Palin ‘unleashed’

Unlike some progressive commentators, I think Sarah Palin was far from drunk in this video response to a speech by Elizabeth Warren that is available on her website. Apparently, it is completely unedited.

Although the arguments are strained throughout, she went off script at about the 2:30 minute mark and seemed to briefly divert from her prepared remarks a couple other times later in the video. For someone with Palin’s resources, this shouldn’t ever happen, especially on the Internet. In any case, she seems sober enough to me.

Indeed, anyone who remembers the 2008 election cycle will recall that, when trying to make candid remarks on the fly, a tangled web of words — a dictionary hodgepodge, if you will — is about what we should expect.

I particularly enjoyed the analogy in a New York Times article from 2008 about Palin’s disastrous interview with Katie Couric:

… Couric asked Ms. Palin, Senator John McCain’s running mate, what she meant when she cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as foreign affairs experience. Ms. Palin could have anticipated the question — the topic of their interview, pegged to her visit to the United Nations, was foreign affairs. Yet Ms. Palin’s answer was surprisingly wobbly: her words tumbled out fast and choppily, like an outboard motor loosened from the stern (italics mine).

“That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land — boundary that we have with — Canada,” she replied. She mentioned the jokes made at her expense and seemed for a moment at a loss for the word “caricature.” “It — it’s funny that a comment like that was — kind of made to — cari — I don’t know, you know? Reporters —”

Ms. Couric stepped in. “Mocked?” Ms. Palin looked relieved and even grateful for the help. “Yeah, mocked, I guess that’s the word, yeah.”

Here is a link to the full video on her website, and here is Cenk Uygur’s take on it.

This isn’t Palin drunk. This is just Palin “unleashed,” as Uyger said. Palin’s handlers should advise that she never go off script, or if she must, invest in a good video editor. But after seven years of this, that’s probably asking too much.

One less headcase in the asylum

Hell, I think Republicans should be gleeful that Glenn Beck has decided to leave the Republican Party, but this shift in the GOP should have happened the other way around.

Now that members of the Republican Party are finally realizing, after six years of the crazy, that the Tea Party and its ilk have sent the party careening dangerously close to the edge of oblivion, establishment Republicans should have neutered the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck years ago. They didn’t, so now they are left with picking up the pieces of a broken party. As I have been saying for the better part of three years, time for the GOP to boot the crazies and reclaim the center held, somewhat admirably, by Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

What happened to Sarah Palin?

I’m sure you are probably ready with the easy answer: Nothing has changed. She has been giving half-cocked, barely coherent speeches for years, and this year, just a few days removed from the grand oratorical opus she delivered at the 2015 Iowa Freedom Summit, she’s still offering up the same rambling diatribes — with or without a teleprompter, it makes little difference — consisting of a strange mix of middle-America colloquialisms and a tinge of bitterness that comes from losing badly in 2008 and being relegated to the hinterlands of reality television ever since.

But Matt Lewis with The Daily Beast has touched on something that I don’t think most people have pointed out, at least not recently. After 2008, Palin actually had a chance to dust herself off and hit the reset button on her political career. He lays out the scenario thusly:

In fairness, Palin was once a reform-minded governor who enjoyed an 88 percent approval rating. But something happened on the way to Des Moines. I suspect the most vicious attacks (especially the “Trig Truther” stuff) radicalized her and embittered her, but I also suspect she also took the easy way out. Instead of going back to Alaska after the 2008 defeat, boning up on the issues, continuing her work as governor, and forging a national political comeback, she cashed in with reality-TV shows and paid speaking gigs.

This isn’t an original or new observation, In fact, back in July 2009, I wrote: “The tragedy of Sarah Palin’s recent press conference announcing her resignation as governor of Alaska flows from the sense that so much potential has been wasted.”

The trouble with taking the easy way out is that it doesn’t last forever. The people who truly last in this business don’t rely on shortcuts or good looks or gimmicks; they survive on work ethic, wit, and intellect. (That’s why, no matter how grandiose he gets, Newt Gingrich will always have a gig. Newt will always be interesting, because he will always have something to say—something to contribute.)

This is why — and it seems many conservative writers are now ready to concede this point — that Palin never really had any staying power or substance in the first place, without laboriously going back to Alaska to study up, and when she is left to her devices, especially without the teleprompter, this is what we get in raw form, which is a shell of someone like Gingrich or John McCain, who are, however much I might disagree with them on specific points, at least capable of manufacturing interesting ideas independent of anyone else.

President tunes out cable news

For all its tireless bluster, FOX News is, for all intent and purposes, wasting its time and energy trying to chastise the president or somehow influence policy. Why? Because President Barack Obama isn’t watching cable news, and that includes CNN and MSNBC. Any president worth his wait in salt wouldn’t be influenced by the media anyway, but for all of Obama’s inadequacies at this point, namely his hawkish drone program and his thus far failed promise to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, we can at least take heart in the fact that we have a president who still consumes publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post in written form, whether in newsprint or digital, which, I might add, is more preferable by several large degrees from a vice presidential nominee in 2008 — who would have been one heart beat away from assuming the highest office in the land — not being able to name a single publication that she reads on a daily basis.

Here is former press secretary Jay Carney talking about Obama’s media proclivities:

Life on the fringe

For at least five years, ever since the Tea Party’s primordial stew was being swirled and mixing into something resembling a coherent platform, I have been highlighting the various ideological inconsistencies with this movement’s noxious approach to politics.

Back in April 2009 when the Tea Party supporters were anachronistically parading around in Thomas Paine uniforms, I highlighted the “idiocy of this generation” and foreshadowed things to come. As I said at the time:

And here we come to the hang of it all: the very reason why the Republican ideals of personal liberty and small government married to notions of moral uprightness do not work. Many on the right attempt to coerce folks in leadership or pray for them or lobby them or whatever on social issues like abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research, hoping federal or state governments would, indeed, solve our problems. They believe federal and state governments can and should solve what they perceive to be our social ills. Government should preserve the institution of marriage. It should uphold certain moral codes that would prohibit heinous dabblings in abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Government should get drugs off the streets and prosecute drug dealers to the fullest extent of the law. State laws should keep the sabbath holy by disallowing the purchase of alcohol on Sunday (and in some states, disallowing even retail purchases before 1 p.m.!) Government should more fully represent our moral values, they say.

And in the same breath, what do we see? The same folks turn an about-face, and speak out against gun control, against big business regulations and against taxes. Thus, they favor big government in some areas and those of moral or social concerns, but not others like taxes or gun control. But they can’t have it both ways, and the logic just does not add up. Small government taken to its fullest end would mean this: the legalization of controlled substances, the continued or even a relaxing of gun control laws, allowing states to decide gay rights, relaxing regulations on abortion and stem cell research and some states disbanning their ridiculous blue laws. True, big government would mean the opposite. But both Dems and Reps want to pick and choose which causes they will champion.

Unfortunately, this idiocy has only continued and has even been amplified in some ways, as Tea Party politicians in Washington have now framed the political discourse between themselves, always on the right side of history of course, and establishment, insider Republicans who they say have a tenuous grasp about the will of the American people and do not have the nation’s best interests at heart. While all of this bickering among officials within the same party is highly entertaining in one sense, and deeply disappointing in another, this toxic atmosphere has engendered all sorts of kookery, not the least of which is politicians calling for the evisceration of the public education system and other federal offices to would-be politicians, like Oklahoma House of Representatives Tea Party candidate, Scott Esk, who has claimed we would be totally justified, on license from the Old Testament, if we started stoning gay people, noting on his website:

I look forward to applying Biblical principles to Oklahoma law.

While it’s fortunate that Esk is only running for a state post and not a seat in the federal government, firebrands like Sean Hannitty, Mark Levin, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin are partially to blame for creating the type of anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-government far-right wing of the Republican Party that emboldens Esk and his ilk, but it is the easily-led, fearful, spineless American voters who are to blame for allowing it to flourish.

The Grand Old Tea Party

Here is Grover Norquist speaking in a Los Angeles Times article about the Tea Party:

Once there were Republicans who voted for tax increases, but they aren’t here any more.… The Republican Party has largely absorbed the message of the Tea Party movement. 

So, essentially the same folks who once railed against the government and the establishment in 2008 in Washington are the establishment in Washington.

GOP puts its tea party ‘civil war’ behind it.

The failed Tea Party experiment

I’ve been writing about the Tea Party’s lunacies on here since the spring of 2009 (Here is my first substantive post about it). As I’ve tracked the trajectory of this experiment in political unrest, I think it’s safe to say the party is all but toast at this point, and here’s why.

Tea Party members have essentially corroded the GOP from the inside out, and in a sign that more moderate, “establishment” Republicans are pulling back the reins on these folks, House Speaker John Boehner and GOP leaders announced recently that they were going to support a “clean,” no-attachments increase to the debt-ceiling, despite some leaders in the party insisting on a list of demands. Attaching demands to the legislation did not have enough support, it died and the actual “clean” bill passed the House on Tuesday.

The Atlantic’s Molly Ball has an excellent article up about the Tea Party’s evolution these last few years, and its eventual acceptance of typical machinations in Washington. As she traces the changes in the party, which as we know is the ultra-conservative, borderline libertarian fringe of the Republican Party, members swept into Washington riding Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber’s popularity and were ready to pounce on and destroy every single one of Barack Obama’s goals, with some conservatives talking heads even wishing that Obama fails at everything he tries to accomplish in the White House. In short, Ball said, the Tea Party came into Congress in 2011 on a “wave of denial and anger.”

teapartyflag

The nation came close to disaster in 2011 when Tea Partiers nearly destroyed the concessions Boehner was planning to make with Obama to keep the U.S. from defaulting on its loans. This would be one of the first in a series of numerous showdowns between more moderate House Republicans, like Boehner, who at their core understand that in some cases, compromise is a necessity and tough decisions have to be made for the betterment of the nation — even if they won’t say this publicly — and the lunatic wing of the GOP.

As Ball put it:

The 2011 showdown was revealing. Previously, the idea of default was so unthinkable that observers and markets didn’t consider it a possibility. But the confrontation showed how far the new House majority was willing to go. They weren’t looking for compromise; they wanted the whole loaf. They weren’t just mad. They were convinced—erroneously—that they had the power to undo Obama’s agenda entirely from their perch controlling one-half of one-third of the federal government. They were in denial.

And in late 2013, the conservative camp forced the nation into a government shutdown, causing undue hardship on the Americans they claimed to care about back in election season. They then proceeded to eat a shit sandwich by subsequently accepting a deal to reopen the government, as Ball points out, that was actually worse than the one they were going to get previously. Now, as the GOP bullheadedly forced the government’s hand, took a sizable ideological step against the grain and managed to somehow make the public even less trustworthy of government with their asinine denials of reality, the only thing left for the Tea Party is acceptance, and well, dissolution.

Ball concludes:

This is how Washington works: Certain things have to get done, and you try to get the best deal you can, and then move on to the next thing. This is basically what Boehner has been trying to tell his caucus for the last three years, but they had to figure it out for themselves. Now that they’ve achieved acceptance, will Boehner’s job get easier? Or will a new wave of mad-as-hell representatives rise up in protest?

If Tea Partiers would have had the brains to realize all this from the start, they could have saved us all, and the nation, a lot of heartburn. They played a dangerous game that took the nation to the brink, and now, with absolutely nothing to gain from it except more angry constituents and some dusty lapel pins, they will more than likely be forced henceforth to ride the bench.

MSNBC host steps in it

It’s one thing to blast Sarah Palin for her “rank ignorance,” callousness and flimsy grasp at history. Quite another to suggest that someone should shit in her mouth two girls, one cup style.

This is essentially what former MSNBC Martin Bashir did when he criticized Palin for comparing the national debt to slavery. He has subsequently apologized and resigned from his post.

Here is, in part, what he had to say in an email to Mediaite after the on-air segment:

I deeply regret what was said, will endeavor to work hard at making constructive contributions in the future and will always have a deep appreciation for our viewers – who are the smartest, most compassionate and discerning of all television audiences. I would also wish to express deepest gratitude to my immediate colleagues, and our contributors, all of whom have given so much of themselves to our broadcast.

Bashir’s comments highlight the problem with stations like MSNBC and FOX News. Pundits on these partisan stations — add left and right wing talk radio to the mix — spend the majority of their time lambasting the other side, and they ratchet up the rhetorical to such a high pitch that eventually they have nowhere else to go except to crude and personal attacks.

I disagree with 99.9 percent of the gibberish that comes out of Palin’s mouth, but dropping her, even metaphorically, in the 18th century to be stripped of her humanity and disciplined like a slave for her political views? Really? I mean, did one of Bashir’s producers not step in and say, “Hey man, this might be taking it too far?”

If you missed it, here’s the video:

Why cover the crazy?

Agreeing with some advice Jonathan Chait offered about political discourse and argumentation, Ta-Nehisi Coates said political commentators — I think he would probably extend this to all opinion writers — should increasingly take on intellectual giants, rather than go after mental featherweights such as Sarah Palin and Michelle Malkin:

Write about something other than current politics. Do not limit yourself to fighting with people who are alive. Fight with some of the intellectual greats. Fight with historians, scientists, and academics. And then after you fight with them, have the decency to admit when they’ve kicked your ass. Do not use your platform to act like they didn’t. Getting your ass kicked is an essential part of growing your intellectual muscle.

I agree to a degree, insofar as it helps the person doing the writing. In Christian apologetics, for instance, it would be more beneficial to the intellectual growth of the writer to argue against some of the best thinkers apologetics has to offer — William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas or Ravi Zacharias, for instance, rather than charlatans like Pat Robertson or James Dobson. That’s not to say the “best thinkers” in apologetics offer a compelling case for belief. I just mean that these “thinkers” — and I used the term loosely — sometimes hold more nuanced views on faith than less erudite pastors and priests who simply quote scripture and assume that’s going to convince us of anything. A person, then, is better equipped to argue from a position of nonbelief when she has anticipated all the ways believers jump through rhetorical hoops attempting to defend faith.

A quote from Omar Khyyam seems apt here:

The Koran! Well, come put me to the test — Lovely old book in hideous error drest. Believe me, I can quote the Koran too. The unbeliever knows his Koran best.

That’s Rhetoric 101. Know your opponents, and anticipate their arguments. So, in this regard providing commentary on the brightest thinkers from any field of inquiry, rather than the most asinine, continues a pattern of learning that, as Coates argues, should not stop once a person gets a college degree.

What Coates doesn’t address is the flip side to this. Does pointing out stupidity benefit readers or does it just needlessly proliferate garbage and give people like Malkin more “air time” than they deserve? Media Matters, of course, has more or less built an empire on pointing out stupidity that takes place on FOX News on a daily basis, and I could crash this server writing about the latest antics of people like Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and their ilk. While I criticize them on here occasionally, would it be helpful to the larger and probably never-ending debate about which ideology, liberal or conservative, is the best one for leading a nation? Probably not.

But I think pointing out stupidity accomplishes at least two important goals. Deservedly, it marginalizes people like Beck and Malkin and their ultra-religious counterparts to the sidelines. Second, and more importantly, it shines a bright light on just how far the political and religious message in America has gone off the rails and how far the GOP spectrum has shifted, and making light of this could hopefully result in more moderate approaches, even among conservatives. Fringe ideology in either direction, left or right, will get us nowhere fast.

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