Wheeled School Bus - Right Front by Bill Ward's Brickpile

There are a lot of people who don’t like politicians. Or they say they don’t like them, since it seems that a lot of the population of our nation don’t actually know any politicians in a meaningful way. I grew up around them, so the idea of hating them seems a little bit like self loathing. Still there are times when the actions of high profile pols stain everyone in the business of government with a black mark.

That is where we are in regards to Sarah Palin. As trashy and unselfconscious as she is I don’t have problems with her being controversial to get more attention. That is part of the nature of politics, but this bus tour of hers is going to be one of those times where people see on politician doing something really distasteful and put it on the all of them.

You Sister Sarah is on vacation and her Political Action Committee are paying for it. That’s right all the bills for the bus, the driver, food and anything else is being footed by not by the Palin’s but by the donors who hope that she will run or support candidates or some such.

Just to rub salt in the wound, it is all completely legal. You see SaraPAC is what is called a “unconnected PAC” which means while it is a still a political action committee it is not associated with a campaign and does not have the restrictions on what it can spend money on. If the erstwhile half-term Governor wants to buy out the gift shop at the Statue of Liberty, then she can do it on the SarahPAC credit card.
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Sarah Palin - Caricature by DonkeyHotey, on Flickr

Obviously we can’t know what is other peoples minds. Even when they tell us what they think and why they do things there is a good portion of doubt as everyone is the hero in the movie of their lives and heroes don’t (at least the run of the mill heroes don’t) have complex and conflicting desires and varying levels of the awareness of them.

Still, even given all the above, there are times when you have to wonder “I “X” really that staggeringly stupid?!?”

This is where I am with half-Gov. Sarah Palin this morning. The New York Times has a good piece running down the factors that make it look as though La Palin might actually be considering a run for the Republican nomination for president. She has bought a house in Arizona which would make travel easier (plus it gets her away from the Payton Place of the North that is Wasilla and all the antics of her meth fueled in-laws and out-laws).

She has rehired staffers who used to run her political appearances. She is having the dreadful documentary of her time as governor shown in Iowa and she is starting to schedule more appearances. All this looks like someone that is at the very least considering running.

Maybe it is the perception that the current Republican field is weak. Maybe it is that all the ones who are even vaguely reasonable as candidate are so damned boring. Last week I was waiting to see Tim Pawlenty give and interview and it was five minutes into the thing before I realized the picture was not just of a blank beige wall, but rather Gov. Pawlenty sitting there!
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Will 2012 be the year of the Republican Dwarves? Let me through some names at you;
Mike Pence, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Haley Barbour, Herman Cain, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann. Now being political junkies you are probably going to at least know those names, with the exception of Herman Cain, who is the founder of Godfathers Pizza (a so so chain that has had decent success) who is also a regional Rightwing radio talker. But try to think outside your political knowledge bubble for a minute. Do you think anyone really knows these folks?

Sure folks know the last VP candidate from the Republican Party. She has made a business of being famous, but it has only worked because she stays either to mediums that don’t allow back and forth or safe outlets like Fox News. Her response to the Arizona shootings showed that she really does not have what it takes to be president no matter how popular she is with her fans.

Newt Gingrich is a disgraced former speaker who is better at throwing bombs than he ever was at legislating. He has a problem with the family values crowd both for leaving his wives and for the fact that he is now a Catholic. Don’t underestimate the problems this can cause with a party that 50% of all members are Evangelical Christians. There is also his distressing “Do as I say, not as I do” problem that might play with the authoritarian Right, but not with the middle that is required to win the presidency.

Mitch Daniels – Who? Sure you know his name, do you know what he stands for? Does he know what he stands for given that the Tea Party base is going to require that every candidate denies global warming, a balanced budget, continued tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy (even though this policy has bled the U.S Treasury dry) an unswerving devotion to the supposed intent of the Framers of the Constitution and an “America, Fuck Yeah!” attitude that insists we can do nothing wrong because when the U.S. does it, then it is right.
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The half-term governor of Alaska was on Shaun Hannity’s program last night for a softball interview to try to walk back the damage done by her self-obsessed video from four days after the shootings in Tucson. The questions she would be asked were fairly predictable, after all she is a paid Fox News Analyst and even if Fox were a real news network and the propaganda arm of the Republican party, they were not going to put one of their own on the hot seat in any meaningful way.

If you can stand it you can see the whole thing below. It is just under 10 minutes long. While many may feel that they have gotten more than their yearly recommended dose of Mrs. Palin, there are some things that are worth seeing in the “interview”. It is about 10 minutes long and you watch it below.

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Jonathan Bernstein writing over at the Plumb Line blog had a really good piece on epistemic closure on the Right and the response to the Tucson shootings. A lot of folks have written about epistemic closure on the Right, which is the idea that they have a nearly closed information universe. The sources that the Right follow do not tend to actually match reality.

Glenn Beck has his own U.S. history and economics. There the Republicans were the ones that passed the Civil Rights act over Democratic objections and major banks can fail without any economic consequence. It is part a parcel of what makes it so hard to have a rational conversation with folks who get their news from Fox and Limbaugh and the National Review Online’s blog the Corner.  . . . Read the rest of this entry →

As expected there has been a lot of false equivalence between the way the Left talks about the climate of hate and anger in this nation and the way the Right goings about it. It is hard for those of us who have been called traitors for disagreeing with the policies of the previous president, who have had our patriotism questioned, who have looked with growing dread as the Right has embraced and defended the rhetoric.

Instead of my describing again and again and again how the left does it better, let me show you all how it is done. Below is a video from the CEO of Media Matters. He lays out the facts and does without hyperbole and with out excess passion.

For those with a slow connection or who are at work, David Brock makes the case that Fox News, Sarah Palin’s employer has been directly implicated in three assassination plots. He talks about the man who threatened Rep. Patty Murray, he talks about the man that was off to kill people at the Tides Foundation and the man that threatened to fire bomb the San Francisco home of then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. All of them have admitted to being inspired by Glenn Beck and Fox News. This has been backed up by their families as well.

Mr. Brock does not need to be incendiary to make a devastating point about who is stoking hate and violence in this country. He coolly and calmly lays out the facts and proves his point.

He then goes on to make a fair challenge, to take Mrs. Palin up on her assertion that there should be a peaceable debate about the issues, he offers to do it any time that is convenient for her.

This is how it is done folks, we can all take a page from David Brock’s book. The way is not to vilify our opponents with words like traitor and Nazi, we just need to forcefully lay out the fact and stand behind them when the rhetoric of the Right gets out of hand.

What’s on your mind tonight Firedogs? The floor is yours.

It is an article of faith that the 24/7 news cycle has changed politics. The voracious appetite of cable news for anything the least bit contentious or scandalous has, the conventional wisdom says, coarsened our discourse and made the political arena a lot wilder. There is a lot to support this, with constant focus on candidates like Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell. Even before those kinds of things started to come up it was widely recognized that she had no chance of becoming a Senator, yet the news cycles were filled with the tidbits from her past and present.

The thing is that it seems that we are moving into a time when it does not destroy every candidate when they say outrageous, even insane things. Four years ago a sitting Senator, George Allen, basically flushed away his political career by calling a Democratic campaign aid “Macaca”.  It was, at the time, a mildly obscure racial slur, but once it came out it was the wind that the Webb campaign needed to push it to victory.

Maybe growing up in a political family has skewed my views on this, but I have a strong feeling that candidates should not make things up. To my mind if you say that there is Shariah law in two cities, one of which is no longer anything but a cemetery, and there is no Shariah law in the other, then your campaign and probably your career should be over. Instead Sharon Angle was able to keep doing and saying crazy things and garner more than 45% of the vote.

The question is, where did this acceptance of crazy behavior come from? Why is it that people like Carl Palladino can have a history of sending out e-mails that are patently racist or containing bestiality pictures, yet still be considered a viable candidate for Governor of New York? I think it has to do with TV but not TV news.

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One of the things that I always wonder when I see Republicans spouting guano crazy stuff is; do they really mean this or is it an act to enflame the their base? There is no way to tell as a general rule; even the half-governor of Alaska is wily enough to say some things that are guaranteed to be red meat for her Facebook followers without having to actually believe them herself.

However there are times when we do get to pull back the veil a little bit. One of those times was yesterday on the MSNBC’s Ed Show. You have probably seen the clip of where Rep. Tom Tancredo called for sending the President back to Kenya since the First Lady calls Kenya his homeland. You might have seen the TMP TV clip where he tries to defend that by saying it is like saying “Let’s send Carter back to Georgia”. All of this makes it look like Tancredo is as serious as a heart attack about this Birther idea.

However, if you saw the whole interview (which is unavailable on line anywhere) you would have seen the opening which puts a completely different spin on things. Ed Schultz had just finished his Psycho Talk Zone segment, where he usually blasts some right-wing talker’s insane blather. When Tancredo came on, was smiling and asked Ed, “What do I have to say to get into the zone?”

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

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