The Unbelievable Palin

from Andrew Sullivan

13 Jan 2010 11:30 am

How Palin Responds To Factual Criticism
She doesn't. She can't actually disprove or rebut any of the mounds of evidence that she is and was the most ignorant and unqualified person ever put on a national ticket. All she does is deny, deny, deny:

“I had been warned not to watch it,” said Ms. Palin of the “60 Minutes” segment in question. That segment dealt with a new book on the campaign that alleges, among other things, that Palin did not know why North and South Korea are two different countries.

“That is a lie,” said Palin.

Host Bill O’Reilly of “The O’Reilly Factor” said that Palin couldn’t have bested Vice President Biden in a debate if she were really that dumb, and offered her his show as a base for future anti-“60 Minutes” offensives. “You now have a forum here at Fox News where you can immediately neutralize ’60 Minutes’,” Mr. O’Reilly said.

O'Reilly effectively backs Palin's claim on the basis that her crammed, force-fed burbling of talking points in the Biden debate somehow refutes the idea that she hasn't the slightest clue what goes on in the world or the slightest knowledge of history outside of sports. And he is essentially pledging that News Corporation will advance her lies and spin, as it did by publishing her book, and protect her from any real scrutiny that a political candidate deserves.

Since Fox is a propaganda operation and not a journalistic enterprise (Shep Smith excluded), they don't push back. What FNC is giving her is a platform to lie unchecked by any journalistic ethics.

I do not believe that this means she is out of politics. Au contraire. FNC and the RNC are effectively the same operation (and Harper Collins, which published her fiction as non-fiction with no fact-checking or editing is also part of NewsCorp). Her new job is running for office via the chief propaganda network for the red states. The strategy is obviously to focus entirely on the base, demonizing the president and anything he does, exploit economic malaise, and then get back to power on a wave of frightened white ressentiment with Palin as the hood ornament one more time.

I fear her.


The indifference to reality, the cult-like connection with the gun-clingers, the charisma, the cunning, the fraud: this is like a second Bush utterly unleashed from any connection to the GOP's more civil and expansive past, holding a view of presidential power that establishes a national security protectorate for the indefinite future, and total unseriousness with respect to the debt and defusing Islamist terror - rather than provoking it even further.

At least this time, we will have more than eight weeks to vet her. But when a politician believes she does not need to respond to the press, when in fact she now uses the fiction that she too is the press and should be asking questions of others, when the platform she has been given provides her with total immunity from direct criticism along with a megaphone for lies, we are in trouble as a democracy.

She is a symptom of a broken political and journalistic system. She is not a tabloid story. She is a threat.

Carol Felsenthal - Clinton in Exile (2)

According to this book, Bill Clinton is a Luddite. He does not use a computer. He doesn't do email. He has assistants who print out his emails and anything else he would otherwise read off of a computer screen.

Carol Felsenthal - Clinton in Exile

I am reading this splendid book about Bill Clinton's years after his presidency. There is a chapter which talks about the opening of his presidential library in Little Rock which Freddy and I visited a week ago today. The date was November 18, 2004, the opening coming in driving rain. Everything we see around the library today came as a result of locating the library where it is. The library has been a boon to that side of Little Rock. More later.

The Bankruptcy of the Republican Party

Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, typifies the complete and total intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party.
From Andreew Sullivan
08 Jan 2010 04:29 pm

Peggy's Predicament
A reader nails it:

Peggy Noonan's biggest problem is that she's not a Republican anymore but she doesn't want to admit it. Like you, Bruce Bartlett, Chris Buckley and myself, she's a conservative - but unlike "us" she is unwilling to completely disengage from the party itself and recognize that it no longer represents true conservative values. But she's too smart to simply regurgitate GOP talking points, so she ends up talking herself into circles.

I think that's about right. But she does at least acknowledge the GOP's bankruptcy and extremism. Which is something,

How Republicans Justify Torture

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good . . . Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race, and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. — Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.

Cornel West - Brother West (3)

I finish this book less enamored with Cornel West than I was at the beginning. Yes, he's an interesting academic, all over the place, born in Tulsa, raised in Sacramento, having schooled and worked at places like Harvard, Yale, & Princeton. And yes, he may be a great scholar, but I am not convinced. I'd like to hear him speak. Otherwise, I'm left with this memoir, written in a popular voice, written like he's some kind of celebrity. I have some of his books, but I am not sure if I will pursue them. It just seems like he's full of himself, dropping dozens of names in this book, seemingly trying to impress the reader. I don't know; I just don't know quite what to think of Cornel West.

Cornel West - Brother West (2)

I continue reading this memoir. So far I say that Cornel West, author, scholar, public intellectual, is all over the place. He does a lot of name dropping in this book---authors, books, people. He seems to know everybody and to have read everything One amazing thing to me is how important music is to him. It's as if music is just as important in fashioning his thinking as philosophy and theology. He says he keeps David Hume by his bedside. Really? His mind seems to range across so many things. Does he had intellectual ADD?