Category: Sarah Palin

Of Pundits And Palin

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by Smitty

The men-striation of the pundits who, more or less monthly, have to remind us that Sarah Palin is horrible–but don’t call them misogynist–remains a source of amusement.
Get stuffed, George Will:

Asked if the GOP would remain the party of ideas if Palin captures the nomination, Will said: “The answer is emphatically no.”

What ideas have you espoused about federal overreach and the national debt that amounted to a fart in a thuderstorm? Besides occasionally having measurably more testosterone in your writing than Dave Brooks (a low bar), how have you championed reducing entitlements, precisely?
Take that, Charles Krauthammer from Bob Zee, quoted in American Digest:

While Governor, her state was one of 2 out of 50 that created net jobs. I COULD WRITE FOR HOURS ABOUT HER ACCOMPLISHMENTS, but it would not do a damn thing for people like Krauthammer and other fraudulent, cowardly, so called conservatives. How come the other intellectual governors that Krauthammer praises could not eke out some job gains? Odd huh?WAKE UP!!!! Do you want to know why the jobs are gone? Do you want to to know why your nation is turning into a shit hole?

IT IS BECAUSE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. We let it happen.

WE CONSERVATIVES LET IT HAPPEN BECAUSE WE SAT ON OUR F***ING ASSES AND REFUSED TO FIGHT the left for the last 20+ years.

Now Sarah is ready to fight, and most of us just let her go out there with no backup, no nothing.

She is used as a human shield for LESSER MEN.

Ace has a lengthy meditation on what the Palin deal is with the conservative priesthood. Somewhere around the middle he bulletizes:

  1. anti-woman animus
  2. a desire to prop up the Old Boy’s Club
  3. tribal concerns about the current power structure (the “elite,” the “establishment”) being displaced in favor of a new power structure in which the “outsiders” and “ordinary people” are on top; as Palin is purported to be the vanguard of this new ruling class, it is postulated that the Old Guard has a strong, self-interested reason to stop her at all costs. (By the way– do most people consider themselves “ordinary”? I always wince at this formulation. Apart from a few people who are a little sub-ordinary and aspire to actually rise to the level of “ordinary,” I tend to think that most people do not consider themselves ordinary. Or maybe ordinary in several ways, but not-quite-ordinary in important ways.)
  4. a need to fit in with the liberal media elite and the so-called conservative intellectual elite which shares many of the shibboleths of the liberal media elite

Summarizing: fear of estrogen, fear of change.
I’m going to guess the latter, and point to the (free registration required for full read) Venerable Mead addressing the Left and making some telling points about the Tea Parties, with whom Sarah is so intrinsically linked, emphasis mine:

The historian Jill Lepore’s book The Whites of Their Eyes makes the point that many Tea Party activists have a crude understanding of the politics of the American Revolution. Yet however unsophisticated the Tea Party’s reading of the past may be, the movement’s appeal to Colonial history makes sense. From Colonial times, resentment of the well-bred, the well-connected, and the well-paid has merged with suspicion about the motives and methods of government insiders to produce populist rebellions against the established political order. This form of American populism is often called “Jacksonianism” after Andrew Jackson, the president who tapped this populist energy in the 1830s to remake the United States’ party system and introduce mass electoral politics into the country for good.Antiestablishment populism has been responsible for some of the brightest, as well as some of the darkest, moments in U.S. history. The populists who rallied to Jackson established universal white male suffrage in the United States — and saddled the country with a crash-prone financial system for 80 years by destroying the Second Bank of the United States. Later generations of populists would rein in monopolistic corporations and legislate basic protections for workers while opposing federal protection of minorities threatened with lynching. The demand of Jacksonian America for cheap or, better, free land in the nineteenth century led to the Homestead Act, which allowed millions of immigrants and urban workers to start family farms. It also led to the systematic and sometimes genocidal removal of Native Americans from their traditional hunting grounds and a massively subsidized “farm bubble” that helped bring about the Great Depression. Populist hunger for land in the twentieth century paved the way for an era of federally subsidized home mortgages and the devastating burst of the housing bubble.

Building on Ace’s points about fearing change above, we now have a delightful oversimplification by means of which to toss the Tea Parties under the bus: Jacksonian. The irony that AJ was the Original Democrat is a fine aside. We now have a tool by means of which the Tea Parties can be written off as unsophisticated rubes. Any intellectual can grasp that the country is broke, we have to curtail federal over-reach, but these Jacksonian rubes do not respect the Powers That Be sufficiently in taking the required action, and that will not do.
Also, “Jacksonian” becomes a shibboleth (I read the Book of Judges years ago, Ace, sorry) by which all the elite understand that Tea Party==Jacksonian==Racist. Brilliant!
What our so-called elite refuse to grasp is that the internet really is changing everything. While the lumpy middle of the standard normal distribution is likely to continue to remain uninvolved, the chunk in between the median and the elite tail has expanded considerably. More people are paying attention. More people, while not necessarily Sarah fanatics, are realizing that the attacks on her from the Left and elite Right are as feckless as an Obama foreign policy statement.
George Will:

“The more attention Palin receives, the fewer Americans consider her presidential timber.” 

Possibly, sir, the time for electing cigar store indians has passed. The country desperately needs someone who can articulate

  • why a century of federal overreach has failed
  • why living in reality as opposed to Progressive la-la land is going to hurt for a good decade or three
  • why we need to look more like Japan in disaster and less like Greece in default when facing this
  • why the GOP (and the pundit priesthood) has been more a part of the problem than the solution for the last century

Sure, Krauthammer and Will and the rest give good column from time to time. Maybe they’re too tactical, and maybe that’s because of relatively myopic audience for which they write. Maybe, too, Sarah Palin’s vision as stated thus far isn’t terribly far-reaching.
Nevertheless, the continuous 360 degree napalm shower directed at Sarah, both by the usual suspects and those who, following Reagan’s 11th Comandment, ought to be friendly, is astounding.
In fact, it’s so over the top as to trigger the question of whether it’s a giant head-fake, something Ace’s analysis misses.
What if the pundit priesthood knows that supporting Sarah overtly will be disaster, but going into lady-doth-protest-too-much mode will force the Tea Parties to ante up in 2012?
Methinks that could be the case.

Judd Gregg Succumbs to Palinphobia

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In a column for The Hill, the former New Hampshire senator surveys the 2012 GOP presidential primary field and confronts his dread fear that You-Know-Who might win the nomination:

Because the nominating process has become so dominated by primary elections, with the vast majority of the delegates chosen by direct vote, it is entirely possible that with no presumptive winner or even favorites, a candidate who runs second or third in a great many primaries could go into the convention with a sizable block of delegates.
Who would this favor? Does Sarah Palin come to mind? Although she is not viewed by most as strong enough to win, she is viewed by many as a person worth voting for to make a statement. And primaries tend to be populated by people who go to the polls with the purpose of making a statement.
Finishing second and third isn’t really a big deal — until you get enough delegates to be the nominee. And picking a nominee who it seems would be easily defeated by President Obama might not be the best statement.

For crying out loud, Republicans, stop doing this!

In what alternative universe does it make sense for prominent Republicans and conservative pundit to publicly declare that the GOP’s 2008 vice-presidential candidate — clearly one of the favorites of the party’s grassroots — is a guaranteed hopeless loser in 2012?

Who does that help, besides Obama?

Look: Everyone studying the 2012 GOP field has their Please-God-No candidate, or perhaps a short list of them. My own darkest fear is a Draft Jeb Bush movement. (“Read my lips: No more Bushes!“) Among the actual likely candidates, however, the one I absolutely can’t bear to think about is Mike Huckabee. He’s a warm personality but, as Ann Coulter says, Huckabee is essentially a pro-life Democrat.

So obviously, I’m anti-Huck. But what’s the point in beating up on the guy every day when, for all we know, he’ll be up on the stage in Tampa accepting the nomination in August 2012?

Gregg’s name has been bandied about as a 2012 candidate, so perhaps he fancies himself on that stage in Tampa. If so, taking a cheap shot at Sarah Palin — and Clyde Middleton is right, this is a cheap shot — is the best way to move himself to the top of the Please-God-No lists of everyone who supports Palin.

More likely, however, Gregg is trying to play kingmaker. Fine: Let him declare which candidate he supports. Let Gregg tell us whose agenda he is secretly serving by submarining Sarah, and then that candidate can go to the top of the Please-God-No list.

Even if Palin isn’t your first choice for 2012 (my own fondness for Herman Cain is certainly no secret), these public outbursts of Palinphobia are unseemly and counterproductive, unless it is your goal to ensure Obama’s re-election.

DON’T FEAR THE UTERUS!

UPDATE: Linked by Da Tech Guy and The Lonely Conservative — thanks!

‘Right-Wing’ Sarah Palin?

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A story from the British Daily Mail about a deranged teenager stalking Sarah Palin brought me to a screeching halt in the first sentence:

A teenager who sent threatening letters to right-wing US politician Sarah Palin has been arrested in her home state of Alaska.

What is it about that phrase, “right-wing,” that obtrudes? It’s mainly because I have trouble imagining a scenario where a reporter would use “left-wing” in a similar context. Surely if Palin is “right-wing,” Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer and many other Democrats must be judged “left-wing” by the same measure, yet that label is never applied to them.

Sarah Palin is a Republican and, like most Republicans, is generally conservative. Barack Obama is a Democrat and, like most Democrats, generally liberal. Yet studies by the Media Research Center and others show that reporters apply the labels “conservative” or “right-wing” to Republicans far more often than they apply “liberal” or “left-wing” to Democrats.

Why is it that Republicans can win an enormous electoral landslide, a political indication that GOP views are closer to the mainstream “center” than the views of Democrats, and yet supposedly neutral reporters still feel the need to apply the label “right-wing” — suggesting an extreme “fringe” ideology — to one of the most popular figures in the Republican Party?

…

Just askin’

Palin, Newt, Huck and Cain, Oh My!

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Rounding up some 2012 news: Both Doug Brady at Conservatives for Palin and Josh Painter at Texas for Palin liked my reaction to “worthless two-faced backstabbing crapweasel” Frank Bailey.

What Bailey has done — trying to cash in with a “tell all” book damaging to his former employer — is a breach of a fundamental principle, best expressed by Elbert Hubbard: “If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.”

Think about it: The only thing that makes Bailey’s ax-grinding manuscript newsworthy is the fact that he once worked for Sarah Palin. So what he is selling (or attempting to sell) is the access he gained because of the services for which she paid him, and the trust she placed in him. She actually gave Bailey the password to her e-mail account! And this is how she is repaid? Ed Morrissey nails it:

Maybe someone should work on the title.  “Blind Allegiance”?  His allegiance seems to have been pretty conditional on getting favorable positions in the Palin administration, and when he didn’t get them, the allegiance apparently turned into dislike rather easily.

Of course, anti-Palin trolls (are these people paid to do this?) quickly infested the comments of my post about Bailey, citing this, that and the other thing “revealed” by disclosure of confidential communications.

Question: Why are we always getting these “insider” smears of Sarah Palin but yet we never see any leaked internal e-mails from Team Obama?

Answer: Because Democratic operatives actually believe in their cause, whereas too many GOP operatives are just in it for themselves.

Bailey seems to imagine imagine himself as doing God’s work in backstabbing his former employer. You may search Scripture to your heart’s content and I guarantee you will never find praise for selfish and disloyal servants.

Nor, for that matter, will you find any scriptural blessing for serial adulterers:

Newt Gingrich’s speech at the University of Pennsylvania Tuesday night quickly took a turn for the dramatic when the first student to question him brought up his admitted extra-marital affair and accused him of being “hypocritical” for espousing moral values.
“You adamantly oppose gay rights… but you’ve also been married three times and admitted to having an affair with your current wife while you were still married to your second,” Isabel Friedman, president of the Penn Democrats, said to Gingrich. “As a successful politician who’s considering running for president, who would set the bar for moral conduct and be the voice of the American people, how do you reconcile this hypocritical interpretation of the religious values that you so vigorously defend?” . . .
Gingrich has admitted that he had an affair with a staffer, now his third wife, in the 1990s — the same time he was advocating for the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the wake of the former president’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. A damning Esquire profile last year shed light on that affair, as well as one he had with his second wife while still married to his first. While the source of Gingrich’s heckling Tuesday night was a Democrat, it nevertheless underscored the trouble many Republicans expect him to face with skeptical religious conservatives in Iowa if he ultimately decides to run for president.

Well, they’re not going to let him forget that, are they?

It has been said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but that doesn’t work too well as a campaign slogan. Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery, but forgiveness isn’t the same thing as a presidential endorsement.

Republicans almost universally acknowledge Gingrich as one of the great political thinkers in the party and admire his ability to articulate the conservative message. But a Gingrich presidential campaign involves little problems of a strictly biographical nature like that, to say nothing of his Dede Scozzafava problem.

Meanwhile, it looks like our friend Lisa Graas is on the Huckabee bandwagon for 2012, with a combination book review and interview:

In the book, Huckabee offers the pro-life view very eloquently, however he did not explain what legislation he would support on the issue of abortion, so when I spoke to him, I had to ask him about that. I decided that the best way to determine what his position is would be to ask him which sitting Supreme Court Justice he likes the most. He responded, without any hesitation whatsoever, “Scalia.”

You should go read the whole thing, because I like Lisa, even if I don’t like Huck. But you all know who I do like, and our friend Matthew Newman at Old Line Elephant has an interview with Herman Cain:

NEWMAN: Do you believe that never holding elected office will be a hindrance to your campaign?
CAIN: Many reporters and members of the elite political class would like you to believe that attending an Ivy League school or having a lifelong political career is essential to succeeding in public policy and public service. Such a perspective indicates how out of touch they are with the American people. Most Americans cannot identify with lifetime politicians. They can identify with someone who has run several businesses, raised a family, survived cancer and achieved his American Dream.
And besides, all of the people in Washington, D.C. have political experience. How’s that working out, for you?

Go read the rest of that. You’ll also want to read Cain’s column in Investor’s Business Daily:

Being in a leadership position without leading is called position-ship.
And when you truly lead, you will be criticized because working on the right problems, setting the right priorities, surrounding yourself with the right people and developing the right plans will not make everybody happy.

This column was called to my attention by a Cain supporter who pointed out that Sarah Palin promoted it on her Facebook page and her Twitter feed. That prompted me to do some thinking out loud at The American Spectator:

Was the former Alaska governor signaling that she might not run in 2012? Or, perhaps, was her promotion of Cain’s column — praising Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s leadership — a backhand dig at Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who punted in his own showdown with Democrats and unions?

Reading the tea leaves is a favorite game of pundits, and I don’t usually bother with guesswork and predictions. Best to stick with what you actually know, and what I know is that Palin did everything in 2010 that a presidential contender would do in preparation for a 2012 campaign. So she has put herself in position to run, but the decision to run or not . . . wow, that’s tough.

If Palin runs in 2012 and loses, all the naysayers will say, “See? We told you so.” And then she would be finished, unless she’s able to stage one of those long comebacks like Richard Nixon did after losing to JFK in ’60 and getting beat for California governor in ’62. On the other hand, if Palin were to decide against running, the naysayers will say, “Chicken!” So she’s damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.

And so we are left to ponder this one little tea leaf — Palin pushing Cain’s column — asking, “Does it mean anything?”

Maybe she just saw the column, agreed with it, and wanted to share it, without consideration of Cain’s status as a potential 2012 rival. And it’s no sweat off her nose: She’s the Big Name no one can miss, whereas for many voters, he’s still “Herman Who?”

On the other hand . . . Well, I’m sure you can see what might be on the other hand.

Cashing In

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OK, so you get hired to do a job and, when the job’s over, you try to hustle a buck by stabbing your former employer in the back.

Explain to me why anyone should ever trust you. Or better yet, explain to me why anyone should ever do anything except spit on the ground when your name is mentioned.

Must be nice to get your book proposal promoted by Politico, you worthless two-faced backstabbing crapweasel.

Hey, Remember That Crazy Conspiracy Theory Glenn Beck Was Talking About?

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According to every Serious Foreign Policy Pundit, it’s absolutely insane for Beck to assert that the Left and the Islamists are in alliance to bring revolution to the Middle East. However, as Donald Douglas points out, that’s what the Left is telling us:

The neo-Stalinist ANSWER homepage has the announcement, “Emergency demonstrations: Stop all U.S. aid to Mubarak dictatorship” . . .
Code Pink’s Jodie Evans . . . served as a top campaign fundraiser for Barack Obama, and now her organization is leading a fundraising operation for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: “Code Pink: Obama, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood Ally Raising (Tax Exempt) Money to Overthrow Egypt Gov’t” . . .

But don’t let yourself be distracted by mere facts. Bill Kristol says Glenn Beck is “hysterical” and it must be true because, after all, Bill Kristol is a Serious Foreign Policy Pundit and Glenn Beck is just . . . well, he’s just Glenn Beck, right?

And really, who is this Lisa Graas person who tells us about “Five Revolutions Backed by George Soros”?

“The Soros centre’s job in eastern Europe is nearly finished. Its main focus now is the Islamic world, Arab countries, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.”

Oh, that’s not a quote from Lisa Graas. That’s a 2007 quote by Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh, a consultant for the Soros-funded Open Society Institute.

But don’t believe that crazy conspiracy-theory stuff. Trust the Serious Foreign Policy Pundits. Because they’ve never been wrong before.

My friend Dr. James Joyner, however, is of another opinion:

Going back at least to William F. Buckley, Jr.’s famous article casting the John Birch Society out of the legitimate conservative moment, it has been understood that letting the fringe define the cause hurts it. Buckley correctly reasoned that Birch founder Robert Welch’s crazy and outrageous conspiracy theories were tainting the legitimate anti-Communist movement.
Similarly, the psychotic rantings of Glenn Beck invite ridicule on the rest of us. Legitimate points are inevitably countered by comparisons with absurd variants by Beck, Coulter, Limbaugh, and others who make a living stoking the fears of the base. This is, at best, a distraction from the debate and, often, makes intelligent discussion of the issues next to impossible because they’ve been preemptively framed by the loudest, most shrill, most hyperbolic voices.

How many times have we heard variations of this argument? 

“Oh, Buckley purged the Birchers and therefore, we must now cast aside Uncouth Person X and distance ourselves from Populist Organization Y, because above all else, the Official Conservative Movement must maintain its precious respectability!”

If we had listened to that argument in 2009, there never would have been a Tea Party movement. Republicans would have rolled over and played dead and gone along with the whole Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda because it was not respectable to oppose Keynesian “stimulus” spending, cap-and-trade, nationalized health care, and so forth.

Now that “the loudest, most shrill, most hyperbolic voices” have succeeded in fomenting grassroots opposition, however, we are told that elected representatives must ignore the people who elected them and, instead, must heed those respectable voices who did nothing at all to help encourage the Tea Party movement.

Hey, let’s dump Ann Coulter because, after all, “the Age of Ann has passed,” right? She’s only the author of, what, five or six New York Times bestsellers?

Yeah, let’s get rid of Coulter because a bunch of bloggers said so.

Purge Coulter! Purge Beck! Purge Sarah Palin! Purge Mark Levin! Purge Rush Limbaugh!

Purge! Purge! Purge!

And keep right on purging until the only people inside the Big Tent are respectable Republicans like Mike Castle, Lincoln Chafee, Arlen Specter and Charlie Crist, and the motto of the Official Conservative Movement becomes, “Me, Too.”

UPDATE: Linked by The Great One: “Cool it with the Stalinist purge crap.”

UPDATE II: Please permit me to point out that, while any conservative who mentions the influence of George Soros is portrayed as a dangerous conspiracy kook, it is perfectly acceptable for liberals to demonize the Koch brothers as right-wing puppetmasters.

UPDATE III: Did I ever mention that you never want to make Dan Riehl pissed off at you?

Haiku Sonnet For Sarah Palin

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by Smitty

Given a challenge by Sheppard to write a poem for Sarah Palin, and a boring afternoon meeting, I should like to submit:

Haiku Sonnet For Sarah Palin
The Palin fascination
 Infecting the news today
  Really does boggle the mind.

Is she Nemesis, some way
 Causing POTUS frustration
  The very First Teeth to grind?

Yet when she enters the fray
 Her words are pointed, but kind
  Lacking recrimination.

And so should she courage find
 Election devil to pay
  To halt a sinking nation,

The class warfare wounds to bind
 And racial fragmentation
  Refocusing liberty,

American elation
 At last will ‘hit the rewind’,
  Ejecting ‘Chicago way’.

Hence all the trepidation,
 The falsehood and the dismay:
  Visionless know they are blind.