Sarah Palin has pretty much brought my life to a standstill this week. Not because she’s a woman, not because she’s an evangelical, but because she’s a prime example of the small town hell I left behind 37 years ago when this farm kid packed his bags and moved to the city.
The Sarah Palins I dealt with in my youth weren’t beauty queens. No, back in my day Catholics were still Catholics, and not converts to the pentecostal movement like Sarah Palin. Where I grew up Catholics tended to stay Catholic because of the profoundly anti-Catholic clique that ruled my world: my Lutheran church’s “100 widows.” With the exception of those elderly busybodies, my hometown was still pretty egalitarian.
But my church was the largest in town, so big we had to split into two softball teams (just like the Catholics). So large we made our own rules, which is why our ALC church sounded more like the Missouri Synod on most Sundays. Like any large group, there were differences of opinion among the parishioners. Some realized that in the ’60s the church needed to reach out to its young people, and our Sunday school classes (which didn’t end until you graduated from high school) started to become more “relevant.” (Younger readers should be advised that relevance was “the” buzzword of the late ’60s.)
Art and Char, two of our more liberal congregants, took responsibility for teaching World Religion to my just confirmed peers (we were mostly sophomores). It was one of the best classes I’ve ever taken in my life. Art and Char didn’t teach us what was wrong with these religions, they taught us what these other people believed, and in so doing helped us to better understand how differently people think in other parts of the world. But the 100 Widows were not amused, and shut us down. Art and Char, as I recall, didn’t even get to finish out the school year. The next year we had to take a class from the leader of the 100 Widows, a well-intentioned older woman who, when challenged, would always say something to the effect of “the devil is here among us, prompting you to ask that question.” And that would be that. She single-handedly pushed most of us away from the church.
Myrtle (that was her name), taught me about power, and how a small group of like-minded individuals could take over a much larger organization like our 1,400-member church (that may not sound large now, but there were only 10,000 people living in the entire county). For me, it was all Mark Twain and atheism after a year of Myrtle. If she was right, then I wanted to go to hell.
Women (and men) like Myrtle were a necessary precursor to the Sarah Palin generation. I have no clue where the power lies in today’s churches, but then it was with the older women. Men didn’t live as long back then because contrary to whatever the liars tell you, hard work will kill you. That and men didn’t used to be quite so churched. I had to read history books to learn how godless the Old West was, but my Dad’s generation still knew families that were defiantly unchurched. By the time I came along it was safe to say that anyone who didn’t go to church didn’t advertise that fact. Not being churched was the next worst thing to being a Communist in my part of Iowa, and I think just about everywhere else in the Cold War U.S.A.
And so countless millions of young people like myself left rural America. Most of us had to because there were no jobs, but in fact it was mostly the “hippies” who left, and the conservatives who didn’t, or who came back after college. Small towns like the ones I grew up next to became more and more conservative, and the evangelicals started showing up in greater and greater numbers.
I think the change came about with Reagan in the early ’80s. Rural communities in the north finally began to see what the South had been living with for so long. Which church you belonged to again became a big deal. For a while, in the ’70s, the old divisions had started to fade away. The evangelicals put a stop to that.
It started with the school boards. The thumpers grabbed a couple of seats and suddenly all the usual crap started: Creationism, anti-evolution crackpottery, book banning, wog bashing, etc. And it wasn’t just old women anymore, these movements were led by male pastors and by working women who subordinated themselves to male leadership. They scared the shit out of my hometown and the majority eventually made it a point to vote in the school board elections so they could be rid of the yahoos.
But they came back. They allied themselves with the jock culture that sprang up with an Eastern German fanaticism in the wake of Reagan’s goalpost-worshipping America. Football was a better wedge issue than Jesus. I had a “braniac” nephew with a fast mouth who put up with a lot of bullying despite being on the football team. (My experiences were much the same but I’m glad to say the bullies didn’t scar my nephew anymore than they did me thanks to good parenting and the fact that our bullies weren’t total braindead steroidal psychopaths like you find in many parts of Texas this country).
No, I can’t say my hometown ever had a “Sarah Palin” to deal with, but I like to think my hometown is quite a bit smarter than most places.
No one has ever accused Alaskans of being too smart for their own good. Being a crusty individual makes you an easy target for the joiners and agenda-minded. The hermits, drunks, cranks, bigots, former whatevers who end up in Alaska do not, I suspect, turn out to vote in huge numbers, and that makes them vulnerable to those who are organized and of a like mind.
Well, more mainstream Alaskans have decided that someone has to speak up, no matter how hard that makes life for the “tattlers” after all this blows over. The L.A. Progressive has some chilling stories about Palin, stories you WON’T read in the Strib or PiPress because mainstream newspapers will protect Palin for the most part, however much some of their columnists might try to blow the whistle.
“So Sambo beat the bitch!”
This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.
“It was kind of disgusting,” Lucille, who is part Aboriginal, said in a phone interview after admitting that she is frightened of being discovered telling folks in the “lower 48” about life near the North Pole.
Then, almost with a sigh, she added, “But that’s just Alaska.”
Racial and ethnic slurs may be “just Alaska” and, clearly, they are common, everyday chatter for Palin.
Besides insulting Obama with a Step-N’-Fetch-It, “darkie musical” swipe, people who know her say she refers regularly to Alaska’s Aboriginal people as “Arctic Arabs” – how efficient, lumping two apparently undesirable groups into one ugly description – as well as the more colourful “mukluks” along with the totally unimaginative “f**king Eskimo’s,” according to a number of Alaskans and Wasillians interviewed for this article.
But being openly racist is only the tip of the Palin iceberg. According to Alaskans interviewed for this article, she is also vindictive and mean. We’re talking Rove mean and Nixon vindictive.
There’s a reason why Palin’s first action as Mayor and then Governor was to fire people. When you hold racist views this caustic, you must surround yourself with yes people who will never, ever talk to reporters.
[M]any people in Alaska, and particularly Wasilla, are reluctant to speak or be quoted by name because they’re afraid of her as well as the state Republican Party machine. Apparently, the power elite are as mean as the winters.
“The GOP is kind of like organized crime up here,” an insurance agent in Anchorage who knows the Palin family, explained. “It’s corrupt and arrogant. They’re all rich because they do private sweetheart deals with the oil companies, and they can destroy anyone. And they will, if they have to.”
“Once Palin became mayor,” he continued, “She became part of that inner circle.”
Like most other people interviewed, he didn’t want his name used out of fear of retribution. Maybe it’s the long winter nights where you don’t see the sun for months that makes people feel as if they’re under constant danger from “the authorities.” As I interviewed residents it began sounding as if living in Alaska controlled by the state Republican Party is like living in the old Soviet Union: See nothing that’s happening, say nothing offensive, and the political commissars leave you alone. But speak out and you get disappeared into a gulag north of the Arctic Circle for who-knows-how-long.
Alright, that’s an exaggeration brought on by my getting too little sleep and building too much anger as I worked this article. But there’s ample evidence of Palin’s vindictive willingness to destroy people she sees as opponents. Just ask the Wasilla town administrator she hired before firing him because he rebelled against the way Palin demanded he do his job, or the town librarian who refused to hold the book burning Walpurgisnach Mayor Palin demanded.
Ironically, Palin was pushed into hiring the administrator by the party poobahs who helped get her elected after she got herself into trouble over a number of precipitous firings which gave rise to a recall campaign.
“People who fought her attempt to oust the librarian are on her enemies list to this day,” states Anne Kilkenny, a Wasilla resident and one of the few Alaskans willing to speak on-the-record, for attribution, about Palin. In fact, Kilkenny actually circulated an e-mail letter about Palin that was verified and printed by The Nation.
I’m sure you’ve seen that email, but click on the link if you haven’t because everyone else has seen it by now except you. When I read it, I began to realize that this isn’t going to be like other elections. The religious bigots I left behind are finally all growed up and ready to stomp some atheist ass (right after they rid the world of Islamo-fascism).
But the proof isn’t in the gossip, it’s in the decisions Palin made. Once you isolate yourself from the greater community, your actions increasingly come to represent the wisdom of the few at the expense of collective wisdom.
According to Kilkenny and others in Wasilla as well as Juneau, Palin reduced progressive property taxes for businesses while mayor and increased a regressive sales tax which even hits necessities such as food. The tax cuts she promoted in her St. Paul speech actually benefited large corporate property owners far more than they benefited residents. Indeed, Kilkenny insists that many Wasilla home owners actually saw their tax bill skyrocket to make up for the shortfall. Two other Wasillian’s with whom I spoke said property taxes on their modest, three bedroom homes rose during the Palin regime.
To an outsider, it would seem hard to do, but an oil-rich town with zero debt on the day she was inaugurated mayor was left saddled with $22 million of debt by the time she moved away to become governor – especially since nothing was spent on things such as improving the city’s infrastructure or building a much-needed sewage treatment plant. So what did Mayor Palin spend the taxpayer’s money on, if not fixing streets and scrubbing sewage?
For starters, she remodelled her office. Several times over, as a matter of fact.
Then Palin spent $1 million on an unnecessary, new park that no one other than the contractors and Palin seemed to want. Next, Sarah doled out more than $15 million of taxpayer money for a sports complex that she shoved through even though the city did not own clear title to the land; now, seven years later, the matter is still in litigation and lawyer fees are said to be close to at least half of the original estimated price of the facility.
She also worked hard to get voters approval of a $5.5 million bond proposal for roads that could have been built without borrowing. Anchorage may not be the center of the financial universe but, like good Republicans everywhere, Sarah Palin knows how to please Alaskan bankers and bond dealers.
For good measure, she turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots.
You don’t need to see Palin’s campaign flyers to know that she didn’t campaign on doing these things. No, big unilateral expenditures come about because of backroom and not townhall meetings. No one ever gets wind of the big deals until they’ve been worked out and all but signed, and then anyone who stands up in opposition finds themselves smeared and ridiculed. And, in a small state (population wise anyhow), local reporters find it hard to bell the cat.
Palin managed to land what Anne Kilkenny says is the plumb political appointment in the state: Chair of Alaska’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (OGCC), a $122,400 per year patronage slot with no real authority to do anything other than hold meetings. She took the job despite having no background in energy issues and, as it turned out, not liking the work.
“She hated the job,” an OGCC staff member who is not authorized to speak with the news media told me. “She hated the hours and she hated what little work there was to do. But she couldn’t figure out a way to get out of the thing without offending Gov. Murkowski” and the state Republican Party regulars, some of whom were pissed off they didn’t get appointed.
But ever the opportunist, Palin quickly concocted a way. First, she waged a campaign with the local news media claiming that the position was overpaid and should be abolished – despite the fact that she lobbied Murkowski hard to get it. Then, mounting what she saw as a white horse, Palin raised a cloud of dust by resigning from the OGCC and riding away with an undeserved reputation as a “reformer.”
But when a local reporter dared to suggest that the reformer Empress has no clothes, Palin tried to get her fired.
“She came at me like I was trying to steal her kids,” said the targeted reporter, who now works for an oil company in Anchorage. “I heard she had a wild temper and vicious mean streak but it’s nothing like you can imagine until she turns it on you.”
But Palin is still a budget hawk, right? Um, no, not according to the real record, which is substantially different than the Republican hagiography we’ve been reading.
As Governor, Palin gave the legislature no direction and budget guidelines, according to the chair of a legislative committee. But then she staged a huge grandstand play of line-item vetoing countless projects, calling them pork. “They were restored because of public outcry and legislative action,” the aide said. “She vetoed them mostly because she had no idea what they were or why they were important.”
But it was enough to get the McCain, who is mostly unobservant of the world around him anyway, to think Palin has a reputation as being “anti-pork”.
In fact, Juneau observers note that Palin kept her hand stuck out as far as anyone for pork ladled out by indicted Sen. Ted Stevens. She only opposed the “bridge to nowhere” after it became clear that it would be politically unwise to keep supporting it, these same insiders assert. Then, Palin fell back on her old habits and publicly humiliated him for pork-barrel politics.
But back to the real Sarah Palin. Some, unlike the wait person in Anchorage who is fearful for her job, are eager to go on the record because they left Alaska, giving them the courage to speak more freely.
“Palin is a conniving, manipulative, a**hole,” someone who thinks these are positive traits in a governor told me, summing up Palin’s tenure in Alaska state and local politics.
“She’s a bigot, a racist, and a liar,” is the more blunt assessment of Arnold Gerstheimer who lived in Alaska until two years ago and is now a businessman in Idaho.
Thanks to the L.A. Progressive’s Charley James for writing the best overview of Palin I’ve seen so far. But I’ve got more than that. If you have a voracious appetite for this stuff, DemFromCT, all have good lists of links to more commentary on Palin. And here are some links I’ve been saving:
Palin’s church: NYTimes, Chicago Tribune
Five colleges, and no, that’s not normal if you’re not pursuing an advanced degree (and even then that’s more than normal)
Sarah, I’d like to introduce you to Hillary (one of the more noxious tropes that emerged this week was that of pundits contrasting Michele Obama with Sarah Palin, which is like comparing Cindy McCain with Joe Biden)
Kornblut on Hillary v Palin
Boxer has a few words about Palin’s “very sarcastic punch”
Bette Davis on Sarah Palin
ErrorThis video doesn’t existAnchorage Daily: Palin stonewalling
Newsweek on how Team McCain is helping Palin stonewall TrooperGate
TrooperGate (ABC video, one I’ve already linked to at another site but well worth watching)
More details on the obsessive nature of Team Palin when it comes to going after their enemies
Kevin Drum on the lack of meaningful vetting
TBogg: “Sarah the Obama Slayer has been dispatched back to Alaska as sort of a “fuck you, come and get me” to the national press”
More copyright infringement from Barracuda party
Strib commenters scorch Palin as divisive
I’m sure you already know that eBay jet sale never happened
Yes, Palin does look like Tina Fey
But add to that the overall nasty campaigning and ugly propaganda that’s emerging in the wake of McCain’s red moose meat nominee:
National Organization of Ugly Women
RNC delegate and member of Congress rips on “godless” colleges
CNBC on the importance of wearing skirts
Anchor babies, the scheming newborns who conspire to make their parents citizens
9/11 enters into the Republicans’ revisionist history
Infighting amongst the saved
ErrorThis video doesn’t existAP still fourniering up a storm
Smarmification (old skook fournierification)
Wolcott: Sneer & Loathing
Yes, a member of Congress has called Barack “uppity”
Since when is community organizing a bad thing?
Robert Parry on the voluminous lying
Krugman on the politics of resentment
Bob Herbert on Republicans running against themselves
Factchecking Huckabee’s lying ass
ErrorThis video doesn’t exist
Hell, it got so nasty this week that Howie Kurtz had to back off his Palin column to issue some caveats.
How do you fight back? Well, not by giving up. Maybe it’s the conservatism that comes with age, but I’m finding more and more lefties who find it fashionable to critique Obama. Some, like buddy Mick, do so from real convictions and an inborn passion. But more and more I see intellectual snark hiding out in the comments, ripping Obama for not campaigning on issues that don’t need to be brought up during a national campaign. Frankly, I have to wonder if the Republicans don’t infiltrate the intelligentsia’s blog comments just like they do the lesser blogs. [Check out the comments on these two very good posts about Obama's beliefs, one, two]
This is about winning, because we can’t afford to lose again.
Maha has a great Joe Biden clip on calling out the lying liars
Media Matters on our fair and balanced media
Al Gore doesn’t even have a jet
Winning is the product of constructive activity. Granted, I may seem like a pretty negative guy most of the time, but we’re now out of the primary season and into the main event, and you won’t see any criticism of the Democratic party from me until after the November election. Nothing means anything if we don’t win this one, and those who Nader out will be, imho, committing the horrible crime I’ve been accused of ever since I voted for Nader in 2000. Then I could say with a straight face that I believed Congress would stop Bush from doing his worst. No one can say that today, not after what we’ve been through, and certainly not after seeing the Keystone fascists in action this week.
—)(—
I can’t close this post without excerpting this gratifyingly cheap shot at Pawlenty:
I was talking with a couple big-time Norm Coleman supporters, Roger and Shari Wilsey, of St. Paul, when Gov. Tim Pawlenty (and eight “aides”) walked by. The Wilseys are friends of mine. Or at least they were until, I’m told, they got wind of a ripping Normie had taken at my hand. (Officially, I’m blaming it on trolls.) But they were as gracious as always.
I mentioned that buzz around the press mob was that the National Enquirer is apparently working on a story about an affair Palin herself has had. (I know nothing more about it, but it is fun tossing it ”out there” for the sake of a reaction. You do silly things to get anything spontaneous out of this crowd.) The Wilseys were flat-affect.
“But there goes the guy who should have been your pick,” I said, pointing at Pawlenty.
“No,” said Roger with reflexive certainty. “They made the right pick. He doesn’t bring the charisma she does.”
Rick Perlstein let it go at this: “Nap time with Timmy Pawlenty: McCain sure made the right call on this one.”
—)(—
I was pretty easy on the cops this last week, but I can’t let them off the hook for how things started to fall apart. We’ll never know how much of the problems stemmed from Sheriff Fletcher’s fascist raids on Minneapolis hippy houses, but Fletcher and his Constitution-flouting DHS masters certainly did their damnedest to piss off the anarchists who were but a tiny part of a much larger peaceful protest movement. Add to that the fact that the ranks of the anarchists were riddle with police spies, and you’re suddenly back to ground less than zero, which in this case would be Richard Nixon.
How much of the violent protest this week was instigated by police informers and paid agitators? We now know that Nixon’s FBI infiltrated the anti-Vietnam War movement, pushing it to violent acts in an effort to further polarize a nation that has never recovered from Tricky Dick’s lies. Hell, the RNC didn’t even count all the Ron Paul votes — the only things that happened in St. Paul this week were made by autocratic decision makers.
By week’s end some cops were most certainly out of patience, and I’m sure Fletcher’s decision to flog urine and feces (the natural byproducts of 30 anarchists temporarily sharing a house) undoubtedly rattled many cops, especially those with less training and experience from the ‘burbs.
No, the week didn’t end well, and now there are stories emerging that call into question whether or not the rule of law still holds in these United States of America.
“Police kicked down doors with guns drawn on families with their children at dinnertime,” Gillis charged. “Reporters and the media at large have been repeatedly targeted for repression. Activists have been abducted off the street in unmarked vans and political prisoners held without access to medical attention.”
The allegation about police use of unmarked vans was apparently first made on August 31 by RAW STORY contributor Lindsay Beyerstein, who was reporting on the convention for FireDogLake. She wrote that “ColdSnap is reporting 9 arrests downtown near the Excel center” and then added in an update, “One of the 9 protesters arrested was a nun, seen being loaded into an unmarked blue van.”
These protesters were later released, but it’s going to take a while to sort out what actually happened, and St. Paulites should be delighted to know that NYC is still settling lawsuits stemming from the lawless behavior of police during the 2004 RNC.
As a nation, I don’t think we can stoop much lower than we did this past week. We now have a national ticket that embraces religious bigotry and affirms all the old “isms” that used to appall the rest of the civilized world.
Meanwhile, back in Denver, new details make it clear that the would-be Obama assassins were hit with lesser charges because the hyper-politicized U.S. Attorney, who had earlier thrown the book at an inmate for mailing baby powder to McCain, didn’t have any problems with someone wanting to kill Obama. That was a real plot, but U.S. Attorneys handpicked by Karl Rove want you to kill Democrats.
Btw, we invaded Pakistan this week.
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“But I like to think my hometown is quite a bit smarter than most places.”
Most places? Sure. Just not Cresco.
And what in the hell is a good Norwegian lad doing coming from a place like Cresco?
Ha ha! I’m not even Norwegian. My wife is. I’m Swedish, with some Irish, German, and Bohemian!
However, the closest my family gets to their Swedish heritage is the occasional Swedish meatball. So I leverage my wife’s heritage as much as I can.