Stupid Republican Thing of the Day (12/20/10) December 20, 2010
Posted by monty in politics.Tags: politics, Republicans, Sarah Palin, waste of oxygen
add a comment
In what is sure (and unfortunately) to become a regular feature, here’s the first in an open-ended series documenting how ridiculous and irrelevant the modern Republican party has become. On a side note, anyone want to wager how many of these in an average week will involve Sarah Palin?
*****
Sarah Palin: “Michelle Obama Wants the Government to Take Away Our Dessert!”
Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but not by much. From CNN:
Sarah Palin is again taking aim at Michelle Obama over her anti-obesity campaign, taking the opportunity in Sunday’s “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” to land a diss against the first lady’s efforts to improve nutrition.
While making s’mores at one point during Sunday’s episode, the former Alaska governor proclaims the marshmallow and chocolate treat is “in honor of Michelle Obama, who said the other day we should not have dessert.”
It’s not the first time Palin has taken a job at Mrs. Obama over her campaign to discourage fattening foods, especially from public schools. The former vice presidential nominee told conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham last month that “the first lady cannot trust parents to make decisions for their own children, for their own families in what we should eat.”
This is how bizarre the GOP’s anti-government rhetoric has gotten, where an observation that our country – and, increasingly, our children – has become dangerously obese can only be seen as an attempt by the government to control your life. They may not be bright, but Sarah Palin has helped the Republicans corner the market on petty and mean-spirited. Will someone please make this woman go away?
*****
Current listening:
Asobi Seksu – Fluorescence (2010)
Last movie seen:
Ghostbusters II (1989; Ivan Reitman, dir.)
The Neighbors Can’t Breathe November 23, 2009
Posted by monty in politics.Tags: politics, Sarah Palin, waste of oxygen
1 comment so far
Okay, I know. When someone shoots video of a politician’s fans at a rally or a speech or a book signing, it’s invariably slanted. They chop it up and edit it so that only the most moronic or inflammatory or entertaining people make the final cut. And I know that this is probably true of any politician. I’m sure you could get a sample of stupidity at any political event … and yes, I’m including Barack Obama’s events in there, too. Conservatives don’t have a monopoly on stupidity – they just seem to own more shares.
But, man. A video taken during one of Palin’s book signings illustrates exactly why Sarah Palin’s fans are – yes, I’ll say it – dangerous. Last week, Jon Stewart brilliantly and accurately called her a “conservative boilerplate mad lib,” her every speech peppered with … oh, hell, just watch it for yourself:
Vodpod videos no longer available.Before I get to the video I actually wanted to show, it’s always interesting to see the GOP attempt to dissect exactly why the liberals don’t like Palin, and it’s always funny to see how wrong they get it. They think it has something to do with her attractiveness or her religion or her outspokenness, when, as I’ve said here before, it has nothing to do with any of that, and everything to do with her being a vacuous, empty-headed twit. Oh, I won’t deny that she’s a master of controlling her image, and in that respect she’s a savvy and brilliant entertainer. But we should never mistake that for actual gravitas or intelligence.
Sarah Palin parrots exactly what her followers want to hear, and they parrot it right back to anyone who asks them about her. As in this video. It pains me that it was taken in my home state, but my consolation is that her fans would sound like this anywhere in the country. Stupid knows no geographical boundaries.
One thing I believed following the 2004 election – and which I believe even more now – is that the red/blue divide in this country comes down to an ability to think critically. Personally, it’s tiring to hear the all or nothing/love it or leave it/black and white rhetoric that consistently comes out of the GOP. There’s never (or rarely, at least) an acknowledgment of the gray areas in an issue, or that ideology is often nuanced, or that it’s possible to support a politician without agreeing with his every issue. You hear it in the responses in that video. No knowledge of Palin’s specific policies or beliefs, no idea about what Obama or the incumbent Congress has actually done to steal their country from them – it’s just God and guns and drill, baby, drill.
And, I’m sorry to say it again, but that’s dangerous. To so blindly support someone about whose beliefs you know nothing outside the empty platitudes she spews in her media appearances is irresponsible. The Republicans harp consistently about not knowing Obama’s background. Even if that were true – which it’s not, let’s go ahead and establish that right away – at least we know specifically what he believes in, and what kinds of policies he’d like to enact. With Palin, we know everything about her past, but that still tells us nothing about the specifics of her ideology.
People are so enamored with Palin’s story (and I’ll admit, it’s a good one) that they completely ignore the crucial problem: she completely lacks substance. And maybe that’s been the biggest failing of our schools: we haven’t properly taught people how to think critically. We haven’t taught them how to look for substance, to dissect an argument, to look out for propaganda. And I’m not going to deny that there isn’t an element of this same problem to Obama’s success. He was a great speaker with a catchy message and a barrier-busting heritage – there were absolutely people who voted as blindly for him as there are those who would vote blindly for Palin. Neither is right. But Obama, at the very least, talked specifically about his beliefs and his policies, unlike the vice-presidential debate, where Palin simply ignored the moderator’s questions to mouth her talking points like the Stepford GOP automaton she is. And it does seem, at least to this humble citizen, that, after eight years of Bush’s smirky arrogance, and with this current fascination with Palin, an inability to think critically often seems to be the province of the right wing.
But back on point: we need to better equip our students to think intelligently and critically. Doing so goes some way toward ensuring that they won’t behave like the people in the video, who are apparently acting without any conscious thought whatsoever – like some bizarre Pavlovian GOP experiment, they begin salivating when Palin derisively utters the phrase “mainstream media.” The final irony, of course, is that Obama’s current education policy – with its emphasis on standards and testing – will only breed more people who are unable to look beyond the rhetoric to the empty promises beneath.
*****
Current listening:
Burning Airlines – Mission: Control! (1999)
That’s What You Always Say November 16, 2009
Posted by monty in news, politics.Tags: news, politics, Sarah Palin
2 comments
It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that Sarah Palin’s upcoming memoir, Going Rogue, contains numerous factual “inaccuracies.” In a fact-check conducted by the Associated Press (I mean, “the liberal media elite”), Palin apparently distorts her own record, and either misunderstands or outright lies about events in Obama’s presidency (confusing Obama’s stimulus package, for instance, with George W. Bush’s federal bank bailout). The AP is kind in saying that Palin’s book occasionally “goes adrift,” when what they really should be saying is that it’s just more of the same kind of paranoid, lunatic babbling that gave us death panels and Drill, baby, drill!
But just as unsurprising as Palin’s drift is the fact that she’s now accusing the AP of doing “opposition research” in fact-checking her memoir.
We’ve heard 11 writers are engaged in this opposition research, er, ‘fact checking’ research! Imagine that – 11 AP reporters dedicating time and resources to tearing up the book, instead of using the time and resources to ‘fact check’ what’s going on with Sheik Mohammed’s trial, Pelosi’s health care takeover costs, Hassan’s associations, etc.
So this is what it’s come to. Checking the veracity of claims made by a public figure – one of the most important tenets of modern journalism – is now spun by the GOP as just another attack by the opposition. Apparently, in Palin’s perfect world, she could just run her mouth about any old thing and have it be taken as gospel by the universe as a whole.
It is, I have to say, a clever ploy aimed squarely at appeasing her base. When you make your reputation as a small-town rube with the intellect of a mosquito and a mistrust of anyone who uses polysyllabic words, it’s just the next logical step to further adopt the role of victim and scream that you’re being raped by the big, bad liberal media. The portion of the American population who actually thinks Palin’s got something to say – you can recognize them because they’re wearing aluminum foil hats and screaming about black helicopters – will fall right in line.
I really wish I had a gauge to figure out how seriously the rest of the country takes anything she says. My first inclination whenever I see or hear anything on the news about Palin or Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity or any of these right-wing asshats is to laugh hysterically. But then I remember that a lot of people take them at their word, and that’s a sobering thought.
Palin wants to spin the AP’s reporting as equivalent to the death of free speech. The truth, however, is that it’s Palin – who claims that the media has no right or responsibility to verify her claims – who’s the real enemy of the 1st Amendment. It goes back to the same point I made about Carrie Prejean last week. The right to free speech means that, yes, you can generally say what you like. What it doesn’t do is guarantee you the right to say what you like and have it remained unchallenged. That’s the beauty of free speech. It cuts both ways. You have the right to say what you want, and I have the right to challenge you. In this case, Palin had the freedom to write a book that’s apparently as boneheaded as the interviews and speeches for which she’s already known, and now she’s angry that responsible journalists have an equal amount of freedom to make sure she’s not completely full of shit.
Sarah, just a word of advice: It’s not free speech if the only people allowed to talk are the ones who agree with you.
*****
Current listening:
Saturnine – American Kestrel (1999)
Last movie seen:
Body of Lies (2008; Ridley Scott, dir.)
Wounded World November 4, 2009
Posted by monty in news, politics, TV.Tags: Matt Taibbi, news, Paris Hilton, pop culture, Republicans, Sarah Palin, TV, waste of oxygen
2 comments
Part of me was ashamed to write about Jon Gosselin and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach the other day. After all, a huge part of the problem with our celebutard-obsessed culture is that the media keeps giving them attention they don’t deserve. Jon and Kate, Lindsay and Paris, the whack-job Mormon family who’ve mistaken Mom’s uterus for a broken gumball machine, the dimbulbs from The Hills, and the entire cast of the Twilight movies – they’d all be so much more bearable if their fame was proportional to their actual level of accomplishment. That means I’d never know who Jon, Kate, Paris, or the Duggard family is, I’d know Lindsay only as the star of the Tina Fey-scripted Mean Girls, the Twilight cast would only appear in Entertainment Weekly articles I skip, and Heidi and Spencer and the rest of The Hills’ demon-spawn wouldn’t register on my radar until Joel McHale ridicules them on The Soup. There’s no earthly reason why any of these people show up on the news. In a fair and just world, they’d be relegated to media oblivion.
The same goes for Sarah Palin. A full year after getting her ass handed to her by voters, she’s still hanging around, like the drunk who doesn’t realize the party’s over. Her memoir, which we’re supposed to believe she wrote all by her widdle self in the space of a few months – despite the fact that she has yet to string more than three words together intelligibly in public – is currently ranked #3 on Amazon, which means that an unfortunate number of people actually believe she has something important to say about anything. My guess is that the book will be good for either A) comic relief, or B) a literary drinking game, wherein the reader does a shot every time she uses the word maverick. Like all the names in the first paragraph, there is no reason, none whatsoever – and I’m quite serious about this – that she gets any media attention at all. I don’t care if McCain chose her as his running mate in a cynical ploy to snatch vaginaed voters away from Obama. She has yet to say anything of consequence about anything, and the fact that anyone is considering her a serious contender for the 2012 presidential election is testament only to how delusional a segment of this country remains.
There are exactly two choices for how the media should handle these people. The first is to stop covering them. It’s a simple solution, elegant and precise. Don’t report on them, don’t show any photos or film, don’t tell us what they said. They’re inconsequential, and every second you devote to them takes away a second you could be using to cover something that actually matters.
The other option – and I could conceivably throw the whole weight of my support behind this – is to reveal them as the buffoons they are. If the NBC Nightly News were to include a 5-minute-long segment called “Daily Dickhead” where the likes of Spencer Pratt or Kim Kardashian were eviscerated through a montage of clips demonstrating their vacuous, selfish ways, I would tune in every night. Seriously. Any venture that encourages the American public to ridicule these self-involved twats is a worthwhile one, in my book.
And, incidentally, I would endorse this exact same handling of Sarah Palin. Somehow we’ve arrived at the notion that being “fair” or being “objective” means treating both sides of an argument as equally valid. As a result, we get serious news reporting of death panels and teabaggings and town hall meetings filled with angry white people who look like torch-wielding extras from Frankenstein. If the big news outlets were really worth their salt anymore, rather than report on these things as though they were legitimate news, they’d call bullshit on the whole enterprise. The right-wing is going to paint the mainstream news media as a bunch of far-left pinko commie faggots anyway, so what would they have to lose if Brian Williams came to us on-air one night and said, “Sarah Palin said today in a town hall meeting that Barack Obama wants to kill your grandparents. What a crazy bitch!”
I think it’s entirely fair to report on death panels and these teabag demonstrations or whatever else the right-wing concocts, but the Big 3 needs to have the smarts and the gumption to really report on them. They need to show, for instance, how the right-wing is using lies and distortion and charged language to derail health care reform, as well as how Fox News and other Republican groups are organizing these supposedly “spontaneous” demonstrations. The news bureaus feel, I guess, like they have to report on these things as serious phenomena, when the truth of it is, if they were really reporting objectively, they’d reveal all of it as a serious fraud to prey on voters’ fears of the U.S. turning into a grandma-killing noueveau-Cuba.
What we really need are more Matt Taibbis, the journalist who wrote the fantastic Rolling Stone article about the right-wing’s campaign against health care reform that I posted a month ago. Taibbi wrote a terrific piece shortly after Palin stepped down as governor of Alaska, but he declined to publish it until now. Here’s an excerpt:
Palin’s paranoid ramblings and self-pitying tantrums on the way out of office not only didn’t injure her chances for national office, they actually appeared to help, as polls taken in the week after her resignation showed that 71% of Republicans were now prepared to vote for her for president in 2012. Just as she had during the campaign last fall, Palin defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of fucked-overness.
Nobody understands this political reality quite like Palin, even if she doesn’t actually understand it in the sense of someone who thinks her way to a conclusion, but merely lives it, unconsciously, with the unerring instinct of a herd animal. Palin’s supporters don’t judge her according to her almost completely nonexistent qualifications for serious office, they perceive her as they would a character in a Biblical narrative, a Job in heels with cross-eyes and a mashed-potato-brained husband who happens to spend a lot of time getting shat upon by Letterman and Maureen Dowd and the other modern-day Enemies of Christ.
On some level Palin understands better than any of us that what’s important to her base isn’t how well she does her job or even what she does with her time before 2012, but who her enemies are and how loudly she beats the drum against them – and when the news comes out that these foes have recently driven her to such distraction that she even started losing her hair (reportedly necessitating a recent emergency trip to personal hairdresser Jessica Steele), it elevates her conservative martyr credentials to previously unimagined levels.
As a national candidate she seems to us normal/rational observers mortally wounded, but as a conduit for middle American resentment she may actually have gained in stature, and don’t be at all surprised if she doesn’t emerge with the status of something like a religious figure when they roll the rock back for her inevitable candidacy three years from now.
This is exactly the kind of reporting we need now. We need the news media to stop acting like every argument is pitched on a level playing field, and that every media personality needs to be treated with the same deference. We need the media to do the heavy lifting and the critical thinking much of this country is unwilling to do itself. And that means they need to be ready to point out the people, on both sides of the political fence and in all aspects of the media, that seek to do us harm.
True/Slant–Taibblog (11/02/09): Palinoia
*****
Current listening:
Talking Heads – True Stories
Current reading:
Rattawut Lapcharoensap – “At the Café Lovely” (in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, ed. by Dave Eggers)
Secrets at the Prom October 8, 2009
Posted by monty in politics.Tags: Levi Johnston, politics, Sarah Palin
add a comment
He does realize women don’t read Playgirl, doesn’t he?
MSNBC (10/7/09): Father of Palin’s grandson to pose for Playgirl
a
a
a
*****
Current listening:
Hüsker Dü – Zen Arcade