Palin’s Last Shot On Wolves & Ashley Judd; Congress Shoots Back

Shannyn Moore
Just a girl from Homer.
July 30, 2009

Several days have passed since Sarah Palin’s final stop on the “Quitstock” Tour. I feel like I’ve awoken from a strange, surreal dream. I can’t yet tell if it was real or not.

I listened closely to Palin’s final speech as governor. Her classic “word salad” style is no less confusing in print. What Palin was supposed to read off the teleprompter–what was released as the transcript, and what she actually said, are two different things. AKM at The Mudflats blog transcribed the actual speech and deserves the “Golden Comma Award” for her efforts.

Palin’s politicization of the troops was vulgar. Her right-wing claim to the second amendment was offensive. Her verbal spanking of the “media” was laughable-the same media she was so grateful for covering her “exit strategy” from the governorship of Alaska.

With such a large national audience, Palin didn’t talk about the plethora of issues facing Alaska. Why would she? She has much bigger fish to fry. She decided to slam Ashley Judd instead. Yes, really.

I don’t know Ashley Judd, but I like her. I know this must shock the Palinistas; they think I dislike Sarah because she’s pretty. According to Palin, she is some sort of Hollywood pixie; a “delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlet.” I don’t judge Ms. Judd on her stunning appearance; but on the criteria of her politics…just like Palin.
“…you’re going to see anti-hunting, anti-second amendment circuses from Hollywood and here’s how they do it. They use these delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets, they use Alaska as a fundraising tool for their anti-second amendment causes. Stand strong, and remind them patriots will protect our guaranteed, individual right to bear arms, and by the way, Hollywood needs to know, we eat, therefore we hunt.”

The second amendment doesn’t afford citizens the right to shoot wolves and bears out of airplanes. I know. Why the founding fathers didn’t think of that is puzzling…oh, wait, the Wright Brothers weren’t born yet. I don’t remember Palin mentioning that the only president to suspend the right to bear arms was George W. Bush during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Sarah brought up a fight she lost. Ashley Judd’s ads fighting Palin’s policy on aerial hunting and the gassing of wolf pups still in their den, were effective. While governor, Palin dedicated $400,000 to fight against the citizen initiative to ban the practice. Her faith based science included bear in the aerial program. As incendiary as the topic is, bringing it up in her final speech was more telling. Mean-girl, high school, vindictive Palin had to get another shot across the bow of the SS Ashley Judd.

The late Charlton Heston, president of the NRA, was from Hollywood. The lionized President Reagan was from Hollywood.

As an Alaskan who has trapped and hunted, the aerial killing of animals is to hunting what hiring a hooker is to dating. A sure thing, with no work. No wonder it appealed to former governor Palin.

Just this week, Congressman George Miller and Senator Dianne Feinstein have introduced the Protect America’s Wildlife (PAW) Act, federal legislation to end the controversial practice of using aircraft and gunmen to chase and kill wolves in Alaska. Please contact your legislators and tell them to support the PAW Act.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shannyn-moore/palins-last-shot-on-wolve_b_247576.html

Copyright 2009 HuffingtonPost.com

Dead fish: Sarah Palin, the future of the Republican Party, leaves office without an iota of credibility

Michael J.W. Stickings
The Reaction
July 27, 2009

“Sarah Palin leaving governor’s post amid confusion, criticism,” says the L.A. Times.

I’d say that’s putting it mildly.

While she’s as wildly popular as ever among the GOP’s extremist faithful, those in the base and the Rush-driven conservative movement, she has, incredibly, even less credibility than she had during the utter embarrassment — to her, to her party, to her state, to the nation — that was her time on the national stage during last year’s presidential campaign. (Just think back to those Couric interviews.)

It was that campaign, once the initial infatuation and media frenzy were over, that exposed her ignorance and her unpreparedness, revealing her as an endless joke worthy of some fine SNL satire but also, given her combination of ignorance and ideological fanaticism (the typically Republican blend of evangelical theocratism and laissez-faire libertarianism), all packaged within the persona of a sanctimonious, grudge-holding thug, as a genuinely dangerous political figure, one who claimed to speak for America but who really spoke for her own sense of victimhood and entitlement.

And now she’s gone — but not for long.

No dead fish is she. Her many worshippers on the right will make sure she rises again, the would-be saviour of a party that is ever-so-desperate for someone to lead it back to the promised land.

(To which I say: Fine with me. There’s no way the Republicans will win with Palin at the helm. Which is why they should by all means build their future around her.)

Copyright 2009 The Reaction

Bite Your Tongue

Maureen Dowd
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
July 26, 2009

Being obnoxious isn’t a crime.

As we reflect on the arc of civil rights dramas from Jim Crow to Jim Crowley, my friend John Timoney, the police chief of Miami, observes: “There’s a fine line between disorderly conduct and freedom of speech. It can get tough out there, but I tell my officers, ‘Don’t make matters worse by throwing handcuffs on someone. Bite your tongue and just leave.’ ”

As the daughter of a police detective, I always prefer to side with the police. But this time, I’m struggling.

No matter how odd or confrontational Henry Louis Gates Jr. was that afternoon, he should not have been arrested once Sergeant Crowley ascertained that the Harvard professor was in his own home.

President Obama was right the first time, that the encounter had a stupid ending, and the second time, that both Gates and Crowley overreacted. His soothing assessment that two good people got snared in a bad moment seems on target.

It escalated into a clash of egos — the hard-working white cop vs. the globe-trotting black scholar, the town vs. the gown, the Lowell Police Academy vs. the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Crowley told a Boston sports station that Gates “seemed very peculiar — even more so now that I know how educated he is.”

Gates told his daughter Elizabeth in The Daily Beast: “He should have gotten out of there and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, good luck. Loved your PBS series — check with you later!’ ”

Gates told me Crowley was so “gruff” and unsolicitous “the hair on my neck stood up.” Crowley says Gates acted “put off” and “agitated.” But the strong guy with the gun has more control than the weak guy with the cane. An officer who teaches racial sensitivity should not have latched on to a technicality about neighbors — who seemed to be outnumbered by cops — getting “alarmed” by Gates’s “outburst.”

From Shakespeare to Hitchcock, mistaken identity makes for a powerful narrative.

A police officer who’s proud of his reputation for getting along with black officers, and for teaching cadets to avoid racial profiling, feels maligned to be cast as a racist white Boston cop.

A famous professor who studies identity and summers in Martha’s Vineyard feels maligned to be cast as a black burglar with backpack and crowbar.

Race, class and testosterone will always be a combustible brew. Our first African-American president will try to make the peace with Gates (who supported Hillary) and Crowley (whose father voted for Obama).

I tracked down Gates by phone at J.F.K. on Friday after he had talked to the president and agreed to go to the White House for a symbolic beer with the man he labeled “a rogue policeman.” Gates, coughing from a cold he picked up in China, said he wondered if perhaps “fate and history chose me for this event.” He was pleased with the thousands of empathetic e-mail notes he’s getting, material for a PBS documentary on racial profiling.

He says he’s ready for “marriage counseling” from the “Solomon” in the Oval, who wrote in his memoir that the police pulled him over “for no apparent reason.” “If Sgt. Crowley and the president and I meet, it’s clearly not going to be like Judge Joe Brown, OK? ‘You tell your side, you tell your side.’ We have to agree to disagree. But I would be surprised if somebody didn’t say, ‘I’m sorry you were arrested.’ ”

How can they ever reconcile their accounts? Crowley says he asked Gates to come outside and the professor replied, “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.” Gates wryly suggests Crowley got the line from watching “Good Times” as a child.

“Does it sound logical that I would talk about the mother of a big white guy with a gun?” he asked. “I’m 5-7 and 150 pounds. I don’t walk on ice, much less (expletive) with some cop in my kitchen. I don’t want another hip replacement.”

I asked how he felt when he learned that Crowley was the one who gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Reggie Lewis, the black Celtics basketball star, in a vain attempt to save his life after a heart attack in 1993. He replied: “I don’t stereotype. I never saw him as the head of the Ku Klux Klan. Maybe he was just having a bad day.”

And Gates says that if anyone thinks he’s a fiery black militant, they’ve got the wrong guy, considering he married a white woman, has mixed-race daughters and has white blood himself.

Mike Barnicle warns that the next time Gates needs 911, he should call the Harvard faculty lounge instead. But Gates ripostes, “I have a feeling the Cambridge police will be especially attentive to my needs.” He said that, as he was packing for China, he got a call from the Cambridge police soliciting a donation and told them to try back in two weeks.

“I haven’t quite decided,” he said between coughs, “if I’m up to that right now.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/opinion/26dowd.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Methland vs. Mythland

Timothy Egan
Timothy Egan Blog
The New York Times
July 20, 2009

Like a brief, intense summer squall, a media storm passed over small-town America a few years ago, stripping away what was left of the myth of the rural idyll to reveal a cast of hollow-cheeked white people smoking meth behind the corn silo.

It was going to destroy the heartland, this methamphetamine epidemic, just as crack cocaine had done to the inner city. There was no George Bailey in this version of Bedford Falls. No John Mellencamp melodies on the soundtrack. Just toothless boys on bikes peddling some nasty stuff cooked up from cold medicine and farm products.

And then it all passed, as these things do, the damage done, leaving the impression of rural America as a broken land, scary. In the interim, the more traditional narrative, of country people somehow more authentic than city folk — “the best of America in these small towns” — came roaring back in the form of Sarah Palin.

In truth, neither of these images does justice to the complexities of small-town life. And neither version does anything to advance the cause of an honest rural policy, something that might help some of the worst casualties of global economic tumult.

People in small towns are more likely to be poor, more likely to lack health insurance, more likely, if they are young, to move out, according to government statistics. In the invisible margins off the interstate, the story about decline takes place in slow motion, rarely attracting a headline.

Palin may soon hit the speech circuit as a woman from another era with an itchy Twitter finger. At the same time, we have a much different look at modern rural life in a new book by the journalist Nick Reding — “Methland: the Death and Life of an American Small Town.”

Reding spent nearly four years charting meth’s course in Oelwein, Iowa, a town of about 6,000 residents nearly 120 miles northeast of Des Moines. There, the people who grow our food are argribusiness oligarchs, and the people who run our factories have cut their workers’ wages by two-thirds, dissolved the unions and shipped in illegals to work for a paycheck that would barely pay for dog food.

Meth is a symptom of this collapse, not a cause. And though its presence in small towns can be cancerous, it never took over rural America. The latest national surveys suggest that there are about 1.3 million regular users of meth — hardly an epidemic in a country where 35 million people said they had used an illegal drug or abused a prescription one.

Still, meth is different in at least one respect. Reding says it is “the only example of a widely consumed illegal narcotic that might be called vocational, as opposed to recreational.” It was given to starving Nazi soldiers to keep them in warrior mode on the Russian front. Now it’s a preferred stimulant for people working two jobs in low-wage purgatory.

“Rural America remains the cradle of our national creation myth,” Reding concludes. “But it has become something else, too — something more sinister and difficult to define.”

Of the 1,346 counties that shrank in population between 2000 and 2007, 85 percent of them were outside the major metropolitan areas, according to the Census Bureau. Not far from Reding’s story, the town of Postville has lost half its population just in the last year after one of the largest immigration raids in Iowa.

Oelwein, like so many small towns trying to shape its destiny in an America that may have passed it by, has spruced up its Main Street, modernized its infrastructure and constructed a spec building ready for any employer who wants to move in. Alas, it’s the same story in thousands of Oelweins: if you build it, they won’t come.

When candidate Barack Obama made that comment about bitter people in small towns clinging to guns and religion, he was criticized as a clueless elite from the big city. No one paid attention to the first part of what he said:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration.”

Every president said he would do something about it, Obama continued, but never did.

The mistake that Palin made was to cast small towns as more virtuous, morally superior in their struggle. The mistake that Obama made was to speak the truth. She can continue to pander all the way to the bank. But he has a chance to make a difference in places that are neither methland nor mythland, just overlooked parts of the same country.
http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/methland-vs-mythland/?th&emc=th

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

My GOP: Too old, too white to win

A Republican looks at the numbers and sees disaster ahead, unless his party figures out how to be less — caucasian

Bill Greener
Salon.com
July 20, 2009

Republicans can engage in complicated studies to determine the standing of our brand. We (after all, I most certainly am a Republican) can search for policy positions that better connect us to the concerns of voters. We can do any number of things to try to change our fortunes. Until we come to grips with some fundamental math, however, the numbers simply do not add up to the GOP prevailing in a national election any time soon.

In 1976, 90 percent of the votes cast in the presidential election came from non-Hispanic whites. In 2008, John McCain won this vote by a 56-43 margin. Had John McCain run in 1976 instead of 2008, not only would he have won, but he would have won the popular vote before a single non-white vote was cast. So, despite all the chatter about the impact of Sarah Palin, despite the unpopularity of President Bush, despite the difficulty of the same party winning a third consecutive national election, despite the charisma of Barack Obama (and the love shown to him by the mainstream media), despite the financial meltdown of September, despite any other factor anyone can cite, if John McCain had been the candidate at a time when non-Hispanic whites were the overwhelming majority of the voters, he would be president now.

What happened? By 1988, the non-Hispanic white vote had shrunk to 85 percent; by 2004, it was about 77 percent; and in 2008, it had shrunk to 75 percent. Last November 13 percent of the electorate was black. Barack Obama won almost all this vote (97 percent). Between 8 and 9 percent of the electorate was Hispanic, a demographic Obama won by a 2-to-1 margin (compared to the 40 percent Bush had won in 2004). That means before the first non-Hispanic white vote was counted, the score was 19-3 for Obama. When you think about the numbers, it’s not that surprising that this past Thursday the first black president addressed the centennial convention of the NAACP. A signal achievement, certainly, an unprecedented event, but not a mathematical shock.

But wait — there’s more statistical gloom for Republicans. Just about 18 percent of the vote was cast by voters between the ages of 18 and 30. As a percentage of the overall vote, this did not constitute any sort of meaningful increase — despite what the pundits were saying. However, since total turnout was up, it did mean more young voters went to the polls. Worse, for Republicans, these voters went to Obama by a margin of 2-to-1. Chances are that now they’ve got the voting habit, a lot of them will keep turning up on Election Day, and keep voting Democratic.

Then, you have increased support for Obama and other Democrats from cities and close-in suburbs. So, in the major metropolitan areas — where diversity is nearly a religion — you have strong support for Obama from virtually every quarter. Guess what else is located in these urban locations? For starters, you have the major media outlets. Is it any wonder that coverage of the election took on the tone of Obama’s election being a virtual certainty? In these locations, Obama was running so strong, it was hard for those observing to see how he could lose. John McCain’s strength came from locations that generally were not the subject of much attention by the national media.

The marketing department of the Republican Party is consumed with the idea of “brand.” How about we actually look at ourselves as an ordinary, non-political business, selling a commercial product? Who would ever start down a path that essentially said that we will be strong in all the declining markets while we let our only significant competition be strong among the emerging and growing markets? Unless North Dakota suddenly gets 54 electoral votes, would someone please show me another way for Republicans to realistically conclude we can compete at the national level?

To make matters even worse, our weakness among minority voters is somewhat masked when it comes to elections that are not national. How can that be? Thanks to redistricting, and the legal imperative to give emphasis to “community of interests,” these minority voters tend to be jammed into congressional districts where they are the overwhelming majority. That means the other districts tend to be more white in nature, and thus more friendly territory for Republicans. Then, at the level of the Senate, the reality is that Utah and Wyoming get the same number of senators as do California and New York.

What this means is that when it comes to an issue like immigration reform, the pressure on Republicans who actually have been elected to office is more often to favor a position that is unattractive to minority voters. If they were to take a different position, they might find themselves facing a primary challenger supported by the party’s activist base. So, at the expense of any long-term perspective, the Republican Party is likely to be responsive to the sentiment of the people responsible for them serving at this very moment.

This tension between what the base wants and what the party needs to attract non-white voters is hardly a new concern. In 1960, Richard Nixon did pretty well among black voters. However, after Barry Goldwater opposed civil rights legislation, Republicans never recovered. Some of the very same Democrats who had uttered some of the most vile, racist statements in the history of Congress became the beneficiaries of a block vote for any and all Democrats.

California is a textbook example of the pitfalls of this kind of short-term political thinking. For many years, California had been good territory for Republicans. After all, it was the home state of not only Richard Nixon but also of Ronald Reagan. Then, in order to secure reelection in the 1990s to the office of governor, Pete Wilson decided to take a strong stand on the issue of immigration. Yes, he won that year. However, after that point in time, Hispanics in the state overwhelmingly supported Democrats, and Republicans have suffered ever since. And as goes California, so goes the nation. A recent poll shows Republicans, at the national level, are viewed favorably by fewer than 10 percent of all Hispanics. The word for this is “disaster.”

Perhaps we are seeing the start of a level of sensitivity to how the Republican label is perceived among voters of Latin descent. As one observes the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become the next Supreme Court Justice, it is clear Republicans on the committee are determined to be respectful, even admiring of what it means for her to be nominated. To be sure, some of the questions have been tough. Nevertheless, all seem to be aware that anything said or done that even remotely could be construed as not appreciating how important all of this is to the Hispanic community is simply unacceptable. This is certainly an improvement in what has tended to be the case in the past.

Unless and until Republicans can demonstrate an ability to attract more support from minority voters, from younger voters, from voters living in urban areas, it seems to this die-hard Republican that we are kidding ourselves if we think the 2008 election was just a speed bump on our road to a lasting majority. Looking at nothing more than the math, it appears to me our challenge is far more daunting.

I don’t pretend to have some solution in a bottle that will change things for Republicans. I do know debates about whether conservatives or moderates need more of a voice in the party strike me as completely missing the point. The debate, for now, should begin and end with asking and answering how it is that we can remain true to our basic principles and grow among these key voter groups that are needed to win elections. Failure to do so can only lead to more defeats.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/07/20/gop_math/

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Another C Street Vet Falls To An Extramarital Affair

Rachel Slajda
TPM Muckraker
July 16, 2009

Former Congressman and C Street resident Chip Pickering’s estranged wife has filed a lawsuit against Pickering’s alleged mistress. Leisha Pickering is suing Elizabeth Creekmore-Byrd for alienation of affection.

Rep. Pickering, a Republican from Mississippi, allegedly continued seeing his college sweetheart while they were both married. According to the suit, some of the “wrongful conduct” occurred at the C Street facility for Christian congressmen — the same one where Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) have lived, and where Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) has recently sought counseling.

What’s with this place?

The suit alleges Pickering and Creekmore-Byrd are still together. Perhaps they’re soul mates?

The complaint is 28 pages long, so we’ll be posting more if we find anything particularly juicy.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/another_c_street_vet_falls_to_an_extramarital_affa.php

Copyright 2009 TPM Media LLC.

Sessions’ Hate Speech

Tom Gilroy
Huffington Post
July 14, 2009

Much of the progressive blogosphere is aghast at the embarrassing Republican strategy of putting Senator Jeff Sessions, a man with a history of racially insensitive statements, as the central interlocutor of a Hispanic woman. Could they really be that stupid — again?

Stupid? No. More like strategic. There is a subterranean agenda here has nothing to do with the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice, and subterranean agendas are what the GOP is always about.

Just as torture was not about getting information but about intimidating our foes and exacting false confessions to justify an Iraq-al Qaida link, just as attacking ACORN was not about investigating voter fraud but about intimidating people from going to the polls, and just as questioning science was not about embracing Creationism but about discrediting climate change so polluting corporations could continue their global plunder, Sessions going after Sotomayer’s non-existent “bias” is not about vetting a potential Supreme Court justice.

It’s about making you afraid.
It’s about making the media afraid.
And it’s about making the Obama government afraid.

The point of putting a “racially insensitive” white man up to question a Latina has nothing to do with bad GOP planning and everything to do with intimidation. Republicans know she’s getting confirmed; what they really want to do is intimidate the White House, the media, and me and you from embracing progressive views.

So, if you’re going to embrace affirmative action, feminism, equal rights, economic fairness, civil rights, — Jesus, even empathy — you stand warned you will be attacked. It has nothing to do with defeating Sotomayer and everything to do with discrediting what most Americans believe and intimidating us from expressing it. It’s also a signal to their dwindling base — disenfranchised, uneducated whites — that the GOP is still the party of the cluelessly and inarticulately disgruntled.

Hence economic fairness is “a special interest,” universal healthcare is “socialism,” and believing in a right to privacy is “judicial activism;” all of it bullshit, but all of it useful.

That’s the goal here; keeping ignorance alive so you can cajole it to the ballot box, the streets, in front of David Letterman’s studio, at the local Board of Ed meeting or the commencement at Notre Dame.

Or outside Dr George Tiller’s women’s health clinic or the Holocaust Museum — carrying a gun.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-gilroy/sessionss-hate-speech_b_232246.html
Copyright © 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

The losers who gave us Sarah Palin

Joe Conason
salon.com
Friday, Jul 10, 2009

Disaster is often followed by recrimination, a bitter aspect of human nature that can be observed among the Republicans as the Sarah Palin fiasco continues to unfold. The Alaska governor’s surprise resignation, amid negative press coverage in Vanity Fair and elsewhere, suddenly revived dormant feuding among campaign operatives and conservative media figures — notably between Steve Schmidt, the former campaign manager, and Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor and Fox News commentator.

In ordinary circumstances, all their bitchy backbiting, spinning and fabricating would be of little interest except as comic entertainment for political junkies. Who first called Palin a “diva”? Who insinuated that she might suffer from postpartum depression? Who searched computer files to find out which staffer was leaking these bilious tidbits to the press? And who cares now, eight months later, except for these losers?

Plainly there is no reason why anyone should care, except for one small nagging concern. It is worth remembering that these are the same people who chose Palin, a manifestly unqualified and incompetent politician unable to string together a series of coherent sentences, as the potential presidential successor to a 72-year-old cancer survivor. So it would be refreshing and salubrious to see the perpetrators of that contemptuous and cynical tactic held accountable for endangering the country.

The latest eruptions from Kristol, Schmidt and all the lesser actors in the Republican reality show echo similar complaints from the closing days of the campaign last fall, when they were blaming each other for the obvious mistake of Palin’s nomination. Back then, Schmidt and other top figures in the McCain orbit — including lobbyists Rick Davis and Charles Black and speechwriter Mark Salter — started to seek distance from the Wasilla phenomenon as soon as they realized that their ticket was going to lose the election, and that her nomination might well be counted among the reasons. In assigning responsibility for impending doom, these gentlemen criticized not only Palin herself but her cheerleaders on the right, the most vocal of whom had been Kristol.

But in late October 2008, the New York Times Sunday Magazine published an extraordinary and timely story that explained exactly how McCain had come to select Palin. According to that article, Schmidt had collaborated with Davis and Salter to promote Palin over several more qualified candidates — after a cursory background investigation that revealed almost nothing about her lack of knowledge, bizarre official conduct, and narcissistic temperament. When the three insiders presented her to a smitten, impetuous McCain, he accepted their judgment, ratified by Charlie Black, one of the most experienced Republican operatives in Washington, who told him that if he chose her, he might win — and otherwise he would surely lose.

It is true, of course, that Kristol had been pushing Palin forward with almost puppyish enthusiasm, ever since his infatuating luncheon with her at the governor’s mansion in Juneau during a summer cruise sponsored by his magazine in 2007. “She could be both an effective vice-presidential candidate and an effective president,” he gushed on Fox News Sunday. “She’s young, energetic.” It is also true, however, that McCain, Schmidt, Davis and Salter chose to listen to Kristol, almost always a political mistake with consequences ranging from the merely absurd to the utterly dire. (The latter category includes the invasion of Iraq, with an astronomical cost in lives and treasure that should be charged to him and his magazine, as he used to boast.)

Enormous as Kristol’s errors in judgment surely were, at least he can plausibly claim to be loyal. If anything he is too steadfast, still insisting that Palin deserves to be considered a serious candidate for the presidency and that her qualifications for that position are comparable to those of Barack Obama.

If that sounds ridiculous — and it does to most sane people — then let’s not forget that Schmidt and many other Republicans were making the same argument on Palin’s behalf, at least publicly, not so long ago. When journalists dared to question her qualifications, after the excited flush faded from her convention debut, Schmidt was belligerent — as befitted a protégé of Karl Rove.

“Her selection came after a six-month-long, rigorous vetting process where her extraordinary credentials and exceptionalism became clear,” he barked. “This vetting controversy is a faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee for vice president of the United States who has never been a part of the old boys’ network that has come to dominate the news establishment in this country.”

Schmidt was lying — about the process, about her credentials, about the confidence he and his cronies supposedly had in her, and about the media questions that he knew to be legitimate.

Rarely is anyone in Washington, from politicians to operatives to journalists, held accountable for the damage they inflict on the body politic. Those who banged the drum for disastrous war flit from one editorial page to the next; those who insisted on ruinous deregulation return as economic advisors to the president. The men who told us that Sarah Palin should be next in line of succession to the presidency may quarrel among themselves now, but they will all be back with yet more stupid advice — and we can only blame ourselves if we listen.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/07/10/palin/?source=newsletter
Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Now, Sarah’s Folly

Maureen Dowd
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Time
July 5, 2009

Sarah Palin showed on Friday that in one respect at least, she is qualified to be president.

Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.

Usually we don’t find that exquisite battiness in our leaders until they’ve been battered by sordid scandals like Watergate (Nixon), gnawing problems like Vietnam (L.B.J.), or scary threats like biological terrorism (Cheney).

When Lyndon Johnson was president, some of his staff began to think of him as “a sick man,” as Bill Moyers told Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Moyers and his fellow Johnson aide Dick Goodwin even began reading up on mental illness — Bill on manic depression and Dick on paranoia.

And so it was, Todd Purdum learned, as he traveled Alaska reporting on Palin for Vanity Fair, that the governor’s erratic and egoistic behavior has been a source of concern for people there.

“Several told me, independently of one another,” Purdum writes, “that they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — ‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy’ — and thought it fit her perfectly.”

The White House can drive its inhabitants loopy. So at least Sarah Palin is ahead of the curve on that one.

As Alaskans settled in to enjoy holiday salmon bakes and the post-solstice thaw, their governor had a solipsistic meltdown so strange it made Sparky Sanford look like a model of stability.

On the shore of Lake Lucille, with wild fowl honking and the First Dude smiling, with Piper in the foreground and their Piper Cub in the background, the woman who took the Republican Party by storm only 10 months ago gave an incoherent, breathless and prickly stream of consciousness to a small group in her Wasilla yard. Gobsmacked Alaska politicians, Republican big shots, the national press, her brother, the D.C. lawyer who helped create her political action committee and yes, even Fox News, played catch-up.

What looked like a secret wedding turned out to be a public unraveling as the G.O.P. implosion continued: Sarah wanted everyone to know that she’s not having fun and people are being mean to her and she doesn’t feel like finishing her first term as governor.

She can hunt wolves from the air and field-dress a moose, but she fears being a lame duck? Some brickbats over her ethics and diva turns as John McCain’s running mate, and that dewy skin turns awfully thin.

Maybe there’s another red Naughty Monkey high heel to drop — there’s often a hidden twist in Sarah’s country-music melodramas. Or is this a reckless high-speed escape from small-pond Alaska, where her popularity is dropping, to the big time Below?

Even some conservative analysts admitted that the governor’s move seemed ga-ga before venturing the spin that Palin might be “crazy like a fox,” as Sarah’s original cheerleader, Bill Kristol, put it.

Maybe, Kristol mused, she could use the 18 months she would have spent finishing her term to write her book and study up on the issues for 2012.

Why not? Palin/Sanford in 2012, with the slogan: “Save time — we’re already in Crazy Town.”

Palin’s speech is classic casuistry.

After girlish burbling about how “progressing our state” and serving Alaska “is the greatest honor that I could imagine,” and raving about how much she loves her job, she abruptly announced that she was making the ultimate sacrifice: dumping the state on her lieutenant.

Why “milk it,” as she put it, when you can quit it? “Only dead fish go with the flow,” she said, while cold fish can blow out of town. Leaving Alaska in the lurch is best for Alaska. She can better “effect change” in government from outside government. She can fulfill her promise of “efficiencies and effectiveness” by deserting Juneau midway through her term — and taking her tanning bed with her.

“We need those who will respect our Constitution,” said Palin, who swore on the Bible to uphold the Constitution. She said she can’t fulfill that silly old oath of office in the usual way because she’s not “wired to operate under the same old politics as usual.”

Naturally, she dragged the troops in, saying that her trip to see wounded soldiers overseas “fortified” her decision to give up because “they don’t give up.”

She refuses to succumb to the “politics of personal destruction.” It’s no fun unless she’s the one aiming those poison darts, as she did when she accused Barack Obama of associating “with terrorists who targeted their own country.”

Sometimes, she explained, if you’re the star, you have to “call an audible and pass the ball” and leave at halftime, “so the team can win” somehow without you.

The maverick must run free when greener pastures beckon. The musher must jump out of the dogsled when warmer climes call. As Palin’s spokeswoman, Meg Stapleton, says, “The world is literally her oyster.”

But just remember, beloved Alaska, it’s all about you.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company