Posts Tagged ‘Palin’

Why Palin Quit

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Very well written. It belabors the obvious, and although I suppose there are some people who still need to be told, if they have the need they probably can’t be told. Also, it relies on unnamed “confidants,” although the reason for that is fairly obvious as well.

This is becoming a rather silly month news-wise, isn’t it? Everything’s either “Michael Jackson is still dead” or “Why Palin Quit.”

Anyway, on with the excerpts…

Contrary to most reports, her decision had been in the works for months, accelerating recently as it became clear that controversies and endless ethics investigations were threatening to overshadow her legislative agenda. “Attacks inside Alaska and largely invisible to the national media had paralyzed her administration,” someone close to the governor told me. “She was fully aware she would be branded a ‘quitter.’ She did not want to disappoint her constituents, but she was no longer able to do the job she had been elected to do. Essentially, the taxpayers were paying for Sarah to go to work every day and defend herself.”

This situation developed because Alaska’s transparency laws allow anyone to file Freedom of Information Act requests. While normally useful, in the hands of political opponents FOIA requests can become a means to bog down a target in a bureaucratic quagmire, thanks to the need to comb through records and respond by a strict timetable. Similarly, ethics investigations are easily triggered and can drag on for months even if the initial complaint is flimsy. Since Ms. Palin returned to Alaska after the 2008 campaign, some 150 FOIA requests have been filed and her office has been targeted for investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Alaska legislature. Most have centered on Ms. Palin’s use of government resources, and to date have turned up little save for a few state trips that she agreed to reimburse the state for because her children had accompanied her. In the process, though, she accumulated $500,000 in legal fees in just the last nine months, and knew the bill would grow ever larger in the future.

The question for Palin-phobes, at least those who successfully pass off the patina of being open to an opposing reasonable argument, then becomes one of: If you were the Governor of Alaska, what percentage of your time could you spend day-to-day in this defensive posture before you figured out the situation was unworkable and something had to change? If Palin’s decision says something so derogatory about her character, her resolve, her determination to fulfill a responsibility, her basic drive, then how high is that percentage, minute to minute? Fifty? Sixty? Eighty?

Some of the critics not only fail to remain open to opposing reasonable arguments, but they remain locked into the wishful thinking that pronounces SCANDAL! Most of those types are busily filling in the details. The question for them is somewhat different: What is this scandal? Are you remembering to take into account that it is now Thursday, nearly a week after the announcement, and the scandal has yet to bubble over? It has remained hidden beneath the most frothy and energized scandal-search, perhaps in this country’s history…lawyers, reporters, tabloid hacks, photographers tipping over trash cans in Juneau. They had ten weeks before the election, many months since then, and they missed whatever it is. Either the details eluded them or they didn’t give the details the same weight the Governor did. Once you fill in the nooks and crannies of that germinating theory, will it capably address all these dichotomies?

More Palin Comments

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

James Taranto, this weekend, officially went on the record hypothesizing that when Sarah Palin dishes out the traditional “I’m resigning to go home and spend time with my family” cliche now commonly associated with the scandal-plagued set…she actually means it.

“Go ahead and laugh, we can wait,” he says.

Knowing there is a heavily-populated and exceptionally loud chattering class of ankle-biters desperate to prove such a theory wrong, he set up a Facebook discussion page to do exactly that. The very first response reflected in a high-quality way, I thought, on exactly what is bollywonkers about all the shenanigans going down this year just in general, with things Palin-related as well as not-Palin-related:

I won’t even try to prove you wrong. The only thing I know for certain about Sarah Palin’s decision, is that it has proven to me that she has all the right enemies, while Barack Obama has all the wrong friends.

Zing! That’s gonna leave mark — on us all. In generations past this was how you figured out if a fellow was going to do right by you, or not: The company he keeps. “You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses.”

We done got away from that pebble of wisdom, or allowed it to get away from us. The results seem to indicate our grandparents were a little bit smarter on this issue than we are. And let us think, not just of Sarah Palin’s enemies, but her friends. She entrusted some close inner circle, for some time it would seem, with this secret that she was going to step down. Quite the bombshell. We all proved trustworthy, as tough as it was for us not to let you in on it, at times.

No, seriously. Whoever was on the ins with this, was given trust and they repaid it. This speaks well of them, and of her. For a Caribou Barbie dimbulb, she seems to know and understand people quite well, and in a way that really counts for something. One wonders how many politicians still serving don’t have such a talent, although one is inclined to believe that one will not have to wait long to find out. Leaks? In Washington? They’re like bottle caps in a beer factory. They happen all the time. Brought in by the truckload, stacked by the palette. Because people don’t know who to trust.

Cassy thinks there was a contest here between Palin and the media, and the media won. The commenter familiar to us here at The Blog That Nobody Reads, Larry Sheldon, goes on record to say…

They won to the extent that they denied to the sate of Alaska what the voters there have a right to,

But they didn’t beat Palin.

Not b[y] a long shot.

All of your “she’s beaten” evidence is from the least credible sources in the history of language. [emphasis mine]

He’s right. Take another reading of the Palin-related sound bites, and keep track of who’s saying what. Everyone who says “stick a fork in her” possesses a Paul-Krugman-esque record of correctness, which is to say a non-existent one.

They shouldn’t be correct about anything, anyway; as we pointed out yesterday, the logic they employ is hideously unsound. We are, this week, consumed in discussing the future of a retiring politician who has none. Their logic says she’s too stupid to ever have had a shot at national office, she sure as hell doesn’t have one now, and yet a profound metamorphosis has taken place in American politics this last Friday. They want it both ways, in other words. The notion that Republicans are just a bunch of losers, because they lost their last, best hope — applies. But they are also to keep their stigma of trying to saddle us with a tundra yokel who can see Russia from her house. That they fail to take note of the obviously dazzling depth of her incompetence, speaks to their political myopia.

Well…you can’t have both of those. You have to choose one: Palin is a promising and effective champion — or she isn’t. I would expect any child claiming the logical grasp needed to graduate from seventh grade, to pick up on this in record time.

Update: Blogsister Daphne has the balls to state a truth avoided by the craven types of lesser substance, in a post called “Hate Is Fun.” She brings to mind a few things I already know:

Thing I Know #34. We are a tribal species, although we’re loathe to admit it, and it comes much more easily to us to bear silly grudges against entire cultures, than legitimate grudges against individual persons.

Thing I Know #40. We are a tribal species, although we’re loathe to admit it, and when people extoll the virtues of “diversity” they tend to talk about skin color and nothing else.

Thing I Know #53. We are a tribal species, although we’re loathe to admit it, and we have very little to say to our neighbors who enjoy a different set of luxuries or who labor under a different set of burdens.

Thing I Know #269. We have a strong tendency to confuse pulling your weight with fitting in. We’re therefore easily confused in the presence of people who pull their own weight but don’t fit in…as well as people who fit in but don’t pull their own weight.

That’s your substandard writing that’ll put you to sleep; now wake up, we’re returning to the subject at hand. Get ready for some far superior written stuff. Daphne’s comments:

Sarah Palin is not of their tribe, culturally or ideologically. She hasn’t played by their rules or bought into their code of narrowly defined group conduct. She’s a renegade anomaly, wielding all the power and benefit of every last feminist tenet without ever stepping foot on that particular reservation. She proves the current batch of young feminists wrong and obsolete, pulling the curtain back to reveal their lack of substance and relevance in the current game of sexual politics. Women have immense power. All the power they want is sitting in the palm of their hand, Sarah knows this fact and lives her life accordingly. She’s no victim of the patriarchy, she’s her own glorious force of life, putting to lie the vaunted despised vagina status many feminists preach all women are cursed with at birth as some delusional high truth of basic female existence.

Tribes get off on viral hate fests against the others, it’s massively fun stuff. Tapping into that primal vein creates unity, crafts a little momentum and fans the flames to chase down and roast rogue elements threatening the group’s comfortable mindset and debatable version of truth. The hate fueled hunt is a bacchanal most humans never pass up given the right conditions – we like a little slaughter with our communal feasts, women particularly enjoy delivering the verbal coup de grace over wine and cheese. We’re well skilled in that form of pack warfare, ripping an objectionable bitch to pieces is one of our ancient talents. Palin’s found herself on the wrong side of some fierce bitches and they’re having a damn fine time flaying the skin off her hide one strip at a time. I see no mystery to these hypocritical feminist attacks, the young ladies are just hewing to their basic natures and having themselves some good old fashioned, primal fun.

I do find it a damn shame that these women will probably never see the irony between their committed dogma and how they’ve treated a woman who’s achieved everything they glorify as the epitome of female success.

D’JEver Notice? XXXI

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Liberals like to call themselves the Reality Based Community. It’s a popular term used especially among liberals who despise George W. Bush.

Perhaps the time has come to re-think that.

They won the last election. Hugely. They won, and now run, freakin’ everything. They act like they lost. They snivel, they whine, they complain, they bitch and carp and moan and bitch some more about some big ol’ power player, some big omniscient omnipotent boss-man not giving ’em a fair shot. Earth to liberals: You are the boss-man!

Now Sarah Palin has ceased to be a threat to them, at least for the immediate future.

They behave as if she has only just begun. Freaking out. Like a sleeping puppy having some terrible nightmare, its little paws waving in the air as fast as they can possibly go. Their story is that this is a real change because Palin doesn’t have a chance now…and didn’t have a chance before…so her resignation is a huge event. Or something. And the country’s dodged a bullet because she would be such an incompetent leader. Although she never had a shot at getting in. And doesn’t have one now. Or something.

These reality-based people are something else. They know for a fact that our oceans are going to boil over due to man-made climate change, somewhere around 2050 or 2100. But they haven’t got a clue about whether it’s going to rain this weekend. They know for a fact that Sarah Palin will be nothing but a pitiful punchline in 2012…but they can’t see three months down the road that a $700 billion “stimulus” plan is going to take off like a scale-model F-18 Hornet made out of wombat shit.

Reality? I’m having an Inigo Montoya reaction. “You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Update: This must be preserved for posterity. With our reality-based people running everything, we are losing our grip on…yeah…reality. Losing our grip so instantly, relative to the tapestry of history, that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will hunger to know how & why.

Josh, this has got to be the blog post of the year. By which I mean — if time capsules took blog posts, and I was invited to contribute to a really tiny one, choosing one item to illustrate to our great-grandchildren the historical backdrop against which the Grand Mistake of 2008 was made…plop. Your three paragraphs with links attached. In they go.

Those are my words. My words to describe…this

Palin to Andrea Mitchell: ‘You’re not listening to me’

Gov. Sarah Palin granted interviews to the legacy media yesterday, and each outlet added its own spin to its presentation of the story. One thing is obvious from watching the various videos and reading the stories: they don’t get it. Palin had to scold NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, for instance. “You’re not listening to me,” she admonished the ditzy reporter after Mitchell asked the governor a question she had already answered.

The Palins’ commercial fishing business requires them to be on the water at the peak of the salmon run, which occurs each year around the 4th of July. The media hacks were clearly out of their element, one reporter describing the experience of being with real people while they are doing real work as “surreal.” From the safe cocoon of the New York studio, Diane Sawyer thanked ABC correspondent Kate Snow in Alaska, “Thanks so much for going up next to the fish,” to get the interview. During the interview, Snow pointed out to Palin: “You have some fish guts on you.” Yes, Kate, that tends to happen to people who work on commercial fishing boats. Flyover country is an alien planet, and those of us who live in it are extraterrestrials to the chattering class. They are still looking for their first clue and not even getting warm.

Video of the Mitchell interview is here, CNN here and ABC here. Write-ups of more interviews by Fox News here, TIME magazine here and the Anchorage Daily News here.

There are updates. Overall, they continue with this faux-reality-based theme…especially with regard to the Manhattan blue-blood know-nothing media theme. Go read the whole thing. These are the people who bring you the news, so it’s important to keep reminding ourselves how little they really know. About anything.

Here’s your video. “I can see Russia.” Aw, a subtle dig, how classy. How balanced and objective. Keep on informing us, you journalists, you. You’re the guys who put Obama in where He is today, and you can’t even admit that you did it…so you must be really, really SMRT!!

*sigh* There are certain professions that have never, ever, in all of human history, attracted real venerability…least of all, from those folks with brains, who knew what they were doing. Journalism seems to have had this problem for awhile.

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” — Thomas Jefferson