Whalin' on Palin, or, Sarah, Vain and Small

Come on, people! Hammer it home! She cannot be allowed. She just…can't.

This woman is stupider than a sackful of moose dung and more dangerous than a hairdryer dropped in the bath. If you think I'm being too hard on her, go read the transcript of her breathtakingly godawful showing in front of Katie Couric, who is herself no Stephen Hawking but who looked so by comparison. The fourth selectman of a backwoods rural township has better interviewee skills than Palin. I defy you to sympathize with her after that. AND SHE WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT?!?!?! She's not fit to run a gas station, a knitting club, a lemonade stand at a county fair.

The evidence can't be stated strongly enough, or often enough:

She gave birth to a Down's syndrome baby, which we do not mock. Then...No, wait, it's really her teenage daughter's baby!

No, it's actually HER baby after all, though she doesn't stay home with him and the only time you ever see him is when she has the unwed teenage daughter dangle him for photo ops.

BUT the unwed teenage daughter who got no sex education in the Alaska public school system her mother oversees IS pregnant. And McCain's camp wants to use the shotgun wedding of said sexually inabstinent daughter to horny redneck teen Levi Johnston for political capital! Happily Ever After coming right up!

She fired a police commissioner because he wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law. Because the b-i-l was mean to her sister! There's an investigation ongoing into this, which is supposed to publish its findings the week before Election Day. Want to bet this somehow will get mysteriously "delayed"? No, I didn't think so.

She fired (then had to rehire) the librarian in the tiny town of Wasilla for not banning books she considered evil and wrong (man, would I love to see that booklist! Are you kidding, would I love to be ON that booklist!).

Yet she has no difficulty believing that humans and dinosaurs coexisted: "I've seen pictures of human footprints walking next to dinosaur footprints!" Yeah, Palin, I've seen them too. They were the footprints…OF A GIGANTIC HOUND!

No, just kidding. If there even were actual footprints and not just fundie Photoshopping, they were the footprints of the paleontologists excavating the fossils. Duh! I guess she didn't notice the Reebok sneaker treads in the imprints…or maybe she thought God created Reeboks 6,000 years ago too, for Adam and Eve to put on their poor sinful feets when trekking out of the Garden of Eden.

McCain, long time ago, once actually cited Palin as an example of "earmarks" (pork) run amuck. I guess he forgot he did that, being old, half-drunk, a compulsive gambler and probably dying of skin cancer (he won't release his medical records. Hmm, wonder why). She's his biggest gamble yet!

She claims she's a big reformer against pork-barrel legislation, but she was quite happy to stick her snout in the trough for the Bridge to Nowhere. Then she was suddenly all against pork after Congress, in the face of universal mockery, deep-sixed the bridge.

But Caribou Barbie kept 27 million dollars of the bridge dough and applied it where she thought porkery would go down best: a toy village of 7,000 people, whence cometh the claim she falls back on for "more experience than Senator Obama", who probably had in his Congressional district the equivalent of most of the population of Alaska. She's a baconator!

She boasts that she has lotsa foreign policy experience because Alaska is next to Russia. (She got the line from Cindy McCain, that tower of foreign policy experience. Oh, sorry, I meant Botox experience. Queen Cindy of Botoxia! Now THERE's a piece of foreign policy cred!) Oh, and Alaska's next to Canada, too! That's a foreign country, Canada is, did you know that? Yes! It is! And Palin has actually talked to Canadians!

She stuck to that Russia line like fish glue and then repeated it endlessly, because she had zip else to fall back on and never realized how hard people were laughing, until finally she used it to Katie Couric, who did her damnedest to keep from rolling on the floor screaming with helpless mirth. Couric's inner cheeks are probably still bleeding where she bit them to stop herself laughing in Palin's face. If you look closely when the camera's on her, you can see her mouth twitching and the utter disbelief in her eyes. Yay Katie!

When asked, Palin couldn't name a single Supreme Court decision except, of course, the one she wants overturned: Roe v. Wade. Not Brown v. Board of Education, not Miranda v. Arizona, not Dred Scott, not Bakke, not any other historic and reverberant decision. Sarah, you ignorant slut! [/Dan Aykroyd]

Speaking of the Supreme Court (or the High Nine, as rednecks inexplicably liked to call it in my youth, on phone-in radio programs out there in Flyoverland): I'd be very interested to hear Palin's thoughts, if you can call her mental processes that, on, say, Griswold v. Connecticut. Of course, someone would first have to carefully explain to her that this was a landmark 1965 Supreme Court ruling that established the right of married couples to use contraception. Many fundies and conservatives like Palin are dead set against not just the right to abortion but the right to contraception of any sort. For anyone.

They even want to prevent husbands and wives employing the pill or condoms or any other method to space their families, a decision that is nobody's business but that of the people involved. If Palin, as is very likely (considering that her daughter's been knocked up by a redneck moron at 17), shares that viewpoint too, Americans must know about it. NOW.

She and her loathsome kind must be kept out of people's bedrooms, single, married, gay or straight. Or else you or your daughter or sister or niece or granddaughter will end up carrying their rapist's babies to term because that's how Sarah Palin wants it.

(And to tell the truth, I have to give her credit for being consistent. If you happen to believe a fetus is a baby, then all fetuses are babies however horrifically conceived, and I can see where she'd take the all-or-nothing viewpoint. It's utterly insane and inhumane, and puts a collection of cells ahead of a living, breathing, thinking woman, but I do understand the warped logic.)

Oh, goodness, there's just so much else so transcendently wonderful that we don't know about her, isn't there! And we never will now, until it's too late, since the Repugs have her muzzled and chained for fear their lipsticked little pit bull will get loose on national TV and rabidly bite them in the butts.

It's an absolute outrage that more members of the media aren't outraged about this. Where's the righteous wrath? Where are the scathing indictments? All on the blogosphere, folks. That's where the big stories break these days.

I tell you, I'm ashamed of my journalistic profession…a bunch of toothless old tigers, too afraid to offend McCain by speaking truth about his lies because, oooh, they'll be barred from the campaign plane like Maureen Dowd.

Well, so freakin' what? McBrainless doesn't answer any real questions anyway! GET him on that! Hold his feet to the fire until he squirms, the way real reporters do! He's been allowed to weasel his way out of far too much and he's told far too many lies. He's a blowhard, a liar, a FUCKING liar and a hypocrite. No more free ride! Come on, journos! Don't hold back when it really matters! What would John Peter Zenger do?

There. Done now. For today.

The Blunder of It All

I haven't posted for a while because, frankly, I keep waiting, fascinated, amused and horrified by turns, for the next political shoe to drop. And there's been a whole shoestore full...

First, the defeat of the bailout bill. Lucky that innocent bystanders weren't trampled to death in the rush of Republican rats deserting the sinking ship that has been their party boat, letting their captain president go down at the helm as he so richly deserves to.

I don't know about you guys, but the last time I heard people pressuring other people to "buy it now, it'll be too late unless you do it right this minute", it was on a used-car lot and the salesman was putting the screws on to unload a lemon.

I have no idea whatever about what's going to happen, but I am relieved that the House came to its senses and that the financial industry will have to clean up its own mess. It was stupidity in Washington and evil on Wall Street that caused this, and now we see the results of 8 years of moron "leadership" and unregulated greed.

Pity we all have to suffer for it. But there's not going to be a recession/depression. That's just scare talk to rattle everybody and get the fat cats rewarded for their unconscionable decisions. I want to see heads roll! I want to see the CEOs of the guilty institutions jumping out of windows! I want to see some accountability at last in a regime that is all about itself and not the least tiniest bit about us.

Which leads me to McCain and his showboating "suspension" of his campaign. What utter rubbish. He didn't suspend anything, not for a heartbeat. He ostentatiously announced he was headed back to DC to "help out his country", then sat on his hands. Oh, he made a bunch of phone calls. And he never ever went NEAR Capitol Hill. So much for his "help". In his own words: "Some people have criticized my decision to put my country first, but I will never, ever be a president who sits on the sidelines when this country faces a crisis.'' No, just having dinner with Lieberman and other cronies. And : "I know that many of you have noticed, but it's not my style to simply 'phone it in.' "

Yeah, right.

As for the Twinkie of the North, Palin brightly and nastily chirps that she has been listening to Senator Biden since she was in the second grade. She can't even get insults right: she's 44. Assuming that she was a second-grader (and probably even then a second-rater, though there's no word that she attended second grade six times, the way she did college) when she was 8, may I, by no means the best mathematician amongst us, remind her that Joe Biden was NOT IN the Senate 36 years ago. So not only can't she do simple math, she can't tell the truth. But we knew that.

And if she's going to play the age/DC-insider experience card, I suggest she take a look at that silver-haired hack who's heading up her ticket. Than whom there is NO one agier or more DC-experienced. Oopsie!

I cannot WAIT for her debate Thursday against Senator Biden. Please, Joe, do NOT blow this most solid-golden of opportunities. I want to see steam coming out of her beehive hairdo. I want to see her eyes pop and her head explode with the effort of having to produce coherent answers to simple questions. I want her synapses to fry themselves like bacon as they attempt to bridge the vast echoing void that is her brain. I want vengeance for every wolf and moose she's slaughtered.

And then I want her gone. Put her back in the deep freeze of her home state. If they aren't smart enough to dump her fundamentalist fundament, then they deserve her. But the rest of us don't.

Oh, and I read in the London Times (I guess no paper here is brave enough to print it) that McCain and Palin want to make a public occasion of the shotgun wedding of sex-uneducated Bristol Palin and her redneck babydaddy. Because it's so, you know, happy and uplifting for the nation to get to watch as two unprepared kids are forced into wedlock which will probably last all of six months. Hey, what happened to keeping your kids out of the limelight, Sarah? Oh, right, only when you can cold-bloodedly use them to shore up your political ass. What a piece of garbage.

Let's do what needs to be done with garbage, shall we? Just take out the trash. It's already stinking.

Just West-Winging It

Emphasis mine...



New York Times, September 21, 2008

Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet

By MAUREEN DOWD


Now that he’s finally fired up on the soup-line economy, Barack Obama knows he can’t fade out again. He was eager to talk privately to a Democratic ex-president who could offer more fatherly wisdom — not to mention a surreptitious smoke — and less fraternal rivalry. I called the “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin (yes, truly) to get a read-out of the meeting. This is what he wrote:

BARACK OBAMA knocks on the front door of a 300-year-old New Hampshire farmhouse while his Secret Service detail waits in the driveway. The door opens and OBAMA is standing face to face with former President JED BARTLET.

BARTLET Senator.

OBAMA Mr. President.

BARTLET You seem startled.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET Come on in.

BARTLET leads OBAMA into his study.

BARTLET That was a hell of a convention.

OBAMA Thank you, I was proud of it.

BARTLET I meant the Republicans. The Us versus Them-a-thon. As a Democrat I was surprised to learn that I don’t like small towns, God, people with jobs or America. I’ve been a little out of touch but is there a mandate that the vice president be skilled at field dressing a moose —

OBAMA Look —

BARTLET — and selling Air Force Two on eBay?

OBAMA Joke all you want, Mr. President, but it worked.

BARTLET Imagine my surprise. What can I do for you, kid?

OBAMA I’m interested in your advice.

BARTLET I can’t give it to you.

OBAMA Why not?

BARTLET I’m supporting McCain.

OBAMA Why?

BARTLET He’s promised to eradicate evil and that was always on my “to do” list.

OBAMA O.K. —

BARTLET And he’s surrounded himself, I think, with the best possible team to get us out of an economic crisis. Why, Sarah Palin just said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.” Can you spot the error in that statement?

OBAMA Yes, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren’t funded by taxpayers.

BARTLET Well, at least they are now. Kind of reminds you of the time Bush said that Social Security wasn’t a government program. He was only off by a little — Social Security is the largest government program.

OBAMA I appreciate your sense of humor, sir, but I really could use your advice.

BARTLET Well, it seems to me your problem is a lot like the problem I had twice.

OBAMA Which was?

BARTLET A huge number of Americans thought I thought I was superior to them.

OBAMA And?

BARTLET I was.

OBAMA I mean, how did you overcome that?

BARTLET I won’t lie to you, being fictional was a big advantage.

OBAMA What do you mean?

BARTLET I’m a fictional president. You’re dreaming right now, Senator.

OBAMA I’m asleep?

BARTLET Yes, and you’re losing a ton of white women.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET I mean tons.

OBAMA I understand.

BARTLET I didn’t even think there were that many white women.

OBAMA I see the numbers, sir. What do they want from me?

BARTLET I’ve been married to a white woman for 40 years and I still don’t know what she wants from me.

OBAMA How did you do it?

BARTLET Well, I say I’m sorry a lot.

OBAMA I don’t mean your marriage, sir. I mean how did you get America on your side?

BARTLET There again, I didn’t have to be president of America, I just had to be president of the people who watched “The West Wing.”

OBAMA That would make it easier.

BARTLET You’d do very well on NBC. Thursday nights in the old “ER” time slot with “30 Rock” as your lead-in, you’d get seven, seven-five in the demo with a 20, 22 share — you’d be selling $450,000 minutes.

OBAMA What the hell does that mean?

BARTLET TV talk. I thought you’d be interested.

OBAMA I’m not. They pivoted off the argument that I was inexperienced to the criticism that I’m — wait for it — the Messiah, who, by the way, was a community organizer. When I speak I try to lead with inspiration and aptitude. How is that a liability?

BARTLET Because the idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional. If you excelled academically and are able to casually use 690 SAT words then you might as well have the press shoot video of you giving the finger to the Statue of Liberty while the Dixie Chicks sing the University of the Taliban fight song. The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

OBAMA You’re saying race doesn’t have anything to do with it?

BARTLET I wouldn’t go that far. Brains made me look arrogant but they make you look uppity. Plus, if you had a black daughter —

OBAMA I have two.

BARTLET — who was 17 and pregnant and unmarried and the father was a teenager hoping to launch a rap career with “Thug Life” inked across his chest, you’d come in fifth behind Bob Barr, Ralph Nader and a ficus.

OBAMA You’re not cheering me up.

BARTLET Is that what you came here for?

OBAMA No, but it wouldn’t kill you.

BARTLET Have you tried doing a two-hour special or a really good Christmas show?

OBAMA Sir —

BARTLET Hang on. Home run. Right here. Is there any chance you could get Michelle pregnant before the fall sweeps?

OBAMA The problem is we can’t appear angry. Bush called us the angry left. Did you see anyone in Denver who was angry?

BARTLET Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I’m a little angry.

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

OBAMA Good to get that off your chest?

BARTLET Am I keeping you from something?

OBAMA Well, it’s not as if I didn’t know all of that and it took you like 20 minutes to say.

BARTLET I know, I have a problem, but admitting it is the first step.

OBAMA What’s the second step?

BARTLET I don’t care.

OBAMA So what about hope? Chuck it for outrage and put-downs?

BARTLET No. You’re elite, you can do both. Four weeks ago you had the best week of your campaign, followed — granted, inexplicably — by the worst week of your campaign. And you’re still in a statistical dead heat. You’re a 47-year-old black man with a foreign-sounding name who went to Harvard and thinks devotion to your country and lapel pins aren’t the same thing and you’re in a statistical tie with a war hero and a Cinemax heroine. To these aged eyes, Senator, that’s what progress looks like. You guys got four debates. Get out of my house and go back to work.

OBAMA Wait, what is it you always used to say? When you hit a bump on the show and your people were down and frustrated? You’d give them a pep talk and then you’d always end it with something. What was it ...?

BARTLET “Break’s over.”




Brilliant. Repost EVERYWHERE!

Dump Biden

And replace him with, of course, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Let him bow out gracefully for the greater good of the party. Let him fall on his sword and take one for the team. And then let the joyful voices of 18 million Hillaryites be heard in the land.

It could happen. It WOULD work. Who cares what the media would say about it? Who cares, even, what McNoBrain and Caribou Barbie would say about it?

Nothing wrong with Biden. I like him a lot. He's got experience and all sorts of other worthy qualities. He's just not going to be able to overcome the LiarLiarPantsOnFire or the Lipstick'd Pig. Or Sarah Palin, either. Because we want/need someone who's going to tear both of them several new ones and look inevitable doing it.

If any woman votes for Sarah Palin simply because she's got two X chromomes (though I'm beginning to wonder about that...), she deserves to be drummed out of the regiment.

Biden Out, Hillary In. It would be freakin' brilliant, and it would sew things up for the Democrats in November. Obama would look like a genius, Biden would look like a hero (and would in fact be one), Hillary would look like The Return of the Queen, and Palin would be failin' (send her back to the tundra!) in her little attempt to shatter the glass ceiling that a million other women all her betters broke for her.

Come on, Obama! Just fuckin' DO it.

Caribou Barbie

It was with great anticipation that I awaited the much-touted appearance of Gov. Sarah Palin on the news the other night, being interviewed by Charlie Gibson.

Now, Gibson, though I like him, is by no means my idea of a hard-hitting journalist, and I fretted that he would let her off with creampuff pitches right down the middle of the plate, stuff that a myopic baby could connect with. Nothing but junk.

I needn't have worried. The questions weren't the roughest, but he did ask them, and he was insistent about them, and the answers she gave...oh deary deary me.

She looked like a moose trapped in headlights when he asked her what her opinion was of the Bush doctrine. When he mentioned foreign policy, she blurted back her stock answer that you could see Russia, yes you could, from an island, yes, an island in Alaska!

She thinks that Georgia should be allowed into NATO and that we should then go to war if Russia gets all shirty about it and reinvades.

She appears to have a profound disconnect (read: SHE'S PROGRAMMED LIKE A BORG!) between the things she's asked and the answers she gives. You can see the panic on her worried little face, and the mental finger running down the checklist on the back of her eyelids for the rote response, and the relief when she finds it. And the answer NEVER EVER is to the question she was asked; it's just a rephrasing of a stock response.

She's a parrot. A Borg parrot.

But let's hear Maureen Dowd tell it (even though I haven't been liking her very much of late...), from today's NYTimes:


The really scary part of the Palin interview was how much she seemed like W. in 2000, and not just the way she pronounced nu-cue-lar. She had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing, the same generalities and platitudes, the same restrained resentment at being pressed to be specific, as though specific is the province of silly eggheads, not people who clear brush at the ranch or shoot moose on the tundra.

Just as W. once could not name the General-General running Pakistan, so Palin took a position on Pakistan that McCain had derided as naïve when Obama took it.

“We must not, Charlie, blink, Charlie, because, Charlie, as I’ve said, Charlie, before, John McCain has said, Charlie, that — and remember here, Charlie, we’re talking about John McCain, Charlie, who, Charlie, is John McCain and I won’t be blinking, Charlie.”

She tried to finesse her previous church comments about Iraq, asking worshipers to pray “that there is a plan, and that plan is God’s plan.” Earnestly repeating after her tutors, she said she had meant to echo Abraham Lincoln, that in war we must pray that we are on God’s side rather than that he is on ours. But her original comments sounded more W. than Abe — taking your policy and ideology and giving it the hallowed mantle of a mission from God.

Sarah has single-handedly ushered out the “Sex and the City” era, and made the sexy new model for America a retro one — the glamorous Pioneer Woman, packing a gun, a baby and a Bible.

Her explosion onto the scene made Obama seem even more like a windy, wispy egghead. Like W., Sarah has the power of positive unthinking. But now we may want to think about where ignorance and pride and no self-doubt has gotten us. Being quick on the trigger might be good in moose hunting, but in dealing with Putin, a little knowledge might come in handy.



Dear God (and I mean that in the pan-deist sense, any god who'll hear me), spare us from this utter nincompoop. (Palin, not Dowd. Well, sometimes Dowd too.)



Oh, and I loved Tina Fey's spot-on impersonation on Saturday Night Live last night. Indeed, the hair and makeup job was so perfect I thought for a second or two that it WAS Palin.

Then she started to speak, and the words were coherent, so I knew it wasn't.

9/11/01 - 9/11/08

Seven years on...do not forget.

The Old Man and The Flea

Ah yes, the experienced John McCain. Sooooo much more experienced than Obama/Biden. How, pray, is he more experienced? Well, let us just count the goddamn ways…

He’s more experienced in voting against raising the minimum wage. More experienced in denying decent benefits for our heroic military veterans whom he has more experience in sending over there to uselessly die and be needlessly maimed in the first place. More experienced in voting against the G.I. Bill (the one he lyingly claims he really supported). More experienced in voting against any kind of bill that would benefit the reeling middle classes. More experienced in voting for any kind of bill that sends more money to his dark masters—big oil, big business and big government.

He's also more experienced in supporting the Iraq war. Gotta take out those weapons of mass... oops, sorry, never mind. He's more experienced in handing multinational corporations big fat tax breaks while the middle class struggles desperately to keep a roof over its head and food on the table and a job in its future. He’s more experienced in hiring greedy corporate lobbyists to run his campaign. He's more experienced in having advisors who call us a "nation of whiners" and more experienced in savagely dissing anyone who doesn’t agree with the reactionary Repug policies.

He’s more experienced in demeaning women. He dumped his first wife, Carol, after a horrific car crash in which she was badly disfigured, crippled and put on weight as a result; he called his rodeo-beauty-queen second wife, Cindy, a cunt in public, and only the other day he suggested that she should compete in a topless beauty contest.

He’s more experienced in being a pig. Ross Perot, who paid Carol McCain’s huge medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both she and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics. “McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,” Perot says. “After he came home [from North Vietnam] Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.”

He’s more experienced in blocking programs that would benefit women and children. He’s more experienced in getting the government to interfere in women’s reproductive freedoms: he’s more of a proponent of abstinence than even Sarah Palin is.

He’s more experienced in being a lying, dissembling, breathtakingly dishonest piece of cowshite. He’s more experienced in using his POW days in North Vietnam as a free pass to just about everything. “Noun, verb, POW” doesn’t cut it, not when there are REAL war heroes out there to put the lie to his opportunism. And not when he steals an Alexander Solzhenitsyn fictional anecdote (the cross his captor allegedly drew in the dirt) to further his own ends and grab some more undeserved glory.

But mostly McLame, McBane, McVain, McSame, McBlame, McInane, McShame, McFeign, McPain, McNoBrain, McInsane is more experienced than anyone on the planet in planting big wet kisses on George W. Bush’s little ratty white frat-boy ass.

He has supported Shrub’s policies over 95% of the time, and is now trying to run a campaign on how he’s the candidate of CHANGE, and DISTANCING himself from Shrub and the policies he himself helped put in place.

WHATTHEFUCK??? Change??? Is he kidding? Does he even HEAR himself? Or is he finally too senile to remember what he did last week, last year, last campaign, the last 30 years? He’s about as much the candidate of change as Metternich was. He’s miles to the right of Emperor Palpatine (who looks pretty good , and a lot healthier, by comparison).

He’s trying to distance himself from the incontrovertible fact that HIS PARTY, the one that’s been in control for the past EIGHT YEARS, is somehow not responsible for the fact that we have no jobs, no homes, no medical insurance, no bank security, no decent schools, no respect abroad, no strong currency, no anything really except a bloated, gloating Republican establishment who got theirs at our expense and now wants to keep getting it because somehow it DESERVES to be kept in office. Why would anyone with half a functioning brain cell vote for another eight MINUTES of this?

And if you do vote for him, then you’re a fucking idiot who doesn’t deserve to be trusted with the right to do so. Because you obviously either don’t see or don’t care for the truth.

What planet of lunatics is this guy from? Does he really think we DON’T REMEMBER? Does he truly believe the past eight years wasn’t the worst time for Americans in our entire history (Americans who aren’t of the ruling class, that is)? Can he possibly be that stupid? Or is he just that breathtakingly cynical? To think we haven’t noticed, or don’t care, and will just vote for the big scarlet R once we get into the booth because he and his droids have commanded us to?

He’s The Old Man. Too old, too same, too wrong, too many dead brain cells, too much baggage.

And then we come to The Flea. The annoying, biting, bloodsucking, bug-eyed little Alaskan insect.

She has NO experience, in ever so many things. No experience in national office. No experience in foreign policy (despite the brainless Bimbo McCain’s assertion that oh yes she does too, ‘cause Alaska is right up there next to Russia). No experience in running any civic entity bigger than 7,000 people until she slunk into the governorship of Alaska. No experience in telling the truth: she lied about the Bridge to Nowhere (she was for it until she thought the feds might make her state actually pay for it, and she hung on to 27 million bucks anyway) and a bunch of other stuff too.

The experience she DOES have? Experience in lying about her own pregnancy and lying about her ham-handed attempt to get her brother-in-law fired from the state police, because she could, or thought she could.

Experience in trying to censor library books bought with public funds for public libraries and firing the librarian. Gosh, refresh my memory, somebody: didn’t HITLER start off by censoring books? Yes, I do believe he did.

Experience in using oil windfall money to NOT fix the WORST STATE SCHOOL SYSTEM IN THE COUNTRY, but instead to send each and every Alaskan a check for $1200. Hey, even bribes are downsized these days…though it’s still more than 30 pieces of silver.

Experience in sticking her hand out to panhandle pork barrel “earmarks”, to the tune of millions, while now virtuously claiming she’s always been against earmarks.

Experience in using state funds for her private purposes, like redecorating her office several times. Experience in leaving a debt-free town (when she took over Wasilla) under a crippling mountain of millions of dollars in debt—yeah, GREAT budgetary skills!

Experience in using her vulnerable, pregnant teenage daughter as a political pawn and forcing marriage on 2 teenagers, a tactic straight out of the 1950’s. Experience in trying to force such non-choices on all other women as well, including victims who become pregnant by rape and incest. Because, as we can all see by her conduct, the children come first…

Experience using her Down’s syndrome infant, incredibly fragile and needy of a mother’s attention, as yet another exploited pawn in her game, foisting him off on the care of his elder siblings while she prances about in public—family values, but only when it suits her and they can serve her purpose.

Experience in backwards thinking: clinging to the loony doctrine of “creationism”, dissing global warming (this as a quarter of her state melts into seawater right under her feet), delisting polar bears from protected status, shooting wolves from helicopters, lusting to drill for oil in protected reserves (even though any such oil wouldn’t BEGIN to help the crisis for another ten years).

Experience opposing any kind of development of alternative energy, even though Alaska would be a great candidate for geothermal and water power, a model for other states to follow. No, just keep sucking at that oil tit, Sarah…

Experience in Bible literalism: Among other things, she encouraged a group of young Alaskan church leaders to pray that “God’s will” be done in bringing about the construction of a big pipeline in the state, and suggested her work as governor would be hampered “if the people of Alaska’s heart isn’t right with God.” She also told the group that her eldest child, Track, would soon be deployed by the Army to Iraq, and that they should pray “that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God, that’s what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God’s plan.”

So that dovetails into NO experience with the American concept of separation of church and state. ANY church. Guess she knows better than Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders what this country really needs! And just what God is she hearing from/praying to, anyway? Moloch? Tash? Doesn’t sound much like Jesus to me…unless he was really supportive of oil pipelines. Quick, somebody go look it up in the New Testament! I’m sure it’s in there somewhere…

She has TONS of college experience, though: five of them in six years, wow, what an intellectual giant, finally managing to eke out a degree as an alleged journalism major without having once worked on a college paper or TV station. But somehow she managed to buy herself a T-shirt reading “I may be broke, but I’m not flat busted.” Oh, the oodles of class! I bet she still has it, too. That’ll look so good in the Rose Garden… And not ONE of her alma maters was contacted by the McCain vetting committee.

She’s a tundra hillbilly with all the compassion of a Borgia and all the sincerity of a snake. No, I take that back: snakes are very sincere. All the sincerity of a tenth-league beauty queen, then. A living, breathing, not-thinking caricature, pure bogus from the big fake smile outward and pure trash from the big fake smile inward. And the deadest eyes I’ve seen since Shrub.

Oh, and let’s not forget the redneck, big-oil-compromised husband who calls himself Alaska’s “First Dude.” Gosh, how sophisticated is that! THAT’ll impress the Queen of England no end, you betcha, when Her Britannic Majesty comes over on a state visit to the Palin White House after McCain drops dead in his first term. First Dude probably eats his peas with his knife and his moose steak with his fingers and drinks his tea out of a saucer…though perhaps that appeals to a significant cadre of voters.

His wife even put him on board for secret state government meetings and security-clearance official emails, though he has no position in the government of Alaska.

And THIS, my fellow Americans, is the ticket the Republicans would have you put in office: the Old Man, the Flea, the Bimbo and the Dude.

And I fear to the depths of my being that they’re going to win.

But I have only this to ask: Are you really as abysmally stupid as they think you are? As stupid as they’re counting on you being? I truly hope you aren’t, but I despair that you really are.

Still, go ahead. Prove me wrong. I’d be absolutely delighted.

Humpty Dumpty Is A Republican

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." --Humpty Dumpty, "Through the Looking-Glass"


From the brilliant NYTimes columnist Bob Herbert:


September 6, 2008

Running From Reality

By BOB HERBERT


If there was one pre-eminent characteristic of the Republican convention this week, it was the quality of deception. Words completely lost their meaning. Reality was turned upside down.

From the faux populist gibberish mouthed by speaker after speaker, you would never have known that the Republicans have been in power over the past several years and used that titanic power to lead the country to its present sorry state.

In his acceptance speech on Thursday night, Senator John McCain did his best Sam Cooke imitation (“A Change is Gonna Come”) and vowed to put the country “back on the road to prosperity and peace.”

Mr. McCain spoke at the end of a day in which stock market indexes plunged. The next morning the Labor Department gave us the grim news that another 84,000 jobs had been lost in August, and that the official unemployment rate had climbed to 6.1 percent — the highest in five years.

If there were any good ideas at this convention of mostly rich and mostly right-wing delegates about how to haul the country out of this mess that the G.O.P. has gotten it into, they were kept well hidden. Perhaps they were tucked away behind the more prominently displayed creationism and “just-say-no to global warming” documents.

It stretches the mind almost to the breaking point to think of John McCain as an agent of substantive change. He once believed that Phil Gramm was the most qualified person in the United States to be president. And he now believes that Sarah Palin is the most qualified to be vice president.

That is not the fault of Mr. Gramm or Ms. Palin. But it sure tells us a lot about the judgment of John McCain.

Mr. McCain is a warrior, a former fighter pilot, and it’s no secret that Americans have long been thrilled by the romantic Top Gun narrative of fighter pilots, those specialists in the realm of the dangerous and the reckless. But we’ve also seen what dangerous and reckless behavior in the White House can do to a nation.

Sarah Palin may someday become president, and for all we know she may be a great one. But she was not chosen as Mr. McCain’s running mate after long and careful consideration and consultation. The best evidence is that she was a somewhat impulsive choice. Voters would be well advised to proceed with caution.

For most voters, the No. 1 issue in this campaign is the financial struggle facing working families that are trying to cope with job losses, declining wages, the high cost of health care, home foreclosures, bankruptcies and the like.

To a great extent these problems are the result of national policies, forged under Republican rule, that overwhelmingly favored the interests of the very wealthy over working people.

Senator McCain’s economic guru through all of this was Mr. Gramm, a former Republican senator from Texas and chairman of the banking committee. He was a demon for deregulation, and he and his wife, Wendy, who once led the presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief in the Reagan administration, were among the big recipients of Enron’s largess.

Phil Gramm was one of the lead architects of the breathtakingly irresponsible policies (No more restraints! No more regulation!) that led to the subprime mortgage meltdown and the current credit disaster.

A corporate insider in the Bush-Cheney mold, Mr. Gramm was thought to be in line to serve as treasury secretary in a McCain administration until July when he put his foot very publicly in his mouth. To Senator McCain’s great embarrassment, Mr. Gramm dismissed the economic downturn as a “mental recession” and complained that the U.S. had become a “nation of whiners.”

That may have been a political no-no, but it was an accurate expression of the slavish devotion of the G.O.P. to the rich and powerful among us, and of the party’s contempt for the interests of working families and the poor. Senator McCain, it should be noted, fully shared Mr. Gramm’s anti-regulatory zeal.

This is an odd crowd, indeed, to be offering itself as a champion for working people.

Senator McCain has been a virtuoso at schmoozing and using the press, which he once jokingly referred to as his base. Much of the press has eagerly collaborated in the idea of him as an outsider, a maverick — in some sense an American everyman. But Mr. McCain, who has been in Washington for more than a quarter of a century, was always embedded with the forces on the side of the corporate aristocracy.

He didn’t just stumble into the toxic relationships that got him into trouble with the Keating Five. And there was a reason for the closeness of his bond with Phil Gramm.

The populists’ garb hangs awkwardly on the frame of John McCain. Everyman he ain’t.

Sarah Palin: She Is Woman Repug Whore

Here's what a REAL woman, with brains and beliefs, has to say about Umbridge:


Palin: wrong woman, wrong message

Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

By Gloria Steinem

September 4, 2008


Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.

Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women's Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.

Desperate Housewife

First, she is a liar. A complete liar. A total liar. A lying queen of lying liars.

Second, she's got the Bug-eyed Gleam of Lunacy going bigtime. All of a sudden, as if by Dark Magic, she's been elevated from dealing with state troopers and banning local library books to a national forum, where she is on TV all the time and fed endless egoboo from her rabid Death Eater groupies. For someone like that, who's been fighting for the respect she thinks she deserves all her political life, this is multiple orgasm time.

She had nothing, a jumped-up housewife who got to manage a minor state to her liking, and now she's got real power. People pay attention to her. Journalists ask her questions and write down what she says. And you can see it in her eyes: she loooooooves it. It's what her craven conservative soul has always lusted after. (It's the ONLY thing people like that lust after, and they don't want YOU lusting after anything at all...)

So she's desperate to hold onto this sudden influx of power into her petty little lying life. She's a vampire, and now all of a sudden she comes out of Alaska and has a world of victims to suck off and infect.

Man, if the mainstream media refuses to pick up on this gift from the journalism god Hearst, I wash my hands of my fellow professionals. It's all there: the lies, the insane policies, the corruption.

And we MUST stop letting them away with challenging us when we call them on it. It's the same old trick that's worked for them for years and years, and it has to be shut down. That, and the hurt outrage they use to cover up their sins and offenses: "Who, US? No, not us! We never said that/did that/supported that! How could you even think we did? It's the other guys! We're all clean and pure!"

Why are people so stupid as to buy into this crap, not once but over and over again? There has to be a way
to get the truth into their heads. But they don't seem to want to know the truth, and they blame US for their own error and misjudgment and the fact that they bought into the lies in the first place.

But Palin has got to be stopped. She's Dolores Umbridge, and McLame is Cornelius Fudge, and we're Dumbledore's Army. It can be done. All we need is the Elder Wand...

Sauce for the Gander

Sooooo...how comes it that if Gustav had hit a week earlier, the evangelicals (or ev-diabolicals, as I like to think of them) would have been frothing at the mouth calling it the judgmental wrath of God falling upon the Democrats, yet now that the hurricane has messed with the Repugs' own little fiesta, we're hearing....what? The sound of silence? Yes, I do believe so!

Thing is, Gustav has helped out John McCain no end. Think about it: he was terrified about being tied to the mast of Dubya's sinking ship the Legacy, terrified about being rightly tarred with the Cheneyrove brush of complicity (he voted for 95% of Dubya's incoherent policies, AND supports the war, AND will keep us in 'cause in his demented senile brain he thinks HE can win it for the world), terrified about having Dub and Cheney appearing at HIS coronation.

And now they're not coming, because of the hurricane. Some folks have all the luck.

Except...all this stuff now coming out, bubbling up from the Alaskan tundra like the crude she wants to dig for, about Sarah Palin.

From the L.A. Times: Critics continue to question why McCain, after months of assailing Democratic nominee Barack Obama as lacking foreign policy experience, would tap a running mate who has been governor for less than two years and before that was mayor of Wasilla, population 7,000.

McCain's wife, Cindy, told an interviewer over the weekend that Alaska's proximity to Russia bolstered Palin's credentials, and Palin has pointed to her leadership of the Alaska National Guard and her Army son's imminent service in Iraq as evidence of expertise.

Oh, stop me laughing! The would-be First Bimbo McCain thinks that Alaska being near to Russia on the map makes Palin an expert on world affairs??? Stick to beauty pageants, blondie, it's all you're qualifed to discuss. I'm appalled your husband called you a cunt in public, but hey, if you can say something like that in public, I'd go even further and call you a brainless cunt.

And the commander of the Alaska National Guard HIMSELF says that Palin is by no means a leader of it and in fact has had nothing to do with the Guard. Ever. So, more lies.

And her insane Dominionist church that wants America and indeed the whole world to be ruled by conservative "Christians." If everyone went after Obama for HIS church affiliations, why are we not hearing outrage about this even more dangerous hookup?

And her bounty for shooting wolves from airplanes. I'd like to see her facing an irate pack alone in the woods, on foot, gun or not.

And her state trooper brother-in-law she tried to put the state muscle on ILLEGALLY.

And the millions of dollars in pork she went after for her tiny town, despite her further boasts of being against pork-barrel legislation.

And of course the pregnant daughter whom she obviously failed to instill with her abstinence values. Or, since young Bristol never had the benefit of actual sex education, thanks to MommyGov's enlightened public-school policies, maybe she didn't think sex COULD make you pregnant.

And the babydaddy, one Levi Johnston, whose YouTube page apparently says he doesn't want kids. Little late for that, I'd say...

And she says Iraq is a MISSION FROM GOD. Who knew she was a Blues Brother in disguise?

Go to www.huffingtonpost.com for all kinds of new information about Palin's extremely checkered past; it's a revelation.

One that John McCain seems to have been blind to. Blinded by his vengeful, spoiled-child wish to sock it to Dubya/Cheney/Rove for not letting him have Lieberman or Ridge as his VP. Does anyone REALLY think that Palin is the best possible person to take over as President after McCain keels over or dies of skin cancer? Do even the Repubs REALLY believe that? If so, there is no hope for this land.

It's the Sauron and Saruman Ticket, my hobbitses!

Any bets on Palin withdrawing her name/being made to withdraw? I'd love to think that can still happen, but I fear not...

Oh, and if it had been Chelsea Clinton or an Obama daughter preggers out of wedlock at 17, can you just IMAGINE what the Repugs would be doing? They have no business whatsoever yelping that this is ooooh so unfair, not when the trash-talk they've indulged in has been ever so much worse. And UNTRUE.

All these things are facts, and nasty facts. I don't see any lies here except Republican ones, do you? To update the old adage, there are lies, damn lies and Republicanism...

Papa Don't Preach

Preach, no. Judge, yes.

But the one I'm judging is Governor Sarah Palin, not her underage, unmarried, 5-months-pregnant daughter Bristol.

Yes, the confession came out today: Bristol's pregnant, and the family says she will marry the baby's father.

So Trig Palin, the Down's Syndrome infant, is Palin's after all. And the Gov. is guilty of MERELY a colossal risk of labor on board an airplane: she may have known her body, as some have said, and felt comfortable with the risk, but it's still ragingly irresponsible.

What if young Trig had decided to come aboard the plane, or at the podium? A premature, special-needs (which they knew) baby delivered in a risky environment, all because Mommy Dearest wanted to give a speech and get home.

Anyway, McCain says he knew all about it. Uh-huh. Would you have been so informed in that ONE face-to-face meeing you had with Palin, John-Boy? That she had an unmarried pregnant 16-yearold? Or did you get the news over the phone?

But though I'm very sorry for young Bristol, having her whole life altered perhaps against her dreams, I have to say it sure sounds like a karmic kick in the head for the Gov.

A religious-right, abstinence-urging, sex-education-barring Mrs. Grundy, and now here she is with her child having a child out of wedlock. Oh, they'll stage a nice shotgun wedding as soon as they can haul the two guilty parties in front of a preacher, but it just goes to show you that karma has a sense of what's fitting. Once you start setting yourself as holier than just about everybody, you're just asking for it...

Not to mention here we have a candidate actively campaigning for VP with a special-needs infant at home and an unmarried pregnant daughter as well? Who's taking care of these kids? Daddy? In between his stints as an oil-company shill?

I hope they're shamed and embarrassed. Not that the poor kid's pregnant and her life as she had planned it is probably over (which it is, unless she and the boyfriend actually planned to get knocked up and be teenage parents instead of finishing high school and going to college), but that the family and the pols alike all tried to cover it up till after the Repuggy convention.

Which is what they were desperately trying to do.

Because they're just that hypocritical.

They make me sick.