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Palin’s own hometown newspaper renders a harsh judgment on her trip to support Saxby Chambliss in Tuesday’s runoff Senate election.
Matt Zencey of the Anchorage Daily News lays it out:
As a justifiably proud military mom, she might ask herself why she is using her conservative star power to support such a reprehensible Republican chicken hawk.
Nice sandwich of praise and criticism there. Keep reading:
I wonder if she knows the true measure of the man she is eagerly helping.
Chambliss was elected to the Senate in 2002 by running one of the most reprehensible campaigns of modern times. He was up against incumbent Democrat Sen. Max Cleland, a Vietnam War veteran who lost both legs and his right arm to a grenade during that conflict.
Chambliss avoided serving in Vietnam. He got four student draft deferments, and when his number finally came up, he was medically disqualified with knee troubles.
In the best Karl Rove fashion, Chambliss the draft-evader attacked Cleland the war hero for being soft on terrorism. Distorting Cleland’s votes about workplace rules for the new Homeland Security Department employees, Chambliss portrayed him as a tool of terrorists like Osama bin Laden.
Given how vindictive Palin is to people who cross her, this shows a lot of courage. It has to hurt, having this kind of criticism from her own local newspaper. Well done Matt Zencey.
11 Comments
I have to wonder if Palin even knows about the 2002 ad. Anyway, we shouldn’t dwell on the past, we should look forward also. And jobs creation.
Vietnam? Is that in Iraq? I got new shoes for the trip. Also. /channeling
I’ve met people like Palin before. I don’t know how to classify their mental state, but it has a bit of narcissism, a bit of denial, and a whole lot of deliberate obtuseness to it. When I told a staunch conservative (like Palin) that Preston Bush, our fearless leader’s grandfather, had sold weapons to the Nazis, her reaction was to scream at me and call me a liar. When I attempted to show her the information contained in two news articles, she yelled at me to get away from her and quit bothering her. It was like confronting a drug addict at an intervention.
Chances are, Palin wouldn’t believe anything negative about Saxby Chambliss, even if you could get her to sit down and watch a videotape or listen to an audiotape of Chambliss being an asshole. Maybe they’ll find a cure for this sickness one day.
FYI, it’s Prescott Bush, not Preston.
But totally agree on the mindset – if you can call it that. Just went a couple of rounds with my wing-nut baby brother. He made the statement that he was glad Bush did that signing statement on the Anti-Torture Bill. I said well, torture doesn’t work. He replied “How do you know?” I said ask your buddy John McCain. He kept repeating “How do you know?” over and over like a broken record.
He also called me a stupid idiot because I believe ‘everything on all those nut-bag internet sites.
While he, on the other hand, believes everything on ‘fair and balanced’ Fox News.
AAArrrgh!
You put your finger on the problem when you compared confronting the person to what happens in an intervention. Long story short. No one changes unless they see they have a problem. She’s got a character disorder. Causes problems for others. Can’t see that. The only “cure” is already available, but not unless she sees she’s got problems – and wants to change that. It takes years of therapy. Much more difficult to treat a character disorder than depression or anxiety. People who are depressed or anxious want to feel better. People with a character disorder want “you” to do the changing, not them.
yet the right wing are determined to have palin run for the next presidential cycle, they are doing everthing possible to give her credibility and experience
the problem is, the more they try the more exposed as a dolt she becomes
Where can we get more reporters like Matt Zencey?
Recommended and Dugg
“Chances are, Palin wouldn’t believe anything negative about Saxby Chambliss”
Well, he’s a wingnut, isn’t he?
What else does she need to know?
Sarah Palin for President 2012
Flush the Republican Party further down the drain to oblivion
Fear is the key
In today’s L.A. Times, Neal Gabler has an article that analyzes exactly what “conservative” Republicans have been doing, tracing their strategy back to Senator McCarthy, not to Senator Goldwater, who in 1964 lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history and wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing.
According to Gabler, the myth tells how Nixon co-opted conservatism, talking like a conservative while governing like a moderate, disenchanting true believers. Ronald Reagan, next, embraced it wholeheartedly, becoming the patron saint of conservatism and making it the dominant ideology in the country, even though he didn’t practice it in terms of fiscal responsibility or size of government. George W. Bush picked up Reagan’s fallen standard and “conservatized” government even more thoroughly than Reagan had, cheering conservatives until his presidency came crashing down around him. That’s how Gabler believes the mythology tells it.
Gabler’s thesis is that the real connection is from Sen. Joe McCarthy, to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. McCarthy attacked alleged communists and the Democrats whom he accused of shielding them, as well as the centrist American establishment, Eastern intellectuals and the power class, many of whom were Republicans, including moderate ones. McCarthyism became a means to play on the anxieties of Americans, convincing them of danger and conspiracy even when they didn’t exist, which he used to build power and support. George H.W. Bush used it to get himself elected, terrifying voters with Willie Horton (and denigrating Dukakis as a commander-in-chief). His son used fear of 9/11 and convincing voters that John Kerry was a coward and a liar and would hand the nation over to terrorists, tried and true McCarthy tactics used very aggressively, and W. then used fear and stealth in pushing through totalitarian unconstitutional measures. The thread continued through McCain and then Palin, probably through Rove (who also coached W.), and I quote from Gabler, “That’s why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama’s relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.”
What Gabler believes is that, because of this tradition, the Republican Party will continue to move rightward. Fear and blame; rabble-rousing; the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys and Bill O’Reillys; and now Palin. This is the direction the Party will take. Probably because it cannot be believed as the party of small government or fiscal responsibility or moral integrity; all credibility lost in the harsh reality of events; at least not until people forget and these actualities become memories and fade. It is a dangerous approach because it incites people to do violent things, especially as times become more stringent.
It is, I believe a shame, because some of the original precepts of fiscal responsibility and keeping government out of peoples’ lives and moral integrity are well worth preserving. The Republican Party which stood for those princples was a Grand Old Party. But, I hate to say it, those are all too easily trumped by fear-mongering and, I might add, difficult to achieve. I would nominate the Republican Party today as the Party of Fear, as opposed to the Party of Solutions. And, if that’s the direction it’s going in, yes, it’s a shame.