I'm sorry if this is offensive, but someone had to say it.
Folks, think about what you're doing when you vote. This isn't American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. This is America, founded by people who believed in Freedom, Freedom of and FROM religion, Who believed in peace, and never engaging in preemptive strikes. Just because she looks friendly, or says she's a pit bull.... doesn't mean she's qualified to be the President of the United States... OUR America. I love our country, I hate what they're doing to it. I really do. (BTW.. not talking to anyone in particular, talking to the masses... I wish the masses would read my blog) LOL
THINK...
and
Read on:
Mad Dog Palin
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted September 27, 2008.
The scariest thing about John McCain's running mate isn't how
unqualified she is -- it's what her candidacy says about America.
I'm standing outside the XCEL ENERGY CENTER in St. Paul Minnesota
Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National
Convention, accepting the party's nomination for vice president. If I
hadn't quit my two-packs-a-day habit earlier this year, I'd be chain-
smoking now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-
for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at
these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and
anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.
All around me, a million cops in their absurd post-9/11 space-combat
get-ups stand guard as assholes in papier-mache puppet heads scramble
around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage
goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and
Georgia are pouring joyously out the gates in search of bars where
they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion Bowls and other "wild"
drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions
in bathroom stalls as part of the "unbelievable time" they will
inevitably report to their pals back home. Only 21st-century
Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and
still think they're at a party.
The defining moment for me came shortly after Palin and her family
stepped down from the stage to uproarious applause, looking happy
enough to throw a whole library full of books into a sewer. In the
crush to exit the stadium, a middle-aged woman wearing a cowboy hat,
a red-white-and-blue shirt and an obvious eye job gushed to a male
colleague they were both wearing badges identifying them as members
of the Colorado delegation at the Xcel gates.
"She totally reminds me of my cousin!" the delegate screeched. "She's
a real woman! The real thing!"
I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of
the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here's the thing about Americans.
You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown
off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions
in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters
cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from
under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards
and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and
Bangalore.
And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before
Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some
cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential
ticket. And if she's a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed middle-
American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his
giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin' Picante
dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because
it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or
anyone else's, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming
narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on
TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror
every morning.
Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern
United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a
new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of
puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying
symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of
our political power.
Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed
fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a
character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to
eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most
Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and
allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run
this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.
The Palin speech was a political masterpiece, one of the most
ingenious pieces of electoral theater this country has ever seen.
Never before has a single televised image turned a party's fortunes
around faster.
Until the Alaska governor actually ascended to the podium that night,
I was convinced that John McCain had made one of the all-time
campaign season blunders, that he had acted impulsively and out of
utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just
two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher
section at Fenway Park. It even crossed my mind that there was an
element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain's decision to
cave in to his party's right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps
he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from a tepid,
ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman -- reportedly his
real preference -- by picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-
to-fail joke of a Bible-thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally
the base? Fine, I'll rally the base. Here, I'll choose this rifle-
toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil
pipelines. Happy now?
But watching Palin's speech, I had no doubt that I was witnessing a
historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern
with the assurance of a sleepwalker - and immediately launched into a
symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between
the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a
beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just
happened to be the innocent targets of a communist and probably also
homosexual media conspiracy. It was a virtuoso performance. She
appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit,
awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly sweet line
about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who, "five children later"
is "still my guy." It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.
Within minutes, Palin had given TV audiences a character infinitely
recognizable to virtually every American: the small-town girl with
just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA
minutes are Holy Writ, and injustice means the woman next door owning
a slightly nicer set of drapes or flatware. Or the governorship, as
it were.
Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a
human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies.
But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering
brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban
American supermom. It's the perfect cover, for there is almost
nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.
Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of
history with her seminal crack about the "difference between a hockey
mom and a pit bull: lipstick," blurring once and for all the lines
between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the
Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety
as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his
ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set
of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles
away shares a husk of government cheese.
In her speech, Palin presented herself as a raging baby-making
furnace of middle-class ambition next to whom the yuppies of the
Obama set -who never want anything all that badly except maybe a few
afternoons with someone else's wife, or a few kind words in The New
York Times Book Review -- seem like weak, self-doubting celibates,
the kind of people who certainly cannot be trusted to believe in the
right God or to defend a nation. We're used to seeing such blatant
cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is
something new. She's all caricature. As the candidate of a party
whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across
the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of
policies. It's just designed to sell her. The thing was as much as
admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy
Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that Palin
wasn't the most qualified candidate, that the party "went for this,
excuse me, political bullshit about narratives."
The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of
American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually
have policy positions; they simply consume them as media
entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive
prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show
contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for
moms, born-agains for born-agains. Sure, there was politics in the
Palin speech, but it was all either silly lies or merely incidental
fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance. A classic example of
what was at work here came when Palin proudly introduced her Down
syndrome baby, Trig, then stared into the camera and somberly
promised parents of special-needs kids that they would "have a friend
and advocate in the White House." This was about a half-hour before
she raised her hands in triumph with McCain, a man who voted against
increasing funding for special-needs education.
Palin's charge that "government is too big" and that Obama "wants to
grow it" was similarly preposterous. Not only did her party just
preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin
herself has been a typical Bush-era Republican, borrowing and
spending beyond her means. Her great legacy as mayor of Wasilla was
the construction of a $14.7 million hockey arena in a city with an
annual budget of $20 million; Palin OK'd a bond issue for the project
before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal mess
that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the
original market price for property the city ended up having to seize
from a private citizen using eminent domain. Better yet, Palin ended
up paying for the fucking thing with a 25 percent increase in the
city sales tax. But in her speech, of course, Palin presented herself
as the enemy of tax increases, righteously bemoaning that "taxes are
too high," and Obama "wants to raise them."
Palin hasn't been too worried about federal taxes as governor of a
state that ranks number one in the nation in federal spending per
resident ($13,950), even as it sits just 18th in federal taxes paid
per resident ($5,434). That means all us taxpaying non-Alaskans spend
$8,500 a year on each and every resident of Palin's paradise of
rugged self-sufficiency. Not that this sworn enemy of taxes doesn't
collect from her own: Alaska currently collects the most taxes per
resident of any state in the nation.
The rest of Palin's speech was the same dog-whistle crap Republicans
have been running on for decades. Palin's crack about a mayor being
"like a community organizer, except that you have actual
responsibilities" testified to the Republicans' apparent belief that
they can win elections till the end of time running against the
Sixties. (They're probably right.) The incessant grousing about the
media was likewise par for the course, red meat for those tens of
millions of patriotic flag-waving Americans whose first instinct when
things get rough is to whine like bitches and blame other people -
reporters, the French, those ungrateful blacks soaking up tax money
eating big prison meals, whomever -for their failures.
Add to this the usual lies about Democrats wanting to "forfeit" to
our enemies abroad and coddle terrorists, and you had a very run-of-
the-mill, almost boring Republican speech from a substance
standpoint. What made it exceptional was its utter hypocrisy, its
total disregard for reality, its absolute unrelation to the facts of
our current political situation. After eight years of unprecedented
corruption, incompetence, waste and greed, the party of Karl Rove
understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to
any of these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to
beat their meat over.
Sarah Palin is that new, new thing, and in the end it won't matter
that she's got an unmarried teenage kid with a bun in the oven. Of
course, if the daughter of a black candidate like Barack Obama showed
up at his convention with a five-month bump and some sideways-
capwearing, junior-grade Curtis Jackson holding her hand, the
defenders of Traditional Morality would be up in arms. But the thing
about being in the realitymaking business is that you don't need to
worry much about vetting; there are no facts in your candidate's bio
that cannot be ignored or overcome.
One of the most amusing things about the Palin nomination has been
the reaction of horrified progressives. The Internet has been buzzing
at full volume as would-be defenders of san-ity and reason pore over
the governor's record in search of the Damning Facts.
My own telephone began ringing off the hook with calls from ex-
Alaskans and friends of Alaskans determined to help get the "truth"
about Sarah Palin into the major media. Pretty much anyone with an
Internet connection knows by now that Palin was originally for the
"Bridge to Nowhere" before she opposed it (she actually endorsed the
plan in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign), that even after the project
was defeated she kept the money, that she didn't actually sell the
Alaska governor's state luxury jet on eBay but instead sold it at a
$600,000 loss to a campaign contributor (who is now seeking $50,000
in taxpayer money to pay maintenance costs).
Then there are the salacious tales of Palin's swinging-meat-cleaver
management style, many of which seem to have a common thread: In
addition to being ensconced in a messy ethics investigation over her
firing of the chief of the Alaska state troopers (dismissed after
refusing to sack her sister's ex-husband), Palin also reportedly
fired a key campaign aide for having an affair with a friend's wife.
More ominously, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to fire the town
librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, after Emmons resisted pressure to
censor books Palin found objectionable.
Then there's the God stuff: Palin belongs to a church whose pastor,
Ed Kalnins, believes that all criticisms of George Bush "come from
hell," and wondered aloud if people who voted for John Kerry could be
saved. Kalnins, looming as the answer to Obama's Jeremiah Wright,
claims that Alaska is going to be a "refuge state" for Christians in
the last days, last days which he sometimes speaks of in the present
tense. Palin herself has been captured on video mouthing the
inevitable born-again idiocies, such as the idea that a recent
oilpipeline deal was "God's will." She also described the Iraq War as
a "task that is from God" and part of a heavenly "plan." She supports
teaching creationism and "abstinence only" in public schools, opposes
abortion even for victims of rape, denies the science behind global
warming and attends a church that seeks to convert Jews and cure
homosexuals.
All of which tells you about what you'd expect from a raise-the-base
choice like Palin: She's a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious
beliefs who had to be educated as to the fact that the Constitution
did not exactly envision government executives firing librarians.
Judging from the importance progressive critics seem to attach to
these revelations, you'd think that these were actually negatives in
modern American politics. But Americans like politicians who hate
books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them
stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules.
Which is why Palin has only seemed to grow in popularity as more and
more of these revelations have come out. The same goes for the most
damning aspect of her biography, her total lack of big-game
experience. As governor of Alaska, Palin presides over a state whose
entire population is barely the size of Memphis. This kind of thing
might matter in a country that actually worried about whether its
leader was prepared for his job -but not in America.
In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole
country to think you've been around for years. To a certain extent,
this is why Obama is getting a pass on the same issue. He's been on
TV every day for two years, and according to the standards of our
instant-ramen culture, that's a lifetime of hands-on experience. It
is worth noting that the same criticisms of Palin also hold true for
two other candidates in this race, John McCain and Barack Obama.
As politicians, both men are more narrative than substance, with
McCain rising to prominence on the back of his bio as a suffering war
hero and Obama mostly playing the part of the long-lost,
futureembracing liberal dreamboat not seen on the national stage
since Bobby Kennedy died. If your stomach turns to read how Palin's
Kawasaki 704 glasses are flying off the shelves in middle America,
you have to accept that middle America probably feels the same way
when it hears that Donatella Versace dedicated her collection to
Obama during Milan Fashion Week. Or sees the throwing-panties-
onstage-"I love you, Obama!" ritual at the Democratic nominee's town-
hall appearances.
So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much a slick piece of
imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image
represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence,
education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation,
and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all
qualities we're actually going to need in government if we're going
to get out of this huge mess we're in.
Here's what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins
"Country First" buttons on his man titties and chants "U-S-A! U-S-A!"
at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and
Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.
The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally
unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or
unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative
who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got.
No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us:
that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we'll not
only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more
years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few
hours around election time.
Democracy doesn't require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it
requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a
while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and
making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what
your real interests are.
This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves
passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then
jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a Southern-Style Chicken
Sandwich because the slob singing "I'm Lovin' It!" during the
commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is
that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or
shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from
your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.
And when it comes time to vote, all you have to do is put your
Country First -just like that lady on TV who reminds you of your
cousin. U-S-A, baby. U-S-A! U-S-A!
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