At moments in the dark of night, as the Teabaggers are revealed as the creation of cynical for-profit lobbying firms, I have to ask myself who the fuck is running Sarah Palin? Idiocy of this intensity does not occur by random osmosis. Moving across the country on her zigzag Overdrive tour, the woman is on TV almost every fucking hour. She made $12 million in the last nine months, and even Tina Fey has become part of the hype. This is more than pandering to a cult of belligerence ignorance. It’s putting the cult on a sold mega-corporate foundation. Palin is the Hannah Montana of modern politics. A confluence of fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, where nothing is what it seems, but the customers are too bemused to know what’s happening. Glenn Beck may go toe to toe with the black helicopters and the Godless Bolsheviks, but Pain is making the mindset a spectacle. It takes a Disney to bring on Hannah Montana, so who’s doing the Disney for Klondike Barbie? Take a look at her $100,000 speaking contract. The document was not cooked up by some grifters out of Fairbanks.
Very soon Palin shows will have flashing lights, fireworks, and smoke. She’ll become the Mothership at appearances rapidly evolving into high-tech Nuremburg rallies, outstripping anything Mick Jagger tried, even at his most imperial. I get a whiff of mega-church and Michael Jackson madness, but quantum more baleful. Or maybe I’m insane.
No one in the media is asking close to the right questions. What is Palin? What entity is financing her seemingly random, Godzilla progress? And what does that entity want? Power? Profit? Control? Some think-tank nightmare of a psycho-civilized brainwashed oligarchy? All of the above? Keith Olbermann may call her an idiot, but never wonders why she’s really being inflicted on us.
We’re being force fed a phenomenon here, neighbours, and I’d really like to know why and to what real end? It’s not often – in fact never – that Doc40 quotes the National Journal, we make the exception when someone called Paul Starobin expends one hell of lot of words on a ploddingly devious, neocon quasi-intellectual case that Sarah Palin is…um…smarter than the average. But the average what? President? Sideshow? Popstar? What? Starobin doesn’t so much as ask. He talks in terms of the presidency but never quite nails it as the ultimate Palin goal.
“The bigger problem is that Palin, notwithstanding her deficiencies in knowledge, is not without a set of beliefs about the United States and its global mission. Convictions can come from books but also, and usually more powerfully, from life experience.”
Umm..?
“Harsh criticism of Palin is not necessarily "persecution," as her sympathizers maintain. Although some of the attacks are on the loony side -- the Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan has assiduously raised suspicions that Trig is her grandson, not her son, thus making Palin out to be a brazen liar and a complete phony, on top of being an ignoramus -- so it goes in American politics. Grover Cleveland, in the 1884 campaign, endured taunts that he had fathered a bastard son. Evidently, there is something about Palin that drives her critics crazy. But if they can pause for breath, they might take a lesson from history as to the wisdom of mocking a political figure for a supposed lack of intelligence. The caricature of Eisenhower as Donald Duck did not stop him from twice defeating, in Electoral College landslides, the cerebral Adlai Stevenson, the darling of the intellectual crowd. The Georgetown set's view of Reagan as "an amiable dunce" did not keep voters from giving the Gipper landslide wins over Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer known for his propensity to micromanage, in 1980, and Walter Mondale in 1984. And Bush won re-election over John Kerry in 2004 despite being pilloried as Cheney's puppet. Whereas Democrats tend to criticize GOP figures as dolts, Republicans tend to criticize prominent Democratic politicians, from Gore to Kerry to Obama, not as dummies but as reincarnated Stevensons -- elite, egghead types out of touch with mainstream America. As results suggest, this is not an exchange with an obvious payoff for Democrats. Palin's critics would be wise to marshal the best assault they can on the basis of her convictions -- on the substance of her vision of America and her policies for fulfilling that vision. This is unimpeachable ground for an inquest. So what if she scribbles crib notes on the palm of her hand: She's doing the scribbling, and the only really interesting question concerns what she is writing down.” Click here for the whole weird thing.
Click here for a pdf of the Palin contract
Click here for Frankie Laine
The secret word is Disconnect
You probably are a bit insane, Doc, but that doesn't make you wrong. She is the patron saint of the High Church of Ignorance and i suspect her next few years will tell a story even John Irving couldn't have coined.
ReplyDeleteSTOP OVER ESTIMATING HER!
ReplyDeleteSometimes all you have is a poster-presence... Palin is a shock-jockey "politician" a lot of sound bites & cover story drama without any worthwhile substance. She's the best hope the RNC has to retain some level of control over that colossal fuck up called the Tea Party... the party fractured & these people who were bankrolled & hyped by the RNC & Fox News weren't even supporting their suggested candidates.
Palin was essentially ousted & had made a book deal out of the tattered remains of her career until all this Tea Party nonsense. Think about it, she fled office in the midst of growing scandal, undermining everything she'd ever blurted about cutting & running. There was little future left for her legacy prior to the fracture in the republican party. They've pulled her back out in a desperate bid at pasting the pieces together.
She's great as smoke & mirrors, gives people anything to focus on except what is actually important. Think back to the Al Jazeera video of the McCain/Palin rallies... people talking about the holy spirit, the blacks taking over & how if something walks & talks like a duck it must be a terrorist infiltration operation. Those are the votes Palin is campaigning for on the Tea Party Express, because desperate times call for desperate measures...
Stop talking about the hillbilly shotgun jesus (or whatever) minority, the attention is exactly what they're after, if this publicity stunt doesn't work, they're fucked. Instead, focus on growing our majority & strengthening the bonds that already exist. We already put Obama in office, like it or not, now the opposition seeks to retake the stronghold, they're even trying, albeit haphazardly, to use our own tactics against us. They're on their backs fighting tooth & nail, we need to stomp on their throat while they're down & end this here & now. You know all about the RNC & their cronies, they're funding Palin's tour bus. What we need are more scandals like the lesbian bondage club, things that strike at their core fundamentals & makes for resignation & talk about it, increase the talk about it. That increases the chances of tea partiers choosing rouge candidates & making their effort to glue the republican party back together long enough to make it through midterms with Palin's bullshit.
Take note... the RNC had 9 million in folding money, the dems had under 500k. If we lose this upcoming struggle, all our efforts will have been for nothing. If we deal out a kill shot here & now, we don't have to worry about a strong base to fight in 2012, they'll degenerate beyond the help of Palin publicity if we don't allow them to keep their footing in this election. Those people said they aren't voting McCain even though they showed up to see what's her face, that should tell you where we are.
Err, should have read "That increases the chances of tea partiers choosing rouge candidates & makes their effort to glue the republican party back together long enough to make it through midterms with Palin's bullshit a failed endeavor."
ReplyDeleteThat's not Sarah Palin! THAT'S A MAN, BABY!
ReplyDeleteThe RNC under Michael Steele isn't smart enough to be ochestrating Palin. Palin is something new. I hate to make the parallel, but it's important, because she's dangerous. In his time, Hitler was something new. He was ultra showbusiness and played to the fear
ReplyDeleteNow you've gone and made me start thinking about Palin AGAIN! First, she is a media darling. She is a photo op that will always make a buck. Much of the media cares only about ratings, and a sense of PC. "How dare you ignore a WOMAN in politics."
ReplyDeleteIt is plan IMHO she is driven by greed. Follow the money. She does nothing unless it will make her money. I'm sure she has a set of puppet master in the shadows, but I'm not certain she is a political animal anymore. Barnum & Bailey seem her style.
What she has is the common touch. She may be a spoiled rich brat, but she projects that image. Like Reagan she is seen as one of the ordinary people. This is intergral to her image. The common people buy the hype. From TV product commercials to political ads. And she is careful to not show any intelligence if she has any. That would offend her male backers.
I think a TV show or a movie deal would shift Sarah to a new direction. I also suspect she is an attention junkie. She will do anything to stay in the limelight.
I've got to stop this rant. I need to work through this more systematically rather than as a real-time data dump.