Marc Ambinder, you’re a smart guy and have really been on your game for the past couple of months, but could you please quit pretending she is the one writing this crap? She doesn’t write the footnoted brainfarts on facebook, and she didn’t write that attack on Huntsman.
She has no damned clue who Jon Huntsman, JR. is, and if you asked her, she’d probably tell you “Of course I support all those huntsmen out there with their right to bear arms to hunt and fish and catch what they eat the way we do up here in Alaska, you betcha.”
*** Update ***
Synchronicity.
Sign the petition to ask Sarah Palin to tell the truth. I get a stipend for every petition you sign.
sherifffruitfly
Why you freely choose to ignore obvious evidence that Ambinder is either not smart or not honest eludes me.
Michael D.
He is smart and honest…
Because John said so!! :-)
Darius
I think the bigger question is, why is Ambinder even reporting on Sarah Palin’s Twitter feed?
demkat620
The larger question is why is anybody following Sarah Palin’s twitter feed at all.
licensed to kill time
“She is the Great and Powerful PalinOz! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
Cris
Tangentially, I love the Change.org petition on the sidebar: “Tell Sarah Palin: Start Telling the Truth.”
HA HA HA HA HA AHA
Oh yeah, that’s all it’ll take, an online petition
kommrade reproductive vigor
If she’s allowing another person to put her name on something, it’s hers. The End.
We’ve already got the Teahadist claiming Liberal Infiltraitors are making them look bad and blaming the mysterious “staff member” when that Obama the Witch Doctor email is sent from their email account. Again. Why give Queen Dingbat a similar out?
Josh
O/T, but what do you guys think of this S.3081 bill proposed by the combined abortive efforts of McCain, Lieberman, and eight other mentally deficient senators?
A person I know, who generally is very intelligent and not given to irrational bouts of paranoia, seems to think that this bill has a 100% chance of passing and it means the government will forever and definitely imprison, indefinitely, all of teh 9/11 troofers.
Generally, I’m not given to hyperbole, and I know that’s a load of shit, but the actual language of the bill isn’t really all that different from something you might see out of Nazi Germany.
Midnight Marauder
@Darius:
@demkat620:
Good points, all around. The second comment at Ambinder’s place sums this all up nicely:
No, Buzz Feedback, he does not.
El Cid
Brit Hume, competing for insight with the Palinistas. There is no massive oil spill in the Gulf because Brit Hume hasn’t seen the oil from the shore. Even Juan Williams is stunned by the brilliance.
Brilliant. Brilliant. Folks, your billion dollar media at hard work.
Keith G
@Darius:
@demkat620:
Eyeballs/clicks/page views.
schrodinger's cat
John Cole@top
You seem angry, did Tunch draw a lot of blood this morning? How is the big guy any way?
ETA: I do agree with you about Palin, I would be happy if she just goes away.
Redshift
@El Cid: Well, these are the same people who insist that carbon dioxide can’t possibly be harmful because we breathe it out. If we could just lock up all those people in a sealed box until they admit it can be harmful, then one way or another, we might actually be able to make some progress on climate change.
aimai
I think people like Ambinder have spent so long imagining what a Republican party might sound like that they seize on Tweets, even from fringe players like Palin, as a kind of free floating, easily available quote to bolster an argument they think the Republican party might/ought to/will make at some point. In fact, I daresay that if Palin’s facebook fakers hadn’t tweeted the combined huntsman/obama hit tweet (is that a concept yet) Ambinder would have had no problem simply making it up. I know I wouldn’t have had any trouble making up a near identical quote. Isn’t that about half of what we do in the bloggosphere anyway: take the stated Republican position and apply it to everything. Its easy! and Seductive!:
These pointless posts remind me of a high school student who knows he’s supposed to “show his work” but doesn’t respect what he’s doing, or his reader, enough to do more than fake his footnotes. At this point there is nothing stupid, venal, ill informed or ill natured that Palin could tweet that I wouldn’t believe as typical of her. And probably Ambinder et al could get away with attributing views to her that she either doesn’t hold, or didn’t express as long as they were Palinesque.
aimai
schrodinger's cat
@Redshift: without oxygen?
beltane
I can’t wait for the day when Huntsman, and not the grifting granny from Wasilla, is the leader of the Republican party. Is Bill Kristol writing this crap for her?
fucen tarmal
palin is political and cultural chiaroscuro that permits the hyp to demonstrate why they know best. she only annoys people who aren’t with her, and aren’t “the man”, because they know the backlash will be that you have to have certain bonafides to ever be serious. she will be opposed by someone with a pedigree, and fail, and the narrative will be, that no one without the pedigree can possibly do it.
jwb
@beltane: Are her predictions all wrong? If so, then Kristol is definitely behind it.
El Cid
@Redshift: How come if they’s ‘evolution’ they’s still monkeys? Answer me that Mr. Book Larnin’!
Brian J
Okay, if she’s not the one actually writing the posts, which I could definitely believe, she has to know they are being written and, even if she is a bit late, know what it’s about. If you don’t think this is the case, then you are essentially alleging that what’s happening in her name represents a bigger Wizard of Oz-style routine than Bush and Cheney had going.
On another note, back when Huntsman was named to his current position, someone here said that while he’s definitely not a liberal, he’s not a reactionary conservative, either, as his support for civil unions shows, and would probably end up as a Democrat before long. I have no idea if this is even a remotely plausible claim, or if it would be anything for us to want, considering I don’t know anything about him, but it does seem intriguing, for a couple of reasons.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
If there was a woman in your school district who was running for School Board President despite the fact that her two eldest children did not graduate from high school on-time with their classes, one due to a drug addiction and the other a pregnancy, would anyone vote for that woman?
Redshift
@schrodinger’s cat: Without any more oxygen than they started with. IIRC, carbon dioxide buildup kills you before the lack of oxygen (though they’d probably refuse to believe that, either.)
soonergrunt
We know Palin didn’t tweet that. There’s no application to transfer notes Todd wrote on her palm to twitter.
El Cid
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
If she blamed libruls and the seckyoolarists and was mean and snotty and shouted about God and soshulism and stoppin’ the Caliphate, yeah, all Republicans.
Redshift
@El Cid: lol, I’m tempted to change my handle to Mr. Book Larnin.
beltane
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: There are plenty of places in the country where people would vote for someone like that just because she would actively promote ignorance, which is a virtue in some people’s minds. Sarah Palin appeals to those parents who would rather see their daughters knocked-up in tenth grade than have them go to college.
Violet
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
Yes, of course. Especially if she was hot. SATSQ.
Brian J
@beltane:
Do you personally know people like that? I can’t think of any person who fits that description in my life, but I’m sure I’ve met them and just don’t know it.
Redshift
@Brian J: I agree that she is as responsible for them as Ron Paul is for the racist columns that were published under his name, or for that matter, as much as any public official whose positions are made coherent by professional staff writers.
Since Palin is a BS artist who clearly doesn’t care whether what she says is true or false, I think it’s entirely possible that Palin doesn’t know what’s going out under her name (or at least may not remember five minutes after she says “sure, youbetcha” to what her staffer tells her is going to be posted), but it’s still a production of the Palin organization, just like a press release from any campaign or office.
It would be better if her utterances got no attention, but that’s because she’s a failed vice-presidential candidate and a governor who resigned for no good reason, not because she may not be doing her own writing.
Redshift
@Brian J: I think appointing Huntsman was a brilliant (though minor) partisan move. Either the GOP will have recovered enough from its current wingnut insanity by 2016 that someone who has served as an ambassador in a Democratic administration has a shot, or they’ll be deprived of a rather appealing candidate. It’s win-win.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@El Cid: @beltane: @Violet:
I grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago in the 1980’s and there is no way in hell a woman like I described would have even attempted to run, much less actually receive votes for the school board.
I find the whole concept of Sarah Palin ridiculous. She’s a hillbilly Mean Girl.
Mark S.
@Redshift:
I can think of twelve million (and counting!) good reasons.
Another good reason is that she’s a moron and just about anyone would be a better governor than her.
skippy
then go sign the other 4 change.org petitions (click the arrow in the upper right corner) over on my site because i get a stipend, too.
Dave C
@El Cid:
Sweet Jesus. When Juan Williams is the voice of sanity and reason in the room, you know your conversation is fucked.
Brian J
@Redshift:
I understand what you are saying and agree with you. But my point is that, if she is not in fact writing them, she’s either (a) authorizing people to use her name in any which way they choose, or (b) under the control of a group of people as if they were blackmailing her. (Perhaps there’s some other possible explanation, but I can’t think of it.) The latter would probably be the more interesting possibility, if only because it’s more unrealistic. And if it’s the former, which doesn’t seem so outlandish, that’s a pretty big fucking story, wouldn’t you agree?
Elisabeth
@beltane:
I don’t know if the parents would rather their daughter end up knocked up versus going to college but I bet there are those who would certainly consider it God’s will should that happen.
El Cid
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: Who do you think is being elected to the Texas school board making our nation’s textbooks so much dumberer and Old Testminty?
Brian J
@Redshift:
I agree. It’s moves like this, where he slyly but quite effectively manages to combine good policy with good politics, that force me to give him the benefit of the doubt.
robertdsc
As much as I like her looks, I don’t think the nation would survive under a Palin presidency.
QDC
The fact that Palin’s tweets are considered news is just astounding. Could the press debase themselves any more?
It reminds me of this scene from Forrest Gump. Can you guess who is Palin and who is the press?
If only she would get tired and go home…
Mnemosyne
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
I was in the northeast suburbs and, a couple of years after I graduated in the late 1980s, my high school banned English classes from showing the short film of “The Lottery” because it was teaching kids to question authority. So, sadly, I think you may be mistaken about that.
ETA: Just to be clear, this was a public high school, not a religious one.
skippy
gah! writing on my itouch, i can’t make links properly. here’s my site.
Allan
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: What church does she attend?
Splitting Image
I think that manufacturing a rivalry between Palin and Huntsman is a brilliant idea and should be strongly encouraged.
Huntsman is one of the few Republicans who has no real ties to the Bush-Cheney administration and who has avoided any kind of pandering to the Birther/Tenther factions. Thanks to Obama’s appointment, he can keep his hands clean until he comes back from China and mount an effective opposition to whichever screwball Palin and Bachmann’s fans have latched on to at that point.
Either he beats them and steers the Republicans away from the cliff, or (more likely) the Palinites take him down in a campaign so mean it will make 2008 seem like a model of sweetness and light. I know Mormons are about the most reliable voting bloc the Republicans have, but you have to wonder how they’ll feel seeing someone as inoffensive as Huntsman get the full Tea Party treatment to clear the way for someone like Sarah Palin.
NobodySpecial
Went to that link, they offered me TWO free issues of Atlantic.
Why do they always wait until AFTER I stocked up on toilet paper?
Brian J
@robertdsc:
I personally can’t envision a scenario where she gets close. It’s hard to quantify exactly how much power the big players have over the primary process, but I’d say it’s enough that they can, in many cases, decide who gets the nomination. If that’s the case, I don’t see anyone letting Palin get the nomination because, as many probably realize but won’t explicitly state, she’s a moron. If it looks like there’s a serious chance of taking back the White House, I’d bet large sums of money the big players will agree on a candidate and then see to it he wins. After all, the first or second biggest concern for those calling the shots in the Republican party is money, and a Palin presidency would, in their minds, threaten their economic security. They would, in other wants, want someone competent, like Romney.
Of course, this doesn’t mean she has no chance at the nomination. Quite the opposite, if it looks like Obama will win, she will probably get it if she wants it, but that will be because anyone with a legitimate shot of not making it look like 1984 all over again will have passed and others will be relatively disinterested in influencing the results.
Or so that’s what I think…
kay
@QDC:
I think it’s amazing and embarrassing that they have completely accepted that they may not ask her questions. Ever. She laid down the rule, and they comply.
Conservatives like to call free media “earned media” in campaigns, because they object to the word “free”, or something.
She hasn’t earned jack. She never appears for a follow-up. She throws this crap at the wall ad media makes sure it sticks. All reward, no risk. They give her millions of dollars of free advertising, and the last possible excuse they had (she’s a “public figure”) ended the day she resigned as governor. She made 12 million dollars on that book. All gravy. Did her publisher purchase a single ad?
If the media are wondering why their business model doesn’t work, they might look into charging commercial entities, like Palin Inc., for advertising, instead of giving it away.
Why should the RNC pay for ads? They have this moronic deranged pit bull, and she’s on television, free, every day and night. And she lost. She’s a deadbeat.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Mnemosyne:
The is no “northeast” suburbs, that’d put you in Lake Michigan. You’re what we called “northshore (ie Evanston, Wilmette, Lake Forest).”
We read “The Lottery” freshman year. Watched the movie too.
Our school district read Fahrenheit 451 in junior high. Banning books didn’t fly in my hood.
Arctps
Hi. I’m an Alaskan who has friends who worked for Palin. One is an expert on oil & gas issues who was once an analyst in her D.C. office. Shortly before McCain plucked her from obscure poverty, I asked my friend if Palin was as dumb as everyone was saying. He said, “If it’s written on half of a piece of paper, she can handle it.” I’m not the only one who thinks that Rebecca Mansour and Joseph Russo, the brain trust who founded http://www.conservatives4Palin.com, write her Facebook notes. She pays both of them through her PAC.
All you have to do is compare the transcript of her “I quit for the good of Alaskans” speech to anything that she’s allegedly written, and I think the answer to this question is clear. Here’s a version at Talking Points Memo. http://tinyurl.com/y96zga2
The funniest thing is that she used a teleprompter to deliver that speech, meaning she actually wrote it out beforehand all by herself.
Brandon
Not to go off-topic, but can anyone explain to me how this doesn’t sound like a rapper?
And this came right after how he was talking about how he was an outsider in Washington and hated being a Senator. This is truly sociopathic behavior.
thefoundation
John,
Even people on your side have reported that she writes her own Facebook posts. Gabrille Sherman from the NY Magazine reported it.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-now/2010/04/how_to_read_new_yorks_big_pali.html
“According to Sherman, Palin writes her own Facebook posts.”
Midnight Marauder
@Splitting Image:
LOLWUT? I mean, I know they are an increasingly powerful contingent (see: Proposition 8, funding of) within the Republican Party, but their most reliable voting bloc? Over heterosexual white males?! Surely, you jest.
Besides, even if they are reliable, they clearly don’t have the muscle within the Republican Party to make any serious moves happen. Just ask Mitt Romney how the Republican Party feels about Mormons as a whole.
frankdawg
wait wait wait – Marc Ambinder is all smart n stuff? When did that happen? Are there 2 Marc Ambinders & I have only been reading the shit pumped by the stupid one?
In the mean time can wee all agree that the Wasilla grifter is only in in it for the cash and the decent people of this country would all be better off if we never mentioned her name again?
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Allan:
I think that is where I’m not connecting. I grew up among Italian, Polish and Irish Catholics, Greek and Ukranian Orthodox and a handful of Lutherans. These folks don’t vote for the mother of a pregnant teenager.
Violet
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
I don’t know if she would have been elected in the 1980’s. But she sure would now. She’s got charisma, she charms men, she plays the part of Good Mom and she’s an evangelical-y Christian. What is not to love if you’re looking for a Real Murkin? Of course she’d run. What would get her elected is her vindictiveness and willingness to destroy anything in the way of her goal.
jwb
@Brian J: I don’t know that they can determine who will win, but they can almost certainly determine who will not be the nominee. And, no, I can’t see them ever allowing Palin to be the nominee. I suspect that Palin knows this as well and understands her role, which apparently includes allowing some faction to write tweets and FB updates under her name.
Brian J
@jwb:
If that’s the case–if she’s really just being a really good team player and a kingmaker of sorts–then she’s a lot smarter than we give her credit for. I guess it’s not completely unrealistic, but I’m not sure I buy it. She strikes me as an ideologue, the type that wouldn’t compromise and actually believe that she had a chance to win. If that’s the case, I don’t see her allowing herself to be used like that.
james
Obviously you would not get any attention unless you put the words Sarah Palin in any of your brain farts..
it is so plain that you do not write your own brain farts as I was told by someone close to you that it is a teenager renting a room in your basement who writes them to make money to buy his XBox games.
Splitting Image
@Midnight Marauder:
You might be misunderstanding what I meant by “most reliable”. I mean that a higher percentage of Mormons are Republican than any other group, not that Mormons make up the largest group in the Republican party. White born-again Christians might be higher, but Mormons are about 70-75% Republican, if I’m not mistaken.
Your second paragraph is pretty much the point I was making. Mormons vote in lockstep with a group of xenophobic assholes who basically hate their guts. The G.O.P. has done a good job of papering that over the last few decades, but it depends on having enough good national candidates throughout the country that any plausible Mormons out there get lost in the shuffle.
If it comes down to Huntsman vs Palin, they’re fucked. Huntsman is a superior candidate to Palin in just about every conceivable way. He even quit his job as governor with more dignity than she did. How do they cover up the fact that they’d sooner have an idiot like Palin than any Mormon, no matter how reasonable?
Remember, this is on top of the Republicans’ refusal to nominate Mitt Romney. Officially, the reason is that he was a notorious flip-flopper. But how plausible is that when the eventual nominee was John McCain?
Mormons may be a smallish minority, but they do control three states. Without those three states, the G.O.P. doesn’t win, period.
gahanson
John Cole, whoever that is, doesn’t write this crap, somebody else does, and he puts his name on it.
WereBear
To understand why that is so, one must remember that in places where Palin appeals, to have a child go to college means they will move away and never come back.
Sacrifice can have many meanings.
Lysana
@Midnight Marauder:
Which heterosexual white males? You mean like the writers of this blog and the plurality of its commenters?
Sarah Palin
@james:
@gahanson:
Thanks for defending that honor thing of mine there, fellas. By the by, I will never, ever sleep with ya, you betcha. How’s that useful idiot thing workin’ out for ya?
kommrade reproductive vigor
@El Cid: I look forward to reading the stories after Hume is found tangled in a shrimp net with a huge wad of tar shoved up his ass.
Anne Laurie
Lines like “Even though Jon Huntsman, Jr. stopped pretending not to run for president to become President Obama’s ambassador to China… “convince me that Ambinder’s trying for “tongue severely in cheek” and coming across as “over-earnest” when he fails. As someone who’s had the same problem right here on this very blog, I can attest that it’s a lot harder to hit that zone than it looks.
As for the “Would you vote this woman for your school board?” argument — over the last thirty years or so, the increasing availability of birth control methods up to and including early abortions has changed the Evangelical/Religious paradigm a bit. The argument used to be that only “bad girls” got “caught” (pregnant), but it didn’t count against the girl’s parents as long as they “helped” (or forced) her to solve the problem with a quick marriage or an extended trip out of town to hide the evidence until the little bastard could be “given away”. The new, improved argument is that “good girls”, like Bristol Palin, may “get carried away and briefly go astray” but a teenage pregnancy is proof that she’s not the sort of slut who (a) uses contraception, which would mean she’d been thinking about having sex in advance, or (b) commits the mortal sin of having an abortion. Ergo, Bristol’s pregnancy is proof that her mother is a fine conservative Xtian woman who’s raised her daughter JUST FINE, praise the Lord!
Midnight Marauder
@Lysana:
No. I mean like the members of the Republican Caucus in the Senate.
And to be fair, the esteemed host of this blog used to be one of those white heterosexual males.
Just sayin’…
jwb
@Brian J: Personally, I think she would be acting differently if she thought she had a realistic shot of winning.
Mark S.
@Arctps:
That gibes pretty well with things I’ve read where she loses interest at meetings if they last longer than ten minutes. She probably has ADD.
@Splitting Image:
I’ve read a couple places that Mitt’s dad never had any problems with his Mormonism when he was running in the 60’s. Progress isn’t a straight line.
yarrrrr
Oh STFU John Cole… Palin is right, get over yourself…
Delia
@Brian J:
My sister, who’s a liberal Democrat, lives in Utah. She says Huntsman was actually quite a decent governor. For example, he did as much as he could for the public schools during the time he was in office, and those were difficult times all over for public education. The present governor’s more the usual sort of idiot.
Brian J
@jwb:
You could very well be right.
@Delia:
I’m surprised they didn’t try to nail him for being a socialist. After all, who but a socialist supports public schools?
Anne Laurie
@Mark S.:
The Mormons were pretty “undercover” until the Moral Majority crawled out from under the GOP Southern-strategy rock. I don’t believe anybody ever talked about John Glenn’s Mormonism during his various campaigns, for instance. And the Spousal Unit, who was growing up in Michigan when George Romney was governor, doesn’t remember Mormonism being mentioned loudly enough to attract SO’s not-very-politically-focused attention. There’s been a certain amount of public Pietism required of American political candidates for at least the last hundred years, but the specific Talibangelical strain of competition only took off after one of the two major American political parties decided that splitting the electorate into us-versus-them factions was a winning political gambit, and to hell with its effect on the general health of the national discourse.
North Dallas Thirty
Of course, because the Obama Party Senatorial Campaign Committee is committed to fighting lies and misinformation.
Except the ones they spread.
So Cole and the Obama Party Senatorial Campaign Committee are calling Sarah Palin a liar…while they are supporting and endorsing a proven one.