Tag: John McCain

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“Game Change”: Sarah Palin and McCain

Just watched HBO’s “Game Change”, about Sarah Palin’s exciting tenure as John McCain’s running mate. Not bad. Not great, but not terrible. I can’t even really tell the politics of the makers– one tends to assume that a Hollywood film is made by liberals. In general, Palin is made to look like an idiot, but then, Palin really is an idiot and even some conservatives will admit that.

A competing conservative biopic, “Undefeated”, has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has been described as “Stalinesque”.

Someone on a message board on IMDB wrote– poorly– about the idea that in order to make a good film (or tv), you have to be able to empathize with people who are different from you.

The problem for conservatives is that the minute you do that, you become a liberal

“Game Change” paints a rather flattering portrait of John McCain in one respect: McCain (Ed Harris) is depicted as running a principled, honest campaign. He is clueless about just how incompetent Sarah Palin is, but he is “ethical”. So he rejects bringing up Jeremiah Wright. He remembers being smeared by George Bush in 2000 with a scurrilous claim that he had fathered a child out of wedlock with a black woman. (The photo used to “substantiate” this claim was of McCain’s adopted Asian daughter.)

That is a very, very relative statement, but yes, compared to the current Republican primaries, he was Florence Nightingale. He was also bitter after the election– in a way that Al Gore and John Kerry clearly were not– and I suspect he was somewhat delusional about just how much damage Palin did. The idea of blaming the media for denigrating the most incompetent personnel decision in modern presidential political history must have occurred to him in his sleep.

Did you know: a committee of the Texas Legislature rejected an amendment to a bill that would have required that public school sex education classes be “medically accurate”.

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Generals Who Never Admit Defeat Even When it Stares Them in the Face

General Petraeus thinks that Obama is leaving Afghanistan too soon.

After 10 years of rather conspicuous failure, Petraeus and the other generals and a few faithfully militant Republicans like John McCain claim that we are on the verge of success– just give me one more chance, honey. I know I’ve let you down over and over again, but this time I think it’s going to work.

Philosopher Karl Popper argued that a scientific theory (or any theory) could not be said to be true unless it was theoretically possible, in a rational sense, to prove that it was false. In other words, to “falsify” it. I wish there was a succinct, well-known term for this position. Maybe there is and I just don’t know it. But once you understand it, it makes perfect sense.

For example, someone tells you that he is underpaid. He deserves more money for the work he does. That’s his theory, his hypothesis.  But is it possible that everyone deserves more money for the work they do? I think a rational person would think not. Next question: is there a single person in the world who does not feel he deserves more money for the work he does? No. So you can’t falsify the hypothesis here– you can’t reasonably believe that any person feels that he should not get paid more. So you respond, “don’t we all”. He hasn’t made his case.

So when the generals argue that the Afghanistan effort is on the verge of success, we could believe they might be right if you could make a sensible case for the idea that they might, if the evidence was convincing, believe that they were ever not on the verge of success. But it is clear that, short of a total annihilation, these generals will never admit that they lost this war. We know this because the generals have lied from the very beginning about how well they were doing, and the prospects of a conclusive victory. Now, some generals even argue that they shouldn’t even look for a conclusive victory: let’s just stay there forever.

That, of course, is not what they promised the American tax-payer when they initiated this war.

In certain criminal cases, fiber evidence is sometimes presented by an “expert” to prove the guilt of an individual. The question I always ask is, knowing what we now know about fiber experts, is it possible that this expert could have failed to find at least one match for any fiber in any suspect’s apartment?

Apparently not. Has one of these experts ever testified in court that they could not match any fibers from the body with any fibers found in the suspect’s apartment? I’ve never heard of it.

So if I had been a congressman back in, oh, 2005, and had been part of one of those hearings at which the generals explain what they are doing and why and how it will lead to success, I would have asked the generals to lay out for me a definition of “failure”, just so we would know what it looks like if it was ever staring us in the face. I would have written it down carefully, made it into a framed poster, and hung it on the wall in the hearing room, so that five, six, seven, ten years later, when the same general was arguing that the U.S. should continue to spend over $1 billion a week on this war, I could point to the poster and say, no, we failed, let’s admit it and move on.

Without a doubt– without the slightest doubt– people like John McCain would have objected. He would say, we didn’t define failure in the right way. I have a new definition. And it’s not what we have now. And we would know that the truth is that every last U.S. soldier could be killed and every last armament destroyed and he would still insist they could win if they would just do the same except more of it.

At least it would be more transparent what people like John McCain want to do, how they see the world, how they understand the purpose of government.

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Mad Hatters of the Tea Party

It’s not that big of a secret that the real movers and shakers in the Republican Party are not Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle, or even Jim DeMint or Sarah Palin.

Well, I think it is to the Tea Partiers.

Listen to this comment by Trent Lott, Svengali of the Republican Establishment, now a lobbyist just raking in the dough, as was always his purpose as a Republican politician (if you receive the money afterwards, is it still a bribe?): “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them”.

“They” are the tea party. It won’t be difficult– “they” are Republicans. They actually believe that in America, the goal of government is to provide a level playing field so that companies can battle it out among each other to provide consumers with the best products at the best price. They are in for a shock. The first thing they will learn, from Trent Lott, Karl Rove, and the others, is that the purpose of Republican government is to pin down the young, the poor, the middle class, and entrepreneurs so that the corporations can ransack their pockets with impunity. The rich, powerful corporations actually control the legislative process through lobbyists who lob millions of dollars at every politician in the firm belief that their votes can be influenced.

What Lott is afraid of– and it’s an amusing scenario– is that some of these tea party candidates are what I call “true believers”. What if they reject the money and vote their conscience? Oh my! The horror! At what point will Sharron Angle realize that she is not voting to “level the playing field” on most legislation– she will be voting to confer fabulous favors and benefits upon powerful interests who will gladly, in return, pay for the expensive negative ads she needs to run in her next election campaign when, undoubtedly, she will be running “against” Washington.

Jon Stewart hilariously showed us John McCain, in a recent campaign ad, declaring that Washington was “broken” and needed to be fixed. Then he showed us McCain using the same line over and over and over again going back to his first election campaign 30 years ago.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…. three times… eight times… ten times… uh… doh!

For all the media hype, how much influence has the Tea Party had on this election? Well, name a single Tea Party candidate who won a seat that the Republicans would have lost without him or her?

That’s right– not one.

Why? That’s pretty straight forward: a “movement” unconnected with a particular idea is always going to fizzle. The Tea Party doesn’t really have a single coherent idea that isn’t

  1. already held, in emasculated form, by the Republican Party,
    too whacko to ever be implemented,
  2. too generalized and idealistic to have any real application.
  3. In August, CNN revealed that the percentage of Americans who actually call themselves members of the Tea Party? 2.

That said, what a shame that we won’t have a real tea party victory. A victory by the Tea party– by the true believers– would be as devastating to corporate interests and old guard Republicans as it would be to the Democrats. If Tea Party Candidates came in and cleared out the lobbyists, the backroom deals, the earmarks, and so on, we might all be better off than we would be under a victory by so-called moderate Republicans.  That is, if they do what they say they will do.

It’s a little puzzling that so much mainstream media– allegedly “liberal”, of course– have given so much coverage to the Tea Party, which, as the Washington Post discovered, is actually quite small and really insignificant.

Why why why? I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, so it must be because conflict and anger and spectacle make good news.

“Look at Lott’s lobbying clients: Citigroup, General Electric, Raytheon, Entergy and other Beltway bandits, subsidy sucklers and regulatory robber barons. These guys live off of bailouts, massive government spending, and earmarks. These are exactly the policies Republicans are supposed to oppose, but don’t. They’re also the very things Tea Partiers and Jim DeMint rail against most.”

Read more at the Washington Examiner.  [dead link: sorry.]

 

The picture, at the top, is of my feet, 1976, Calgary, Alberta, sitting in a basement apartment we rented for the summer while working for the United Grain Growers.

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Ridiculously, He Won

Palin owes her power to identity politics, pitched with moralistic topspin. She exploits the same populist impulse that fueled the career of William Jennings Bryan—an impulse described by one Bryan biographer as “the yearning for a society run by and for ordinary people who lead virtuous lives.” From Vanity Fair, September 2010

Is it even remotely possible that this dangerous lunatic could end up as President of the United States? The story is that she is preparing a run, setting up fundraising bodies, collecting direct-mail lists, distributing IOU’s to any number of Republican House and Senate candidates. That looks like groundwork. This looks like someone who believes her own (selected) press. I am so smart that even I don’t know how smart I am. Everybody who matters knows how smart I am.

There is something seriously demented about American politics. Americans hate their government. They believe that Washington is full of idiots and liars. These are the people they elected. Okay– so we were a tricked. These people were good when I voted for them, and then they got corrupted by Washington.

So a new guy comes along and says I won’t get corrupted. I’m going to clean out Washington. So they elect him. Two years later they hate him too. They hate him so much that when he spends $30 million smothering the state with ads declaring that his opponent is a child-molester and a heretic, they vote for him again. That’s all it takes, apparently, to fool the American voter. $30 million, supplied by the lobbyists representing the companies that persuaded their representative to do their bidding instead of the voters’.

So ask these voters, what’s ruining this country? Those damn unpatriotic foreigners! Feminists! People who don’t wear American flags in their lapels. Moslems! Mexicans! Homosexuals!

My friends, there isn’t a single Mexican in the country who can pay your Congressman enough money to do his will– but that’s who you’re upset about? You complain about the government wasting money on roads and schools, while they build billions of dollars of weapons for imaginary enemies? You have been driven into massive debts and bankruptcy and you’ve lost your job and your house because of the actions of greedy, dishonest American investment bankers, and you don’t like Obama because he’s smart and thinks he’s better than you?

The Vanity Fair piece on Palin is fascinating if only for a glimpse on that perennial American political paradox: how millionaire white American capitalists inevitably campaign for political office as “just folks” and try — and often succeed in painting their Democrat opponents as “elitists”.

Sarah Palin is America’s Evita in that regard– the poor little aw shucks hockey mom with down home values and divinely inspired common sense. How far that can take you in federal politics if you don’t even know who Margaret Thatcher is (presumably, she does now) is the question to be answered in 2012.

A friend of mine has mused that the Democrats should have lost the last election on purpose– the country was going to hell as a result of George Bush’s incompetence and there would be hell to pay and most people are too stupid to connect policies and consequences and delayed consequences, so whoever was in charge at the moment would get the blame.

My theory is that the Democrats did try to lose the election. They almost nominated a woman, realized she might win, thought better of it, and nominated a black man instead. Ridiculously, he won anyway.

There really, somewhere, should be a picture of John McCain sitting in an easy chair smiling. Smiling away…. Well, he should be smiling– instead, he seems bitter. Does he seriously believe that he could have come up with a plan that would have balanced the budget and reduced unemployment to 7% by now? Sure– by cutting taxes for the richest 1% of the population.

 

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Same as the Old Boss

Like a lot of people, I have been willing to cut President Obama a lot of slack. A vast network of incompetence, abuse, and secrecy can’t be turned around over night. But I am increasingly disturbed by clear signs that Obama, perhaps in the interest of finding “common ground”, is not making the changes he was elected to make.

The latest of these (see the link, above left) involve yet another case in which Obama, apparently terrified that Americans will find him inadequately ruthless, refuses to stop abuse, torture, and arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. He thinks that one of these detainees, after release, will conduct an act of terrorism and the Republicans will gleefully make the case that only assholes like Dick Cheney can stand up to the forces of darkness. Even worse: it might look like George W. Bush was right.

It’s not an isolated incident. Obama has refused to release photographs showing more prisoner abuse in Iraq. He hasn’t changed U.S. policy to Cuba, or Iran, or North Korea. He supported the amnesty for telecoms that violated your right to privacy at the behest of Homeland Security. He won’t reveal new details about who the government is spying on without warrants or how often they do it.

The photograph issue is a telling point– during the campaign, Obama argued that transparency and honesty would ultimately increase respect for America around the world. He can’t now argue that circumstances have changed. He can’t argue that he has new information that he didn’t have during the campaign. He can’t argue that there is a risk to American soldiers that did not exist during the campaign. The only thing that changed is that Obama now has the power to do what he said he would do. He promised something. He didn’t deliver.

Just another politician? It’s beginning to look like it. The style is different, yes, but so far Obama has not staked out a path that is substantively different from what we could have expected under McCain, or even Bush. What we have now are the same policies, but provided with more thoughtful, coherent explanations.

He is also trying to block investigations into the Justice Department’s procedures for authorizing torture during the Bush Administration. In other words, so you tortured a few Arabs? Big deal. We’ll just let bygones be bygones and let those evil lawyers and judges go on their merry ways while the victims of their actions lay shattered and broken in their prison cells.

Finally– his economic “reforms” leave in place most of the lousy structures and policies that created this massive economic disaster in the first place.

Is this what the majority of Americans– more than ever voted for Bush– wanted? Is this what they voted for? What is going on here? Do they have a right to feel betrayed?

Bush, with a razor thin margin of votes, took the U.S. into a disastrous war, violated the constitution, and destroyed the economy. Obama, with a substantial majority– won against a moderate Republican– seems afraid to do anything he promised the voters he would do.

The world is crying for a dramatic gesture from this government that things are different.

So far, things seem mighty same.

The story in the New York Times.

Obama prides himself on his ability to build consensus, to seek common ground, to forge compromise. Since the Republicans pride themselves on the fact that they are always so right that they don’t need to listen to anybody else (which is not to say that some Democrats believe the same thing), this is a win-win situation for conservatives. I fear that Obama’s health care proposals will be so compromised by this process that they will fail, which will allow the Republicans to proclaim that it was always a bad idea.

* Note: while some liberals can be as doctrinaire as conservatives (and conservatives love insisting they all are), it is also true that a core liberal belief is that there is some value in all points of view– precisely the kind of moral “flexibility” Conservatives say they detest. Can’t have it both ways: which is it?

More Compromises:
On Detainee Rights

“Second, Democrats learned never to go to war against the combined forces of corporate America. Today, whether it is on the stimulus, on health care or any other issue, the Obama administration and the Congressional leadership go out of their way to court corporate interests, to win corporate support and to at least divide corporate opposition.”
David Brooks, NYTimes, June 30, 2009

Yet another depressing story.

Added July 24:  It should be noted that a few days after the above comments, David Brooks complained bitterly that Obama was pursuing the radical agenda of the left wing of the Democratic party and not giving adequate respect to moderation and compromise.

Okay Brooks, which is it?

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Dear George Will: About Canadian Health Care

George, I know you strive to be fair and balanced though your basic worldview is conservative.  As a Canadian who “suffers” under our single-payer system, I would ask a very simple, very important question: having lived under a single-payer system for almost fifty years now, could you persuade a majority of Canadians to give it up, and let a “market-based” system prevail?  Do you think most of us believe that will drive down health care costs and give us more “freedom”?

George Will on Health Care

Most Canadians I know can’t even believe that there is a debate on this issue in the U.S.  We are all mightily impressed that America believes it’s system is better and everyone else is wrong even though Americans seem to know nothing about any system but the one that is failing them now.  It’s possible that everyone else is wrong.  Sometimes everyone else is wrong.  It’s also possible that the sun orbits the flat earth.

Anybody can find a few Canadians who don’t like our system, and few horror stories of delayed care and inept management.  No reasonable person can deny, however, that the U.S. system costs astronomically more to administer, and that almost all Canadians receive basic health care without the slightest impediment, and that the actual results in Canada are better than in the U.S.

Furthermore, I have no idea of where you would find any proof that Canadians do not have a choice of doctors or hospitals or treatments.

True– we can’t choose to opt out.   But Americans can’t really opt out either.  They can’t!— an American without insurance will still receive treatment at any nearby hospital.  Who pays for it?  Everyone, through taxes and astronomical charges for treatment for the insured.

Isn’t that the basic principle of insurance?  Any of us could suffer a serious illness or injury.  Why not agree to contribute to a plan that covers everyone?  Especially since we all know that those who “opt out” will still receive medical care one way or the other, but certainly less efficiently.

Finally– this is one gripe I do have about conservatives in general:  I think they are far more likely than liberals to persist in believing something long after it has become overwhelmingly clear that the results show they are wrong.  Example:  McCain actually stated at one time that Obama’s idea of talking to Castro was ridiculous because, with his long experience, he knows that it wouldn’t work.  Excuse me!  Exactly how many more years must the embargo continue before it “works”?  That is absurd.  Why not just admit that the embargo has failed and try something new?  Liberals, who have a mind-set that entertains alternative realities, are by nature more inclined to consider other possibilities.  McCain would still be in Viet Nam.  McCain will be in Iraq for 100 years (a joke really– the oil won’t last that long and then we will go back to indifference to human oppression).  And McCain will continue to believe that through some miracle, health care costs can be reduced by letting it “compete in a free market”, as if  dying of cancer is a commodity that could be sold to a hedge fund.

For the record, I’m not sure the Canadian system couldn’t stand a few modifications, and I am very interested in Obama’s hybrid ideas.  Not sure about them– but– as a liberal– I can consider the possibility that different points of view have something to contribute to our ultimate success on any issue.  Hey George, why not be the first reasonable conservative to admit that, as a family values kind of guy, you would like to see all of the nation’s children covered, and it clearly– the results show!– isn’t happening under your free market system.

Sincerely,

Bill Van Dyk

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Obama’s Terrorist Pals

It is a little bizarre to see Sarah Palin and John McCain both continue to charge that Obama “pals around with terrorists” long after the slightest shred of credibility has long left that scene. They do the same with the “Joe the Plumber” references, though any rational person can now quickly verify that, in fact, Joe the Plumber keeps more of his money under Obama’s plan than he does under McCain’s.

You would think–I did– that a politician would stop using a certain line of attack once it has been discredited. So it’s somewhat amazing to see McCain and Pail continue to flog those charges at every opportunity.

Did someone advise McCain that the truth here doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter at all. If you repeat the same charge over and over and over again, no matter how ridiculous, a certain segment of the voting public will begin to believe it. Heck, about 20% of adult Virginians think Obama is a Moslem. How hard can it be to persuade other white Americans that he actually pals around with terrorists.

It occurs to me that each side tends to make the accusations that they would feel were most shocking if levied against their own candidate. McCain lacks empathy for the working man. He is erratic. He is unconcerned about the working class. The Republicans have the most horror for charges that a candidate is not patriotic, doesn’t bowl, doesn’t like guns and shooting furry creatures.

And Obama pals around with terrorists.

And they repeat it and repeat it, and no one wants to be charged with inflammatory rhetoric here, but isn’t that the classic “big lie” strategy? Don’t like that insinuation? How else do you explain the utterly brazen disregard for factual information here? McCain simply doesn’t care whether informed, reasonable people believe it’s untrue– he’s going to repeat it anyway, over and over again, because he believes it will sway voters. He believes in this. He has no hesitation. He has nothing but contempt for the idea of campaigning with honor and respect, as a gentleman, in spite of his increasingly absurd claims to be driven by such sentiment. Driven by it? He pisses on it every time he speaks.

When a committee of legislators in Alaska found the Sarah Palin had, indeed, violated State Ethics rules in the way she tried to force Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to fire her former brother-in-law Mike Wooten, Palin brazenly claimed that the report exonerated her. Palin has been touting her “maverick” credentials as the governor who stopped the notorious “bridge to nowhere” when she did no such thing. McCain was pro-choice only a few years ago. He voted against the Bush tax cut when it was first presented. Forget all that. Don’t even look it up. You are too stupid to look it up. When I tell you I believe something it means exactly what I say it means and nothing more and nothing less. What is a “google”?

Of course, the standard conservative rejoinder is “the Democrats do it too”. Bullshit. Yes, both parties exaggerate and distort each other’s and their own records, but they are not the same. The Republicans, in this election, have built their entire campaign on it. The Democrats might be saying that Northwest is North, but the Republicans are insisting that up is down and black is white.

I’m biased! I’m biased! Yes, indeedy, I prefer Obama. So that qualifies me as biased. If I preferred McCain instead, I suppose I would not be “biased”. I would be “objective”, “fair”, and “reasonable”. Everything I say about McCain is a lie because I am biased because I prefer Obama. So when I say that Sarah Palin doesn’t look like a very strong candidate because she can’t even handle an open-ended interview or press conference, let alone a cabinet meeting— it’s not true. It’s biased. Now you know.

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One Breath Away: The Vice Presidents

I never ever dreamed that I would ever see a worse nomination for vice-president than Dan Quayle or Spiro Agnew — never, ever, ever.

Here’s a list of recent Vice-Presidents:

Lyndon Johnson
Hubert Humphrey
Spiro Agnew
Gerald Ford
Walter Mondale
George Bush
Dan Quayle
Al Gore
Dick Cheney

All right. There is Dick Cheney.

I’m sure some conservatives feel that liberals are just picking on Dick Cheney. They’re right: we are. Probably because he’s white. If he had been black and advocated torturing people, we’d probably cut him some slack. Yes.

Cheney understood the federal government, having worked in various capacities for several Republican Administrations, unfortunately. He understood how to get away with invading the wrong country, torture, violations of civil liberties, deregulating the financial industry. Cheney understood better than Bush himself that when the sheriff breaks the law, nobody is going to arrest the sheriff, and if you did, you would appear in court and find out that the judge was the sheriff’s mom.

Quayle was merely grossly incompetent, unprepared, petty and annoying, immature, and unsuited for office. Other than that he was okay.

And then there is Sarah Palin. Palin is right about one thing: in a statement made before she was nominated she said that any woman who accuses her critics of sexism is doing a disservice to the cause of women’s success in politics. But the Republicans were off to the races with their hysterical accusations of media bias before any bias could even have expressed itself. Thus the immortal Wolf Bitzer, perhaps the most sheep-like national reporter out there, practically sponged himself drooling over Palin’s acceptance speech: “she hit one out of the park”. And I am not a reporter: I am a guppy.

You could argue that Bitzer just meant that she was a hit with the Republican crowd at the convention.  If so, he should have said, “Palin is big hit with the Republican crowd” not “she hit one out of the park”.

Why have so many people lost their minds so quickly. Neither Palin’s critics nor her defenders knew anything about her before making brash assertions. The difference is, that the critics were correct — nobody knows enough about this woman to nominate her to be the second in line to the most powerful office in the world. And the more we are finding out about her, the more shockingly wrong she seems for the office.

The unseemly embrace of this woman by the entire panoply of right-wing commentators and the nattering nabobs of neo-conservatism, like Dobson and O’Reilly and Limbaugh, borders on the bizarre. No, it is bizarre. It’s not like they have been touting this remarkable woman for years and she finally got the recognition she deserves. It’s not like they actually knew much about her. It’s more like a desperate mob having been tossed a lifeline. An amazing lifeline. Oh, the sweetest, most remarkable, most well-qualified and pure and magical lifeline of all: a hope of winning the election and making those big tax-breaks for the rich permanent and invading Iran and sparing all those Bush Administration officials any kind of investigation — with teeth– into the carnage they have wrecked upon the constitution.

And she’s hot!

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Brief Self-Serving Acknowledgement

Told you.

I wrote in an earlier rant on Dobson that if McCain ever shows any signs of making a competitive election of it, Dobson will find some flimsy excuse to let bygones be bygones and suck up to him.

Well, Sarah Palin’s nomination as VP gave him the opening that he needed. Not that he’s alone– the rest of the agents of intolerance are all lining up behind him, lips puckered…

McCain, desperate for any kind of help in an election year in which Americans have shown clear signs of wanting a change, caved in to the Christian right and held several meetings at which he suddenly expressed his craven admiration for the likes the John Hagee and Dobson, leading Phil Burress, an organizer in Ohio for religious groups, to announce that McCain had won him over because– wait for it– he couldn’t be “pressured” into changing his position.

At least, not the other position.

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Sarah Palin

The funny thing about John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for VP is how utterly, purely ideological it is. Imagine, for a moment, if you will, Dr. James Dobson announcing that, while he liked Ms. Palin, he couldn’t endorse her because there is nothing in her record or experience to indicate that she is ready for the most powerful job on the planet.

Imagine…

But that would require James Dobson to apply consistent standards to all politicians, regardless of party.

Surprise: though you might have read otherwise, the hard Republican right doesn’t care about competence at all. Not at all. The only thing that matters is ideological purity. Ms. Palin hates abortion, loves guns, and ready to open up any part of the country to those beautiful oil wells. Best of all, as a true Bush Republican, she just rustled up a $500 million subsidy for a Canadian pipeline company. Free enterprise? Taking a risk and then working hard so you can be rewarded for your initiative and hard work? Obviously, that’s just for schmucks. Real capitalists suck at the government teat and Governor Palin, like Bush, pardon the image, is more than happy to provide it.

Ms. Palin– she does accept the “Ms.” for some incomprehensible reason– is also in favor of abstinence-only sex education and we all know how well that works. Come to think of it, Ms. Palin appears to have intimate experience with the failures of that approach, but conservatives never let failure stand in the way of ideological purity and, besides, most of the Republican’s most militaristic leaders never served in the army, so I suppose we shouldn’t be shocked when its most passionate advocates of abstinence…. (Her oldest son, Track, was born April 20th, 1989. She eloped August 29th, 1988. Do the math.) But this is also consistent with Republican sexual morality: John McCain, Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and so and so on, all “fooled around”. This list, of course, doesn’t include the Republicans who didn’t get caught.

Is the essence of Republicanism to persuade others to not do what you did?

The other thing is this: Palin has five children, including a child with Down syndrome who is less than a year old. But she clearly and willingly represents a constituency that thinks young mothers should be at home with their children. This is not a job in the secretarial pool. Would they mind if she was paid less than male vice presidents? It’s like divorce and military service. The Republicans are bravely and conspicuously hypocritical. She will fight to deny other women the right to enjoy the benefits of fifty years of feminist activism.

To her credit, she did not seek an abortion for her fifth child though she knew he had Down syndrome. Bravo. But statistics show that over 90% of parents who receive that diagnosis– regardless of political philosophy– do opt for an abortion. That means another fair chunk of the right wing constituency says do as I say, not as I do, but not Palin.  Fair enough.

 

Watching Jon Stewart the other day, something struck me… his sarcasm can be a bit relentless and sometimes seems to fill in for analyses — the best satire is really witty analysis– but think for a moment about the one thing even Jon Stewart dare not mock— that’s right: the sponsors.

Are these people crazy? Irving Kristol appears to have met the good witch of the west. Does any single rational person doubt that if Obama had picked someone of Palin’s experience and qualifications for VP, Irving Kristol would be leading the charge against?