Marc Ambinder has a pretty sharp piece about the problem with media outlets giving Lady Starburst too much play:
Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, has every right to submit an opinion piece on health care to the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, and they’ve got every right to print it.
But Palin’s existence in this debate does not (a) lend her voice any credibility and, beyond that, even if you believe that her experience as a state governor does give her at least a modicum of credibility, it does not follow that, because her voice is credible, it ought to be influential.
I believe that Sarah Palin is ballot box poison for the Republican party and that making her the face of the party will hasten the party’s well-deserved demise. On the other hand, while I’m all for making fun of all the stupid things she does, taking her seriously as a policy person makes us weak as a nation and as a people. Since I put country first, I think newspapers should stop publishing her ridiculous opinion pieces.
I recommend checking out the comments on Ambinder’s piece. It gives a pretty thorough tour of the various idiotic defenses of Palin, e.g.
All you numbnuts are missing the point: Sarah may not have a PHD, and she may not use Harvard-smarty Lowell House words like “trenchent,” and drink white wine, but she’s lived the life the rest of have lived, and she speaks for us.
Zed-015
Just to be a pedant. The tag should read “We are all Mayas now”. The word Mayan refers solely to the spoken language of the Maya.
Keith
Politico’s comments are just as choice. Most tend to be of the “She makes libtards angry! GO SARAH!” variety, neglecting the part about *why* she makes liberals angry – namely the part about “death panels” being true not because they are or will be true, but rather, because the concept “rings true”.
JenJen
A con friend of mine keeps emailing all of us about how outraged, OUTRAGED I TELL YOU, he is about the Van Jones thing.
No matter how many times each of us writes back, essentially, “So? OK, OK. But he’s gone. Why are you still bitching?” he continues to bitch, moan, whine and complain. You’re not upset enough! The media is LIBERAL and won’t report what happened! Why aren’t you MAD! Grrrrr Hulk Smash!!
So this morning, he sends this along:
“Tell me how you feel in 2013 when President Palin puts a Birther in charge of the Ministry of National Energy Production.”
Ummmm…. OK. I’m tempted to tell him that the idea of “President Palin” is remedial on its own, but honestly, even if we were talking reality here, is that really the worst thing she’d do?
Ugh. I’m Wingnut Weary.
rob!
Harvard-smarty Lowell House words like “trenchent,”
There’s something so beautiful, so perfectly beautiful, about making fun of people for using “smarty” words, and then misspelling that word in the process.
As Patton Oswalt once said of a heckler, “You’re going to miss everything cool and die angry.” That’s what I think about when I hear from people who like Sarah Palin.
Bubblegum Tate
This is a perfect Palinite, one who absolutely, positively believes that Palin Mystique, that she’s just a regular ol’ outsider and therefore inherently superior to all other candidates blah blah blah. The Palin Cult of Personality is way worse–and way stupider–than the Obama Cult of Personality.
4tehlulz
>Ministry of National Energy Production
So Palin is running for president of Iraq?
BFR
“Tell me how you feel in 2013 when President Palin puts a Birther in charge of the Ministry of National Energy Production.”
The biggest concern I’d have with that would have to be the change from a republic to a monarchy. That’s gonna be rough.
licensed to kill time
“Palin for Populist President – Because She Makes Us Feel Less Dumb”
Citizen_X
@rob!: Doesn’t “trenchent” mean “makes you want to smack the person in the head with a trenching shovel?” That applies here, right?
And Patton Oswalt: best goddam thing on the stage with a microphone since Bill Fucking Hicks. I’m serious.
harlana pepper
“she’s lived the life the rest of have lived”
Um, I don’t recall attending 7 different colleges, including one in Hawaii, before I got my degree. But, of course, I’m one of those poor schlumps that had to go to a state supported school because my hard-working dad could not afford a private school. And I’m pretty sure school-hopping around the country would not have been in the picture
Nope, I guess I ain’t “one of them.” I’m guessing it might be b/c I know how to spell the word “trenchant.”
feebog
I loved this guy:
“SomeDumbGuy September 9, 2009 9:46 AM
I found her Op-Ed informing. Here is what I learned:”
Followed by the usual rightwing talking points in her OPED.
I guess we now know the answer to the age old question:
“Is our children learning?”
Funkhauser
Hey, back off Lowell House! It is a lovely place with peaceful courtyard that they show off during the campus tour.
@rob!: Marc also misspells the same word in his piece.
Keith
@BFR:
Fixed.
Ambergris
Since that Levi Johnston piece in the Vanity Fair I don’t believe that Sarah Palin is going to run in 2012 anymore. I also don’t think that she writes any of these pieces, either on Facebook or WSJ op-eds, herself. Some puppetmasters are still using her name to distribute messages to her minions while she is writing her book and looking for opportunities to make some quick cash.
MattF
My Conservative Democrat friend believes that the absolute worst thing McCain did was to have Palin as his VP candidate, that her nomination was just unforgivable. And there are lots of people who agree. Putting Palin’s stuff on the WSJ editorial page just reminds everyone how terrible she is and how far the Republican Party has fallen. So, bring it on, I say.
cleek
oh yeah?
well, ConYanker has a different opinion:
Ruh-roh Shaggy!
Oh Noes! How can this be?!
LOLZ!
Zifnab
My name is the Lorax and I speak for the treeeeeeeeeees!
Really? If your spokesperson is Sarah Palin, I question if even you know what your own political positions are.
Incertus
Personally, I hope the national media does cast this as a Palin v. Obama debate. By the time it’s over, we’ll have single-payer.
Elie
The MSM just likes to goad us with Palin and get the left/progressives to react and then we read their newspapers, magazines, blogs etc to comment and show our outrage and such. They know she is a fool and also that the minority of people who take her seriously, don’t really matter either politically or culturally (from their point of view). They are just the “dummy hand” manipulated in a big Bridge game to increase hits on their blogs or readership in their failing periodicals.
She enjoys us as well because the left progressives are the key to her popularity with the small right wing population that supports her. The more we scream, the tighter they hold her and make it more likely that the parties cited above will pay her dough to do more beard yanking on us.
We just cannot resist it…though that would kill her popularity and visibility faster than anything — ignore her — completely. I know we won’t — just too much fun for us, right? Wink, wink…
call_me_ishmael
Maybe my troll-fu is weak, but I’m on the fence whether that particular comment is bogus. Its almost impossible to tell the trolls from the lunatics from the rank and file wingnuts these days.
You know, the Palin crowd reminds me of the late, lamented BIRDZILLA.
Those were the days.
GregB
Hey didn’t Pol Pot believe in the inherent goodness of life in the sticks and didn’t he hate all of the smarty intellectuals to the point of having children club them to death?
Does Sarah Palin support the liquidation of intellectuals like Pol Pot?
-G
Ash Can
If Sarah Palin looked like Bella Abzug or Betty Friedan, she’d be living her life in obscurity in a trailer park in Boise.
Comrade Darkness
@Ambergris: Her previous editorial had such horrible sentence construction I was willing to credit it to her. It wasn’t bad in the way that a good writer would try to make it bad to make it seem more authentic either, which was my second thought.
GregB
I in no way meant to imply that Pol Pot was an intellectual.
-G
The Moar You Know
@cleek: He forgot one small detail; Americans don’t read, especially not faggotty, hoity-toity papers like the “Wall Street Journal”.
Maybe USA Today, at best. But not the WSJ.
harlana pepper
Media-wise, giving credibility to anything Sarah Palin says by giving it ample airtime is akin to the media’s treatment of screaming, racist teabaggers as “concerned citizens” with “legitimate” issues, and that it’s perfectly fine for one of these “citizens” to practically assault a Senator (Specter, for whom I have no love, but my god, where was the outrage on that one?).
Comrade Darkness
@Ash Can: In all fairness, if Obama looked like Kucinich he’d still be in the senate.
Brian J
This isn’t always the case, but generally speaking, defensible opinion pieces don’t really need defending. They speak for themselves and tend to go by without much controversy. It doesn’t matter what the opinion expressed is, just that it’s backed up by some coherent set of facts or values.
Sarah Palin’s opinions, such as they are, don’t have that. Instead, they have a mix of hyperbole, distortions, and outright lies. If she had published a piece calling for expansion of HSA/MSAs or something along those lines, she wouldn’t be facing the sort of criticism she is now encountering. People would disagree with her, no doubt, but they wouldn’t be ridiculing her.
That people need to latch on to some absurd defense speaks volumes about the quality of the opinion expressed.
Jager
If my wing nut brother in law is any example (I believe he is the perfect example) here is why he likes Palin:
1. He believes that there is plenty of oil right here in the USA, if only the government would let the oil companies drill for it.
2. He believes that the US military can rule the world, if only the government would let them.
3. He believes that global warming is a joke and it is a government plot to do something to take away his “freedom”.
4. He doesn’t believe in using “big words” because it is confusing and doesn’t get right to the “point”.
5. He believes that Europeans are soft, lazy and stupid and it isn’t possible that they live as well as Americans.
I could go on, this is the philosophy of a guy, who after he tanked his own business went to work teaching cabinet making at a state prision so he could get the benefits and the retirement. He is now retired at 62 and collecting SS and the state pension. My sister is still working for the state so he can enjoy her health insurance plan. He spends his time playing golf, (the worst swing in the world) bitching about government and since he has the time, he is dabbling in local republican politics. He is a typical Palin Lover.
BTW, he hates big corporations too, so go figure?
Demo Woman
On one hand Sarah is afraid of death panels, on the other she is for taking away the safety net the seniors have now with Medicare.
The rest of the article is private insurance and tax cuts. As stated before repubs don’t admit that tax cuts increase the deficit. Can someone ask Sarah if she knows what rescission of contract is and how that might affect the elderly?
harlana pepper
@Ash Can: As a woman, I can attest to the fact that it still takes quite a chunk of change to look and dress that good in your forties. Just ask her campaign stylists about their salaries.
“One of us” my white ass.
JK
Can anyone name another politician who has gotten so much attention from the MSM based on accomplishing so little as Sarah Palin?
She’s not even a one term governor for Christ’s sakes. When it comes to Sarah Palin, there’s no there there. She has less substance than cotton candy. She’s a walking cardboard cut out.
This country has become an Orwellian nightmare. In a sober, rational society, Palin would be seen as a coward and a quitter for resigning as governor because people were filing too many lawsuits against her and saying mean things about her.
As John Belushi used to say, BUT NOOOO.
This clueless, gutless MSM, which has completely forgotten the meaning of journalism, transforms this obnoxious airhead into a leading spokesperson for the Republican Party and a leading contender for president in 2012.
cmorenc
Remember the TV Series “Northern Exposure”? (The wife and I watched a DVD of the first season’s episodes down at the beach over Labor Day on a crappy-weather day). On that show, Sarah Palin would have fit right in as another delightfully cracpot character reflecting the eccentric local color of Alaska…oh, wait the scriptwriters of that show sort of already sort of gave the Palinesque slot to a guy, Maurice the fictional former astronaut who was given to gruffly spouting right-wing “truthie-isms” about the world in a manner strikingly similar to the way Palin would if she was a guy.
The reason the characters on this show were charmingly likeable, despite obvious deep flaws in the character of every one of them, is that it was all about a local, exotic community in remote rural Alaska where we could enjoy both imagining ourselves snuggled into the eccentric embrace of the place and its spectacular natural setting, yet also enjoy being at a safe great distance from the hardships, difficulties, and frustrations of actually having to put up with having our lives run by folks such as these (Maurice in particular).
The conservatives are stuck on the idea of Sarah Palin as a real-life character out of “Northern Exposure”, oblivious to what an obnoxious dunderhead someone like Maurice is in real life if they’re actually given real power.
Xecky Gilchrist
@The Moar You Know: Maybe USA Today, at best. But not the WSJ.
You’re right, but the people who tell the Real Murkins what to think do read the WSJ.
ironranger
Funny thing about that “liberal” media. How do rightwingers explain why liberals hate our media just as much or more than they do?
I guess that falls under a very long list of issues that demonstrate the rightwingers’ remarkable capacity to believe two (or 3 or 5) different memes at the same time.
Nellcote
Does Sarah Palin even exist? Aside from a couple of wingnut ho-downs and dinner in NYC, she’s not been seen in public since she quit Alaska. I believe “Sarah Palin” is now a brand that she’s sold off to others to use as they see fit. Clearly she isn’t writing those WSJ opeds and the facebook/twitter pronouncements could be written by anyone.
harlana pepper
@Jager: What a story. So, have you asked him about how he has applied his ideology to his personal life? Cuz I expect the screaming teabag seniors to all drop their Medicare on principle. Oddly enough, I’m still waiting.
tripletee
Yeah, see, that’s the problem – I wouldn’t vote for your dumb fucking ass either.
I imagine people like this watch Idiocracy and see it as something to aspire to. President Palin literally flipping off all of the libtards in her first State of the Union address – now that’s the way guvmint should work!
Jado
She is the equivalent of Homer Simpson running for Sanitation Commissioner.
Her next campaign slogan is going to be “Can’t someone else do it?”, just like Homer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trash_of_the_Titans
And we will end up just like Springfield, having to relocate the country 1500 miles down the road so we don’t drown in our own mess.
Napoleon
The only way the Republican party will reform is if outlets like the WSJ publish things from people like her. Only once the crazy extremist are so deligitimized that any sane Republican officeholder would not be in the same room with then will you see that party return to sanity.
chopper
so that’s the choice? its either a white-wine-drinking phD with 50-cent vocabulary or a moronic ‘hockey mom’ whose grasp of issues as well as the english language is almost bushlike?
at this point i’m ready to vote for anyone who’s willing to force people to take an IQ test before you let them have a keyboard.
JK
From Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican convention
“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity”
This line comes from columnist Westbrook Pegler.
Pegler once lamented that a would-be assassin “hit the wrong man” when gunning for Franklin Roosevelt.
h/t http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122100226859616967.html
Pegler expressed his fervent hope about Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.”
h/t http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/governor-palins-reading-l_b_126478.html
Would the MSM have ever given Obama or Biden a pass if they delivered a speech quoting someone as delusional as Westbrook Pegler? Would Liberal Media?
Tonal Crow
She durn well does! It says riiiiight hear: “This Di-ploma ack-nowledgz that Sarah Palin iz a doctur, level ‘Piled Higher and Deeper’ (PHD), in the feeld of un-wizdum.” Take that, you libtards!
Napoleon
@Comrade Darkness:
If Obama looked like Kucinich he would still be in the state house.
Morbo
Well, we do have pretty good confirmation that the French/Chinese are laughing at her/us.
licensed to kill time
@cmorenc:
I loved that show. I would not inflict Sarah Palin on Cicely, Alaska, but she and Maurice would have made a great pair – babbling buffoons of boobery.
JK
“Sarah may not have a PhD”
Does Sarah even have a high school diploma?
Stoic
This is the classic bullshit complaint. I say someone’s opinion is stupid. They counter that they have a right to their opinion and I’m denying them their rights. This all has followed from our hippie days when everyone was beautiful and everyone was “equal”. Now opinions are “equal” and sacrosanct against analysis or discussion. Classic critical argumentation has fallen to the democratization of imbecility.
Nutella
“she’s lived the life the rest of have lived”
Are there that many ex-governors out there with $1 million net worth who buy their clothes at Neiman Marcus with other people’s money?
That’s a fairly unusual life, I’d say.
Tonal Crow
@Stoic: Ah, the GOP: the worst of the right, and the worst of the left.
Rick Massimo
@Zifnab:
It’s so awesome that Republicans don’t go for identity politics, isn’t it?
jenniebee
Who doesn’t drink white wine? You can get a bottle of Pinot Grigio at Kroger’s for about $5 a bottle. It probably lacks refinement, but it’s got a nice fruitiness about it and goes well with roast chicken.
Leelee for Obama
@ironranger: It’s like the dinosaur bones BS-God put them in Idaho, or somewhere to test their faith that the earth is only 10,000, or is it, 6,000 years old. They think we bitch about the SCLM to fool them into thinking we don’t like them, when secretly, we love them all to bits.
and that’s where this country is headed
JSDreyer
My Gods, she’s the kind of woman you could just sit down and have a beer with, and that’s why she’d make a great president. Don’t you see that?
licensed to kill time
@JSDreyer:
That’s exactly what flashed through my mind. The “going-with-my-gut” method of voting worked so well last time.
Jager
harlana pepper
short answer from bro in law:
“I earned it, didn’t I?”….he can’t or refuses to see stupidity of his “convictions”
He and I used to go around and around about Viet Nam. We were both in the Army, he never left the states, I went to Viet Nam, saw combat and got out ranked higher than he did. In his mind his service was patriotic and mine wasn’t because he “believed” in the war and I didn’t. To him my service, decorations and promotions are not valid! Sound like the knock on Kerry during the campaign, doesn’t it?
I don’t argue with him anymore nor does anyone else in the family, we all used to hope sis would dump him! Probably too late now!
ChrisB
@Ash Can: I just hope that enough people who read this blog know who Bella Abzug was. My first thought after reading your post was that if Barack Obama had Abzug’s balls, we’d already have single payer health insurance.
Tsulagi
You got that right, patriot. Winky uses all the words and intelligence level behind them real Americans like Promise Keepers in the C-Street House love to hear: “You Betcha!”
asiangrrlMN
I am with Benen on this one, and I am going to repeat it ad nauseam whenever this piece of excrement floats to the top: Bored now.
Ash Can
@Jager: Sounds like poor bro-in-law is heavily into denial, as is everyone else who thinks like he does.
Brachiator
Actually, I think that this hits on the heart of Palin’s appeal, and the GOP’s desperate grasp for a (dare I say it) “Great White Hope.” It’s not going to work, but it will be fun watching the GOP try.
The idea is that an ordinary “real white Christian American” with a modest intellect is superior to a fancy pants Ivy League Muslim Commie Socialist black president.
As for her column itself, it can easily be broken down into its constituent parts: Ronald Reagan, Big Government, free markets. Also, too, death panels.
The column is largely incoherent and old cheese; for example, exactly how much health care savings would come from tort reform? Damn little.
But by positioning Palin’s column in advance of Obama’s speech, it inherently makes her look statesmen-like. And because it appears in the free section of the Journal, right wing pundits will be able to mention it and provide links to it even though the typical wingnut is probably not a Journal reader.
The Great Under-Reported Story Palin’s column was clearly ghost-written by someone (the seams clearly show in a number of places) and Rupert Murdoch and the editors of the WSJ clearly decided to commission the column and when to run it. It is apparent that Murdoch and his Fox News/WSJ machine is co-operating with the GOP to push its candidates and agenda. How come nobody is writing about this?
DonkeyKong
And she doesnt have to get drunk on the beer she’s having with you to refer to her newborn as “tardo”
JK
@asiangrrlMN:
Best quote of this thread. Thanks for getting to the heart of the matter as ususal.
ricky
@Incertus:
As Governor Sarah sent everyone in Alaska a check. And made them bigger.
Who was the last President who sent you a check?
Is the pie bigger?
ricky
@ChrisB:
If Barak had Bella Abzug’s balls he would not have had to waste any time buying non existent children a dog.
kay
I said media would be talking about Palin today, and I was right.
They can’t quit her. Not Americans. Don’t blame us. Her poll numbers are horrible.
Media can’t quit her. They’re foisting their personal obsession on the country. Media are going to shove Sarah Palin down our collective throats every day until the 2012 elections start.
This a romance between Sarah Palin and that huge segment of the media who are fascinated with her. It has nothing to do with viewers or readers or most laughably, “the issues”.
ricky
@Stoic:
So?
ironranger
@Leelee for Obama:
It’s no wonder so many rightwingers are overwrought. It has to be extremely stressful to have all those divergent thoughts continually bouncing around in their heads especially when Beck, Rush & the whole propaganda machine keep adding to the brain soup daily.
Jager
Ash Can
He is deep in denial, I do get my shots at him from time to time. The last time he and my sister stayed with us, I came home from work early and caught him listening to Rush in my home office. I made him finish listening in his rental car! Or the last time my good bro in law and I played golf with him…he topped the ball about 4 times (we made him count the swings) I suggested that since he sucks so bad swinging from the right, he should try playing from the “Left”.
Augustine
I know Lowell House.
I passed out in Lowell House Senior Common Room.
And you, lady, are no Lowell House.
Oh, and, “trenchent” = “series of tubes”
gnomedad
Wow, that’s quite the outlier for the WSJ.
ironranger
@Jager:
You saw combat but he is more “patriotic” because he believed in the war….Wow, that is major skewed thinking.
The Saff
@JK: Spot on, JK. I think that’s why all the publicity she receives makes me crazy. She’s a lightweight of the worst kind and yet the media cover her like she has substance. I don’t recall anyone being interested in anything about John Edwards after the ’04 election.
ChrisB
@The Saff: Except Rielle Hunter, I suppose.
dlw
You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the New West. You know – morons.
JK
@gnomedad:
That comes from a column by Thomas Frank not from a WSJ staff writer.
JK
@The Saff:
The MSM doesn’t care about substance. Their brains can’t handle that. They’d rather focus on celebrities like Sarah “the Mosse slayer” Palin.
Steve_in_NC
“white wine”, heck thats cheaper then Miller Lite. All the real fancy pants’ drink “red wine”.
Brachiator
@JK:
Fixt
Is that as in “a rollin’ Palin gathers no mosse?”
Lola
@JK:
The MSM keeps propping Palin up for one reason: money. Palin sells more than all of the other old white male Republicans. When journalism is primarily a profit industry the people are hurt, similar to health care.
Court H
I can’t believe they still put Patrick Buchanan on MSNBC as a commentator. The guy just wrote an essay saying that Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy, and he gets a pass. Give me an F’in break.
Surreal American
What’s with the wingnut commenters citing Dennis the Peasant over at Ambinder’s blog anyway?
Sure, DtP is smarter than the Malkin/Allahpundit/Morrissey crowd, but that’s not something any rational person would want to file under his or her “Personal Qualities I’m Extremely Proud Of” folder.
harlana pepper
@Jager: just, wow
Jager
The point with my brother in law is that these people truly live in an alternate reality, his stateside service in the Army is better than my year in combat relates to his his belief that W’s service in the Air Guard in Texas was better than Kerry’s service in Viet Nam.
Another example of how totally fucked this kind of a world view is;
Bro in law was hanging around my Mom’s condo with my sister’s and I as we packed up Mom’s stuff a day or so after her funeral. My Mother had a box with my Army stuff in it, I never kept any of it with me and I was looking at the contents for the first time in close to 40 years. Shit head commented on a picture of my Recon unit just before we left on a mission…blacked out faces, headbands, scarves, Montagnard bracelets and beads, weapons and 30-40 lbs of ammo each! His comment, “you guys dressed just like you were in the Rambo movies” I said “No, Rambo dressed like we did and you silly bastard we dressed like that for a reason…the head bands and scarves were for the sweat generated by the 99% humidity, the beads and bracelets were given to us by guys we trained and fought with and it was an honor to wear them and an insult not to!” Later that night at a family gathering he started to call me “Rambo”..I finally called him out and the chickenshit wouldn’t fight me. Thats the last time we discussed our respective military service, its been a relatively peaceful 4 years! And yes, I’d had many cocktails the night I called him on his bullshit!
Bender
Rob!, Harlana, Augustine, et. al. —
It was Marc Armbinder, that know-nothing redneck jug-band overalls-wearing pig-fucker hillbilly, who misspelled “trenchant” in his piece (“because Palin isn’t seen by most Americans as a particularly trenchent analyst of policy). The commenter was merely quoting him verbatim. You have beclowned yourselves yet again.
I could not possibly laugh any harder than I laugh at people who are trying so hard to promote themselves as superior while proving that a) they themselves can’t read and b) their guys are just as stupid as they imagine the other guys are…
I loves me some cosmic justice!
GusThePrimate
>>…she’s lived the life the rest of have lived, and she speaks for us.
“Us” being the people who sat vacant-eyed in my school classes wondering when they should take their next Quaalude. The rest of them were probably off at some so-called Christian academy being taught right-wing lies.
binzinerator
@DougJ
She’s both symptom and vector of the disease not the disease itself.
Palin and Palinism would not be present in our body politic but for the enfeeblement of its mind and soul.
There are always demagogues seeking to lead and they will if only people let them.
robertdsc
Never has evil been so beautiful.
Brachiator
@binzinerator:
Palin seems less than a demagogue, and more like a modern Claudius, with Ivy League educated neo-cons like Bill Kristol and Ross Douthat, along with Rupert Murdoch, trying to pull her strings.
The fantasy, I guess, is that she would be even more compliant than Dubya, a lazy brained, pretty populist face fronting elitist oligarchs, pushing the lie that a “Just Folks” Mom with limited education, zero curiosity, and a soundbite vocabulary could actually function as president.
I think that the majority will continue to reject this crass attempt to manipulate citizens, but I feel sorry for the wingnut fringe who suck this stuff up.
matoko_chan
Nah….its demonic possession.
The spirit of Kylon of Croton.
Kylon was the pissed off plutocrat whose application to Pythagoras’ School for Elites was rejected, so he raised a mob of local farmers to chop up the teachers with scythes and burn down the school.
Palin is the perfectly distilled poison pill of class and IQ resentment in a shiny candy shell.
It is all about teh respect…..
Palin: “I’m just as smart as you snobby stuck up elites and intellectuals….I’m just smart in a different way…a BETTER way!
I’m godsmart.”
binzinerator
@Ash Can:
More truth to that than many will admit.
Those on the right damn well know its true but won’t ever admit it — they know it ain’t her intellect or her policy chops or her experience that got her where she is now, but admitting she’s where she is because of her boobs and ass is admitting they were cynical bastards full of shit all along.
Some on the left won’t say it because they get all knee-jerk offended, in a wonderful example of a self-administered hamstringing, because they want to insist that a woman using her sexuality to get what she wants is a strong feminist thing to do, ignoring that the lack of intellectual capacity, experience, or capabilility in such a person who does that might in fact be an exemplar of what they once railed against.
oh really
Oh, I think there’s room on the comics page. And since Craig’s List took over the world of classifieds newspapers could probably squeeze her opinions in between “Garage Sales” and “Lost Pets.”