Author: Andrew Sullivan

 
Sure, Palin can get Adam Bellow to drop the last fig leaf from his commercial privates and turn Jonathan Burnham into an openly gay publisher of a vicious homophobe, but what courage does that take? Sure, Palin can bamboozle the press corps with fantastic lies, and a press strategy currently being used by Tiger Woods, but in the face of all this, a 19-year-old was prepared to one-up her with Vanity Fair and Playgirl and act as if he had not a care in the world.

And what a story he has told.

It is as follows: Palin is a total fraud. She is not what she says she is. According to someone who lived with her for years, who fathered her grandson and fell in love with her daughter, the last thing she is is what her followers blindly believe: authentic.

She's a phony, according to Johnston, a negligent mother, a devious plotter, an alienated wife. Far from a "real American", she is layer upon layer of political artifice, designed cynically to appeal to pro-lifers and feminists, evangelicals and populists, independents and rock-ribbed Republicans, all laid on top of a fanatically narcissistic sociopathy. Here's a taste of what Johnston has asserted:

The Palin house was much different from what many people expect of a normal family, even before she was nominated for vice president. There wasn’t much parenting in that house. Sarah doesn’t cook, Todd doesn’t cook—the kids would do it all themselves: cook, clean, do the laundry, and get ready for school. Most of the time Bristol would help her youngest sister with her homework, and I’d barbecue chicken or steak on the grill.

Remember that Johnston is the only family member who actually knew and lived with Palin and has broken ranks. He could be lying, of course, or seeking revenge, or bargaining for more access to his son, or something else we don;t know about. But given Palin's record of dissimulation, it seems to me he deserves at least as fair a hearing as she has had, even if nothing like the millions she has raked in. His story deserves to be taken more seriously as a real account of what Palin really is. Until Wallace and Schmidt screw their courage to the sticking place, he's the best we've got.

Here, for example, is his recounting of an incident that few MSM observers can quite handle:

Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret—nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning this plan. She was nagging—she wouldn’t give up. She would say, “So, are you gonna let me adopt him?” We both kept telling her we were definitely not going to let her adopt the baby. I think Sarah wanted to make Bristol look good, and she didn’t want people to know that her 17-year-old daughter was going to have a kid.

So the "outrageous" conspiracy theory aired on the Internets in late August 2008 that Palin had a cockamamie idea to pass off her daughter's baby as her own actually happened, according to Johnston. But it was not about Trig as the soon-debunked rumors first had it – whom Bristol simply could not have chronologically given birth to. But it was about Tripp – and indicative of a deeply deceptive, half-nuts mentality. I mean: did Palin think she could ever have gotten away with that kind of baby switcheroo, when the real father and mother opposed it? Notice that this was not planned as an open adoption. It was designed to hide Bristol's pregnancy, which would remain a total secret, meaning "nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant," meaning in turn that Palin's own pregnancy would have had to be faked. Now, maybe Levi is just harassing Palin using half-baked Internet rumors about Trig to apply to Tripp. But, again, she is the one with the record of proven lies, not Johnston. And what this says about Palin's capability for outright deception is quite striking, if true.

Johnston's account for the reasons for Palin's bizarre resignation are also more convincing than Palin's classic insistence that she was quitting because she was not a quitter:

Sarah was sad for a while. She walked around the house pouting. I had

assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make "triple the money." It was, to her, "not as hard." She would blatantly say, "I want to just take this money and quit being governor." She started to say it frequently, but she didn't know how to do it. When she came home from work, it seemed like she was more and more stressed out. It seemed like she couldn't handle the job anymore. I think that she was just through with it all or that she'd become used to getting everything she wanted handed to her. She'd rather take the money and keep that kind of lifestyle. When a magazine offered six figures to be at the hospital when Bristol gave birth, she said yes at first but then told us not to do it.

She was not exactly a diligent governor either:

Throughout the years I spent with them, when Sarah got home from her office — almost never later than 5 and sometimes as early as noon — she usually walked in the door, said hello, and then disappeared into her bedroom, where she would hang out. Sometimes, she’d take an hourlong bath. Other times she sat on the living-room couch in her two-piece pajama set from Walmart — she had all the colors — with her hair down, watching house shows and wedding shows on TV. She always wanted things and she always wanted other people to get them for her. If she wanted a movie, Bristol and I would go to the video store; if she wanted food, we’d get her something to eat, like a Crunchwrap Supreme from Taco Bell. She’d try to bribe everyone in the house, or give us guilt trips. She used to make Bristol feel bad by telling her that she did everything for her. This was unfair because, even before the campaign, Bristol was already the mom in the house, and she got tired of having to take care of her siblings.

What can we make of this?

It's unverifiable – but no less so than Palin's autobiography. And compared with her bizarre, constantly changing stories and multiple lies about any number of empirically indisputable facts, Johnston's monosyllabic yeses and nos and plain English eye-witness accounts that have never changed are like oases of sanity and calm.

When I got to meet Johnston, I asked him simply how he seemed so calm as a nineteen year old up against an international celebrity with millions of dollars and every pimp in the "publishing" and political industries trying to suck up to her. "Because I'm tellin' the truth," was his simple, and immediate answer.

I can't know who's telling the truth for sure. But after a decade of frauds enabled and abetted by political corruption and media cowardice, Palin might well be the biggest fraud of all, perpetrating a hoax so massive no one can quite see it. Perhaps the most memorable quote of the year came when Levi said quite simply, even after unloading all of the above:

"There are some things that I have that are huge. And I haven't said them because I'm not gonna hurt her that way … I have things that can, you know — that would get her in trouble, and could hurt her. Will hurt her. But I'm not gonna go that far. You know, I mean, if I really wanted to hurt her, I could, very easily. But there's — I'm not gonna do it. I'm not going that far.

Or as he also put it:

:She knows what I got on her."

But the rest of us don't.

Yet.

(Photo: GQ).

Kevin Drum wants to know when Obama willl give up on bipartisanship:

Obama clearly seems dedicated to a program of compromise and bipartisan comity, and he wants to keep at it long enough to give it a real chance of working.  But how long is long enough?  I never really believed Republicans were ever likely to respond to olive branches in the first place — they need a few more years in the wilderness before they're willing to really take stock of the corner they've painted themselves into — so I'm not a good judge of this.  But it's been nearly a year now and Republicans, if anything, are more intransigent than they were on inauguration day. How much longer does Obama give them? Another year? Two? At what point does he finally give up and decide that he's just being played for a patsy?

He keeps going because the party that loses the middle is the party that looks the most intransigent and ideological. I hope he keeps up the kind of discipline he has so far.

A reader submits Merle Haggard's "If We Make It Through December." Lyrics after the jump:

If we make it through December
Everythings gonna be all right I know
It's the coldest time of winter
And I shivver when I see the fallin snow

If we make it through December
I got plans of bein in a warmer town come summer time
Maybe even California
If we make it through December we'll be fine

I got laid off down at the factory
And there timings not the greatest in the world
Heaven knows I been workin' hard
I wanted Christmas to be right for daddy's girl
Now I don't mean to hate December
It's meant to be the happy time of year
And why my little girl don't understand
Why daddy can't afford no Christmas here

If we make it through December
Everythings gonna be alright I know
It's the coldest time of winter
And I shivver when I see the fallin' snow

If we make it through December
I got plans of bein' in a warmer town come summer time
Maybe even California

If we make it through December we'll be fine

A reader writes:

I live very near Laredo and it is no more appropriate to talk about book stores in Laredo without mentioning Nuevo Laredo than it would be to talk about Brooklyn and fail to mention Queens. They are right on top of each other and most Laredoans routinely cross the border for groceries, tools and, yes, books. Nuevo Laredo, like much of Mexico, is awash in oodles of little book stores with titles primarily in Spanish, but English too. Book store life – with readings, discussion groups, good coffee and bad guitar playing – are very alive and well in Nuevo Laredo and enjoyed by the Laredo crowd as well.

"Pope Benedict’s action this week seeks to destroy the evidence, which is the point. If he were to have his declaration hoisted as a sign, it would say: “The Holocaust was the work of a few Nazis, period.” In fact, that has been a theme of his controversial papal statements on the subject. In Cologne, in 2005, he told an audience of German Jews that Nazi anti-Semitism “was born of neo-paganism,” as if it were unrelated to the long history of Christian anti-Judaism, embodied in the “Christ-killer” slander, and preached from nearly every Christian pulpit nearly every Good Friday for more than a thousand years. Speaking at Auschwitz in 2006, Benedict blamed the Holocaust “on a ring of criminals,” an exoneration of the larger German nation that is almost unheard of among the impressively self-critical Germans of Benedict’s generation. At the death camp, he went on to make the astonishing claim that by eliminating Jews, the Nazis were “ultimately” attacking the church. He complained of God’s silence, but not of the previous pope’s," – Jim Carroll, whose Practicing Catholic was one of my favorite books of the year.

Another performance by the soon-to-be knight:

A reader writes:

Three years ago my partner and I visited India.  The sites that impressed me even more than the Taj Mahal were the man-made Ajanta and Ellora Caves.  For centuries, Buddhist monks and others, using primitive tools, spent their entire lives carving these caves knowing they would never live to see them finished.  Back home I was working on a lawsuit where corporate directors had committed fraud, doing all they could to inflate the next quarter's earnings reports.  All that mattered was the next financial statement. 

For all I know these caves could have been built with child slave labor but our tour guide explained to us that they were built by monks, men who felt connected to what had gone before them, who worked on it themselves, and would pass the work on when they died.  For centuries.  I like to think they saw themselves spiritually connected to the passage of time and they dedicated their lives to that trust.   

I think of Obama that way.  Great change comes at glacial speed.  George Washington didn't become a king but he still owned black slaves.  So did Jefferson yet that didn't stop him from expanding democracy with the Louisiana Purchase.  Lincoln waited two years to free the slaves and did so only in the South, exempting the border states still fighting for the Union.  Even the New Deal, arguably the most significant change in our government since the revolution, didn't include healthcare, didn't desegregate the schools, etc.  Only a George Bush thinks that the one-man "decider" gets to change things at once, at his whim.  What a fool.  Obama understands what the Bush's of the world and even Bill Clinton fail to grasp.  A leader is only as great as her or his contributions to the flow of historical progress. 

 

No way will Obama accomplish all that he wants. But when his time ends, the right person following him will be able to build on his accomplishments, just like the monks at Ellora and Ajanta left majestic but incomplete structures for those that followed them.  Contrast that to Bush, whose predecessor has had to devote much of his time to fixing the mess he left.

 

Josh Shahryar profiles Grand Ayatollah Yousef Sanei, the most prominent of the remaining opposition clerics:

Sane’i is the perfect man to replace Montazeri. He represents the same brand of moderate Islam that Montazeri espoused. This includes his stance that women have equal rights with men and can be judges and sources of jurisprudence. He has denounced suicide bombings, considers nuclear weapons as being against the soul of Islam and forbidden and perhaps shockingly, even believes that followers of other religions if they are sincere would go to heaven. These are the qualities that endeared him to the late Montazeri and this is the reason why today, thousands of people from around Iran announced their willingness to defend him against the government.

And he'll need it; Sanei's offices were attacked by Basiji militiamen yesterday.

The LA Times reports:

Large-scale protests spread in central Iranian cities [including Esfahan and Najafabad] Wednesday, offering the starkest evidence yet that the opposition movement that emerged from the disputed June presidential election has expanded beyond its base of mostly young, educated Tehran residents to at least some segments of the country’s pious heartland. […] The central region is considered by some as the conservative power base of the hard-liners in power.

Iranian authorities are clearly alarmed by the spread of the protests.

Mojtaba Zolnour, a mid-ranking cleric serving as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative to the elite and powerful Revolutionary Guard, acknowledged widespread unrest around the country. “There were many [acts of] sedition after the Islamic Revolution,” he said, according to the website of the right-wing newspaper Resala. “But none of them spread the seeds of doubt and hesitation among various social layers as much as the recent one.”

Scott Lucas provides a similar analysis. Video above was shot in Najafabad yesterday.