I'm going to apologize in advance for another posting on Sarah Palin. I realize that issues are more important than personalities, but I fear the prospect of an end-times Armageddon believer having the nuclear codes, I really do. By most accounts Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson yesterday was a complete train wreck. The Eskimo queen was stilted in her delivery and apparently had no idea what the Bush Doctrine was, despite the fact that it will form the basis of McSame’s foreign policy. (Gibson described it to the clueless Palin as, “anticipatory self-defense.” ) Whatever, what is important is sticking to your plan, not thinking for yourself: “You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war.” Uh, yeah.
What came out of her mouth wasn’t reasoned analysis or thoughtful consideration of the questions asked, rather, she regurgitated Republican talking points and sounded as if she had just memorized a stack of cue cards with titles like, “Ten Things I Should Know About NATO”. Oh, and she also indicated that it might be necessary to attack Russia. Then again, she’s an expert on Russia, being the governor of Alaska and all, which is sort of close to Russia. Slate’s lead sentence in today’s article Palin v. Gibson Round One pretty much summed it up, “Without being smarmy about it or unfurling gotcha questions, ABC News anchor Charles Gibson demonstrated that he knows volumes more about national security and foreign policy than does Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.”
As if the interview wasn’t enough, yesterday, Palin also took a leap off the straight talk express by telling a group
After yesterday’s interview it isn’t hard to see why the McCain campaign has kept Palin away from reporters and off the interview circuit. The woman is as moronic as the voters the Republicans are trying to pander to. Frankly, this is getting ridiculous. Somebody should arrest John McCain for endangering democracy.
3 comments:
This woman is giving me an ulcer, and driving me back to the bottle. The good news is that I'm seeing Obama yard signs much more than McShame ones, by a ratio of about 5:1, and this is San Antonio aka 'military city', Texas [albeit close to downtown].
I think we'll need to make a retreat with Mr.Puffer at one of his NM reservations and sweat all this toxic election shit out for a few days. I hope you're keeping
well mate.
Peace,
Kevin
Hey Kevin,
A good sweat seems like just the thing to detoxify the country. If we don't address climate change soon it will me a mandatory thing. I'm doing ok up here. I hope you are also.
Mark
We're doing better, although now that my mind has cleared a bit from the alcohol/herb haze it was in for the past few years I find myself missing New York a lot. Glad to see you're doing well - I've been checking in on your blogs intermittently. supplemented my Bageant fixes. You should send some of your rants to Bageant - I think he'd appreciate them.
Check this out:
http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/
afterthefuture/2008/09/
how-republicans-think-ii.html
How Republicans Think II
From John Cole:
The McCain campaign truly is a bizarre exercise in the suspension of reality. Everything they label as a priority, they go out and then do the exact opposite. Consider:
1.) Decide that lobbyists are the number one evil in politics, and then staff your entire campaign from top to bottom with… lobbyists.
2.) Spend months proclaiming you want to run a decent and honorable campaign, and then run the sleaziest general election campaign in years, so bad that folks who honestly love you (the media) are not only revulsed, but shocked into such a state that they are committing actual acts of journalism.
3.) Spend months discussing experience and how yours is superior, then decide change is the real message, and that in order to enact change, we should elect the guy who promises to keep doing things the same way they have been done the last eight years.
4.) Make earmarks the central focus of your reform agenda, then nominate an earmark queen and lie repeatedly about her involvement in the central notorious earmark in the past ten years (the Bridge to Nowhere).
And on an on and on. It really is crazy.
It's not crazy, because it's very effective. The word nihilistic is more apt. And then there's the NYT editorial this morning on the Palin interviews:
But that is not what troubled us most about her remarks — and, remember, if they were scripted, that just means that they reflect Mr. McCain’s views all the more closely. Rather, it was the sense that thoughtfulness, knowledge and experience are handicaps for a president in a world populated by Al Qaeda terrorists, a rising China, epidemics of AIDS, poverty and fratricidal war in the developing world and deep economic distress at home.
Ms. Palin talked repeatedly about never blinking. When Mr. McCain asked her to run for vice president? “You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission,” she said, that “you can’t blink.”
Fighting terrorism? “We must do whatever it takes, and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.”
That should have been her answer to the question about the Bush Doctrine. Never Blink. The mentality of the Right in every culture and in every era is about the raw assertion of the will to power, and whoever blinks first loses. It's also at the heart of the primitive "kindergarten politics" I wrote about the other day. It's about never backing down, no matter how ill-conceived and ridiculous your ideas or policies. It's not about whether you're right or wrong; it's about dominating the opponent, no matter how much it costs or how much damage you cause. There is, in fact, a certain glee in the blowing of things up.
Extra point: What political philosophy combines nihilism and the raw assertion of power?
A thought for moderates: Your mistake is to assume that there is good will where there is none with McCain and the people running his campaign. To make such a mistake is a sign of your decency and good will, but at least consider the possibility that people people like this have no compunction to take advantage of your decency. McCain, like the rest of us is a complex human with many contradictions. There was a time when McCain had a soul--even recently, but it's becoming clear he sold what was left of it to realize this last ambition of his life.
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