Sarah Palin Archive

Rand Paul’s father, Ron Paul (R-TX-14) developed a tremendous following on the Internet, and swayed a pretty significant number of young net-hip professionals to profess a belief in Libertarianism. It’s not surprising; political neophytes could guess the whole marketplace of ideas concept of the early Internet might just work for politics as well.

So I’m not surprised Rand Paul thought he could use the Rachael Maddow show on MSNBC to mine the liberal base for new voters. What he didn’t count on, is that libertarianism itself got a fair hearing. Paul had 18 minutes to answer Maddow’s question about the public accommodations clause of the civil rights act, and he couldn’t, because he knows Americans don’t like “letting the marketplace decide” people’s rights.

So now Paul and his lukewarm supporter Sarah Palin are trying to float the theory that Paul somehow got ambushed, even though that question had become a major problem for Paul in previous newspaper and radio interviews where he tried to make his case.

Blaming MSNBC is not an avenue available to a libertarian. As the conservative media group AIM pointed out, he chose to go on Maddow’s show, it’s a privately owned channel on a non-scarce distribution system, which its viewers watch as an act of free-market capitalism.

The free market doesn’t always work, but it worked this time. It pointed out what’s wrong with libertarianism as a 21st Century political philosophy. If Rand Paul were truly committed to his belief system, he’d be happy that it worked so well in practice.

When Sarah Palin posted a map of “red” congressional districts whose incumbent congresscritters voted for the health care reform act, she used gunsight crosshair icons to designate them. Perhaps she was intentionally feeding into a political climate marked by some recent right wing calls for violence or maybe she was just trying to be cute. Either way, she’s given us one more reason to fear her.

It’s possible she is so completely out of touch with the acrimony of last week’s Health Care protests that she doesn’t understand how this kind of imagery makes her look like a demagogue. Or maybe she’s just a demagogue.

I’m picking the latter, because when even folks like Elizabeth Hasselbeck called her out for it, she chose to counter it with a tortured piece of writing on her Facebook page that tried to claim it was all just one big metaphor, which could just as easily be hoops talk.

While Palin gets props for trying to walk back the rhetoric by claiming its just taken out of context, the whole misdirection attempt has the “dog ate my homework” feel of a 10th grader.

Most 10th graders grow up, and if their thoughts wander back to their immature lies and deceptions, they’re embarrassed. That hasn’t happened yet to Ms. Palin, so we’ll have to collectively be embarrassed for her.

It would be like me trying to argue that my headline is a reference to Ms. Palin doing her hair. Even if I could convince you that was my intent, it would leave you wondering why I chose something so meaningless when I could have found a thousand better ways to make my point.

The Republican ticket has devolved into a sad, tired and ugly thing the likes of which I’ve never seen in 55 years.

When you take somebody fresh out of the PTA who can barely handle a promotion to mayor of Wasilla and was clearly over her head as governor, and launch her as high as she’s tried to soar, you’ve got to expect a graceless crash. The part of the Brian WIlliams interview that was aired tonight shows McCain and Palin as buffoonish.

There’s a dog and pony show quality to the pair that makes you realize how well most experienced politicians mask that taint, which must come naturally to most folks.

When they sarcastically called Obama “The One,”I doubt they ever anticipated they would be so disorganized, off-message and downright self-destructive just a few weeks later. Their remedies make their plight worse, its almost like resistance is futile. Maybe some of ‘em on the religion rich-right may be starting to think “The One” without the sarcasm.

In the interview, McCain had this nervous spunkiness that Robert Preston would be great at portraying. He was on a hot griddle, because next to him was a woman who was working without a net and not good at keeping her balance. There were moments that reminded me of the Couric interviews.

You could tell that she was being asked about things that raised questions she’d never even considered before. She was torn between trying to formulate an answer while simultaneously trying to grasp what was to her a new idea. Its cruel. No its fun, no its cruel.

And so sad. It would be fun if Robert Preston and Charo were playing the parts, and Blake Edwards was directing it for the screen. Everybody would get the joke and everybody could laugh. This is cruel because the more we learn about Sarah Palin the more the question becomes how could this woman even be considered for the job of being a heartbeat away.

That embarasses not just one woman, but a whole campaign, a whole party, and a whole nation. We should all be totally ashamed of ourselves.

One of the most telling examples of how Palin represents more of the same “George Bush mentality” came tonight when she gave voice to the time-worn political adage: “I’ll answer the question I wish you’d asked, instead of what you did ask.” Usually, a politician doesn’t brag about the fact he or she doesn’t have to actually answer the question, but Palin brazenly staked out her claim to be non-responsive in a way that harkened back to Bogart’s Treasure of Sierra Madre.

‘Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!’

She did it again when she tried to circumvent global warming by saying she didn’t want to “argue” about it. That time, Biden called her on it, and to great effect! She did remarkably well tonight, considering that a “good” performance is probably one that doesn’t need substantial rewrite to wind up in an SNL script.

But Biden was excellent at the long, slow, deliberate process of remiding Americans why we’re where we are, and that McCain was instrumental in getting us here, and the instapoll numbers are bearing that out. Even on the Faux News website.

Sarah Palin is today being trotted through the United Nations in a sort of live-flash-card attempt to give her some foreign-policy gravitas. But the McCain campaign should save its time; Sarah Palin doesn’t grasp global concepts easily, even when she sees hints of the macro concepts in micro examples.

Some of these micro-examples have resulted in complaints from her apologists about the way we have learned about the micro-events. They were personal, they say, and should be kept private.

Her unwed pregnant daughter, for instance should be off-limits, even though her soldier-son can be worked as press fodder. Maybe if she’d learned a public policy lesson from her family’s personal problems her daughter’s delicate condition wouldn’t be so attractive to the pundits. Abstinence pledges, purity rings and promise-keeping don’t prevent pregnancy, they certainly don’t prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Abstinence education doesn’t work, and because we know she’s seen it up close, it suggests that she isn’t adept at learning from experience.

Could Sarah Palin find Alaska on the polar-projection world map on this flag?

When her Yahoo account was hacked it raised a larger question: Sarah Palin’s competence to understand even fundamental computer security, even if that means knowing her limitations and using sites paid for by the State of Alaska, learning and following their guidelines.

Since the mid-70s we’ve known that pursuing an energy policy that consists merely of finding more fossil-fuels to keep them as cheap as possible only results in mushrooming inefficient consumption, not only for us but for the rapidly industrializing world. Though the Republican admnistration has denied it for nearly 8 years, greenhouse gasses are choking our planet. Its even more noticible up there in Alaska, and drilling and mining more carbon-based fuel isn’t the answer because it doesn’t work, and if she were wiser, she’d know that.

We’re learning more every day about the nature of our universe, thanks to some very clever unmanned space missions, and some even more clever earth-bound monitoring systems. These are telling us that the world is a lot older than claimed by just about any Christian creation theory you can find. Trying to harmonize the Old Testament with cosmology by aging the universe at a few thousand doesn’t work. If she knew any Medieval church history, she’d see the pitfalls for public figures and ditch the dogma, because it doesn’t work.

But in her running mate, she has an understanding friend. If anyone should know that torture doesn’t work, it would be a man tortured to the breaking point who signed false documents and repudiated them later. Yet John McCain capitulated to the demands of the Bush Administrtaion to approve torture.

No one should be more aware of the pitfalls of financial deregulation than one of the two members of the Keating Five re-elected after deregulation of financial institutions resulted in bank failures and a government bailout. Yet he embraced Phil Gramm and again supported deregulation resulting in an even more spectacular set of financial failures. “Because It Doesn’t Work” doesn’t stand in John McCain’s way, so perhaps that trait in Sarah Palin is just one more reason he picked her for the ticket.

Today, we have one more example of Sarah’s church life slamming hard against her political one. John McCain’s chief of staff has been outed as gay. No doubt we’ll hear the Redstaters and the Palin apologists wailing that somebody’s personal life has been sacrificed, but its another example of Sarah Palin wrapping herself in beliefs that are inconsistent with the real world. She’s not only out of touch with the macro, she can’t even see what’s wrong in the micro: the dissonance of her beliefs vs. the private lives of her own immediate circle.

McCain and Palin’s theories aren’t new, radical, or maverick. They’ve been tried and tested in administrations from Reagan to Bush, through 4 decades of public policy and social doctrine, from Hanoi to Gitmo, and each one has come up wanting because it just doesn’t work. The fact she can’t see this when we know she’s seen so much of it up close should scare us to death.