The Dish

In an extensive must-read Alaskan fact-check of Palin's book, Craig Medred finds:

"Going Rogue," Page 35: "Together Al and Lena (Todd Palin's grandparents) helped start the Bristol Bay fishery in the 1930s, drifting for salmon from sailboats…"

FLAT-OUT WRONG. According to a history compiled by a Bristol Bay author for the conservation group Trout Unlimited, "The fishery began in 1884 when San Francisco businessman Carl Rohlffs organized the Arctic Packing Company and built the first cannery on the Bay at the Native village of Kanulik across the Nushagak River from present day Dillingham. The first commercial pack of canned salmon was only about 400 cases or 6,000 fish." According to a history of the fishery done by Ray Hillborn of the University of Washington, "by 1912, 19 canneries and 1,083 sail-powered gillnet boats harvested and canned over 20 million salmon annually." That's about two decades before Palin claims Todd's grandparents pioneered the fishery.

My email to Adam Bellow about whether "Going Rogue" was fact-checked remains unanswered. (What's he gonna say?) But what's fascinating about Medred's Alaskan fact-checking is the broader picture it paints: of a woman always prepared to make stuff up on the spot and even in print on matters that can easily be independently checked. This is the strange pattern I noticed very early on and catalogued in the "Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin" series. Medred concludes:

It is tempting to go on picking apart the other 270-or-so pages of

"Going Rogue" in this manner, but I couldn't do it. It felt like piling on. It was clear by this point the reporting in the book was, at best, horribly sloppy, or, at worst, that Palin needs to heed her own demand: "Stop making things up."

The most incredible stories are those about her own family. Her completely ludicrous stories of her fifth pregnancy and labor are not alone in being beyond anything but religious belief. Medred notes this doozy:

"I was alerted to threats against Willow by students at her Juneau

school, one particularly disturbing," Palin writes. "Someone posted a note on an Internet set site threatening to gang-rape her at school. I never felt safe for her after that. Later the same thing happened to Bristol."

Is this true? (Are we supposed even to ask such an empirical question of "Going Rogue"?) If it was, why did Palin not call the cops?

Is she not a pit-bull in defending her children? She is more outraged in the book by her lie that some reporters asked Piper some questions than that Willow and Bristol were threatened with gang-rape! Then this from Medred:

There are a couple things I really would like to have asked Palin or Stapleton after reading the governor's claim that the "first official event (at the governor's mansion) was a dinner for friends and family that was interrupted by a leak dripping water through the ceiling onto the grand piano. We had buckets under ceilings for two years until Todd helped track down leaks and repairs were finally finished."

Did they really have a bucket on the grand piano in the governor's mansion for two years? Did it really take Todd Palin, a guy who can fix a snowmachine outside at 40 degrees below zero, two years to track down a leak? Did anyone think about calling a plumber?

It's like asking why a woman whose water has broken and who is experiencing contractions at eight months with a special needs child wouldn't go to an emergency room. She's either lying or embellishing through her teeth or is bent on risking the safety of her child or is a total lunatic. Those are your options. Believing her story as she tells it simply isn't an option.

You can live in a rational world and ask rational questions, but you soon realize you're dealing with a disturbed individual who shouldn't be allowed custody of a child let alone a nation. I've tried to make sense of this book. It cannot be done. It's a tissue of lies, truths, half-truths, fantasies, grievances, and hilarious references to Plato and Aristotle. It's a joke, as she is. And yet this joke is, to my mind, the likeliest Republican nominee for president in 2012. And one of the most common reasons people cite for supporting her is her honesty. 

Think of what that says about America in 2010.

This angle hasn't been much explored in the MSM but politically, it seems pretty salient to me. Everyone agrees that Latinos are becoming a critical voting bloc without whom no political party will easily form a majority in the near future. The collapse of Latino support for the GOP in the last few years – another triumph, Mr Rove! – was critical to Obama's landslide. And a new poll suggests that the GOP's total opposition to any health insurance reform that might actually insure significantly more people could be another blow to Republican-Latino outreach. Among the details of the new poll:

86% report that it is important for Congress to pass a bill on health reform before the 2010 election.

Hispanics now place health insurance reform before immigration reform as their top political priority:

32% reported health care, 30% identified the economy—including jobs and mortgage issues, 17% picked immigration as the biggest issue, while another 9% identified the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan… When asked which of the two was the more important, two?thirds (67%) of respondents picked health reform, compared to just 20% for immigration reform, and 10% thought they were of equal importance.

All the gaming of the political fallout of health reform seems to be focused on white independents. They're important. But the GOP's opposition to any meaningful health insurance reform may be winning them some short-term tactical gains in their base, while further isolating them in permanent minority status in a multi-cultural and multi-racial nation.

Joe McGinniss exposes Palin's true travel means:

It seems now that Palin hasn’t been on the bus, except for short hops between local airports and hotels and book-signing sites. Instead, as first reported by the Alaskan blog Palingates, she’s apparently been aboard UJT750, the Gulfstream American twin-jet that she first boarded at Westchester County airport shortly after noon on November 18, bound for Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the first stop on her tour. The full activity log for UJT750 can be found here. The bottom line is that the plane’s goings and comings track Palin’s tour perfectly: from Grand Rapids to Washington, Pa. and then to Rochester, N.Y., Roanoke, Va., Fayetteville, N.C., Birmingham, Al., and Jacksonville and Orlando, Florida.

There is, of course, nothing the least bit inappropriate about flying from place to place on a book tour. […] What’s wrong in this instance is the apparent fakery created and sustained for the sake of building pseudo-populist appeal—and selling books. Sarah Palin and Harper Collins have consciously tried to give the impression that she is doing her book tour by bus when the evidence suggests she is not. At every stop, she’s been filmed getting off Big Blue looking rested and radiant. She dazzles onlookers and interviewers with her seemingly bottomless reserves of energy. And no one suspects she may secretly be hopping on and off her main means of transport, UJT750, and resting up in hotels.

The jet apparently costs $4,000 an hour.

Ambers previews it:

His speech, as described in broad terms by advisers last week, will be short and serious. His challenge is to persuade Americans that the war in Afghanistan is winnable, as Americans tend to give their presidents significant leeway so long as they believe that the president is confident in his strategy.  Officials said last week that while he would outline a clear exit strategy, he would not tie troop withdrawals to any specific political developments in Afghanistan, which might run into opposition from Democrats in Congress, who are demanding benchmarks. Nor is the President likely to impose direct conditions on Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.

I’m going to give the speech a chance. It’s a very difficult situation, and, after Bush’s grotesque mismanagement, no options are anything but varieties of awful. But everything I hear sounds like conventional drift to me – Bush’s policy with a much more interesting and intelligent discussion beforehand. So instead of staying in neo-colonial occupation against an insurgency that now feeds off US intervention with no real strategy, we will stay in neo-colonial occupation against an insurgency that now feeds off US intervention with lots of super-smart defenses of the indefensible. Great. Marc Lynch isn’t so thrilled either:

I’m impressed that [Obama’s] team seems to have given serious thought to the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the legitimacy of the Karzai government, the lessons of the Soviet experience, how to pre-empt future demands for more troops, how to maximize leverage, and how to craft an exit strategy.  It doesn’t mean that they’ll get the policy right — or even that there’s a right policy to find.  I predicted weeks ago that the result of the strategy review would be a decision to add 30,000 or so troops, it wouldn’t work, hawkish critics would give Obama no credit for the decision, and next year we could have the whole argument over again.  Here’s to hoping that Obama’s speech…proves me wrong.

Canadian edition.

3QD reader Cyrus Hall writes:

My temporary home of the last five years, Switzerland, has just voted for one of the most  bigoted and undemocratic constitutional reforms in recent memory: the banning of Islamic minarets on Mosques.  The vote appears to be quite stunning, with 58% of voters backing the ban.  This was after the most recent polls showed the measure being rejected by 53%, a story in itself.

This represents the most direct attack on the European Muslim minority yet.  The French "headscarf ban" was at least religion neutral — something I would still argue against (as an Atheist), but I appreciate the attempt at even-handedness.  On the other hand, this constitutional amendment targets a small, largely immigrant population (many of whom have no vote), single-handedly banning them from behavior that would be perfectly acceptable were they of any other faith. Outrageous.

A Dish reader dissents:

Your “Good God” response makes you sound like a knee-jerk liberal, Andrew, as well as making your own toleration seem as shallow as your accusation of that of Europe. To this agnostic Buddhist-leaning Massachusetts Democrat, the response of the Swiss makes perfect sense.

The 2009 estimated population of Switzerland is 7.7 million. The article you link says there are 400,000 Muslims in Switzerland. That makes 5.19% of the population. Why should the other 94.81% of the population agree to the building of towers whose function is to broadcast foreign peoples’ foreign language calls-to-prayer five times a day? Can you think of a clumsier way for 5% of the population to piss off the other 95%? I have no problem with anyone wanting to practice their religion so long as it hurts no one else. And I also have no problem with the Swiss being unwilling to listen to “Allahu akbar, etc.” at dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset and nightfall. The Roman Catholic church down the street from me has a carillon that rings the hours. I like it; it’s pretty and it provides a useful function for the entire neighborhood. But, if it broadcast its priest intoning “Introibo ad altare Dei” every time Mass was said, I’d be on the phone to City Hall every time I heard it.

There are currently four minarets in all of Switzerland. None conduct the call to prayer. Moreover, there is no distinction between "foreign peoples" and Swiss-born Muslims. This is a fascistic act and a profound attack on religious freedom. We will see soon enough if the Christianists who regularly bloviate about religious liberty utter a single sound of protest.

One of Rick Warren's (and president George W. Bush's) longtime allies in Uganda, Martin Ssempe, is the author of a classic piece of minority-baiting legislation. Its details belong in the history of genocidal hatred:

The Ugandan penal code already criminalizes sexual relations "against the order of nature," a characterization that is frequently used to prosecute gays. Under the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, homosexual relations are specifically targeted. Anyone in a position of authority who is aware of a gay or lesbian individual has 24 hours to inform police or face jail time. Individuals found to engage in efforts to sexually stimulate another for the purpose of homosexual relations, or found touching another for that purpose, will face life in prison. Those who engage in "aggravated homosexuality" — defined as repeated homosexual relations or sexual contact with others who are HIV/AIDS infected — will face the death penalty.

This is an act of terror and murder against an already beleaguered minority, and Warren is an accessory to it. As a powerful figure in distributing AIDS funding in Uganda, he cannot bring himself to oppose a law that would condemn someone in a gay relationship to death, and imprison him or her for touching another human being, and inciting a wave of informing on family members and friends and acquaintances in order to terrify a sexual minority. This alleged man of God cannot speak out on this – except to protect his own p.r. His schtick of actually being the nice evangelical – a schtick that got him to Obama's inauguration – is a lie. If he cannot condemn this fascist act of violence against a tiny minority of vulnerable human beings, then his position in this struggle is clear enough.

Just as he publicly inveighed in favor of stripping gay couples of civil equality in California, and then pretended he didn't, now he distances himself from Ssempe, while refusing to condemn this law reminiscent of early attempts to wipe out minorities in Serbia, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda. This is classic avoidance in an atmosphere of extreme danger. It is the same as the Catholic church's disgraceful neutrality in Rwanda and Nazi Germany, as they saw a chance to enable others to wipe out a minority they wished could be wiped off the face of the earth:

Warren won't go so far as to condemn the legislation itself. A request for a broader reaction to the proposed Ugandan anti-homosexual laws generated this response: "The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations." On Meet the Press this morning, he reiterated this neutral stance in a different context: "As a pastor, my job is to encourage, to support. I never take sides."

He lies. He has taken sides, whenever possible, to stigmatize, demonize and now physically threaten the lives of gay people in his own country and abroad. And his silence on this issue means the deaths of others. Warren needs to come out and condemn this law as evil, which it is. And to stop hiding his own enmeshment with the most virulent forms of fundamentalist hatred under the veil of media-savvy benevolence.

A reader writes:

Perhaps the Democrats can look to India for reasons to be optimistic.  At this time, the BJP is in electoral ruins, aided by their rank and honest fundamentalism. They've been smashed by Congress for two elections in a row and the report on Ayodhya is about as damning as can be. In response, the hardcore base is working to eliminate anyone who can lead them out of the wilderness. Just as in the GOP, this is done in a pursuit of ideological purity.  The only difference is the

religion being espoused.

The RSS, which provides the ideological grounding of Hindu nationalism, as well as a significant section of the ground game, has forced Jaswant Singh out for the simple act of praising the founder of Pakistan. They've warned all other moderates to basically shut up and toe the party line. No one seems to remember that the BJP became nationally popular thanks to a pragmatic program of economic growth, reducing corruption, and downplaying Hindutva.  Again, the moderates in the party are bemoaning these trends, and warn that divisive communalism may lead to short term electoral gain, but will ultimately lead to total marginalization.  No one is listening. 

There are clearly huge differences between the American and Indian electorates, but both seem sick of politics based on fear of the other, aside from a paranoid minority that has no positive identity, only one framed in opposition.  This minority is geographically concentrated.  In the US, it's the South.  In India, it's the Cow Belt. 

As Obama considers adding yet more troops to the near-decade-long occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq cannot muster sufficient political consensus to organize the elections critical to the departure of 120,000 US troops. The Beltway consensus that Iraq has already been a victory was always more about the Beltway than Iraq, and more about sustaining neo-imperial morale rather than confronting reality. The Beltway doesn't do reality very well. They prefer Palin and "bending the cost curve" and "exit-ramps" and "optics".

So let's confront reality and remember exactly what the Iraq "surge" was designed to achieve when it was launched in 2007. It was designed to create a security environment in which a new Iraqi political settlement could be hammered out between the various sectarian factions. On this critical test, the surge did prevent more chaos and disintegration, largely because of a well-exploited spontaneous shift in the loyalty of several Sunni tribes. But the vital – indeed central -  task of ensuring that the minority Sunnis have a real stake in the new Iraq (central because it's the core guarantee that a civil sectarian war won't break out again) has not been accomplished.

In fact, recent events suggest a move backwards as the entropy of the Arab and Muslim world reasserts itself. Sectarian violence is up. Little integration of Sunnis in the largely Shiite "national" military has occurred. Core questions of Sunni representation and central issues of territory – such as the Kurdish-Arab fight over Kirkuk – remain unresolved. Lawmakers who told the Americans they were past sectarianism are stoking it again:

Mr. Hashimi, a Sunni who told me not long ago that Iraq was now ready for historic reconciliation, was widely accused of acting in a purely sectarian way to ensure more votes for his bloc. The Parliament’s Shiite and Kurdish blocs promptly joined forces in last week’s session and, despite intense American lobbying, passed yet another election law

that would reduce Sunni seats even more.

To summarize the NYT today:

Adopting legislation to knit the country together; reforming the Constitution; strengthening independent security forces; reconciling Iraq’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — all were benchmarks, and all remain partly or wholly unmet, despite the security gains that were supposed to create the space for political progress and thus peace. Instead, Iraqis treat their Constitution — like the benchmarks — the way they treat what few traffic lights operate here. “So what?” a Kurdish lawmaker, Mahmoud Othman, said when asked about the risk of holding the election later than the Constitution demands.

“Nothing in Iraq is very legitimate.”

All the surge did was provide a face-saving way for the US to create enough temporary security to leave. Given the chaos of the first four years of occupation, this was an achievement. But the achievement was in preventing total humiliation for the US, not anything close to victory or success stable enough to leave with anything but another civil war as the likeliest outcome. But the US didn't leave, Obama took the neocon advice, and is still hanging on to the notion that a stable, democratic, self-governing Iraq is possible after only six years of occupation, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, 5,000 dead Americans, countless wounded and disabled vets, and up to $3 trillion in taxpayers' money.

As Obama appears to be intensifying the lost war in Afghanistan, with the same benchmark rubric that meant next-to-nothing in the end in Iraq, he does not seem to understand that he will either have to withdraw US troops from Iraq as it slides into new chaos, or he will have to keep the troops there for ever, as the neocons always intended. Or he will have to finance and run two hot wars simultaneously. If he ramps up Afghanistan and delays Iraq withdrawal, he will lose his base. If he does the full metal neocon as he is being urged to, he should not be deluded in believing the GOP will in any way support him. They will oppose him every step of every initiative. They will call him incompetent if Afghanistan deteriorates, they will call him a terrorist-lover if he withdraws, they will call him a traitor if he does not do everything they want, and they will eventually turn on him and demand withdrawal, just as they did in the Balkans with Clinton. Obama's middle way, I fear, is deeper and deeper into a trap, and the abandonment of a historic opportunity to get out.

I pray I'm wrong. Maybe Iraq will teeter away from a second implosion. Maybe the Af-Pak strategy is credible in a way Iraq's surge never was. We have yet to hear the president's explanation and we would do well to ponder his proposal as thoroughly as he has.

But I fear Bush's wars will destroy Obama as they destroyed Bush. Because they are unwinnable; and because the US is bankrupt; and because neither Iraq nor Afghanistan will ever be normal functioning societies in our lifetimes.

You want empire? Then say so and get on with it – with far more forces, and massive cuts in domestic spending to rebuild thankless Muslim population centers thousands of miles from home for decades into the future.

You do not want empire? Then leave.

Those are the presidential level choices.

And neither Bush nor, it seems, Obama has the strength to make them.

On the Dish over the weekend we learned that the Iranian regime threw another nuclear tantrum, the Swiss banned Muslim minarets, and "The Family" funded the horrifying anti-gay campaign in Uganda. We also tracked the EAU climate-change scandal here, here, here, and here. Also, Andrew dissected Krauthammer's latest take on the climate issue.

In other political coverage, Fallows recorded Obama's under-reported gains in Asia, a DailyKos poll showed the president's base cracking, Reihan compared healthcare reform to the Iraq invasion, and Gabriel Arana analyzed the case that could make or break gay rights at the federal level.

In cultural coverage, Tehran Bureau investigated sexting on the subway, Rachel Kramer Bussel brought some sexy sites, Matt Zoller Seitz spotlighted cooking in cinema, Matt Sigl nuked George Lucas, and Betsy Phillips fought Safran Foer and the book industry. And don't miss Hanna Rosin's report on the prosperity gospel and how it harmed the housing crisis.

In Palin postings, Andrew Halcro tore apart Going Rogue, a theocon supporter wrung his hands over the book, and the former governor kept up her quitting streak. The Dish posted two particularly unique Window Views here and here. (Buy the book version here.) In case you didn't know already, toddlers are terrible at everything. And if you missed our Thanksgiving Wrap, go here.

— C.B.