The Dish

“It is not about me. It is not even about my children’s future. It is longer lasting than that,” – Sarah Palin, explaining why there are “eternal” ramifications for not resisting the Obama radical revolution. “I’m waiting for George Washington to appear. And it’s usually followed by your name … Washington was the indispensable man and that’s why I say, “I’m waiting for George Washington to appear, someone who doesn’t want to serve but will because he must,” – Glenn Beck to Sarah Palin.

The Ailes launch of a new political-media party is being framed around Palin as a “reluctant to serve” outsider, a new Washington combined with Esther. Hence her resignation is a reason to support her! It proves that she was too pure, too Godly, to survive the worldly political corruption that infects everything in Satan’s capital city, Washington. And that’s why the elites will do everything to destroy her – not because they have some idea that a political leader should not be a congenital liar or ignorant of fifth grade history or devoid of any relevant experience – but because they are on the side of Satan.

Ailes’ new political-media party is fueled by Beck’s integration into the paranoid far right, aided by O’Reilly’s fading but still significant grip on ageing Reagan-Democrats, and galvanized by Hannity’s nightly unvarnished propaganda and endless demonization of all things not-Republican. But until Ailes found Palin – a figure who instantly short-circuits rational thinking in those who support and oppose her, he had not yet found the sub-rational rallying point.

Now he does: the fusion of Fox Barbie-doll beauty, marinated in evangelical Christianity, mouthing every cliche that survives from the Reagan era until it has no relation at all to reality, propelled by what former Christianist Frank Shaeffer has called “the deepening inferiority complex suffered by the evangelical/fundamentalist community.” This FNC/RNC merger is another threat to reasoned discourse in public life, because it is a showman’s concoction of very powerful emotional elements: resentment, sex, religion, anger. It creates its own reality.  “We Do Not Torture”; everyone in Gitmo was the “Worst of the Worst”; the stimulus lowered growth; all the debt is Obama’s fault; Obama is a Muslim and non-American; the White House is stacked with the Islamist/socialist enemy within; if we had not bailed out the banks, we would be roaring back from the recession; Obama wants to ignore the war in order to effect a radical transformation of America into some kind of scary version of France and Waziristan. And on and on. I’m not exaggerating. Listen to these maniacs. The last idea was fomented by Dick Cheney. And they are waiting for their moment: another terrorist attack that they will blame on the deliberate negligence of Barack Obama. Then the Dolchstoss card, played only faintly so far by Cheney and Giuliani, will be played with a crudeness and radicalism that could well be explosive. You think they won’t pull that trigger? Dream on.

This new political-media conglomerate  endorses a supreme executive unrestrained in his or her conduct of the war against Islam (for that is the real import of the Giuliani complaint), and empowered to seize anyone anywhere and torture them in the name of national security. It is also critically connected to the settlement movement in the West Bank – for Palin’s vision of more and more Jewish population expanding outwards in that region is part of the plan for the End-Times. Hence its belief in waging war on Iran.

Non-believing people have a hard time swallowing all this. It seems so wacko. Religious people who have had any experience of fundamentalism in their lives know it all too well.

Forget the RNC, Michael Steele or John Boehner. Ignore Romney.The new RNC is FNC. Roger Ailes is creating a new political entity that could redefine the right in America for a generation, and if it gets to power, will make the two terms of George W. Bush look like a golden era. No one in the GOP can stop this. Because Ailes now has their entire base in his hands. What he frames they will believe. When McCain surrendered to Palin, it was his last – and unintended – blow to a sane or responsible conservatism.

Ambers thinks they might be:

Mark Hemingway points out that Tea Parties in the Northeast have enthusiastically supported a pro-choicer who once posed for Cosmo. Now — Scott Brown has run as a conservative candidate, and not a moderate, and isn't terribly popular with the GOP establishment. That makes him all the more attractive to the anti-establishment factions in the TP movement.

There are plenty of Tea Partiers who want to buck the two party system, and plenty more who wouldn't support a pro-choicer, but there seem to be more than a bucketful of them who want to leverage their energy into getting Republicans elected to Congress — Republicans who can be counted on to block the Democratic Party's agenda. The CW in DC is that the Tea Party movement will wind up hurting the GOP in the long-run by pulling its core further to the right. Maybe so. In the short term, though, this robotic monolith is showing signs of sentience. Democrats might want to notice…

DiA's problem with nepotism:

The reason why you shouldn’t appoint your daughter as your surrogate inside the State Department isn’t necessarily that she lacks the relevant experience. It is that your daughter is very likely to give you an inflated sense of your own genius, and that relying for strategic advice on a familial clique is likely to drive you into a blind corner of actions that only look defensible to people who are related to you.

Timothy Kincaid sums up day three of the prop 8 case. So does the LA Times. Bil Browning rounds-up the twitter accounts of those live-tweeting the trail from inside the court house. They are aggregated here. A few recent tweets (newer tweets are at the top):

ellemenohpe Egan: SSM is good for $ in SF and CA via more wealth accumulation, healthier behavior of married individuals, and less spent on healthcare

AmerEqualRights Dr. Egan: Research shows married people accumulate more wealth #Prop8

Chris_Stoll Egan found a negative economic impact on SF and the City budget from denying marriage equality for same-sex couples. #prop8

ellemenohpe Egan's role is to assess economic impact of proposals to the city. He has been established as an expert witness in urban econ. #prop8

AmerEqualRights Dr. Edmund A. Egan on the stand now. He is the Chief Economist for the City and County of San Francisco. #Prop8

The Dish model is spreading to other parts of the web. Ezra Klein:

The one thing I do want to do is add some aggregation to the blog. To that end, I've hired Dylan Matthews — who many of you know as a former guest blogger of mine and the blogger behind Minipundit — to help me run through the papers in the morning and flag items I'd otherwise miss.

Also see Ben Casnocha's thoughts on personal brands becoming more important than media brands.

Blumenthal takes the temperature of the race in Massachusetts:

If you accept the very close margins on the PPP and Rasmussen surveys as real, then Brown is successfully persuading a lot of non-Republicans to support him who typically vote Democratic.

Here’s a hypothesis that might explain the pattern: if Brown ekes out a victory or comes within a few percentage points of winning, it will because he wins the support of a lot of voters — most of them independent — who typically vote Democratic. Brown has probably not yet closed the sale with these voters, given their prior vote history, but they are poised to support him. Perhaps it is harder for them to tell a live interviewer they are ready to vote Republican. Perhaps the more anonymous nature of the automated methodology better simulates the act of voting which will ultimately force a decision.

Or perhaps Martha Coakley is a machine hack who doesn’t deserve elevation. And Massachusetts voters are ready for another well-timed swipe at the one-party state that too often takes them for granted.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities warns:

It would be advisable for policymakers to act sooner rather than later on a package of credible deficit reductions, while delaying the effective date of some provisions by several years until the economy is in much stronger shape. Policymakers should also expect to return to long-term deficit reduction multiple times over coming decades; the problem is far too large to address in a single legislative package. For one thing, political limitations on the amount of pain that can be delivered in a single dose would make it unlikely that a single package large enough to put the budget on a sustainable long-term path in one fell swoop could be enacted. Just as importantly, uncertainty about key factors — notably about the economy’s path and the future growth of health care costs — mean that we cannot judge now the best way to solve the long-run problem once and for all. Nevertheless, policymakers should start soon to work on major policy changes.

(Hat tip: Ezra)

Just listen to the beginning of their restaurant chat, appropriating both the WTC site and the Statue of Liberty. More to the point, listen to the framework of their discussion. The core concept is a "re-founding" of America. Beck writes a few sentences in his notebook, suggesting that Palin and only Palin is capable of saving the United States from the "radical, revolutionary crazy people" (Obama, Clinton) and relentless progressives (McCain). There's a combination of simmering class ressentiment, and a profound sense of self-pity:

Tomorrow I meet Sarah Palin and family for the first time. I am actually a little nervous as she is one of the only people that I can see who can possibly lead us out of where we are in. I don't know yet if she's strong enough if she's well-enough advised, or if she knows she can no longer trust anyone. I don't know if she can lead us and not lose her soul.

Here you have a confluence of many of the themes of the far right. Distrust of everything in politics, of every politician, of the "system" that has been co-opted by mysterious and menacing elites, and a sense of total beleaguerment in the modern world. And the interpretation of Obama as a hoax foisted on the country by these elites, an alien, subversive danger to "real America".

What you have  is a new kind of radical right fusionism. The anti-government, populist streak taps into class resentment, and broader anger at what has been a terrible period for fiscal responsibility. But the narrative also fits precisely into the evangelical-Christianist narrative of being misunderstood and persecuted by the world, a constant humiliation and alienation … that leads to a series of events in which things on earth get much worse until a leader, a new Esther, emerges to save us.

The more you listen to Palin, you sense a shift in her consciousness, a shift that she is indeed the woman chosen to save this country – chosen by God. "It is God's plan" was Palin's reaction to losing the election.

And the plan is that she will lose once only to be resurrected at the head of a large army of disaffected and alienated Christianists, a brigade of anti-government populists, channeled and organized directly by a media outlet that has long since abandoned the role of a neutral journalistic organization.

FNC is now the RNC. The strategy is clear: demonize Obama as a threat from within (the classic McCarthyite paranoid tradition, given more oomph by race and religion), add a whiff of the idea that he is deliberately weakening America to allow Islamic terrorists kill us, portray even obviously emergency moves, like bailing out the banks, as a plan to take over the entire economy and socialize it, and wrap it all up in a coded religious eschatology.

If you are not alarmed by this development – a new, proto-fascist political party being recreated on television in front of our very eyes – then you have not read much history.

"We were never ready … no one was prepared to defend her. Nobody knew anything," – Nicolle Wallace.

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