free markets and freeenterprise. Enough with the name-calling.

Howard-Hill replies:

If indeed the Tea Party Movement is truly nonpartisan and is not a Republican movement as it has often been contended, then the question is: why is the RNC or any other Republican organization, weighing in on this matter in defense of the movement? This was not a Republican matter which required an RNC response or involvement.  It is a Tea Party matter which needs to be resolved between the Tea party and the NAACP.

The GOP is not in a position to take on a movement which has no leadership which — when issues such as this arise — can be held accountable. Nor can it control what happens at events or who appears and participates. Why then issue a blank check?

And after all – it's not as if the Tea Party activists return the favor.

by Dave Weigel

Jesse Walker, keying off my argument about Fox News and the Panthers, thinks that's the case.

The New Black Panther Party plays the same role for the right that Hutaree-style militants play for the left: They're a tiny, uninfluential group whose importance is magnified to keep the base excited. Left and right wind up worrying more about each other than they care about the institutions that actually govern the country. It's great if your goal is maintaining movement identity, but not if you're more interested in changing policy than collecting scalps.

I like this comparison and think it's 99% true. The 1% where it's not true — the left gets attention when warning about militia dangers because of Oklahoma City. Unfair, probably, but militia members who mean well know how damaging the legacy of Timothy McVeigh has been. The left knows this, and that's why you see a rush to paint conservatives with the "militia" brush — Americans hear it and think "like those terrorists who blew up the Murrah building!" By contrast, the fringe New Black Panthers are more silly than violent. The only "violence" I can think of them being involved came when they stupidly charged into volatile situations in racial hotspots, in order to get media attention. But I can't think of anyone who's charged them with violence.

That's not to defend the Panthers. It's just to point out the ridiculousness of this story. The Hutaree cult didn't pose a threat to anyone. These idiots don't pose a threat to anyone. It's easy, and lazy, to see a 30-second clip of scary guys in military garb and yell "Open-shut case! Voter intimidation! We have video!" But when you stop and realize that 1) no one has claimed the NBPP stopped them from voting, 2) the Philadelphia precinct was the only one where this tiny group pulled this stunt, and 3) they're about as threatening as any other group of racist newsletter editors, you realize the game being played.

by Chris Bodenner

Chris Rovzar gets in the mindset of the millions of teen girls for whom Bristol is trying to be a role model:

Thought: What if I can't raise this baby alone?
Well, What Happened to Bristol? Apparently, having a baby out of wedlock can make you famous, and give you a contract with Candie's. And apparently your family, because of public scrutiny, will back you up to the hilt, helping you care for your baby as if it is everyone's child. And your previously cash-strapped mom might also become a singular national industry and make like $12 million the year after your baby is born! So no worries there, certainly.

Thought: But what if I still love my bad-boy boyfriend, after all that?
Well, What Happened to Bristol? Well, Bristol still loved Levi. And lo and behold, Wasilla's resident brainless thug came around! After a year of trash-talking her family and doing everything he could to destroy Bristol's mother, Levi texted one day to say he loved her! And just like that, they got back together. Before they even talked it over with their parents, they were on the cover of a magazine. Posing like the beautiful family they were always meant to be! She landed the bad boy!

Gawker chases rumors of a reality show in the works. Lord let it be true.