You Can Take The Girl Out Of Wasilla, But You Can't Take "Miss Wasilla '84" Out Of The Girl

The Mighty Q whiffed on the "Bush Doctrine" question posed by ABC's Charles Gibson. In fact, The Mighty Q sounded like Miss Teen South Carolina 2007, Lauren Caitlin Upton:

Now, The Mighty Q does her beauty queen shtik:



If this is (fair & balanced) male bovine excrement, so be it.

[x Salon]
Making A Mockery Of 9/11
By Joan Walsh

Republicans have tried to make 9/11 their own personal day of mourning and political commemoration. But 9/11/2008 could well be remembered as a low point in GOP history. It's the day we learned beyond any doubt that John McCain put his manhood in a blind trust to win the presidency. By most reports he wanted to pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate, but Karl Rove and James Dobson told him he couldn't. So he chose someone who is unprepared to be president, who could well put the country at risk were she ever called to assume the presidency.

The fact that Sarah Palin sat for her humiliating interview with ABC's Charles Gibson on 9/11 is one of those strange serendipitous events that makes one believe there's order in the universe. Remember how 9/11 changed everything, especially our new seriousness about the larger world and foreign policy? Never again would we risk a president, maybe not even a Senate candidate, without global experience and sophistication.

What a mockery Palin made of all that. I'll get criticized as sexist for saying this, but I would say the same thing about a man who sounded this ignorant: Talking to Charles Gibson tonight, Palin sometimes reminded me of poor Miss South Carolina, who, asked why many Americans can't find the U.S. on a map, famously said: "I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps. And I believe that our education, like, such as in South Africa and the Iraq, everywhere, like such as, and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children."

This statement from Palin about Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is better, but not hugely: "I believe that under the leadership of Ahmadinejad, nucular weapons in the hands of his government are extremely dangerous to everyone on this globe, yes. We have got to make sure these weapons of mass destruction, that nucular weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran."

Alex Koppelman immediately caught the biggest gaffe of the interview: Palin's deer-in-the-headlights ignorance about the "Bush doctrine" that claims for the U.S. the right to unilateral, "preventive" war against nations perceived as fomenting threats against us. Her answer committing us to defend Georgia or the Ukraine against Russia was almost as bad, and the way she spelled out what NATO membership means, by rote, you could see the quickly crammed index cards in the back of her brain. She put Israel in charge of our Iran policy. John McCain should be ashamed of himself. Ashamed, on 9/11, to have picked someone as ignorant and unready to be president as Sarah Palin.

People who like that sort of thing are going to like Palin's interview, a lot. Apparently, there is a constituency of people who want their president to be just like them, who want him or her to be someone they can have a beer with, to be just as clueless and uninformed as they are. But I believe that's a small constituency. I believe that most Americans, most independents, and serious, patriotic conservatives, are going to see this interview and be very, very afraid. Her combative act didn't really work on Gibson; neither did familiarly peppering her sentences with "Charlie." Charlie did not seem charmed.

I think some liberals owe Charles Gibson an apology; he asked decent questions and followed up well; he really couldn't hide some natural human surprise at how poorly prepared -- though well-coached -- Palin seemed to be. But in fact, it's good luck that liberals savaged Gibson for his treatment of Obama in the Democratic debate last February. It will insulate him a bit from GOP attempts to shoot the messenger, which are inevitable.

[Joan Walsh is the editor-in-chief of Salon, a San Francisco-based on-line magazine. She joined Salon as its first full-time news editor in 1998, and became managing editor in 2004. Walsh had previously worked for In These Times and the Santa Barbara News and Review. She has written freelance articles for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times and The Nation. Walsh is the author of two books, Splash Hit: The Pacific Bell Park Story and Stories of Renewal: Community Building and the Future of Urban America. Joan Walsh holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Wisconsin.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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More Blue Eyes, Lyin' In The Rain

Lie (noun): a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood. The Geezer's campaign is in the full control of Turd Blossom's acolytes. The Geezer couldn't beat 'em when they lied about him and Mrs. Geezer in the South Carolina Dumbo primary in 2000, so The Geezer's joined up with the sleaziest crowd this side of the fires of Hell. If this is (fair & balanced) outrage, so be it.

[x Brave New Films]
I'm John McCain And I Approve This Message
By Robert Greenwald

[Robert Greenwald is a film director, producer and political activist recently noted for his documentaries critical of Fox News and of the Bush Administration, as well as numerous award-winning television movies from the 1980s and 1990s. Greenwald attended the NYC High School of Performing Arts.]

Copyright © 2008 Brave New Films, Inc.

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The Choice — Not An Echo (Of Greed) — Is Clear

The BoBo Boy nails the Dumbos for being stupid creatures who want to throw vouchers at problematic schools, privatize (another term for kill) Social Security, and deregulate the financial sector so that we can enjoy more Enron-Bear Stearns-Freddie Mac-Fannie Mae disasters. Had enough? If this is a (fair & balanced) choice — not an echo — so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Social Animal
By David Brooks

Near the start of his book, The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater wrote: “Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being.” The political implications of this are clear, Goldwater continued: “Conservatism’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?”

Goldwater’s vision was highly individualistic and celebrated a certain sort of person — the stout pioneer crossing the West, the risk-taking entrepreneur with a vision, the stalwart hero fighting the collectivist foe.

The problem is, this individualist description of human nature seems to be wrong. Over the past 30 years, there has been a tide of research in many fields, all underlining one old truth — that we are intensely social creatures, deeply interconnected with one another and the idea of the lone individual rationally and willfully steering his own life course is often an illusion.

Cognitive scientists have shown that our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context — by the frames, biases and filters that are shared subconsciously by those around. Neuroscientists have shown that we have permeable minds. When we watch somebody do something, we recreate their mental processes in our own brains as if we were performing the action ourselves, and it is through this process of deep imitation that we learn, empathize and share culture.

Geneticists have shown that our behavior is influenced by our ancestors and the exigencies of the past. Behavioral economists have shown the limits of the classical economic model, which assumes that individuals are efficient, rational, utility-maximizing creatures.

Psychologists have shown that we are organized by our attachments. Sociologists have shown the power of social networks to affect individual behavior.

What emerges is not a picture of self-creating individuals gloriously free from one another, but of autonomous creatures deeply interconnected with one another. Recent Republican Party doctrine has emphasized the power of the individual, but underestimates the importance of connections, relationships, institutions and social filaments that organize personal choices and make individuals what they are.

This may seem like an airy-fairy thing. But it is the main impediment to Republican modernization. Over the past few weeks, Republicans have talked a lot about change, modernization and reform. Despite the talk, many of the old policy pillars are the same. We’re living in an age of fast-changing economic, information and social networks, but Republicans are still impeded by Goldwater’s mental guard-rails.

If there’s a thread running through the gravest current concerns, it is that people lack a secure environment in which they can lead their lives. Wild swings in global capital and energy markets buffet family budgets. Nobody is sure the health care system will be there when they need it. National productivity gains don’t seem to alleviate economic anxiety. Inequality strains national cohesion. In many communities, social norms do not encourage academic achievement, decent values or family stability. These problems straining the social fabric aren’t directly addressed by maximizing individual freedom.

And yet locked in the old framework, the Republican Party’s knee-jerk response to many problems is: “Throw a voucher at it.” Schools are bad. Throw a voucher. Health care system’s a mess. Replace it with federally funded individual choice. Economic anxiety? Lower some tax rate.

The latest example of the mismatch between ideology and reality is the housing crisis. The party’s individualist model cannot explain the social contagion that caused hundreds of thousands of individuals to make bad decisions in the same direction at the same time. A Republican administration intervened gigantically in the market to handle the Bear Stearns, Freddie and Fannie debacles. But it has no conservative rationale to explain its action, no language about the importance of social equilibrium it might use to justify itself.

The irony, of course, is that, in pre-Goldwater days, conservatives were incredibly sophisticated about the value of networks, institutions and invisible social bonds. You don’t have to go back to Edmund Burke and Adam Smith (though it helps) to find conservatives who understood that people are socially embedded creatures and that government has a role (though not a dominant one) in nurturing the institutions in which they are embedded.

That language of community, institutions and social fabric has been lost, and now we hear only distant echoes — when social conservatives talk about family bonds or when John McCain talks at a forum about national service.

If Republicans are going to fully modernize, they’re probably going to have to follow the route the British Conservatives have already trod and project a conservatism that emphasizes society as well as individuals, security as well as freedom, a social revival and not just an economic one and the community as opposed to the state.

[David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times and has become a prominent voice of politics in the United States. Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 with a degree in history. He served as a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, and a commentator on NPR and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." Brooks has written a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Brooks also writes articles and makes television appearances as a commentator on various trends in pop culture, such as internet dating. He has been largely responsible for coining the terms "bobo," "red state," and "blue state." His newest book is entitled On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Blue Eyes, Lyin' In The Rain

Q: How do you know when The (Blue-Eyed) Geezer's lyin'? A: When his lips are movin'. Q: How do you know when The Mighty Q (new expert on the Bush Doctrine) is lyin'? A: When her lipstick-covered, pork-lovin' lips are movin'. If this is (fair & balanced) polygraphy, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Blizzard Of Lies
By Paul Krugman

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”

Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.

So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.

Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.

And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.

One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.

But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

[Paul R. Krugman is currently a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. Krugman majored in economics (though his initial interest was in history) as an undergraduate at Yale University. He earned a Ph.D. from MIT in 1977 and taught at Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, the London School of Economics, and Stanford University before joining the faculty of Princeton University. Krugman received the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economics Association in 1991.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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