Author Archives: Tom Crippen

Does she know what she did?

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Palin twitters a feisty defence:


Critics are spinning, so hang in there as they feed false info on the right decision made as I enter last yr in office to not run again


But she gets the decision wrong. Her feisty defense leaves out the decision that is under attack, namely her resignation — the decision she announced on Friday, the one that had media types scrambling back to the studio. Because, for a politician holding a public trust, just up and quitting your job is much stranger and more newsworthy than letting people know that you won’t be on the ballot again. And now she’s forgotten the damn decision.

She never stops being odd, she never starts being coherent.

update, From her Facebook announcement:

And though it’s honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make. But every American understands what it takes to make a decision because it’s right for all, including your family.


One thing Americans understand is the difference between moving up and flaking out. A governor can quit to become president or even commerce secretary. A governor doesn’t quit to do the ineffable. And certainly not this fast — after 2 and a 1/2 years and on a weekend when her press secty is across the continent. Something very odd just happened. Maybe not lurid or amazing or dramatic, because we don’t know. But at least flakey.  

“… right for all, including your family.” If she doesn’t want her family in the public eye, she’ll have to give up being famous. Quitting as governor won’t do it; she’ll have to quit being a celebrity. Any bets on her doing that?
update, Bomp-ba domp-bomp. Fred Barnes voices grim words: “Palin is no Reagan.” (Bonus! Barnes accidentally says Tom Dewey had charisma. And Bob Dole for that matter. And Richard Nixon. One piece of sloppy phrasing can have some far-reaching effects.) 

Lady Wack-a-doo flies south

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update, Huck is deadly on the Great Bird:
 

Huckabee, looking at his own time as a governor, asked that “If that had been the case for me, I would have quit about the first month? Been there, done that.? One of the things you have to do is decide, ‘Look, they’re not going to chase me out.'” 

If she’s smart, she won’t be looking to win office ever again. She might do well in a few Republican presidential primaries; so did Pat Buchanan. But that’s the limit. Even if she moves to Montana and runs for a House seat … well, maybe.  
**********

My latest guess: the David Letterman flap went to Palin’s head and now she wants to do media flaps full time.  The guy behind the new career direction is John Ziegler; he’s got her ear. She’s going to be picking fights over news coverage and leading boycotts because of “anti-faith” and “pro-gay” programming content. Seems like a good way to raise money. Maybe she’ll have a show on Fox or CBN, as part of her operation. She’ll be like a televangelist but working the political side. Instead of interceding with God for the viewer, she’ll be interfering in society on God’s behalf, and mainly that will take the form of 1) loudly disrespecting big-name media personalities and institutions (Dan Rather, Letterman, the NYT, whoever else), and 2) staging video ambushes and embarrassing office sit-ins so as to target executives of the companies with ads on the wrong programs. (On second thought, maybe you don’t pull ambushes/sit-ins on people with access to corporate lawyers. Well, whatever Michael Moore used to do.) Her show’s basic fodder will be outrage over cable programming, especially snotty comedy shows; some of these will then make a point of baiting her to get exposure on her show, and the two sides will develop a degree of mutual reliance.

Along with the show she’s running boycott campaigns and letter campaigns, for which she will raise money thru personal appearances at civic theaters and skating rinks across the country. All in all what promises to be a lucrative organization, since the small-town right feels like politics has proven to be a bust.
Of course it will all turn to shit before any of the above gets too far, reason being that Palin is crazy and so is Ziegler. 

Ding dong

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“This is not a retreat. It’s an advance in another direction.” Oh boy. 


First part here, second part here. For your collection.

This announcement was thrown together awful fast. She’s talking about investigations and packing her bags in a hurry, so maybe she’ll wind up in Brazil. Even if not, at least now she can’t ever be president. You can’t see it happening even if you’re a paranoid liberal pothead with a science fiction bent. She is now a quitter and a flake. That will be the view of anyone who’s not a wingnut and of some who are. Two and 1/2 years as gov.

My guess is she wants to make money as a celebrity, especially since she needs money for legal fees (because of the ethics complaints). [update, I also find it tempting to think that she thinks she can make pres by the celebrity route, that she believes her personal wonderfulness is only being hampered and obscured by office and its headaches, that she thinks now she can blaze her way to the top by being glorious full-time in the media.]

[second update, Marc Ambinder wrote this: “Palin, in Alaska, is a sitting duck for the people and forces she believes are ruining the country. She can’t fight back — she can’t protect her family, her values, her worldview — while she’s governor.” I think that’s meant to be her view, not his. Even so, I don’t get it. How does being governor make her a sitting duck? People don’t make fun of her for what she does as governor, not unless they are actually in Alaska. The rest of us don’t know enough to say. We make fun of her for her ignorance and sleazy behavior. Ambinder goes on to argue that the real deal here is that she hasn’t done well as governor and is fed up with being chivvied and hassled by the other Alaska politicians. He implies that going national full time looks a lot better to her because that line of approach is all about showing off and making speeches, not delivering governmental results. Sounds very plausible to me; I do gravitate toward the “bright lights, big city” explanation for her flakeout. Still leaves us wondering why she had to throw her announcement together so precipitately.]  

[third update, Says her ex-friend and ex-campaign manager:

 When she comes to Alaska, everyone calls her “Sarah.” Out there she’s governor–almost president-elect. She’s not Sarah. They introduce her with pomp and circumstance. Build her ego up, do that whole thing. Here, she comes back, she runs into a buch of Alaskans. It’s humbling. It’s nothing big to us. They don’t mind calling you on the carpet. It’s nothing special. She’s just one of us. But she decided she wasn’t going to be one of us…

Sarah’s uppity!]

I just heard about the resignation this afternoon, since I’m staying off the Internet (kind of). Griffy Flatts, my building’s excitable janitor, gave me the news. He watches CNN a lot and is obsessed by US politics. He gave me an earful about the resignation and the relevant clip, which he said showed her emotional and incoherent — “babbling.” Hah, no. Her voice shook here and there, but she delivered a good performance and pursued a more-or-less consistent rhetorical thread in her remarks. They were confusing only because she was talking thru her hat. No emotional free associating, just really extreme fancy dancing: human-growth psychobabble to reframe her decision to quit, murky references to political operatives targeting her after she got on the McCain ticket. passing the ball when the other side has you in its sights (doesn’t say who the other side is).

Says now the state won’t have to pay for pursuing all the ethics complaints against her? for the time she spends on payroll defending against the complaints? Kind of missed that bit, but she’s saving Alaska money by stepping down while all these ethics complaints are pending against her, and she’s saving the state more money by quitting instead of just serving out her term as a lameduck. Lameducks go on junkets a lot, and she doesn’t want to let herself do that.   

What was that she said about one complaint being about her holding a fish? From what seed of truth has she spun this mutant?

This is beautiful

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Okay, Todd Purdum and Vanity Fair, this is how it’s done. Let us now thank Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe for bringing to light the Steve Schmidt/Sarah Palin correspondence of October 15, 2008. It includes one of the most beautiful emails ever written by a busy professional to a lying, narcissistic idiot. The email is also a chance to see a Republican political operative going into reverse mode. Instead of scrambling facts, he’s spelling them out; hey, he’s good at that too.

Background: Sarah Palin’s husband, Todd, belonged for 7 years to the Alaska Independence Party, which wants Alaska to secede from the United States. During the campaign, Palin complained to Steve Schmidt and others in the top command that not enough was being done to push back against criticism of Todd for his secessionist ties. The back-and-forth over this matter was all by email.
Schmidt told her no, they weren’t going to touch the AIP issue. Palin harangued him again, this time claiming that the AIP’s platform doesn’t mention pulling out of the U.S. Schmidt lost it and wrote the following:
Secession. It is their entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be innaccurate. The innaccuracy would bring greater media attention to this matter and be a distraction. According to your staff there have been no media inquiries into this and you received no questions about it during your interviews. If you are asked about it you should smile and say many alaskans who love their country join the party because it speeks to a tradition of political independence. Todd loves his country

We will not put out a statement and inflame this and create a situation where john has to adress this 
Isn’t that great? It moves me.
Palin had also claimed that Todd registered with the AIP by accident, that Alaska voter registration forms list the party only as “Alaska Independent” and Todd had meant to register as an independent. But no. Alaska forms list the party by its full name.
Lying to her own side. Lying about points of fact available to anyone who might want to look. In-fucking-unbelievable. But Andrew Sullivan has already covered this ground. 
So all can one say is that Steve Schmidt lived the dream. He got to write Sarah Palin an email spelling out how full of shit she is.
update, Yeah, another thing. “I’m afraid he finds our country so flawed he pals around with terrorists.” And meanwhile she’s married to a guy who finds our country so flawed he wants his state to secede.

Marie’s doing okay

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I blogged here about Marie, who was waiting for biopsy results the last time I saw her. Good news: no cancer. I kind of guessed as much because I heard her voice halfway across Cafe Depot. Nothing subdued or weighed down about her; she’s like normal.

I ran up and asked for news, and she gave me the lowdown. The lump, whatever it is, has to be removed, but there’s no big threat. I congratulated her and she thanked me, but she’s had the good news for a while now and really wanted to show me a framed print she had bought of a vase and flowers

“On Bullshit” discussed

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My thanks to commenter Billjac for bringing up H. G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. I found an excerpt (right here; warning, it cuts off in midsentence) and someday I may read the whole book. The excerpt, at least, is very good and taught me a lot.

First thing, I’d said that Frankfurt, in giving his concept the name “bullshit,” simply  “slapped on” the term. No! “Bullshit” is most often used to mean something very broad, namely wildly and obviously false statements, but it is also used often enough to mean exactly the concept that Frankfurt has in mind. As far as I can tell, no other word is used for that one idea, so what can you do? Out of stubbornness, I’ll refer to the Frankfurt-identified style of bullshit as “b.s.,” but no, he was not at all arbitrary in saying “bullshit.”
More later, I guess, but I’ve got to run.

Bad job on Palin

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That Vanity Fair article on the Gal was pretty lame. (Mentioned it here.) It was notable mainly for two giant holes: nothing about the $150,000 shopping spree, nothing about “Africa is a country/who’s in Nafta?” and the other imbecilities Palin was supposed to have committed during her debate prep. Those were major stories: if a really plugged-in behind-the-scenes tell-all piece about Palin comes out, I want to hear anything I can about whether those allegations are true.


All right, the piece mentions the shopping spree, a one-time passing mention, and refers to it as if spree and pricetag were established facts. But no details and no presentation of evidence. At the time of the original stories, some paper or web site reported that one of the stores in question said it had no record of the purchase allegedly made there. One hopes a big-deal piece like the Vanity Fair article would help us wade into questions like that. But the best we get is the forlorn hope that the spree story must be true because the article acts as if it were. Ah well.
(update, The corollary of that last point: the “Africa is a country/who’s in Nafta?” stories are probably not true. If the article could have used them it would have, especially since it makes so much noise about the problems between Palin and McCain’s staff during the runup to the debate. Now I get to play told-you-so because I warned friends when the stories came out. Never believe a story sourced to a Republican political operative, especially when he/she is anonymous. It’s a measure of GOP flacks’ moral standing that they are more dishonest than Palin is stupid.)

Another big gap: the fiasco over her nominee for Alaska attorney general. The guy got voted down — “the first time in Alaska history that a cabinet nominee was rejected.” Sounds major! But why did the guy get voted down? The article mentions that he has said dumb things about gays and that he is against “subsistence hunting preferences for Native Americans.” That’s it? That’s enough to get you voted down in Alaska? Well, okay, I guess it’s possible, but sounds like there’s something missing.

Another: Palin’s communications shop. The article says it’s lousy, but everyone has heard that already. How about some examples, or something about the background and style of the shop’s allegedly incompetent director? How about a concise summary of the back-and-forth over whether Palin would speak at the Senate-House fundraiser? That was a damn mess, a great chance to watch her staff’s incompetence in action. Nothing.

The article is just all the usual stuff everyone knows, most of it mentioned headline fashion (did you know Levi Johnston did some tv interviews?), plus a few bits of new material as garnish. The Palin-as-God email, a couple of poignant blind quotes by McCain advisers about what a jerk Palin is, nothing else.

Fuck, what a disappointment. 
update, Now this looks promising. A CBS.com story headlined “Palin E-Mails Show Infighting with Staff.” Something to check out.