Author Archives: Tom Crippen

Barstool embarrassments

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Milton, one of my cafe buddies, claims he heard the following at the Bifteck, our local bar. A fellow was trying to pick up a girl. He told her about how he was an actor, mainly, but he did some work as a shoe salesman too.

Girl:   “Isn’t that frustrating? I mean, you being an actor but having to sell shoes.”
Guy:   “No, no, not really. There are a lot of parallels, kind of a strong connection really. Because when you’re selling, you’re performing. I mean, from my perspective, it’s essentially retail theater.” 
Milton claims that the man, at this point, lifted both hands to make the air quotes gesture. That sounds too perfect, but Milton swears by it. The man went on to use the “retail theater” phrase four or five times before the girl excused herself to visit the ladies room and then disappear.

Kids Comics Roundtable: Jules Feiffer’s Clifford

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You’ll find four of the strips below. Clifford was Feiffer’s first strip, and he did it for Will Eisner’s studio; the series ran on the back page of the Spirit section. Wikipedia says Feiffer was born in 1929, and I vaguely recall Clifford as running from 1949 to 1950, so Feiffer was the age of a college student when he did the strip. Fantagraphics collected the whole run as the first volume of its Collected Feiffer.

The previous Kids Comics Roundtable installment (Noah on telling kids what to like) was here, and you can see a roundup of my previous Golden Age scans here.
If you want to see these a bit larger, click on them and then click in the new screen where it says “Full Size.” It’s good enough to read them by. 
Jan. 22, 1950         
Clifford 4



Feb. 5, 1950

Clifford 2

Feb. 19, 1950
Clifford 1

March 5, 1950

Clifford 3

From Palin’s bathroom mirror to the Weekly Standard’s cover

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The problem wasn’t so much Palin as it was Alaska. She had become too big for her home state.


That’s one way of putting it. Put in the right pronouns and you can imagine Palin speaking to her bathroom mirror: “It’s not my fault! It’s … Alaska’s. They’re all jealous.” But the quote is from Matthew Continetti’s piece in the Weekly Standard giving the troops the rundown on why their hero fled. The article is a case of third-person narcissism: the writer’s engaging in borderline personality disorder on behalf of another party.

The reasons given for Palin’s quitting are 1) nobody would govern with her, 2) people say mean things about her, and 3) she’s already done everything any governor could hope to do in office. Point 1 is blamed on the national Democratic Party, which supposedly bosses around the legislators in individual states (wish it could get Congress in line). For point 2 it’s treated as a given that every charge against Palin has been refuted. Point 3 is voiced by Palin herself: “I know that we’ve accomplished more in our two years in office than most governors could hope to accomplish in two terms. And that’s because I hired the right people.”  So it’s okay for her to quit because she’s just way, way better than any ordinary governor. And you know it’s true because she says so.

Of course she also said once that she was a pitbull. Continetti sidles gently up to the sad fact that this claim was a charade:

The accusations affected Palin emotionally. A rare and necessary talent for a great politician is the capacity to ignore or laugh off the critics’ most vicious assaults. FDR had it. So did Reagan. When Palin spoke at the 2008 Republican convention, it seemed as though she had it, too. Her commanding performance gave the impression that the previous week’s falsehoods, exaggerations, myths, insults, and smears did not matter to her. Not one bit.

This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, however. Over time, the attacks on Palin–on her character, intellect, appearance, femininity, and family–clearly got to her. 


But he can’t let go of the idea that, somehow, she really is tough. Palin “knows how to win a political knife-fight,” he says after paragraphs spent lamenting that the poor lady had to deal with mean legislators and harsh words. In fact the whole “knife-fight” passage is interesting for its incoherence:

… she is a newcomer to the national arena. The bulk of her career has been at the local and state level, where the stakes and the tempers are low compared with the rock ’em, sock ’em dramas that play out inside the Beltway and on the cable channels and blogs. “Everyone else in ’08 had been in the game for decades,” John Coale said. “They all had been there. This was somebody playing for the first time.” For Palin, the hostility directed at her was novel and shocking. Because she prides herself on her unconventionality, and because she knows how to win a political knife-fight, she decided to fight back.


 So, for one thing, it turns out that Palin really was too inexperienced for the big time, even though the Standard and its buddies had been saying the opposite all along. For another, we’re told that Alaska is quite a tranquil place politically, although the rest of the piece says the state has become ungovernable because of the nasty vendettas against the governor.

A last point: in the fall we were told about Palin’s vital executive experience. Now we find out it really doesn’t matter who commands the Alaska National Guard. The point of a governor turns out to be entirely legislative: if the governor has passed, or claims to have passed, all the laws she had in mind, then there’s nothing left for her to do but twiddle her thumbs. It’s not like there are any floods for her to deal with or a state administration that needs to be run properly.

In America, we elect our executives to fixed terms on the understanding that they have day-to-day duties to fulfill and that these duties remain no matter what the legislature is up to. That would especially be the case in Alaska, where the legislature meets for a few weeks but the governor is on duty all year round. Unless she finds something better to do.

“The job had become demanding and unpleasant,” Continetti writes. Is there any other politician anywhere who would get a sympathetic hearing for that argument? Not that she could get such a hearing from just anybody. Alaska may not understand Sarah Palin, but the Weekly Standard does.

This just in: Nicole Wallace is a jerk

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The “pals around with terrorists” line came straight from the McCain high command, according to reporters Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Marc Ambinder summarizes:

an e-mail from campaign adviser Nicolle Wallace [was] sent to Palin on the morning of October 4rd, with an attached New York Times article about Obama’s relationship with Ayers.
Turns out that the McCain campaign was a week away from running an ad linking Obama to Ayers. The e-mail from Wallace, according to Balz and Johnson, reads as follows: “Governor and Team: rick [Davis], Steve [Schmidt] and I suggest the following attack from the new york times. If you are comfortable, please deliver the attack as written. Please do not make any changes to the below without approval from steve or myself because precision is crucial in our ability to introduce this.” 
McCain HQ had suggested the following line: “This is not a man who sees American as you and I do — as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.”

When complaining about what a diva Palin was, McCain’s people would cite the very line the campaign had given her. They claimed she had “gone rogue” and delivered the line all on her own. Well no, looks like that wasn’t the case. (Assuming the email is genuine. Ambinder’s post doesn’t say where the fellows got ahold of it.)
Does this mean that Palin isn’t a diva and whack job? I doubt it. She has a trail of bitter ex-allies from Wasilla to Juneau to wherever Republican high command is now bunkered. My guess is that the McCain people 1) wanted to keep their distance from an especially nasty attack, and 2) wanted another stone to throw at the Gal.
The “pals” revelation brings up the same lesson taught by the great post-“pitbull” letdown: never trust a story sourced to Republican political operatives.

Yeah, lipstick, and also pit bulls are kind of tough

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The first time I heard the lipstick-pitbull line? Well, I remember reading this a couple of days before Sarah Palin’s big convention speech. William Kristol wrote it, of course:


McCain aides whose judgment I trust are impressed by Sarah Palin. One was particularly amused by this exchange: A nervous young McCain staffer took it upon himself to explain to Palin the facts of life in a national campaign, the intense scrutiny she’d be under from the media, the viciousness of the assault that she’d be facing, etc.:

Palin: “Thanks for the warning. By the way, do you know what they say the difference is between a hockey mom and a Pit Bull?”

McCain aide: “No, Governor.”

Palin: “A hockey mom wears lipstick.”


Oh, that nervous young staffer. I like Palin’s amused, unruffled air in deflecting him. I also like the idea that anyone would trust William Kristol’s assessment of who is trustworthy. And the idea that we would think Palin came up with the lipstick line. And the idea that this conversation ever took place.

We all know how the line went over. Now, from the big Times article on why the governor decided to quit:

Late last week, as her sport utility vehicle made its way through the town of McGrath, Ms. Palin said in an interview that the seeds of her resignation had been planted the morning Mr. McCain named her as his vice-presidential choice.

“It began when we started really looking at the conditions that had so drastically changed on Aug. 29,” she said. “The hordes of opposition researchers came up here digging for dirt for political reasons, making crap up.”


Well gee, Princess! You should have listened to that nervous young aide! Though, admittedly, his probable nonexistence could have gotten in the way. But, all right then, listen to Janet Kincaid of Palmer, Alaska. I don’t know if she’s involved in politics, but she seems to have glommed onto a fact of political life that everyone in the country knows except Sarah Palin:

“In politics, you’ve got to just let it roll or it will eat you alive.”


Good point. By the way, I don’t concede that anyone has made up anything derogatory about Gov. Palin. All the inventing seems to have been intended to build her up. For an example, see the start of this post.

The press loves cliches and taglines and obvious irony, so I’m kind of surprised that we don’t hear about the pit bull line now that Palin has turned tail. Even the liberal bloggers haven’t harped on it much, from what I’ve seen. So I’ll say this: some fucking pit bull.

She wasn’t much of a governor either. I don’t mean just that her policies were bad or that she proved inept. I mean that she progressively forgot that she was supposed to be governing:

Amid all the turmoil, Ms. Palin’s enthusiasm for the job itself seemed to be waning, her office appointment books from January 2007 through this May indicate. Since her return from the national campaign her days have typically started later and ended earlier, and the number of meetings with local legislators and mayors has declined.

That 70% percent of Republicans say they’d be likely to vote for Palin in a presidential race shows that the GOP has become a system for generating and then swallowing bullshit. It’s bad enough that the schmucks think that being tough beats or encompasses all other virtues, like intelligence and competence. But they insist on thinking Palin is tough when she has demonstrated that she isn’t. She has broken before the very test that, way back at the beginning of her national career,  was supposed to prove what superior iron she was made of. 

Come to think of it, her downfall wasn’t even pressure at the national level. The ethics complaints that she says drove her from office were all filed by locals. Forget the big time — Palin can’t hack politics in Alaska, a state with fewer people than Barack Obama’s old state Senate district.

What a fucking loser. Sarah Palin is a pair of breasts, a pair of cheekbones, a pair of glasses, and a winsome mouth that delivered a speech somebody had handed her. Republicans have given up on political life and switched to a fantasy life, and for those purposes she works just fine. She never was a pit bull, just a party doll.

No, that’s not why she left

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At Greg Sargent’s Plum Line we learn that Palin’s departure, despite what she tells us, won’t free up any money for teachers or roads. Alaska doesn’t hire lawyers per job; it has them on staff and they get their salaries no matter what assignment is in front of them. Defending Palin against all those ethics complaints may be a waste of their time, but the state won’t be spending any less on its legal department if the complaints go away .

Sargent says Palin’s office arrives at a figure of $1.9 million spent to defend against the complaints. That’s from dividing the lawyers’ annual pay by the money they received during hours spent on the complaints.
TPM says only 3 ethics complaints are still pending, one-sixth of the original total. The others all got wrapped up quick enough, possibly because 9 of them went before the state’s personnel board, whose members can be fired by whoever’s governor.
update, Here’s a good point. Palin says she passed an ethics reform law and that this is the law that makes it possible to file ethics complaints against her. Steve Benen suggests that, under Palin’s own account of things, she passed an incompetently designed law. After all, from what Palin says it can be abused to drive a governor to resign for no good reason. 

No Uighurs, but …

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… Andrew Sullivan has been busy.

update, Has anybody ever heard a joke about Trig? I haven’t. Some people somewhere must have made such jokes, but only in the sense that some people somewhere must have shoved eggbeaters up their butts and then rushed to the emergency room.
Yet there Palin was talking about “mean adults” or the like taking shots at the little guy. Like who, where, when?
update 2, entitled “She’s Delicate, I Guess.” Palin’s lawyer said she had to call it quits because she had been “on duty now for two and a half years solid.” And, admittedly, two and a half years are quite a chunk out of a four-year term.