This bit of Sarah Palin worship in a dead-tree outlet (and also this one) leaves me speechless. Yeah, I know, it’s the New York Sun. But still. What I find absolutely staggering is this little bit, though:
Mrs. Palin, in her Facebook posting, did not criticize, or even mention, the First Lady, who is entitled to a vacation. She did speak of how the president’s lecture to the AFL-CIO “must have been tough for our good union brothers and sisters to sit through, though it may have resonated with some union bosses who desire their members to adopt a herd mentality, too, so as to not dare speak up against what Washington is doing to us.” What struck us about this is that it’s hard to think of a Republican reaching out so pointedly to union members since the man who invented Big Tent Republicanism, Ronald Reagan.
Mrs. Palin’s demarche is one to keep an eye on.
ZOMG! A politician used a nice phrase to describe a group of voters!
How do I put this? Hrm, let’s try this: IT’S ONE GODDAMN PHRASE IN ONE GODDAMN POST ON A FUCKING FACEBOOK PAGE 18 MONTHS BEFORE THE FIRST FUCKING PRIMARY AND SUDDENLY SHE’S REINVENTING BIG TENT REPUBLICANISM? SERIOUSLY?
Ok, I feel better now.
I just don’t get this brand of Palin-worship, especially coming as it often does from people who like to bitch and moan about Obama being treated as a Messiah. It absolutely boggles my mind. She writes something on Facebook and it becomes earth-shattering news demonstrating that she is as grand and invincible a person as Dr. Kevin Pezzi. It’s a Facebook post, not a policy speech, and definitely not a press conference. In that post, she took the earth-shattering step of saying a nice thing about union members (whose votes count the same as the next person) while simultaneously trashing the unions themselves. She issued no policy proposal, no explanation of how she thinks government should act (or not act, as the case may be) so as best to assist those union members.
This counts as not only meaningful outreach, but as an outright strategy of trying to reinvent “Big Tent Republicanism.” Because, y’know, no Republican politician in the last 30 years has had a single good thing to say about individual union members. And definitely not a single Republican politician has tried to sponsor a single bill or piece of legislation or to push for a regulatory reform that would benefit union members during that time span. And we certainly can’t expect the folks at the New York Sun to be familiar with Peter King, who has a long history of close ties to labor and even has been known to get endorsed by the Teamsters – he’s from that faraway land of Long Island, after all. It’s not as if George W. Bush ever made a desperate attempt to reach out to union members. Oh, wait – all those things actually happened? And since Reagan?
That doesn’t matter – Palin’s Facebook postings trump all, don’t cha know? Those postings must be treated as serious news, accepted uncritically and then inflated so that each is an integral piece of evidence of the beauty queen’s brilliance and splendor.
What the fuck kind of world is this where the use of a single phrase in a single Facebook posting by a half-term governor of a small state counts as news at all, much less as grounds for an entire piece of hagiography by an editorial board at a newspaper in our largest city? Where there is actually a constituency that believes “she’s popular on Facebook” is a synonym for “she’s intellectually serious, smart, and competent.”
As Whiskeyfire writes:
“… while the Reagan veneration has always been more than a little absurd, next to the Palin veneration, it makes some sort of sense. “She is popular on Facebook” is not exactly a triumph of statecraft, unless we’re now electing Kardashians.”
This is not politics. This is the popular girl in high school saying that she thinks the dorky kid is “kinda sweet,” and everyone praising her for her kindness and suddenly pretending to like the dorky kid. I’d say that this is the equivalent of a cheesy 80s movie, but that’s not fair to the cheesy 80s movie.
Mark,
If I had a pic of Gov. Palin in her cheeleading ‘costume’ or her basketball uniform, I’d fwd it to you. I know you want one, and I agree, she is….well, something.Report
@Robert Cheeks, well huh….. i would have guessed you believed jerking off to be against gods will and all that.Report
@gregiank, G-man, dude, I have no interest in what you do with your package. I just thought Mark would appreciate the fact that the governor’s a fine looking woman.Report
@Robert Cheeks, wink wink nudge nudgeReport
@Robert Cheeks, oh dear. Does this mean that she didn’t re-invent feminism after all?Report
Political me hopes she does well. She’s sucking all the oxygen away from the actually dangerous candidates.
Policy me worries. She seems a symptom of the GOP’s continuing slide towards unseriousness. God knows there are a lot of subjects where we could use a serious opposition party in DC.Report
@North, please Jesus, maybe she’ll split the party.Report
@Jaybird, Impossible Jay. Well possible but it’d be breif. The Palin led half would be utterly intolerable to business interests and would likely be unelectable and would fizzle out swiftly. That is, unless she got control of the GOP and the rational right split out. That’d be mind blowing and strange to see.Report
@North, JB and North, on her worst day, a day she is able to see Russia, she’d be better than our nearly documented and truly distrubed Kenyan communist “president.”Report
@Robert Cheeks, I’ve grown less than enamored with the whole “better than the last guy” kinda thing.
That’s how we got *HERE*.Report
@Jaybird, So true, but I never declared for her.Report
@Jaybird, well, if we just quit electing those ‘worse than the last guy’ presidents, the system would work beautifully. We’d be sitting here on big piles of cash going, ‘George Washington?! How did that idjit ever get elected?’Report
The media never treated Sarah Palin like some sort of God. I have never heard news about kids in schools singing a poem about great Palin is. She never preches she will stop the global warming.
You are just projecting. Obama is doing so badly your only escape to reality is to bash Sarah Palin.Report
@Annie, I don’t recall Mark being an Obama supporter. So Obama doing well/poorly wouldn’t be an emotional issue for him.Report
If you are really honest at least you will try to learn something about Palin and I am not talking about SNL sketchs
http://www.conservatives4palin.com/2010/08/governor-palins-accomplishments.htmlReport
@ Mark
Glad to see someone else is really getting tired of the Palin schtick.
@ Annie
I would hazard a guess that Mark is well aware of Ms. Palin’s accomplishments, as listed. Whether or not he considers them of note is an entirely different matter.Report
Just to throw something out there on the general subject: My wife voted Republican in every presidential election since 1996 (the first presidential election she could participate in). She says she will vote against Sarah Palin in 2012, should she win the nomination. Of all the aspects of Palin-worship I’ve seen (which I’ve seen a fair amount), the hardest for me to understand is the notion that Democrats hate her because they fear how effective she will be in a presidential election.
Good gawd, man, even if you agree line-by-line on her platform, she couldn’t even stick it out as the governor of a low-population state for a single term. The fact that Mitt Romney left his governorship (of a high-population state) after one term left me unimpressed.Report
I’m getting a bit tired, in general, of news outlets believing that “reading something on the internet” is the same thing as “gumshoe investigative reporting”. I can’t figure out if it’s that they’re lazy, stupid, convinced that their audience is lazy & stupid, or all of the above.Report
The other thing is that, for a lot of people, this *is* politics. I mean, those of us who hang out here are more into the wonky side of politics, and that’s certainly what y’all write about. But there are a ton of people for whom politics is Sarah Palin said ‘refudiate’ and Barack Obama gave the wrong number of states and didn’t they sound dumb and isn’t Jenna Bush pretty?
Now those people should know more than they do, but it seems to me that, no matter who wins in future elections, it’s going to be taken as proof that pandering to those people is a winning strategy in the media and political arenas, and, inevitably, the wonks are going to be on the outs, if they’re not already.Report
Refreshing to read of Pat’s and Annie’s comments. One gets tired of reading and hearing the same rhetoric over and over and over and over. In the old days (yea I’m old) if candidate A wanted to discredit candidate B it would be over demonstrated leadership and ability to get the job done (you know qualifications not personality – where would we be without Snookie). Today you simply destroy the person’s character, of which James Carville was probably the best. For me I don’t think Palin is qualified for the same reasons that Trumwill gave (nice no personal attack just simple thing like demonstrated qualifications of leadership).
Leave the personal attacks and stick to the issues – what a concept.
Food for Thought if You are HungryReport