The story. The photographer. Recriminations. More recriminations.
It’s like listening to Goebbels watching the Wizard of Oz and screaming at the screen when the curtain is pulled back. Never pull the curtain back: clients don’t like that. Republicans? Republicans will shoot your dog, then render you over to Syria for questioning. Don’t expose Republicans if you value your ass.
[via the movie quiz guy]
•••••
More on Tina Fey’s doppelganger:
McClatchy on the socialism of Alaskan family-based expense accounts (when Uncle Sucker is paying)
Like Hillary’s love for the Cubs and the Yankees, Sarah dug the Steelers until she upgraded to the Seahawks [h/t MrSponge]
A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.
The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. You can almost see them smacking their lips in anticipation, whether they’re wearing lipstick or not.
This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin’s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with “a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,” she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, “run our factories” and “fight our wars” and are “always proud” of their country. As opposed to those lazy, shiftless, unproud Americans — she didn’t have to name names — who are none of the above.
There were several creepy subtexts at work here. The first was the choice of Truman. Most 20th-century vice presidents and presidents in both parties hailed from small towns, but she just happened to alight on a Democrat who ascended to the presidency when an ailing president died in office. Just as striking was the unnamed writer she quoted. He was identified by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal as the now largely forgotten but once powerful right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler.
Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, misrepresented Pegler’s too. He decreed America was “done for” after Truman won a full term in 1948. For his part, Truman regarded the columnist as a “guttersnipe,” and with good reason. Pegler was a rabid Joe McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (“geese,” he called them) were all likely Communists.
Surely Palin knows no more about Pegler than she does about the Bush doctrine. But the people around her do, and they will be shaping a Palin presidency. That they would inject not just Pegler’s words but spirit into their candidate’s speech shows where they’re coming from. Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, said that the Palin-sparked convention created “a whole new Republican Party,” but what it actually did was exhume an old one from its crypt.
The specifics have changed in our new century, but the vitriolic animus of right-wing populism preached by Pegler and McCarthy and revived by the 1990s culture wars remains the same. The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay “cosmopolitan” urbanites (as the sometime cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani has it) who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.
I live in a small town, I like living here, and there are definite advantages to it — it’s easy to get to know other members of the community, the life style is a bit more laid back, and a lot of the hassles of just moving around are absent. But small town values? The ones the Republicans are worshipping seem to be the narrow insularity verging on xenophobia, the judgmental meddling in other people’s affairs, the backward-looking reverence for the good old days (which actually weren’t that good), the worship of ignorance, the easy way authority can personally intrude on people’s lives without oversight, except by a coterie of good old boys. They seem to overlook the schools in neglect, the churches sprouting everywhere like poisonous mushrooms, the alcoholism, the spousal abuse, the kids who just want to get through high school and flee to a city where something is happening, the elderly piling up and outnumbering the young and being shuffled off to cheap complexes, the despair of people caught in dead-end menial jobs with few prospects for going beyond. That’s also small town America, and when I hear a Republican singing the praises of small towns, I have visions of a walmartized wasteland where everyone goes to church. It’s not good.
HER FAMILY IS OFF LIMITS!!! [Please take note of the URL]
•••••
Some reminders that we live in a predatory society where businesses make money from punishing, not serving, their customers.
Citibank routinely harvested “overpayments” from customers [but if a corporation writes you a check for too much, you can be arrested for trying to cash it]
Payday loans, cont. [Congressional Democrats enabled this Republican piracy]
MPAA unilaterally expands their censorship powers to include Internet ads
Standardized test companies punish students who use test prep services [if your school didn't get you ready for college, accept your karma and go to tech school to become a phlebotomist]
Slingbacks for the Hot 2 Trot six-year-olds
Scientology cult successfully removes most anti-Scientology videos from YouTube
UK prosecuting two Oink members who, between them, uploaded a grand total of two CDs
As China’s loan portfolio expands, Taiwan’s freedom reconjugates to the past tense
Guns N’ Roses leaker a hapless pawn in marketing scam?
Radical business plan based on NOT screwing over customers
Like evil genies hoarding treasure, corporations have stolen our freedoms and they won’t give them back unless Congress and President Obama force them to. McCain is just a continuation of the ongoing screw job. Chartjunk has a graphic that shows exactly how McCain will perpetuate the destruction of the Middle Class.
The money is all with McCain (even if they’re shorting him on the campaign donations). I tried to watch the morning talk shows today, but Giuliani forced me to switch from Meet the Press to ABC, where George Will’s lying fucking ass [Mr. I just quoted an obscure 17th C wanker had never heard of the Bush Doctrine?] chased me back to NBC where I turned off the tube rather than listen to more of Bob Woodward’s Beltway bullshit.
But before I turned the TV off, I was exposed to this: The Original Mavericks.
They’re not going to stop lying, not ever. TV networks that value their audience share should start running disclaimers before showing this hog slop.
•••••
More politics:
Rightwing St. Paul columnist explains the Kinko’s controversy
Michigan Republicans called out on foreclosure vote suppression, decline to sue rather than submit to the discovery process
Executing the innocent to score political points
Like the Iraq war, Bush refuses to put Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout on the books
Court rules that newspaper commenters have right to privacy (?!) [I know this is a good thing, but it saddens me to think about all the paid Republican hacks who hide behind anonymous posting names to dish dirt at the Strib]
Bush selling tons of arms right now to ensure global instability continues long after he’s been sentenced to life in some European prison for his war crimes [every gun sold to a fascist eventually ends up in the hands of insurgents]
Norm Coleman has a new ad about Al’s potty mouth that is, surprisingly, pretty lame — except for this bit:
This is exactly what the Republicans do: every time you nail them on the facts, they twist things into some kind of bizarre perceived insult, and demand an apology. That is soooooo lame. Nothing is sadder than two guys facing off and suddenly one of them goes into apology-demanding mode. It tells you two things: 1) the apology demander is too gutless to throw a punch, 2) the rest of the “fight” is going to be really embarrassing to watch.
Oh, and if facial asymmetry is a sign of a dishonest person, Norm’s pre-ad disclaimer says a lot:
This is Norm being judgmental. You might ask just what gives a weasel like Norm the right to be judgmental, but you would be wrong to ask. Like Sarah Palin, Norm’s personal life is out of bounds. It’s wrong to wonder how his marriage survives his East Coast promiscuity, his wife’s West Coast promiscuity, and his latchkey kids who thank god have cell phones so mom and dad can track them down every few days or so.
OK, how cheap is that last bit? Not cheap enough. Norm got to where he is today because a plane mysteriously crashed and, in a brilliant bit of guerrilla theater, five zillion wingnuts had apoplexy because one grief-stricken man said one thing that was somewhat inappropriate, and the resulting hissy fit was a Category 2 windstorm of epic bloviality.
This fall voters will vote remembering who/what Norm Coleman is. That won’t be good for Republicans. Yes, Norm, like Sarah, has his base, but popularity doesn’t always translate into acclaim.
•••••
An oddlot of good, nonpolitical, reads:
The creepy joy of cooking with Vincent Price [h/t Gene in DM]
Concordia University bans Facebook [TechDirt's reaction]
No, we’re not running out of bandwidth [silly thought]
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