Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

In after Baud. Damn.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

We’re not going back!

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

People are complicated. Love is not.

Books are my comfort food!

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91Comments

  1. 1.

    licensed to kill time

    __

    The truth is that Palin’s threshold problem is sobriety.

    Wait – she’s a drunk, too?!

  2. 2.

    dmsilev

    What a disjointed mess. The editor in me wants to take that post and start crossing out whole chunks.

    She’s still the Panglossian archangel of the anti-intellectual strain in conservatism? She blows off evolution and asserts that humans can eat meat because animals are made of meat. Evolution might reply that if Sarah Palin didn’t exist, God would have had to invent her. The conviction that she’s the talisman for a vital center in American politics? Check. The ability to capture the patronizing — and yet pornographically attentive — focus of the establishment media? Check. The preternatural skill at making the other side feel good about making the other other side feel bad? All there.

    Ow.

    -dms

  3. 3.

    jeffreyw

    If I was smarter and more focused and lots of people liked me and I had lottsa money I could win a national election if I also gave a shit.

  4. 4.

    valdivia

    Marc put down whatever you are smoking (which is clearly not of the same quality as whatever Sulli is smoking) before you ever attempt this kind of analysis ever again. He sounds like he took out all hit lit crit readings fro college to write this.

  5. 5.

    El Cid

    I could probably think about several acquisitions of major Wall Street firms if I would just make several billion dollars over the next few months.

  6. 6.

    schrodinger's cat

    Sarah Palin can’t win a national election now but she will be able too if she reads a few books over the next couple years.

    By that logic, DougJ, you should run for President, I am sure you have read more than a few books, and you can also solve differential equations.

    I have a question, why are most of our Presidents lawyers, why not some scientists, engineers, mathematicians? I wonder..

  7. 7.

    Zifnab

    Sarah Palin can’t win a national election now but she will be able to if she reads a few books over the next couple years.

    Absolutely. I say run her fast and run her hard.

    Mondale Palin ’12!

  9. 9.

    freelancer

    Panglossian archangel…pornographically attentive

    adverb fail. And what does “Pornographically Attentive” even MEAN?! Is Marc in a lowball contest with Tom Friedman?

  10. 10.

    Ash

    I believe that Josh Marshall at TPM said all that needs to be said.

    What a pity that so many pixels have to die a meaningless death just to spin out narratives about how this moron can cease to be who she is.

  11. 11.

    calipygian

    I, like most people, immediately thought of Hans Robert Jauss when I read that and got iatropic excitement all over my pants.

  13. 13.

    beltane

    I can’t be an Olympic skier now but maybe if I start taking a few skiing lessons, I’ll be ready for the 2018 Olympics.

  15. 15.

    nepat

    Sarah Palin can’t win a national election now but she will be able to if she reads a few books over the next couple years.

    It’s more than that. He’s calling for a total personality transplant. If Palin can become Margaret Thatcher, she just might have a shot!

  16. 16.

    Midnight Marauder

    @El Cid:

    I could probably think about several acquisitions of major Wall Street firms if I would just make several billion dollars over the next few months.

    And just like that, a glorious new meme was born…

  20. 20.

    eemom

    and the nightmare continues.

    I’m not as well acquainted with “Sully” as the rest of y’all seem to be, but if he comes up with something that will bring this despicable woman down I will TOTALLY marry him and bear his child.

    Yes, even though he’s gay and I’m too old for any more childbearing and my husband would flip out. THAT is how much I want her gone.

  22. 22.

    Ash Can

    Evolution might reply that if Sarah Palin didn’t exist, God would have had to invent her.

    He already has invented her, many times over. Ruthless grifters with more looks than brains are a dime a dozen, and that includes the small percentage of them who get (and, in this case, long overstay) their fifteen minutes of fame.

  23. 23.

    Xanthippas

    That’s not what he says. Specifically, he says this:

    For Sarah Palin to come back from somewhere, she needs to set a goal. To start with, she might immerse herself in a single issue for a few years, become an expert, and then use it to launch a broader conversation about what America ought to look like. Her policy statements to date have been, and don’t believe me, just ask any smart Republican you know, treacly at best. If Palin gets smarter and more serious, if she embraces reality, then she can probably change the perception that many Americans have of her. Palin can be formidable and a real player in American politics, if she wants to. But she has so far expressed no doubt that her 2008 persona is the right persona for the future. No self-doubt. No awareness of her own humanity and imperfections. That’s common sense?
    </blockquote
    In other words, she needs to do what she is incapable of doing. Is this controversial?

  27. 27.

    MattF

    I have, in my life, known some smart women– I have also, in my life, known some stupid women. And after much trial and error, many hardships and joys– I can, at long last, tell the difference.

  28. 28.

    Comrade Scrutinizer

    @Ash: Even better, this from Connor in the comments section:
    __

    1. Do you really believe this shit that you say here?
    __
    2. If you do, and let’s say it’s true, does that make you happy or sad for the future of this republic?

  29. 29.

    Comrade Dread

    It’s more than that. He’s calling for a total personality transplant. If Palin can become Margaret Thatcher, she just might have a shot!

    Once Bob Dole reads from the Necronomicon, the soul of Reagan shall rise and take control of the body of Palin to combine his optimistic skilled oratory with boobs.

    Then mankind would become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy.

    Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

  33. 33.

    Martin

    Perhaps if she looks at the moon more regularly over the next few years she’ll also be qualified to be an astronaut.

    (Apologies to Redkitten)

  34. 34.

    El Cid

    How many books would Sarah be allowed to read before she became an East Coast ay-leetist all concerned with ‘facks’ instead of using her guts?

  35. 35.

    jenniebee

    If I had a different body type and was in fantastic shape and had trained for years and was twenty years younger, I could be the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi in a couple of years if I was also Russian.

    Hey, this works like a charm!

    I’m reading Going Rogue right now. It isn’t word salad, but the paranoia is strong with this one. She is always but always anticipating that people won’t like what she has to say or what she wants to do. Which isn’t surprising, because she’s exactly the kind of person who, the more exposure you have to her, the more reasons she gives you not to like her. I just got to the part where, as Mayor of Wasilla, she asked all of her staff for “letters of resignation to keep on file in the event that [she] decided to replace” them. Then she explains that the request was a test to see who was a “team player” and who wasn’t.

    Personally, if someone made that request of me, I’d write it up for them, but tell them not to bother to file it, I’d sent it to the press as well, have a nice day.

  36. 36.

    Midnight Marauder

    @Xanthippas:

    In other words, she needs to do what she is incapable of doing. Is this controversial?

    I’m not sure who you’re comment is directed at, but I don’t see anyone here saying that anything Ambinder wrote is “controversial.” I’m also not sure what the difference is between the interpretation you’re advancing and what DougJ said at the top (assuming that is who you are referring to).

  37. 37.

    calipygian

    I just got to the part where, as Mayor of Wasilla, she asked all of her staff for “letters of resignation to keep on file in the event that [she] decided to replace” them. Then she explains that the request was a test to see who was a “team player” and who wasn’t.

    That is really dickish and indicative of someone with really, really shitty leadership skills.

  39. 39.

    joes527

    @calipygian:

    I just got to the part where, as Mayor of Wasilla, she asked all of her staff for “letters of resignation to keep on file in the event that [she] decided to replace” them. Then she explains that the request was a test to see who was a “team player” and who wasn’t.

    Oooo! oooo! I know that one!

    That was a clear demonstration that Sarah is not a team player.

  40. 40.

    Martin

    Ah, so as she says, she didn’t fire the librarian and police chief, she just forced them to give her a letter of recommendation to put on file which she then pulled out and accepted at her convenience. See, they resigned!

  43. 43.

    El Cid

    Nobody, but nobody, does pre-emptive preparatory searching for any possible minor suggestion that somebody somewhere might be slightly dismissive of us or our every tiniest preference as a frighteningly serious grievance as us Southerners, at least our whiny ‘lost cause’ white Southerner division. Hell, that’s been half of our national culture war politics for the last century.

  45. 45.

    Delia

    She’s still the Panglossian archangel of the anti-intellectual strain in conservatism? She blows off evolution and asserts that humans can eat meat because animals are made of meat. Evolution might reply that if Sarah Palin didn’t exist, God would have had to invent her.

    What the bloody hell does this even mean? Near as I can tell, that Ambinder still remembers that he read Voltaire in his freshman seminar and thinks he can throw a few names and semi-quotations around to catch George Will’s attention.

  49. 49.

    Leelee for Obama

    Ambers has, how you say, jumped the proverbial shark. Even if Sarahcuda reads real, college-level poli-sci and economics non-stop for the next 2 years, she will still be dumber than a bag of hammers, because she doesn’t let silly little things like facts get in the way of her ideology. She learned that from St. Ronnie of Raygun, too. Also.

  51. 51.

    'Niques

    I said a long time ago I hoped she’d had a fit with her ghostwriter (perfectly plausible), whose payback would be to add something scathing (but true) somewhere around page 350. Most of her fans won’t get that far. Sarah, herself, won’t have read it. But eventually someone like Sully will make the discovery and broadcast it for all the world to hear.

    Just a fantasy of mine.

  52. 52.

    Delia

    @Leelee for Obama:

    She learned that from St. Ronnie of Raygun, too. Also.

    I think she’s way dumber than St. Ronnie. Ronnie had the discipline to stay on target long enough to finish a movie, which is something. He could also memorize lines and act like a President, at least until the Alzheimer’s started to kick in. This more than Our Sarah can do.

  54. 54.

    valdivia

    Oh Oh Sulli posted an update, he says there is no big wow there, just a better understanding of the birthing thing.

    All this waiting for that? I haz a sad.

  55. 55.

    Nutella

    If Palin gets smarter and more serious, if she embraces reality, then she can probably…

    And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

    It’s Ambinder who’s dumber than a sack of hammers.

    Yesterday he told us all that all biological scientists are atheists except a few who are Deists, because evolution demands loss of belief in God. This would be a big surprise to the many Christian, Hindu, etc. biological scientists, but only if their standards were so low that they waste time reading Ambinder.

    When I think of all the smart, knowledgeable journalism grads who are unemployed while this idiot babbles away in the Atlantic, I could cry.

  56. 56.

    Leelee for Obama

    @Delia: I wasn’t comparing their intellects. Reagan was orders of magnitude smarter than Sarah. Admittedly, the starting point is low, but still. No, my point was that she is ineducable, because facts and truth mean nothing to her if they are counter to her ideology. GWB was the same-I know he was a legacy Yalie and his MBA from Harvard was a joke, but you’d think just being on the campuses might have changed something, but no, not a thing. He admitted as much to his Professor at Harvard.

  58. 58.

    Origuy

    Someone needs to tell Ambinder that the Bulwer-Lytton Contest is only for fiction, not political commentary. Oh, wait….

  59. 59.

    shortstop

    It’s not just dumb of Ambinder; it’s wildly unoriginal. Since late August/early September 2008, various people have been assuring us that if Sarah just hunkers down and bones up, she’ll be ready for the Big Time. In that 15-month period, has she finished reading so much as a People article?

  60. 60.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @Delia

    What the bloody hell does this even mean? Near as I can tell, that Ambinder still remembers that he read Voltaire in his freshman seminar and thinks he can throw a few names and semi-quotations around to catch George Will’s attention.

    I now have a mental image of Ambinder trying to coyly romance George Will by dropping references to Voltaire in his columns. I’m not blaming this on you. I just wonder what the fuck is wrong with my brain that makes me think of things like this.

    Indeed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof comes to mind with Marc Ambinder as Brick saying “One man has one great good true thing in his life. One great good thing which is true! I had friendship with George Will. You are namin’ it dirty!”

    Yeah, I need help, or more painkillers, or less, or something.

  61. 61.

    Shell

    Then she explains that the request was a test to see who was a “team player” and who wasn’t.

    So, you get somebody to be a team player by making them think they could be canned any minutue?

    That’s like trying to ensure your spouse’s love by telling them you could divorce anytime.

  64. 64.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    The fact that anyone is still taking this grifter seriously is just amazing to me. Her inability to run as a candidate for anything other than “Miss most likely to start WWIII” is clear to anyone with at least a couple of functioning brain cells. To hear El Rushbo lauding her (ghost written) book to be “one of the most substantive policy books written in my lifetime” (paraphrasing), makes me finally come to the conclusion that Rush is performance art, much like Stephen Colbert. There can be no other explanation for it, particularly when he follows such thoughts with a rant about Obama being “out of his depth” and “inexperienced” and “in over his head”. (I listen to this dickhead so you don’t have to tag). It is my most treasured wish that Bible Spice is the Republican nominee for 2012, with Bachman as her VP nod. I pray to the FSM every night for such a thing.

  65. 65.

    The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I have a question, why are most of our Presidents lawyers, why not some scientists, engineers, mathematicians? I wonder..

    We had a brilliant nuclear engineer for president. He turned out to be History’s Greatest Monster™. Please try to keep up.

  67. 67.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I have a question, why are most of our Presidents lawyers, why not some scientists, engineers, mathematicians?

    I think that a big chunk of it is that the mode of thought that makes somebody a successful engineer, scientist, or mathematician tends to make them ineffective as a politician. We’ve had two presidents who were trained as engineers, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, and both were deeply flawed at the dealing with people side of the political business. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It’s a product of the technical mindset.

  70. 70.

    Leelee for Obama

    @Roger Moore: As the daughter of an engineer, I can tell you that they are generally not good with people unless tanked. Carter seems a humanist engineer, but I think it’s the farmer in him.

  73. 73.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I have a question, why are most of our Presidents lawyers, why not some scientists, engineers, mathematicians? I wonder…

    We had a brilliant nuclear engineer for president. He turned out to be History’s Greatest Monster™. Please try to keep up.

    Jimmy Carter wasn’t a brilliant nuclear engineer, or even a nuclear engineer. The last president we had who was an engineer was Herbert Hoover. On the other hand Hoover, like Carter, was probably one of the best ex-presidents we ever had, really wasn’t all that bad as a president and had the credit for policies he started stolen by his successor (FDR took tons of the ideas for the New Deal from Hoover just as Reagan took credit for Jimmy Carter’s defense buildup). Also, like Carter, Hoover was defeated by an opponent who ran against him on the grounds that he had increased the deficit and national debt and once elected went on a massive spending spree that drove up the debt and the deficit.

  74. 74.

    schrodinger's cat

    @The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge:
    You are right. I guess I was thinking of the recent Presidential elections, Obama, Clinton, Kerry, Gore all being lawyers. It seems like Democrats have nominated lawyers in the past few election cycles. My initial statement was overly generalized but there do seem to be more lawyers in politics then other professionals. Just an observation.

  76. 76.

    Roger Moore

    @Leelee for Obama: I wasn’t just pulling that claim out of a hat. My father is an engineer. I’m a scientist. I talk to other scientists all the time. I’ve dated scientists. I went to a Major League techie school. I know damn well that techies as a group just don’t think the way you have to think if you want to be a successful politician. It’s a career path that attracts rationalists who want the universe to be explicable, even if it’s not perfectly predictable. Mushy thinkers- who make up at least 90% of the general population- drive us up the wall. It’s not a good mindset for somebody whose career depends on dealing effectively with anyone other than other rationalists.

  78. 78.

    asiangrrlMN

    Oh my god. These threads are the best! Which brings me to a moral dilemma. All the threads mocking those who cover Palin have been sidesplitting. They have made me laugh out loud several times. This is a good thing. Yet, I loathe La Palina and just want her to go away. Yet, if she goes away, no more funnies to be made at her expense. Decisions, decisions.

  80. 80.

    Marc

    Ambinder: your references to Pangloss would look a lot more impressive if you could end a declarative statement with a goddamned period.

  84. 84.

    cmorenc

    @Schrodinger’s Cat:

    ..why are most of our Presidents lawyers, why not some scientists, engineers, mathematicians? I wonder..

    Be careful what you wish for here. The following US Presidents had engineering degrees:
    – Herbert Hoover
    – Jimmy Carter

    The following foreign president had a medical degree and was a practicing psychiatrist:
    -Radovan Karovic (of Bosnian Serbian infamy).

    Of ALL the US Presidents so far, the ONLY one with any plausible claim to being a bona fide scientist (back in the day when no formal credentials in such were usually required or even available):
    -Thomas Jefferson.
    But since Jefferson was ALSO a lawyer back in those Renaissance man days, he’s sort of on probation as a scientist.

  85. 85.

    cmorenc

    I’d also point out as a further contemporary example that having extensive science-oriented training is NOT necessarily much insulation at all from adopting and holding dear wacked-out regressive anti-science grounded political views.

    – Ron Paul, M.D.

    – Tom Coburn, M.D.

  88. 88.

    mandarama

    @brantl:

    Duh, it means Marc Ambinder is Very Smart!

    (actually, I think it means the symptoms / impetus that send one to seek medical help–i.e., “I find the iatropic effect of reading Marc Ambinder to be debilitating.”)

  89. 89.

    Xanthippas

    I’m not sure who you’re comment is directed at, but I don’t see anyone here saying that anything Ambinder wrote is “controversial.” I’m also not sure what the difference is between the interpretation you’re advancing and what DougJ said at the top (assuming that is who you are referring to).

    Well, the difference is that Ambinder doesn’t say what DougJ says he does. I like media criticism, but I also like accuracy.

  90. 90.

    bjacques

    @cmorenc/85:

    You forgot Dr. Senator Bill Frist.

    I think Tyrebiter up there is saying that Sarah Palin appeals to the better Panglossian archangels of our nature.

  91. 91.

    licensed to kill time

    A panglossian archangel stole my reply arrow and I want it back, the better to shoot revanchists.

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