Tag Archives: irritation

Victory

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On line at the Cafe Depot today, the woman ahead of me was talking on her cell phone so hard she couldn’t follow what was going on. When she was fumbling around for her money, and still talking, I got mad and reached over to touch her shoulder. Me: (level but stern):  “You’re taking my time. Stop talking.”

The woman was perfectly polite about it. She got her money out, and noted that she had been reaching for it, then paid and took her coffee before she started talking on the phone again.
I always feel silly after I get angry, so it touched me when Lynn, the young monarch of the Cafe Depot counter people, thanked me for saying something. The cell phone people drive the Depot staff crazy, she said, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Then, over by the milk and cream pitchers, a young fellow on staff appeared at my elbow and thanked me too. I had no idea I’d been doing the right thing! I thought I’d just got mad and lost my cool.

Trig and his awful mother

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Reactions to Sarah Palin’s decision to resign the governorship of Alaska have been a reminder of her unmatched ability to elicit strong emotions from friend and foe alike. We know some of the reasons why. It’s her evangelical Christianity and her folksy manner. It’s her small-town roots and her “new feminism.”

Yeah, if you don’t like Palin it’s because you’re a bigot. It’s not that you think being mayor of Wassilla isn’t enough to prepare someone to run the country. You just hate small towns. Come to think of it, a lot of Palin haters liked Bill Clinton just fine, and he was awfully folksy. But Palin is also ignorant and intellectually feeble, and she tries to fake her way thru difficult situations by desperately bullshitting whoever’s in range. And for her a difficult situation is a question, such as “How about that economy?” or “So why did you quit being governor?” She says nasty, untrue things about political opponents (“read terrorists their rights”) and whines whenever anybody hits back. So, of course, yeah, what we dislike about her is her “new feminism.”
Obviously, I just got triggered by a Christian Right op-ed piece. It’s by Gary Bauer, a longtime CR panjandrum, and Daniel Allott, a fellow he employs to help with the words. It got such a rise out of me because it says I despise a one-year-old kid who has Down syndrome: 

Palin gave birth to her youngest son, Trig, who has Down syndrome. Since then, mother and son have become objects of the left’s unrelenting scorn and the right’s unflinching fidelity.

Well, fuck you, Gary Bauer. You have three pieces of evidence for your claim: a reader’s diary entry at Talking Points Memo, a post at an antifundamentalist humor site (the post’s writer just quit), and a quote by a libertarian nutball at a place called the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism. The first two items weren’t directed at Trig, just at the idea that Down syndrome might be something the world needs more of (because of Palin’s comment “The world needs more Trigs”). The third item is just a libertarian being crazy: “it is crucial to reaffirm the morality of aborting a fetus diagnosed with the Down syndrome.” If you don’t like what the guy said, talk to him at the next CPAC. But leave “the left” out of it.

Trig is a reminder of our fierce ambivalence over disability. Every mention of his name is a pinprick to our conscience. Every photo of mother and son is a reminder of concepts — vulnerability, dependency and suffering — our culture no longer tolerates, as well as virtues, such as humility, dignity and self-sacrifice, it no longer extols.

The left doesn’t believe in “vulnerability, dependency and suffering.” Well, that’s a new one. Furthermore, Sarah Palin embodies “humility, dignity and self-sacrifice.” Sure. All you have to do is redefine every word involved and the idea works perfectly.
You can see that Gary Bauer is after some big game here. He thinks the medical profession and society as a whole are pressuring people to abort genetically handicapped children. I think he’s got matters the wrong way around. Raising an afflicted child is an admirable choice, but it’s not one I would force on anybody. And you’d have to force people because being born with a severe handicap — being retarded, being born without a spine — is an onerous condition, one that imposes suffering on the child and requires great sacrifice from everyone in the child’s family. Given a choice, most parents won’t have such a child.
Gary Bauer figures that’s the result of some far-reaching propaganda campaign. No, it’s just people being allowed to do what they want. Bauer doesn’t see it that way, but he sees none too clearly. Just ask him what he thinks about Sarah Palin.

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.

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. 

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.) 

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?

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

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It’s one of the worst books I’ve ever read. When I was a kid I liked Pere Goriot and Eugenie Grandet, and I managed to get thru Lost Illusions. I thought I was toughened up to Balzac’s eccentricities. But Girl is a disaster. It could have been a one-page “Ribald Tale,” or whatever Playboy used to call that feature it ran in the old days. Instead it’s a bloated novella that gets dumber as it goes on. It’s the kind of “classic” that makes you think nobody back then could do anything right.