“The Next Palin Is In Your Pigsty”: She May Not Field Dress A Moose, But She Castrates Pigs
Before the 2016 campaign for president could even begin in earnest, the greatest political romance of our times has already died. And it could make all the difference next November.
In a turn that was perhaps inevitable but nonetheless remarkable, Sarah Palin delivered a hyped-up speech (at Iowa’s high-profile Freedom Summit) that drew disappointing reviews from within her own base of support.
To the surprise of no one, Palin’s critics blew a gasket straining to capture the extent of their contempt for the warmed-over address. An apparent TelePrompTer malfunction — the nightmare of pols ten times more polished and canny than Palin — only added to their sense of gleeful horror.
But with her rambling rehash of familiar tropes and postures, Palin finally outlasted the patience and goodwill of her own core constituency — the red-meat grassroots and the movement conservative media. Without any infrastructure, without any institutional platform, Palin could always count on her brand of performance art to put going rogue back in vogue. No longer.
Small-time soap opera, you say. End of an error. Actually, this is a big deal. Because the Palin phenomenon — the popularity, the opportunism, the branding, and, yes, the politics — all arose from a single source. Palin’s importance wasn’t as a new kind of conservative, ideologically speaking. It was as a new kind of politician.
There had never been a Republican or a Democrat with Palin’s combination of personality, character, youthfulness, and very specifically gendered sort of sex. Even to the critics, she didn’t come off as a pencil-necked weenie like Bobby Jindal or a sound-body-sound-mind orthogonian like Paul Ryan.
Being a woman helped. But, to borrow a line of analysis from critical theory, Palin wasn’t gendered the same way as other political women, in any party. She was no granny in a pantsuit, like Elizabeth Dole or Hillary Clinton. She doesn’t come off as fustily professional as Carly Fiorina or Meg Whitman. Palin’s character type can never be a career politician because she’s not even a career woman, in that stereotypical manner now apotheosized by Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer.
Palin’s life experience mattered because it betokened the entry into politics of a new kind of woman — equally into sports, guns, and kids. Palin’s character type eventually appeared to exist everywhere across the vast red swath of the American interior. Conservatives have long understood in what complex way their youthful women could be masculine without losing the femininity. (Tocqueville bemusedly praised American ladies’ “manly virtue.”) The revolution was in a conservative woman mobilizing that naturally grown manner in the arena of national politics.
However you choose to slice and dice gender identities, you must admit that Palin’s success arose from her own — and that losing her appeal in spite of it, much like earning an F in English, took a lot of willpower to pull off.
The failure was on glaring display when the right-leaning Washington Examiner went in search of praise for Palin’s prospects, but notable figures in the conservative mediasphere balked. Red-state stalwarts like HotAir’s Ed Morrissey sighed that her speech “wasn’t well prepared”; Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades HQ said simply: “She is done.”
Voices like these, once locked into mutual admiration with the rogue Republican who decried the “lamestream” media, can’t by themselves consign Palin to the political scrapheap. As they freely admit, however, the grassroots has “generally moved on,” too, in the words of Ben Domenech (whose website, The Federalist, I have written for).
So the essential question for 2016 is where, or whom, they’ll move on to. The tea party ethos that Palin helped midwife may be protean and loosely organized, but it hasn’t weakened much as a political force. This year’s crop of presumptive Republican candidates offers the conservative base its strongest, broadest, and most credible choices ever. Domenech could plausibly suggest to the Examiner that contenders with an outsider appeal, such as Gov. Scott Walker Or Sen. Ted Cruz, were well positioned to attract and energize Palin’s former constituency.
But character type is deeper, and it’s prior to politics. The true heir to Palin’s constituency will be a woman. How could it be otherwise?
It’s a question not lost on the Republican elite, which is smart enough to know there is no real reason Palin’s character type can’t be brought into a more establishmentarian alignment. Enter Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst — servicewoman, heartland heroine, and the no-brainer choice to respond to the president’s State of the Union on behalf of the whole Republican Party. Even a pig-castrating farm girl, you see, can find her way into the arms of such king- and queen-makers as Mitt Romney.
To her credit, Ernst possesses far more discipline than Palin, whose taste for guns did not extend into a longing for the military life. But if the whiff of the establishment gets too strong around her, the base will balk — just ask Marco Rubio. And the jilted Palin constituency will be up for grabs again.
By: James Poulos, The Daily Beast, January 29, 2015
“You Can See Russia From 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue”: My Disorienting Day With Sarah Palin
Had John McCain been elected president in 2008, Sarah Palin still may not have ever set foot in the White House…because she wouldn’t have been able to find it.
On Friday afternoon, the failed reality-television star and one-time VP nominee materialized in Washington, clad in a leather blazer, to deliver a speech to the crowd at the Values Voter Summit—an annual social-conservative confab held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, a sprawling, gilded maze of a place that is rumored to be haunted by a dead maid.
Maybe she was the one screwing with Palin’s notes, because about halfway through her remarks, Palin said this: “Don’t retreat: You reload with truth, which I know is an endangered species at 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue. Anyway, truth.”
1400 Pennsylvania Avenue.
One assumes Palin was attempting to say truth is an endangered species at the White House, which is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue is roughly a plaza in front of the Willard Hotel.
Palin is not the first politician to make this mistake. On Aug. 1, 2008, Rep. K. Michael Conaway, Republican from Texas, wrote a letter to then-President George W. Bush, which he addressed to:
“The President
The White House
1400 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500”
I would like to imagine Conaway has spent the last six years wondering why he never received a response.
Out in the hallway of the Omni Shoreham, I talked to conservative women who felt that Palin’s mistake was not a big deal: “She speaks from the heart,” Marlea Knighton of Arizona, said. “The news never misprints?” Linda, an older lady from Virginia, said that anyone criticizing Palin for not knowing where the White House is located is just doing it “because they’re scared of what she says,” because women “who love the Lord” are intimidating to non-believers, like those populating the mainstream media.
Mark Roeske, who operates campaign buses, offered a different take: Conservative women like Palin intimidate feminist women because “they’re women who are not just a vagina,” and so they feel compelled to attack her whenever possible and make her seem stupid.
Gaffe aside, the rest of Palin’s speech was an unremarkable, nonsensical collection of Palinisms haphazardly strung together and delivered in her signature bright-yet-bitter-sounding sing-song style—like a homicidal kindergarten teacher.
“You’re the Americans that the media loves to hate,” she crooned, menacingly. And then, “All you mama grizzlies out there, rear up and charge against the lawless, imperial president and his failed liberal agenda and the lapdogs in the media.” And then, “So, I’m out in the shop with Todd, and he’s winterizing his snow plane.”
Let’s hope Todd has a better sense of direction.
By: Olivia Nuzzi, The Daily Beast, September 26, 2014
“You Don’t Bring A Lawsuit To A Gunfight”: It’s Clear Republicans Have Found Yet Another Area For Intra-Party Arguing
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has heard members of his party call for President Obama’s impeachment for reasons that are unclear, but yesterday, he made clear that he’s not on board.
When asked Wednesday by NBC News what he thought about the failed vice presidential nominee and half-term Alaska governor’s demand that Congress remove Obama from office, the Ohio Republican said, “I disagree.”
Boehner is leading a charge to sue the Obama administration over what he sees as an abuse of executive power, but the speaker has said the lawsuit is not a step toward impeachment.
Got it. The House Speaker is prepared to file a lawsuit against the president for reasons Boehner can’t explain, but presidential impeachment isn’t part of the House Republican leadership’s plan.
So, does that put the matter to rest? Not yet, it doesn’t.
Former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) told Fox News, “You don’t bring a lawsuit to a gunfight and there’s no room for lawyers on our front lines.” (One hopes that Palin was speaking metaphorically and that she doesn’t actually see political disagreements with the White House as a “gunfight.”) The comments came on the heels of a written piece in which the Alaska Republican said conservative voters should “vehemently oppose any politician” who “hesitate[s] in voting for articles of impeachment.”
What we’re left with is the latest wedge dividing the party. It’s not yet a litmus test for the right, but four months before the 2014 midterms, it’s clear Republicans have found yet another area for intra-party arguing.
The Hill ran an interesting piece yesterday noting that much of the disagreement is about tactics, not ideology.
Staunch House conservatives are quashing calls for President Obama’s impeachment.
They argue an impeachment trial would be a doomed effort, with a Democratic Senate, that could hurt Republicans in the midterm elections.
For those who see the far-right impeachment crusade as silly, this may seem reassuring, but I’d like to pause to note a relevant detail: rank-and-file GOP lawmakers aren’t balking at impeachment because it’s dumb and unnecessary; they’re balking because they doubt it’ll advance their broader political goals.
The piece in The Hill is filled with quotes from House Republicans who are sympathetic to the idea of impeachment, but who worry about the electoral consequences and/or have no hopes that the Senate would remove Obama from office.
I emphasize this because, at least so far, I haven’t seen any GOP lawmaker say something like, “I disagree with impeachment because the president hasn’t committed an impeachable offense.” For much of the Republican Party, that Obama is guilty of serious wrongdoing is apparently a foregone conclusion, for reasons only they understand.
Byron York, meanwhile, suggested yesterday that the Speaker, arguably the top Republican official in the federal government, may ultimately have to simply declare whether impeachment is on or off the table. It’s what Nancy Pelosi did in 2006, and it’s what Boehner may have to do in 2014.
That sounds about right, though it’s worth remembering that the weak Speaker isn’t necessarily the final word on the subject. As we talked about the other day, the Speaker didn’t want to create a debt-ceiling crisis, but the far-right insisted and Boehner went along. The Speaker didn’t want a government shutdown, but the far-right insisted and Boehner went along. The Speaker didn’t want to hold several dozen “repeal Obamacare” votes, but the far-right insisted and Boehner went along. The Speaker didn’t want to kill immigration reform, but the far-right insisted and Boehner went along.
Now the Speaker is cool to impeachment. Whether others in his party care about Boehner’s preferences remains to be seen.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 10, 2014
“The Rock Is Beckoning”: An Open Letter To Sarah Palin
Dear Ms. Palin:
I feel sorry for you. I truly do. It must be terribly frustrating to be so irrelevant. To have your rabble-rousing, race-baiting drivel limited to Fox’s Sean Hannity Show in your desperate, pathetic, never-ending quest for attention. You are, put simply, one of the most ignorant, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, hate-filled, polarizing individuals ever to hit the national political stage (thank you John McCain).
Your new video, in which you call for President Obama’s impeachment because of his “lawlessness,” is an unconscionable, unpatriotic piece of garbage. The level of disrespect, condescension, sarcasm and reality-butchering is astounding. To say that your fake-cutesy, sing-songy, snarky delivery is vomitous would be a colossal understatement. You’re also quite tone-deaf, comparing your suffering over his presidency to that of a “battered wife.” There really are no groups you won’t offend, are there?
Impeach Obama? For what, doing his job amid relentless Republican obstructionism and intransigence? For trying to keep government operating efficiently? For growing the economy? For creating millions of new jobs? For caring about 8-year-olds crossing the Mexican border alone? For wanting to find a practical, compassion solution to the immigration issue? For providing everyone health care? For trying to narrow the income inequality gap? For protecting women’s rights? For allowing people who love each other to marry?
That you, like that other heartless conservative Dick Cheney, even have a perch from which to still spew your venomous hate-speak, is unfortunate. No one, not even the Fox faithful, should be subjected to your incendiary bile. You’re a failed, disgraced politician who, despite becoming a humiliating punchline following the 2008 election, refuses to crawl back under your rock. Trust me: no one except Hannity, a few horny white Republican dudes and a smattering of their intellectually bankrupt women are interested in what you have to say.
Ssshhhh….hear that sound? It’s the rock beckoning….
By: Andy Ostroy, The Huffington Post Blog, July 10, 2014
“One Twisted Sister”: Wingnuts’ War On The Troops, The Ugly Lesson Of Bowe Bergdahl And Sarah Palin
After nearly five years, Bowe Bergdahl, a 28-year-old Idahoan and the last remaining American POW in Afghanistan, is finally coming home. The Obama administration made the announcement during the weekend, framing the deal that swapped Bergdahl for five Taliban-affiliated Guantánamo Bay prisoners as an example of two U.S. promises: to leave no man behind and to finally, mercifully, and after nearly 13 long years, begin to end the war in Afghanistan. For Bergdahl and his family, the move is a blessing. For those who doubt the administration’s commitment to ending the war, it is a reassurance. And for the loudest members of the far right, it is a mistake, a capitulation, a disgrace.
Their argument, in brief: By agreeing to trade prisoners of war with the Taliban, Obama made the U.S. look — what else? — weak. “You blew it again, Barack Obama, by negotiating away any leverage against the bad guys,” wrote the perpetually enraged Sarah Palin on her Facebook page. The deal, argued Palin, had “destroyed troop morale” while causing “Osama Bin Laden’s partners in evil crime” to “joyfully celebrate.” What really infuriated the half-term governor and former vice presidential candidate, though, wasn’t so much Obama’s actions as Bergdahl’s. The price the administration paid for liberating him, Palin intimated, was simply too high. He didn’t deserve it. How come? Because he expressed “horrid anti-American beliefs” and deserted his fellow soldiers prior to his capture.
As you might expect from any Palin story, there are some issues. For one, whether Bergdahl found himself under Taliban control because of bad luck, as the administration claims, or because he decided to abandon his post is up for debate. (And keep in mind that, even if he had deserted, that hardly makes it ethical for the government to abandon him to his captors.) For another, Palin’s note about the deal lacks some crucial information — like the fact that the men released from Guantánamo will have to spend at least a year in Qatar, or that the U.S.’s impending cessation of the war in Afghanistan would necessitate the release of the Gitmo detainees anyway. But for all it lacked in terms of responding to this relatively simple news story in an informed, accurate and insightful way, Palin’s angry Facebook missive was great in one respect: It was a perfect example of what happens when soldiers refuse to live up to the far right’s fantasies.
We’re all familiar with how conservatives — but especially extreme ones like Palin — deify, romanticize and claim ownership of the men and women in the armed forces. We all remember the 2004 Republican National Convention, when President Bush all but dusted off that iconic green “Mission Impossible” flight suit in order to portray himself and his party as the sole guardians and stewards of the military. We all remember the countless times during the Bush years when a Republican or a conservative would ask an antiwar Democrat or liberal why they so hate the troops. We expect to see right-wingers genuflect before the Platonic ideal of an American warrior. We expect to hear more stories about Marine Todd.
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