Posts Tagged Sarah Palin
There is a brilliant episode of the always brilliant South Park in which obese, racist 4th grader Cartman viciously mocks a motivational speaker at his school, a dwarf. After failing to enlighten Cartman through passive resistance, the speaker ultimately organizes the other students to mock Cartman’s weight, which infuriates him. At that point the dwarf confronts Cartman and tells him, “Now you know how it feeeels.”
To which Cartman responds with uncontrolled laughter before, once again, viciously mocking the dwarf.
The point that the show so precisely made is that you simply cannot force someone to recognize their own hypocrisy. This lesson came to mind as I watched  C-Span’s Washington Journal this past Sunday, which featured as its guest Mona Charen, a former speech writer for Nancy Reagan and now a conservative pundit and podcaster.
Mona came across as polite and intelligent (despite being the author of a book called Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, thereby adding to the boorish compendium of conservative literature with inflamatory titles), but at one point she nearly made me do a spit take when she complained about certain rhetoric coming out of the White House allegedly comparing the pus-sucking, goat-raping  asshats of the House Tea Party to “terrorists”. (I mention the Tea Party’s fondness for goat sodomy only to remind any Republicans in my audience what a smear really sounds like.)
Said Mona:
You frequently hear people calling into C-Span… saying ‘Well, the people on the right called Obama a Muslim or the people on the right said that Obama wasn’t born in America”, Â therefor anything that’s now said against Republican’s is only fair play… Those things were never said by leading Republicans, they were never said by leaders of the party… these comments about calling Republicans ‘terrorists’? That’s coming from the very top.
Come again?
I have no reason to paint this otherwise even-handed woman as a lunatic, but either Mona hasn’t been paying attention for the past couple of years  or she has been shooting kerosene into her brain. Let’s get this straight: the Republicans, for the four years of Obama’s first term, embraced racism at the highest level.
The birther hoax was, of course, a racist attack evident to anyone who didn’t have Tetley’s tampons dangling from their hat, and birtherism had (and still has) legions of support within the Republican apparatus.
How about congresswoman and presidential candidate Michelle Bachman? Does she rank high enough as a “leader” or is Mona only counting Republicans who live on Mt. Olympus? “I think the first thing I would do in the first debate is offer my birth certificate so we can get that off the table,” Bachmann once said when questioned about how she would aport herself in the presidential race she ultimately entered.
What about Sarah Palin (remember her? Vice-presidential candidate for some also-ran in 2008)? She was happy to flirt with the legitimacy  of birtherism when it suited her, too.  And Arizona governor Jan Brewer actually had to veto birther legislation that made it all the way to her desk!
This is the business the Republican party was making “Job 1” while America was trying to claw its way out of a depression.
Meanwhile, although there have been some justifiably colorful metaphors issued by the Democrats regarding the suicide bomber-like proclivities of the Tea Party, no one in the White House has actually called them “terrorists”, or even “terroristic”.
The tendency is to say that Dubya got it just as bad as Obama is getting it, but that is to miss the point of the nature of the slanders. Was George Bush the most hated blight on America since smallpox? Yes, and liberals expressed this frequently. But attacks on Bush’s intelligence, on his war-mongering, on his false folksiness in the face of an elite upbringing–these, apart from being the sorts of smears that every unpopular politician has faced throughout history, at least had some basis in truth. Bush did trip over his words regularly enough to set Swiss time by. He was a frat boy with a rich daddy, and he did con us into war (find any Republican who will sing Iraq’s praises today if you doubt the last claim).
Is Obama actually a Muslim? A Kenyan? An illegal alien? An Arab? And if he’s a socialist, why is Jamie Dimon still walking the streets with an unconfiscated passport?
And it wasn’t only the party elite that advanced the birther agenda. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh–virtual GOP party organs–as well as the entire sphere of conservative radio and punditry, not to mention Internet “news” outlets like the Breitbart cult, contributed to the spread of birtherism. To suggest that any of these are illegitimate or merely the corner bars for right wing rubes is horse shit. Top conservative politicians appear on even the most vulgar conservative programs often enough to have their own monogrammed towels in the bathrooms. The great wound done to our public discourse comes from the fact that now these leaders of the GOP take their cues from the propaganda mills instead of the other way around.
Mona Cheran may not realize it, but she is living in Karl Rove’s bubble as surely as any of the right wing’s more obvious fruitcakes. This leaves her ilk unable to comprehend how blowback from all their rage might be working against them in this (latest) budget crisis. Obama may have a thick skin, but even a rhinoceros has a memory. Is he really supposed to feel sympathy for John Boehner as the piranhas of the Tea Party chew up his career using the same irrationality that Boehner didn’t speak out against when it was used against Obama?
The attacks on Obama were then, and often still are, based in his otherness, his foreignness… at their core, his blackness. Yes, coded bigotry is still bigotry, but conservatives are long since  inured to any attempt to get them to recognize what all that birther bullshit was always about. Try as you might, you can’t make them know how it feeeels. All you can do is not let them get away with it.
What’s wrong with my life that I have time to watch more than 16 seconds of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference? What man with a functioning sex organ would pass his weekend wrestling with C-Span’s stuttering video stream so he could catch every word of Mike Pence’s call for “fast-acting tax relief” for the wealthy? I knew the Republican’s were trying to reinvent their brand, but I had no idea their new brand would be Rolaids.
That might be  appropriate, however, considering how in love the Republicans are with bromides. So many hosannahs offered up to God, the Declaration of Independence and our can-do spirit, and not a single fucking idea about how to paddle the nation away from an onrushing waterfall.  The conference was a Willy Wonka factory of catch phrases, buzz words and felatio for Israel, all totaling to one crystal clear agenda for the nation that will adrenalize Republicans straight through to November: We Want Our Power Back!
![]() Ron Paul: Strawman |
All the Republican’s best gimmicks were in attendance at the 3 day New Orleans event; Bobby “The Mummy” Jindal, both black Republicans and, of course, Her Nibs. Everyone had a cock up the other’s ass as they delivered one retread of the Party’s favorite talking points after another. It was almost as if they were in competition to see who could deliver the weakest teleprompter joke before “Who Dat”-ing their way into the short term memories of the residents of that city which, under the vigilant gazeof our last president, became ground zero for a Roland Emmerich movie.
Many were the hollow pledges to repeal healthcare reform, and bountiful were the efforts to turn that “Party of No” albatross into a Republican badge of honor for sticking to their guns. Newt Gingrich promised a campaign of “2+2=4” signage,  hoping that this subversive anti-communist  tactic from Poland will resonate with Americans who are terrified at the prospect that Obama will attempt to try KSM in their living rooms.
But God and the Teabaggers were the real guests of honor. The Republicans could scarcely decide which deserved more ram’s blood. The Deity was all but promised a ziggurat-sized throne of ivory and gold when the Republicans retake the nation, and why not? The Right has become completely unmoored since they realized there will be no money for them to play with the next time they have the White House, and considering the Faustian bargain they have made with lunatics they would usually not toss a rhetorical farthing to, we can expect that conservatives will be doubling down on religion and nationalism to justify their existence in the years to come.
Rather than try to bridge the gulf between themselves and the Democrats, the Republicans declared their strategy loud and proud: the partisanship will grow and grow and fucking swallow the sun by November!! The Republican agenda is now exactly the inverse of Ronald Reagan’s, and that is why they worship at his altar. He is the last relic of an age before the great Thousand Year Winter  swallowed their cause and scattered their tribe. The Republicans have no Cold War to win, no Greatest Generation to build an American Dream for, not a cent for another adventure overseas. Their rhetoric is an appeal to patriotism for patriotism’s sake, but to what end? Liz Cheney’s new McCarthyism? Newt Gingrich’s gay baiting? Are these the pillars of a Renaissance?
RNC Chairman Michael Steele came out swinging hard in his speech, but he swung at a lot of air. How does he reconcile his “Coming to America” melting pot grandeur with the conservatives’ xenophobic stance against immigration? When he tried boosting the crowd’s capitalist spirits by saying “America’s enemies have never been the wealthy or the strong”, was he admitting that her enemies are the poor and weak? Finally, some honesty from the GOP!
And then, like some Heavy Metal centurion, Ron Paul rocked the house! You’ve got to hand it to this guy: he draws more genuine love and enthusiasm from young Republicans than Sarah Palin could if she whored Bristol out for nickel blowjobs. Paul offered not a peck on the cheek for the theocrats and plutocrats who preceded him. He alone called bullshit on rumors of Obama’s socialism, denounced American empire and called  for an end to the war, and was applauded for every word. And just to squeeze the Party’s teabags a little, he went and won the conference strawpoll for #1 conservative!
Well, not exactly. Mitt Romney edged Paul out by a single vote. Romney’s strategy was a stroke of genius: he didn’t show up. But he did  allegedly spread a lot of influence around in the form of tchotchkes and the like. Should give you an idea about how he’ll run for president.
Ron doesn’t have dough. He shows up, and crowds cheer. Kids cheer. The Republicans will be the last people to understand what this means.