RBSC

**Sir X** · October 7, 2008, 10:36 AM

Shallow, fake... Sarah Palin is beyond parody

The kid-glove treatment of the Republican vice-presidential candidate is an insult to women

Martin Samuel

div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited {color:#06c;}There is a time when it is necessary to take the gloves off and that time is right now, said Sarah Palin in Colorado. Interesting that she did not want the gloves off before her vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden. Oh, gloves on then. Headgear, too. Maybe some of those big shoulder pads that quarter-backs wear; and throw cushions for a softer landing. In fact, Palin and her minders could not have demanded a safer arena for debate when the opposition was within striking distance. Biden appeared with his hands tied, his intellect muted, his manner subdued, lest he should seem smarter, better informed or more competent than his opponent, a move which was inexplicably deemed undesirable. This shows how far we have come. Intelligence is now viewed as a threat. Isn't that how Pol Pot operated?
Meanwhile, the Republican lobby put pressure on the debate moderator not to go heavy on foreign policy, perhaps fearing that Palin would repeat her view that experience in this area was linked to proximity to a coastline, and expectations were lowered so that just avoiding intellectual humiliation would be seen as victory. And it worked. She got the name of the Nato commander in Afghanistan wrong and Biden smiled politely. She pronounced nuclear the same way that Homer Simpson does and he had to find it charming. She failed to answer direct questions, while advancing a carefully moulded image as a straight-talking maverick, and it went unquestioned. Now, from a safe distance, Palin wants the gloves off. Of course she does, with no chance of instant scrutiny.
Palin is the queen of misinformation, delivered with faux folksiness as authentic as a three- dollar bill. She is not the pitbull in lipstick of popular myth; she is Deputy Dawg with a forked tongue, engaged in a war against intelligence. Those falling for this act are her collateral damage. Barack Obama did not pal around with terrorists. He did not vote to increase the tax burden on families making $42,000 a year, or vote 94 times to increase taxes. Palin's statements on these subjects are not a reality bulletin from Main Street, Wasilla. Palin's statements are lies. Madeline Albright did not speak of a place in Hell reserved for women who do not support other women. Palin misquoted her. Albright said help, not support. And there is no such place as Hell.
Even so, for those American women who worry that they risk damnation if they don't vote the Republican ticket, it should be explained that eternity with a pitchfork impaled in your rear is still preferable to a vote for a politician who aided her political career by using her Down's syndrome child to cover her daughter's pregnancy bump. And it is at this point that we need to talk to the Democrat women considering joining Palin's ranks and ask: what the hell is wrong with you? People were imprisoned and trampled to death by horses for this? They marched, they demonstrated, and for what? A vote cast on the basis of a Y chromosome?
Background

Hillary gives the pitbull a pat

Behind the lipstick, the pitbull vanishes

Battle restarts after Palin and Biden sideshow

Why I love Sarah Palin

You go, girl. Go? Go where? Go to college? Go back to that Republican cramming camp to be told what newspapers to say you read and be fed another set of fake statistics where real knowledge and opinions should be? It is easy to parody Sarah Palin, wrote one commentator last week. No, it isn't. It is near impossible because so much of what she says reads like a satirical script anyway. Tina Fey, the finest Palin imitator, was reduced on Saturday Night Live to using Palin's exact words in response to a question about the bailout package last week, because they were beyond imitation.
“That's what I say that I like every American I am speaking with we're ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bailout, but ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, um, helping the, oh, it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and, and putting it back on the right track; so healthcare reform, and reducing taxes and reigning in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans and trade we have we got to see trade as opportunity not as, a, a, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today we, we've got to look at that as more opportunity, all of those things under the umbrella of job creation, this bailout is a part of that.”
Genuine answer from potentially the second most powerful politician in the free world. How can anybody parody that?
Tina Fey is at least attempting to do the job of nailing Palin's shallowness, her falseness, her studied populism and the way the standards and expectations of public debate have been lowered to accommodate her. Yet if there truly were this liberal media elite to which Palin makes constant reference, it would have bounced her out of the building by now. Anyone who thinks Palin's performances since her catastrophic CBS interview have been adequate must also believe the American public are stupid. By any normal yardstick of political discourse - substance, accuracy, coherence - she is a bust.
Against Biden she was judged a success, not on what she said, but on the connection she is believed to have made with a fictional Joe Six-Pack: so those giving the thumbs-up must also believe Americans to be simple suckers for a wink, a dropped “g” on a verb, and the use of the odd folksy phrase. You betcha. Doggone it. She's a bump on a log. Darn right.

**Sir X** · October 7, 2008, 10:40 AM

Tina Fey, the finest Palin imitator, was reduced on Saturday Night Live to using Palin's exact words in response to a question about the bailout package last week, because they were beyond imitation.

she is Deputy Dawg with a forked tongue, engaged in a war against intelligence

**Sir X** · October 7, 2008, 10:56 AM

As I see it, its Obama /Biden vs Palin .McCain has no relevance in this campaign.It has become the campaign against Sarah Palin ignorance ,inserted by questionable MCain judgement of making her a possible V.P.

He has no ground to stand on the economy , he lost that battle a while back when he said he doesnt understand it , and it is strong etc.

He is fighting a battle of judgement and patriotism against Obama , and Palin does a good job of sucking the fight out of his campaign.

The question is being asked openly what kind of judgement does Palin has , and with such judgement where would such a patriot lead this nation.

We had Bush for 8 years , Palin cannot be given 1 day.

**Sir X** · October 7, 2008, 10:59 AM

Behind the lipstick, the pitbull vanishes

Sarah Palin’s performance in last week’s big debate revealed her emptiness

Andrew Sullivan

div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited {color:#06c;}The sputtering, ramshackle motor-bike repaired in the back yard that is the Sarah Palin candidacy made a clear decision last Thursday night in her one and only “debate” for vice-president. If she gained enough speed and hurtled forward fast enough, the blur of movement would conceal the lack of any basic knowledge underneath, the absence of any relevant experience, the fathomless ignorance and the pathological lying that have dogged her candidacy so far. And to some extent it worked.
Expectations were so low after a series of comically disastrous TV interviews with Katie Couric that merely not drooling or breaking down in tears would have been a triumph. She rattled off a series of clichés and catch phrases – “say it ain’t so, Joe”, “doggone it”, “Joe Six-Pack”, “hockey moms” – that somehow kept the illusion of her viability on life-support. She was trained as a sportscaster and she won her debates in Alaska by simply breaking all the rules of debate, not answering any direct question and performing a piece of slightly unhinged but definitely riveting one-woman performance art.
In the end she still lost the debate on Thursday. The polling showed that most viewers believed that Joe Biden – much more restrained than usual – won. It may have had to do with Palin answers such as this, responding to Biden’s criticism of the Bush administration’s record in education: “Say it ain’t so, Joe – there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [sic] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future.
“You mentioned education and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more.
“I come from a house full of schoolteachers. My grandma was, my dad, who is in the audience today, he’s a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year . . . and here’s a shout-out to all those third-graders at Gladys Wood elementary school – you get extra credit for watching the debate.”
Yes. Here is a potential leader of the free world. But by the standards of the more recent statements – unable to name a Supreme Court ruling apart from Roe vs Wade; unsure what the word “caricature” meant; citing as her foreign policy experience the fact that Vladimir Putin travels through Alaskan airspace – this was Abraham Lincoln. For a Republican base that scorns educational excellence, treasures “home town” values and trusts only born-again evangelicals, it was enough. To them, her lack of ability is in some ways a sign of her authenticity. And the fact that John McCain, of all people, decided to tap this wellspring of know-nothing populism to give him a chance in a daunting electoral environment will only entrench this kind of gambit in the Republican future (if there is one).
Palin says she will “reform” government but has offered no specific plans to describe what she means. She says she will cut spending but mentions only pork-barrel boondoggles, which account for a tiny fraction of America’s massive debt. Her response to the financial crisis is to “take on the greed and corruption” on Wall Street, whatever that may mean in practice. There is nothing there. She is not a pitbull with lipstick. She is lipstick on a Cheshire Cat that disappears on even cursory inspection. She is a gimmick, a good-luck Barbie doll fixed to the front of an eight-wheeler truck called the McCain Express.
She is also a liar. She is not a liar in the usual political sense. She tells lies that can be shown to be empirically untrue by anyone with access to the public record. Many of these lies are trivial, but their triviality is related to the fact that they are utterly unnecessary. I learnt a long time ago, following the Clintons, that if people lie unnecessarily about small things, they are capable of lying about the big things as well.
In the past month we have discovered the following: Palin told one interviewer that she asked her daughters for permission to accept McCain’s veep offer; she told another that she had accepted the offer immediately and unblinkingly without asking anyone. The first version was, it turned out, a lie. But it sounded good for the 10 seconds needed on national television.
She insisted back in Wasilla that she did not fire the police chief. When the reporter called the cop to check, he read a termination letter, signed by Palin, over the telephone. Despite her claim to Couric, Palin has not met any trade missions from Russia.
She did not oppose the “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska; she lobbied for it. She said she sold a state aeroplane on eBay. She did not. She claimed her Teleprompter failed in her convention speech. It did not. She said Alaska’s state scientists had concluded that polar bears were in no danger. A journalist’s legal request to review the report showed that she had lied and the scientists had indeed said the bear was endangered. Palin said Alaska provided “nearly 20% of the US domestic supply of energy”. It does not. The gas pipeline she touts as her main “mission accomplished” has not broken ground and may never do so. She says she took a pay cut as mayor of Wasilla. She did not. And on and on.
These lies are not in any dispute because they are factually checkable. To avoid any engagement on these subjects and the untruths she has told, she refuses to hold a press conference of any type.
Mercifully, the Palin Express, however fast it travels, has wobbled with time. As in the debate, as her manic energy at the start faded into the fumes of frantic clichés, the American public has seen enough to be underwhelmed.
Maybe in other times, when elections could afford to be about hockey moms and baby daddies, the Palin farce would be received as mere colour in the dry grey of politics.
But as two wars lurch unpredictably forward, as the global economy teeters on the edge of a precipice, as the planet enters unknown and potentially drastic climate patterns, as carbon energy empowers terror and tyranny . . . the Palin pick remains what it always was.
Unserious. And not a little terrifying.

**Karl** · October 7, 2008, 11:05 AM

Originally posted by X View Post

Unleashed, Palin Makes a Pit Bull Look Tame

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As Palin Brings Up Ayers, Obama Team Cites Keating

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"For me, the heels are on, the gloves are off," she announced at high noon Monday to a group of Republican donors at the Naples Beach Club.
You betcha.
As the donors sipped their bloody marys and mimosas, she added, in a conspiratorial stage whisper, "I'm sending the message back to John McCain also: Tomorrow night in his debate, might as well take the gloves off."
Darn right.

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Of course, it's not only gloves and heels; headgear has a role, too. "Okay, so, Florida, you know that you're going to have to hang on to your hats," she said at a morning rally in Clearwater, "because from now until Election Day, it may get kind of rough."
Say it ain't so, Sarah!
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a McCain confidant, told The Post's David Broder that the campaign would "go down in history as stupid if they don't unleash" Palin. Well, the self-identified pit bull has been unleashed -- if not unhinged.
Barack Obama, she told 8,000 fans at a rally here Monday afternoon, "launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist!" This followed her earlier accusation that the Democrat pals around with terrorists. "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America," she told the Clearwater crowd. "I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country." The crowd replied with boos.
McCain had said that racially explosive attacks related to Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are off limits. But Palin told New York Times columnist Bill Kristol in an interview published Monday: "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more."
Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
McCain's swoon is largely out of his control, the result of an economic collapse that ignited new fears Monday when the Dow Jones industrial average closed below 10,000 for the first time in four years. That's why his lead in Florida polls, which once reached as high as 15 points, has turned into a three-point deficit.
But the campaign has reacted with recriminations (the St. Petersburg Times reported that the Florida Republican Party chairman, after questioning Palin's aptitude, was told that he couldn't fly on her plane) and now Palin's rage.
The angry GOP vice presidential nominee even found a way to blame the market decline on the yet-to-be-enacted tax policies of the yet-to-be-elected Obama.
"If you turn on the news tonight when you get home, you're gonna see that, yah, this is another woeful day in the market, and the other side just doesn't understand -- no!" she said at an afternoon fundraiser at the home of mutual fund giant Jack Donahue. "Especially in a time like this, you don't propose to increase taxes. The phoniest claim in a campaign that's full of them is that Barack Obama is going to cut your taxes."
Of course, Obama never promised to cut taxes for people at $10,000-a-plate lunches in air-conditioned tents on waterfront compounds. And the crowd -- among them New York Jets owner Woody Johnson -- reacted without applause to Palin's Joe Six-Pack lines. After they didn't strike up the usual "Drill, baby, drill" or "USA" chants, Palin, rattled, read hurriedly through the rest of her speech.
The reception had been better in Clearwater, where Palin, speaking to a sea of "Palin Power" and "Sarahcuda" T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. "One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," she said. ("Boooo!" said the crowd.) "And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,' " she continued. ("Boooo!" the crowd repeated.)
"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.
Palin also told those gathered that Obama doesn't like American soldiers. "He said that our troops in Afghanistan are just, quote, 'air-raiding villages and killing civilians,' " she said, drawing boos from a crowd that had not been told Obama was actually appealing for more troops in Afghanistan.
"See, John McCain is a different kind of man: He believes in our troops," she said.
At times, Palin hinted at the GOP campaign's troubles. "It's going to be a hard-fought contest, especially in these swing states, some maybe we would not have expected," she admitted to donors. She allowed that "John McCain and I need to do a better job" of talking about the economy.
At other times, she had troubles of her own, as when she spoke over the weekend of "our neighboring country of Afghanistan" or when she got choked up at the Clearwater rally, saying, "Some of your signs just make me wanna cry," without explaining which ones or why.
But then the gloves came off, the heels came out, and Palin was once again talking about her opponent hanging out in a terrorist's living room.

So taking the headline of your post as face value - Obama who started his personal attacks in a debate with Hillary...also loses?

**Sir X** · October 7, 2008, 11:06 AM

Was that after the kitchen sink or before the pots kept banging against Obamas head ?

**Gamma** · October 7, 2008, 11:21 AM

obama seh...him nuh throw the first punch...only the last! you can't fool all of the people all of the time.....ergo...bye bye hillary...

**Karl** · October 7, 2008, 11:31 AM

Originally posted by Gamma View Post

obama seh...him nuh throw the first punch...only the last! you can't fool all of the people all of the time.....ergo...bye bye hillary...

dat a wah im seh...nuh wah im duh!
has tings stan hit luk lacka im trow di fus puch an a guh trow di las!

**Gamma** · October 7, 2008, 11:32 AM

what was the first punch pray tell...palling around with domestic terrorists?

**Gamma** · October 7, 2008, 11:33 AM

wait deh...are u saying that he has fooled all of the people all of the time?

**Islandman** · October 7, 2008, 11:54 AM

The repugs have resorted to personal attacks for decades and have won six of the nine presidential elections since then, so I don't think that statement is anything close to true.

Lets take a look at 1972. An unpopular war, a poor economy and a country divided culturally. Quite similar to today execpt the Dem candidate is not a black guy with a muslim name.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
McGovern: Should've fought 'ridiculous' attacks

In 1972 election, Democrat overwhelmed by GOP offensive, cultural shifts

By Jason White
Senior Editor
MSNBC
updated 7:33 a.m. ET, Tues., Oct. 7, 2008
NEW YORK - The Republican line of attack against George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for president in 1972, was devastatingly simple: He was the candidate of amnesty, abortion and acid.

McGovern, a former World War II bomber pilot and senator from South Dakota, never thought the line would stick. And he was confident that the largely unpopular war in Vietnam would help sink Richard Nixon’s reelection efforts.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

“I thought it was so ridiculous it wasn’t worthy of an answer,” said McGovern, 87, in a recent interview with msnbc.com. “I was in that kind of mode: People know I’m a trustworthy person, they know I’m a patriot. Well they didn’t know those things.”

McGovern said he should have done more to fight back.

“If somebody makes you look like a fool, you’ve got to answer it. I think Democrats in the past, myself included, probably underestimated the impact of negative campaigning,” he said.

'Silent Majority'
In his campaign against McGovern, Nixon positioned himself as the more mainstream candidate, part of the so-called “silent majority” of Americans fed up with the cultural upheavals of the 1960s.

He went on to win in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. presidential history, netting more than 60 percent of the popular vote and taking every state but Massachusetts. In the process, he forged a template for how future GOP candidates could take advantage of cultural divisions that emerged from the turbulent 1960s.

“[W]e keep having that election over and over again,” said Rick Perlstein, author of "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America." It was the “first election of many that was structured as a referendum of meaning on the 1960s.”

Perlstein said Nixon was able to pry away two traditionally reliable Democratic constituencies – white ethic voters in northern cities and southern conservatives – by painting Democrats as the party of surrender in Vietnam and liberal social values at home. Those two groups have trended Republican ever since.

Pat Buchanan, a Nixon speechwriter at the time, was one of the chief architects of Nixon’s strategy.

“The entire strategy was to convert it into a referendum on the president of the United States. Do you support the president? And not even to mention McGovern’s name,” Buchanan said. “We just had him overwhelmed with resources. …McGovern was completely frustrated and flustered by it.”

Divided country
One of Buchanan’s main responsibilities was to craft the talking points and speeches that went out to top Nixon surrogates.

“We targeted Catholics with our position on right-to-life as opposed to the massive amnesty abortion position of McGovern. We targeted veterans because one of the central issues was the Vietnam War,” said Buchanan, now an MSNBC political analyst.

“The country was really divided. By then we were well into the culture wars,” he said. “Agnew [the vice president] and Nixon were considered middle-Americans who represented the boys in Vietnam and traditional values.”

Despite presiding over an unpopular war, Nixon earned some breathing room by reducing the number of troops in Vietnam and making inroads with two foreign adversaries: He initiated high-level talks with China and negotiated an arms treaty with the Soviet Union.

Nixon also pulled every lever he could to get the economy moving in a favorable direction. This included imposing wage and price controls and, as Buchanan put it, “gunning” the money supply. “The engine was going so loud you could hear it,” Buchanan said.

Buchanan believes McGovern made it easy for Republicans to paint the Democratic nominee as removed from the mainstream. They did this by criticizing his calls to leave Vietnam quickly, to create a welfare program that would give $1,000 to every man, woman and child, and to slash military spending.

“McGovern at one point said, ‘I would crawl on my knees to get the POWs back.’ Americans didn’t want to crawl on their knees in those days,” Buchanan said.

McGovern was surprised his military background didn’t inoculate him to the attacks.

“I tried to convince the public that we needed to take a more critical look at spending on the Pentagon,” McGovern said. “And that got me labeled as weak on defense, notwithstanding the fact I was a decorated bomber pilot from World War II and I think Nixon was a clerk of some kind far away from any guns.”

Perhaps surprisingly, given the fact it later forced Nixon from office, the Watergate scandal played almost no role in the 1972 election.

While the initial break-in took place months before the November vote and the cover-up consumed parts of Nixon’s political apparatus, the burgeoning scandal was dismissed by the White House and mostly ignored by the public.

In fact, one poll at the time suggested voters widely believed that Nixon was more trustworthy than McGovern.

“I remember that poll and being shocked by it,” McGovern said. He attributes the trust gap to the abrupt removal of his running mate just days after his selection. The decision followed Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton's admission that he had been treated for depression with electroshock therapy.

McGovern's regret
Buchanan doesn’t think there’s much McGovern could have done differently to win the election.

“I don’t think he made many mistakes. To win the nomination he went hard left,” Buchanan said of McGovern. “And he went that far left because that’s where the energy and the fire were with the youth and the Democratic Party. But once you’re over there, you’ve got to get back to the center. And our job was not to let him get back to the center, which was what we accomplished.”

While Perlstein, the historian, thinks the GOP came up with a new template for success in 1972, McGovern believes Democrats may have learned some lessons from his defeat.

“If [Clinton] was criticized even in the slightest he had a release on the wire in 30 minutes responding to it. I think he learned that working for me in 1972,” McGovern said. “So if the Republicans learned some things and applied them in 1972, I think Democrats are beginning to understand that they have to be more sensitive to criticisms and quicker to respond.”

Despite being on the losing side of one of the biggest landslides in presidential history, McGovern said the election left him with just one regret.

“I can take the defeat. I’d had defeats before that,” he said. “But the hardest thing for me to live with since 1972 has been the feeling that the American people didn’t really get an accurate reading either on Nixon or me. I think they had two twisted and distorted views of the kind of person I am and the kind of president I would have made, and I think they had a mistaken view of Nixon, as Watergate later demonstrated.”

© 2008 MSNBC Interactive
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27008437/

**Islandman** · October 7, 2008, 12:05 PM

When you read this you wonder how Kerry was caught by surprise by the swift boat propaganda and didn't think it would cause harm. Seems like the exact same playbook.

**Sir X** · October 7, 2008, 12:34 PM

Islandman ,You missed my point completely , the Republican candidates are doing it directly , not via swift boats or other propoganda alternative means.Directly!

Isnt that a 1st ? Its a new low in the personal attack scheme of republican things , repubs did it in a underhanded, implying way , now its out in your face , palling with terrorist , liar , etc , whats next ?

**Islandman** · October 7, 2008, 12:52 PM

For a candidate on the ticket to be saying what Palin said, you may be right about the direct nature of the attack being a first. I guess desperation is more of a factor this time.

I am not sure if it won't reap results for them though. Obama is just so different from what these people are used to for president it don't take much to raise the silly doubts that they have in the back of thier minds already.

He don't even have any purple hearts to back him up little bit. Maybe thats a good thing, because he knows that he has to fight back immediately.

RBSC

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Once you resort to personal attacks you have lost . Palin

Once you resort to personal attacks you have lost . Palin

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