The Dish

A reader made a mash-up of this post and this post. Carry on.

Here's a revealing glimpse into how a delusional, incompetent, pathological liar has managed never to hold a real press conference and yet remains a credible public figure. She avoids the filters – i.e. skeptical journalists – and deploys one simple propaganda tool:

(Requests to interview Palin for this article, specifically about her experiences in the 2008 campaign, were turned down. Her former communications aide Meghan Stapleton explained that "with her Fox exclusivity, we are denying requests for articles and stories right now.")

The reason I banged on and on about Palin's bizarre story about her fifth campaign prop during the campaign was not because I wanted to invade someone's privacy, or engage in loony conspiracy theories. The reason is simply that this story raised legitimate questions of fact, and that the press decided that it would never ask the relevant questions, and indeed ostracize and ridicule those who did. 

Palin managed to sail through the campaign without any real scrutiny on a crucial matter of credibility, when proving her case would have been as easy as a simple fax of a readily available extract from what must have been voluminous medical records. But not even the McCain campaign asked for such evidence. And the press utterly bailed. Now, she is able to use one powerful propaganda outlet, press-restricted buck-raking speeches, and a book of magical realism to continue this creepy, unaccountable celebrified campaign.

The problem here is not really Palin. Every delusional, ignorant nutcase should have a chance to get away with running for national office. The problem here is the system – a system that allowed someone no-one knew anything about to get very close to being a 72-year-old's heartbeat away from the presidency, a system that deems some questions unaskable, a press that is more concerned with maximizing ratings and avoiding offence than in getting answers. This system is dangerous. If you construct a sealed media cocoon, and false narrative, and a massive money-machine, you can get further than most people imagine. And remember, presidents have been elected with 43 percent of the vote before. 

So I haven't given up on this line of inquiry. Trust me. I have not given up.

I have to say even I was a little gob-smacked when Mitch McConnell simply said that the financial regulation bill was another bank bailout. But I found it fascinating as a glimpse into the RNC-FNC mojo. The idea is simply to lie about legislation and hope that FNC and the system designed for epistemic closure on the right would carry the day. Even if it is untrue – death panels, etc – it can become true for one half of the political system that has abandoned any relationship to the reality of hard choices, as opposed to the fantasy of some kind of 1950s nirvana.

It seems, however, that the bald-faced attempt to say that black is white has not exactly worked this time. I can see a successful financial re-regulation law getting passed soon, with sufficient GOP support. The best summary of the facts rebutting McConnell can be found here. This time, the facts seem to have won. But it was a close call.

By the way, have you begun to notice the massive amount of legislative change and action since Obama came to office? More will.

In Australia, the police are increasingly frustrated at the Catholic church's refusal to fire abusive and rapist priests.

In a Youtube:

Upset by Charles Blow's characterization of race relations at a tea party event, Conor Friedersdorf has sparked an extended discussion about the tea partiers and racism. Conor:

I am hardly blind to Confederate History Month, or the subset of Southern conservatives whose ideas about race in America are quite wrongheaded. I just think its nonsense to invoke those conservatives in order to defend a New York Times column that Mr. Serwer himself calls “unfair” and “reductive,” or to call someone oblivious because they don’t include in every blog post on race a paragraph that says, “To be sure, it is understandable for a writer to pen a wrongheaded, reductive column attacking conservatives as minstrel show managers given the fact that some other conservatives who are completely uninvolved in this particular controversy hold problematic views on the subject of race.”

Here's part of TNC's response:

A serious campaign of diversity would have to open itself not simply to blacks who are worried about the deficit, and think that health care reform was a bad idea, but those who also think that birtherism is insane, that the notion that Obama favors blacks says more about the beholder than Obama. And then it would have to actually broaden its policy reach–the Drug War and incarceration rates seem like a natural fit. Or even representation for Chocolate City.

Bernstein's take:

I haven't seen too many Tea Parties or Sarah Palin rallies among border Latino communities, or for that matter among "black folks in Mississippi or Hmong in Wisconsin."  I have, however, seen people at Tea Parties and Sarah Palin rallies waving signs that sure looked racist to me, and we've seen rank-and-file conservatives who persist in believing and spreading racially-coded lies about Barack Obama.  From this, I conclude that perhaps at least some Palin and Tea Party fans hear ethnicity when conservatives talk about "real Americans" or talk about "taking back America."  Second of all, those "coastal dwelling white liberals" in places like Hollywood, San Francisco, and New York (all places attacked by name by conservatives)…well, it ain't only about race, now, is it.  Not to mention that there are an awful lot of blacks, Latinos, and Asians in those areas, along with the Jews and the gays and others who don't quite fit into "real America."  Does Friedersdorf really believe that New York is attacked because it's rich, and not because it's…er…um…I think the word I'm looking for is cosmopolitan?  Really?

The tea-party is beginning to get serious. Knocking off Specter – now Crist, with possibly McCain to follow – it was inevitable they'd get around to Lindsay Graham eventually. And – not that they're intolerant or anything – Graham's ambiguous sexual orientation (like Elena Kagan's) is a big fat target.

What's fascinating to me is how there is a practical overlap here between the gay left and the tea-party right. Pro-outing gay groups would dearly love to out Graham, but the tea-partiers are upping the gay left's ante. Both see the concealment of Graham's orientation as a threat; the left sees it as yet another way in which Washington engages in fantastic hypocrisy and still can't enact laws to provide full equality for gay citizens; the right somehow sees it as a secret sign of Graham's "un-American" views, or as a way in which he is subject to blackmail.

And that is what is truly disgusting about William Gheen's rant. It both insinuates that Graham's gayness  might be inherently un-American, and explicitly explains Graham's more moderate views on immigration as the product of liberal blackmail. This last claim truly is a function of bizarre paranoia. Are Washington liberals actually threatening to out Butters if he doesn't play ball in immigration or financial reform or Afghanistan? Please. Is Graham unable to make his own mind up on issues regardless of his sexual orientation?

I remain opposed to outing anyone except the most hard-core hypocrites. But I remain just as passionately in favor of gay people being out – for their sake and the sake of a better understanding and dialogue on gay issues, and as a way to get past the gay question altogether. Kagan and Graham need to understand that kinda-ask-sorta-tell can't work any more. And the choice to clear the air is theirs' if they want to take advantage of it.

Do they have that courage? Do their respective parties?

The venting here has an air of desperation about it. But it reveals just how tough it is for moderate conservatism to find a place in today's political climate:

[A Thatcherite's] advice – attack the Liberals precisely for their Liberalism – is right, but impossible for the current Tory leadership to put into effect. Cameron has spent his leadership calling himself a liberal Conservative and talking up his own place in the progressive pantheon. This was always a mistake, and compounded by Cameron's ill-advised folly in pushing for the television debates, has allowed the Liberals to make the breakthrough they have.

But the one thing that's even clearer is that if Cameron had retained a Thatcherite identity for the Tories, he would be in an even worse state. He is being out-flanked by a politician to his left, with more fiscal grit and more radical options for change: adopting the euro, the end of a nuclear deterrent, an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Money quote:

Clegg's lead is of course a bubble. The tragedy for the Tory party is, so was Cameron's. A flimsy, shiny lead, pumped up purely by Gordon Brown's premiership, and with the prospect of that ending, Cameron's lead has gone pop too. It will take more skill than Cameron, and his campaign manager Osborne have shown to date to make the Liberal bubble burst before it's lights out.

Aaron David Miller calls dreams of an American brokered Israeli-Palestinian peace a religion unto itself:

Like all religions, the peace process has developed a dogmatic creed, with immutable first principles. Over the last two decades, I wrote them hundreds of times to my bosses in the upper echelons of the State Department and the White House; they were a catechism we all could recite by heart. First, pursuit of a comprehensive peace was a core, if not the core, U.S. interest in the region, and achieving it offered the only sure way to protect U.S. interests; second, peace could be achieved, but only through a serious negotiating process based on trading land for peace; and third, only America could help the Arabs and Israelis bring that peace to fruition.

Read it all. It's as balanced a view of the no-hope position as you'll find. My worry is that all problems are impossible to solve until someone solves them. And in this case, the solution is so blindingly obvious getting there should be possible in two presidential terms. My own patience on this score has lessened as one absorbs the global blowback of the US-Israel conflation in the Muslim mind. But Miller's pessimism is based on cruel experience and is well worth absorbing. From his conclusion:

The believers need to re-examine their faith, especially at a moment when America is so stretched and overextended. The United States needs to do what it can, including working with Israelis and Palestinians on negotiating core final-status issues (particularly on borders, where the gaps are narrowest), helping Palestinians develop their institutions, getting the Israelis to assist by allowing Palestinians to breathe economically and expand their authority, and keeping Gaza calm, even as it tries to relieve the desperation and sense of siege through economic assistance. But America should also be aware of what it cannot do, as much as what it can.