Not at all surprising, but damn: “When we serve, we devote ourselves to God, family and country. My decision maintains this order.” Divine intervention prevents us from enjoying the hilarity that a Palin campaign promised.
Where do I sign up to work for the Bachmann campaign?
Sarah Palin: “I’m through whining about a liberal press…[proceeds to whine about liberal press].” Sure.
In related news, since the Mets seem to be going with Brad Eamus at 2B I was dead wrong when I said that the estatic reaction to the release of Luis Castillo showed that Mets fans had almost as little understanding of sunk costs as Jeff Wilpon. While I never thought that the Mets would be dumb enough to actually play inexplicable fan favorite, medicore 1B, atrocious corner OF and Hustling White Guy (TM) Daniel Murphy at 2B (in the sense that he’d wear a glove and stand near second base), I am beaten-down enough to think that the Mets were going to plug in a minor league veteran type with as little future and even less present value than Castillo. But even though he might prove to be more Dave Silverstri than Dan Uggla, Eamus has enough upside to be worth a flyer — shows that the new regime (including Collins) might know what it’s doing.
Liberals sometimes criticize Sarah Palin because we’re absolutely terrified that she will make a formidable candidate. After all, in the wake of her historic performance as VP candidate, who could doubt it? And if she makes Haley Barbour her veep choice, whew, that would be unbeatable. I’m very, very scared.
The GOP primary season is shaping up as a reality TV freak show of Springeresque proportions, what with Michele Bachmann about to toss her tinfoil hat in the ring, Donald Trump threatening to make America “respected” again, and Sarah Palin continuing to mull whether to add her crayon-scrawled resume to the hopper. Then there’s Professor Gingrich making noises about bringing his unique style of pro-colonial historical analysis to the struggle to overthrow the Kenyan usurper. Throw in Ron Paul, this week’s version of Mitt Romney, and a healthy dose of groveling before the Tea Party’s demands that the government balance the budget by getting rid of NPR, and the 2012 presidential race promises to be a veritable laugh riot.
Of course one of these guys/gals could well end up getting elected, in which case the joke will be on Planet Earth.
Some amusing nastiness from James Wolcott, on the development of the next hit reality TV show, tentatively entitled Reality.
Like soul brother Beck, Sarah Palin has moonshot herself into a zero-gravity zone that is beyond parody, where brazen self-caricature takes on the bold outlines of cartoon stardom and nothing she does perturbs her fan base. They have adopted her as their mommy savior and the ridicule and criticism she receives only endear her more to the faithful, proof of how much she gets under liberals’ prickly skin. With each new iteration of herself (tweeter, best-selling author, Fox News political analyst, Facebook avenger), Palin becomes more of an infotainment fembot, an irresistible force impervious to the political rules that hamstring lesser phonies. Had Al Gore or John Kerry made the gaffe Palin made over the Korean conflict (“Obviously, we have got to stand with our North Korean allies”), it would have been pin-the-tail-on-their-donkey-butts for weeks, whereas for Palin it’s just another dot in the pointillism of her ongoing cavalcade. Palin’s worst enemies have never been David Letterman, the “lamestream media,” or Katie Couric but her own insatiability for attention, a narcissism with no Off button or volume knob.
Wolcott cites David Seaton for the interesting idea that the bug-eyed craziness of Beck et. al., is a (conscious?) strategy on the part of the Lords of Capital:
A blogger named David Seaton provided the keenest insight into the tactical superiority of Beck’s home-brewed surrealism. “To understand what Beck is doing, to understand him, you must suspend your capacity for rational thought and just let the emotions wash over you and try to take note of them as they assault your endocrine system,” Seaton wrote. As America enters the downward slope of empire—its debt mounting, the disparity between wealthy and poor continuing to chasm, the environmental ravages becoming irreversible, high unemployment becoming the cruel norm—the Richie Riches have a vested interest in misdirecting people by blaming the powerless for the sins of the powerful. Incoherence isn’t a bug in Beck’s software program, it’s the primary directive. Seaton: “That is what the Tea Party, Fox, etc is all about: keeping people from thinking straight. The idea is to play on people’s emotions: fear, hate, racism, xenophobia, just to keep them from doing the math. The Teabaggers, Beck, [Gingrich] and Fox [News] are often criticized for not making any sense This is not a failure of communication or an error on their part That is the object of the exercise: to make rational thought difficult or impossible due to emotional overload.”
As is so often the case in this postmodern world, what was once satire is now sociology:
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic
.
Tammy Bruce and Sarah Palin’s flack. Maybe Althouse is doing some writing for Palin on the side or something.
…TBogg: “Johnny Cash once surveyed a man in Reno just to watch him die.”
I basically agree with Melissa about the most recent Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin, which is almost as devoid of content as the last one. If you were feeling really charitable you could say that in this particular case the obsession with trivia was a more important factor than sexism. Certainly male politicians – including Bill Cinton, Al Gore, and John Edwards — have been the targets of similar hatchet jobs, although I do think it’s true that women are more likely to be attacked for their child-rearing or for showing anger around their staff. But whatever role of sexism per se — and I think it’s pretty evident in the article’s focus — the anecdote about Piper being used for an applause line gives away the show. The way modern political campiagns use children as campaign props might be distasteful, but as a criticism of any individual politician it’s about as devastating as pointing out a politician dressing more formally in public than they do puttering around the house.
What’s especially frustrating about this is that there most certainly is a good long negative profile to be written about Palin for a general audience. Calling her followers to “refudiate” tolerance and religious freedom in lower Manhattan is just the latest example of her being an extremely pernicious public figure, and her claims about her accomplishments and stands have been mostly lies and half-truths from the beginning. An article that detailed this type of information in a high-circulation monthly would be useful. An article that discusses her low tips to bellboys, twitter ghostwriters, and the similarity of a the nickname of a supporter’s blog to an adult swinger’s site haha — not so much.
Shorter Verbatim Sarah Palin: “Dr.Laura:don’t retreat…reload! (Steps aside bc her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence”isn’t American,not fair”).”
When I said that when a winger talk show host asserted that private individuals criticizing her racist remarks were violating her First Amendment rights she was echoing the constitutional theories of the most recent Republican nominee for Vice-President of the United States, I wish I was joking.
Rozen, via Glenn Greenwald:
Our colleague Ken Vogel reported yesterday that Sarah Palin’s SarahPAC has paid Kristol’s Weekly Standard colleague Michael Goldfarb and former McCain campaign foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann of Orion Strategies $90,000 since July 2009 to advise her on foreign policy.
Okay, fine; that’s it. Sarah, let me make you this offer right now: I will work for 2/3rds of whatever you’re paying Mike Goldfarb, and I swear to Jeebus that my product will be twice as good. I can work in the neocon genre:
Peace through strength! Bomb Iran! Palestinians suck! Yay Reagan! A nuke in every home!
See? I’ve already exceeded the Goldfarb standard. Plus, you get to portray yourself as all bipartisan-y and stuff. How can you lose?
Sarah to Rand: When you say something stupid, horrible, and indefensible in public, always blame the questioner. It never fails; the morons just lap up the “liberal-media-coastal-elite-hate-America-bias” bullshit. Try it yourself!
Were that this was true:
Add Mike Huckabee to the list of Republicans criticizing the Arizona law. As I keep saying, Huckabee is dangerous; he’s very conservative and not very well educated, but he’s smart and sane and has a conscience. Unlike Sarah Palin, he could wind up as President.
Certainly, if we were playing “death is not an option” I would much prefer Huckabee to Palin as president. The problem is, I’m not a Republican primary voter, and more to the point I’m not a major Republican businessman or fundraiser. It’s pretty clear from the 2008 primaries that the GOP’s money wing doesn’t want Huckabee, which ends his chances. While I see no reason why they would object to Palin, and hence if she chose to run in the primaries she could definitely win. And while she’s inept and unpopular enough to challenge political science evidence that candidates don’t really matter in presidential elections, any major party candidate can win under the right conditions. Be very afraid.
For whatever reason, Google Reader’s “Explore” option recently started lumping all political sites together irrespective of orientation, which means that even time I try to find new, interesting voices, I’m bombarded with new, interesting-for-the-wrong-reason-but-potential-blog-fodder voices. For example:
We believe the TV show [Sarah Palin]’s producing with Mark Burnett on the wonders of Alaska will be Reaganesque in its reach of regular people.
For something written by “such good writers,” that sentence is uglier than it is stupid. The majority of Americans won’t appreciate a show about “the wonders of Alaska” for the simple reason that Americans only watch things about Alaska when its bears eat tourists. Don’t believe me? Consider Christopher Nolan’s career:
Batman Begins: $205,343,774
Insomnia: $67,263,182
The Dark Knight: $533,316,061
When his films take place in Alaska, their domestic gross drops, on average, very large numbers because Americans don’t believe that states whose moose-caribou population density (1.11/sq. mi.) outstrips its population density (1.03/sq. mi.) count as America. The idea that a successful Palin campaign could be initiated by a show about 700,000 moose and caribou picked to live in a state and have their lives taped to find out what happens when they stop being polite and start getting real—there’s wishful thinking, then there’s whatever that is. This too:
If [the show is] informative, well-produced, and showcases Palin’s Alaska, we believe it will become a cultural phenomenon. We foresee Alaskan imagery everywhere in 2011. Which is a wonderful setup for the Palin brand in 2012. Late 2010-early 2011 is also when Palin’s next book is due: a policy book on American Virtues. That will be coupled with a book tour that should end round about February 6th, 2011, the day we believe Palin will announce her presidential run. Essentially, the tour bus she uses for the book [American Virtues] will just be slightly rebranding as PALIN 2012, instead of American Virtues. Chances are, “American Virtues” will actually be her campaign motto. We can see the branding and marketing already at work.
These people should not be mocked for claiming 1) that Palin will write a book by her lonesome, 2) that it will be policy-oriented, or 3) that people can write policy books about virtues: they should be pitied for the wistful tones in which they imagine the subtle repurposing of a tour bus in terms of branding, because people who daydream in ad lingo about campaign slogans are the saddest people in the world. Then there’s the fact that, on principle, dreamers this dumb deserve pity:
Palin’s playing 11th dimensional chess that RedState’s not seeing, because it’s so focused on Romney, or dazzled by his Mattel-produced hair. She’s operating a fully-formed multimedia strategy designed to counter Dr. Utopia’s razzle dazzle and media darling status.
Follow that RedState link and you’ll find a discussion of a post at the Daily Caller that warms my heart:
[I]t is very important to point out that something like this may already be Palin’s plan (for the record, I have shared almost all of these thoughts with her via her personal e-mail but have received no response). So far, I have not seen one shred of legitimate evidence indicating that she has decided to run and some serious indications that she won’t.
Wait—Palin decide to ignore this asshole? Excellent. Anyone with any sense would distance herself from people like him, wait—did I just suggest that Sarah Palin is a person with sense? Maybe she is playing 11th dimensional chess.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
