The return of Ass®ocket™

Elle Woods is a stretch, but Judith Warner is right to say that Sarah Palin is quickly becoming an object of pity. Via Spencer Ackerman:

“I don’t think she knows how she’s going to finish a sentence when she starts one.” 

Julie Gauthier, Center for Independent Media

I never thought she’d last this long, and I don’t credit her for her longevity. No, this is all McCain’s insane criminal Bush posse. They won’t let Palin fail because that would mean admitting that McCain failed to vet her. Except he did fail, and he should have vetted her.

This isn’t Quantum Leap. You can’t just wake up one morning to find yourself inhabiting the body of the Republican party’s veep nominee. As much as people joke about the vice presidency, it’s not a gig you can fake your way through. Especially not when you have witch doctors in your closet.

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Lileks writes about zero tolerance today, and uses lots of frownie emoticons to express his disapproval. To his credit, he’s been trash talking zero tolerance for a long time now. Ditto Joe Soucheray who, in ‘01, wrote:

For all you readers who disapprove of my anachronistic thinking, would you please tell me which aspect of modern psychobabble education actually works? Is it the self-esteem part? The it-takes-a-village part? The zero-tolerance-including-snowballs part?

When rightwing comedians set their sights on school administrators and other so-called liberal authority figures, their wit is devastating.

How then is it that they can’t see the same folly when it’s manifested by their elected leaders? Here’s some zero tolerancing Lileks and Soucheray and their ilk have been cool with:

Zero tolerance for Saddam Hussein

Zero tolerance for antiwar protesters

Zero tolerance for endangered species

Zero tolerance for equal rights for (women, Muslims, GLBT, etc.)

Zero tolerance for Bush haters

The list goes on and on, altho I’m sure both Lileks and Soucheray can point to items they haven’t flogged. No one lets all ten knuckles touch the earth at one time. For starters it’s hard to drag your thumb knuckles. For seconders, all paleocons are compromised. It might be Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, it could be BC Bud, but somewhere in their refrigerators you will find cheese touching meat, right next to a porkchop feeling up the hummus. They’d call it part of their right to privacy, but we know it for what it is: heresy. Secrets play a big part in your life when you hang out with zero tolerance conservatives all the time.

Lileks has a Mac. He understands, but he plays the game anyhow, ridiculing those he disagrees with even when they operate under the same powers Lileks cheerfully cedes to our political leaders. Boxcutters are OK for schoolkids, but not OK for airplanes? 

Again, it takes real perseverance to kill someone with a boxcutter, and nowadays I doubt most folks would stand idly by while you doggedly saw through a key portion of your victim’s anatomy. Isn’t it time some of our wingnut Menckens turned their scathing ripostes on the shampoo-in-a-baggie ass clowns who run the Transportation Security Agency?

Or can they only pick on the relatively weak and powerless, and then only at moments when the tide of public opinion is in their favor?

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I had a Katherine Kersten moment this morning. Yes, she’s still on vacation, and no, I don’t read her blog, but I did see a picture of her blonde doppelganger:

 

On the right (of course) is Katherine Kersten, smug, patriotically correct, and scornful of those who do not share her values. On the left, Jeanne Zapata, a bus cleaner who represented herself in court and who just won a six-figure settlement against the Met Council for the barbaric and sexist working conditions at the East Metro garage.

How well does conservatism work for uneducated women who work in grab-ass environments for peanuts? Not well according to Zapata. When the laws on the books weren’t enforced, she did a terrible, terrible thing: she sued. Worse, she won. 

Fucking tort law. Now women everywhere will think they have a choice about how things are run. 

And yes, I’d love to see Kersten write a column about Zapata, but I’m not entirely sure Zapata would be willing to talk to Kersten.

She describes her former workplace as “totally evil,” and the civil complaint she filed alleges unequal treatment and numerous crude behaviors among her former co-workers. She alleges she was told she was fired for moving a security camera away from a women’s restroom, interfering with an investigation, and being insubordinate and disruptive….

[S]he’s considering asking for a new trial. There’s a lot that the jury wasn’t allowed to hear about, she said, and she knows she would be better prepared next time.

“I want a new trial because I want to do things right that I made a mistake at before,” she said. “I should’ve objected to [the Met Council's] evidence all along, but I didn’t want the jury to think that I had anything to fear.”

Kersten could never approve of such a woman. Zapata is fearless, but modern day Republicans are the party of fear and subordination to authority. What would Katherine Kersten’s life have been like had she been a bus cleaner? I think we can assume no lawsuits would have been filed, but there would have been a lot of angry prayers submitted down at St. Paedophilia’s.

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McCain/Economics:

Kevin G. Hall

E.J. Dionne

Paul Krugman

Eugene Robinson

Paul Lightman and Margaret Talev

Tom Toles

WaMu sold to J.P. Morgan

I’ve given up on there being a debate tonight. McCain is determined to suck all the joy out of this election, turning it into a bitter ender festival of slights, a dim-bulbed paean to paleoconservatism, alleged mavericity, despoiled tundra and closely monitored public libraries.

Maybe Lileks and Soucheray can team up to write a musical about this slo-mo, haz mat train wreck of a campaign. Something light. Something with corndogs in it.

But maybe not quite this GLBT friendly.

 

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