Sarah Palin: Pallin’ Around with Druggies?

Part of the problem with using guilt by association is that your associations are examined much more closely than they would be otherwise.

Sarah didn’t like that Barack had served on a board with William Ayers. Fine.

But I don’t like it that Sarah spent some time with Sherry, the mother of Bristol’s baby daddy.

From the Times:

State troopers have arrested the mother of Bristol Palin’s boyfriend on drug charges. The woman, Sherry L. Johnston, was arrested after troopers served a search warrant on a Wasilla home. Ms. Johnston, 42, has been charged with six felony drug counts. A trooper spokeswoman said in a news release that the charges were in connection to the prescription painkiller OxyContin. Ms. Johnston is the mother of Levi Johnston, 18. Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, announced in September that her daughter Bristol, 18, was pregnant and that Mr. Johnston was the father. She is due to give birth this weekend.

Why does Governor Palin associate with druggies, and what connection does she have with the Medellin cartel?

See how Sarah’s logic can work against her?

The Bush Years: A Look Back

From Tom Tomorrow:

I wonder what percentage of Bush voters would get the joke?

Who ARE These People??

Thank you Sarah Palin!

Ugh!

A political action committee is thanking Gov. Sarah Palin for her conservative values and service to America in ads timed for release around Thanksgiving.

Our Country Deserves Better Committee, a PAC that supported Palin during her vice presidential candidacy, will begin airing the ads on Tuesday.

In one, comforting music plays as images of Palin are flashed on a screen and a male voice says, “Gov. Sarah Palin, a grateful nation wishes to thank you for serving the people of America with a servant’s heart.”

The more cynical among us might prefer to thank Sarah Palin for giving us endless hours of comedy and for handing the election to Barack Obama.

Palinism???

WTF?

Today, in the parking lot of my local supermarket, I ran across this bumper sticker:

I’m not sure what this sticker might mean. upon completing a google search of “palinism bumper sticker,” I’m still baffled. There are no clear matches.

I take it to mean something like Michael Barone’s statement that “journalists trashed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee, because “she did not abort her Down syndrome baby.”

Or am I reading too much into this?

What Was Sarah Palin Cooking???

Sadly, I’m still obsessed.

Did anyone see her on Fox’s Greta show last night?

She was cooking in her business suit and put some hot dogs in buns and then placed them in the oven.

Who does that? I was worried about the buns burning.

Later, she stuffed the hot dogs with cheese.

Again, who does that?

I’m not questioning her abilities as a chef, but what the fuck was she doing with those hot dogs?

The Future of the GOP?

Krugman:

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

I’ve been thinking about this and I’m starting to conclude that the 2012 GOP race could easily come down to a three-way between Palin, Romney, and Huckabee. Palin and the Huckster will have the theocons battling it out against Romney, who will represent the party’s old establishment.

In a race like that, Palin would have a decent shot to win the nomination as much of the base will still be angry about the media’s treatment of Palin and their unsubstantiated claims of ACORN-based voter fraud in 2008. Their resentment will linger and fester, causing them to nominate Palin in a final act of “fuck you” defiance that the hard-right theocrats seem to be so good at.

More from Krugman:

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

I think we’ll win tomorrow. But once that happens, the battle will have only just begun.

You think the war the GOP waged on Clinton was ugly? It was nothing compared to what’s coming once Obama is in office. Limbaugh and his ilk will once again go apeshit accusing Obama of being a Muslim Marxist with a crazy Christian preacher who hates puppies and they’ll be crying about Michelle’s nonexistent “whitey” video and they’ll be angry at both of them because they will adopt a breed of dog that the wingnuts don’t favor. Remember how much they hate Socks that cat?

And, worse, the wingnuts will have the help of Fox News to rile up their resentment.

But in their anger, post-rationalism, and pettiness, the hard-right may cease to be relevant, especially if Obama, as expected proves to be a competent leader who inspires our better selves.

I can’t wait for the first GOP presidential debate, which, if this year is any guide, will be held shortly after the 2010 midterms.

Switching Obama and McCain

From the inbox:

Obama/Biden  vs McCain/Palin

What if things were  switched  around?…..

Think  about it.  Would  the country’s collective point of view be different? Could  racism be the culprit?

Ponder  the following:

What  if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage,  including  a three-month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage  daughter?

What  if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law  Review?

What  if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating  class?

What  if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a  divorcee?

What  if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his  standards?

What  if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?

What  if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to  painkillers  but also acquired them illegally through her charitable  organization?

What  if Cindy McCain graduated from  Harvard?

What  if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five  were five United  States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal  as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s  and early 1990s.)

What  if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent  speaker?

What  if Obama couldn’t read from a  teleprompter?

What  if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems  and a record of crashing three planes?

What  if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly,  on many occasions, a serious anger management  problem?

What  if Michelle Obama’s family had made their money from beer  distribution?

What  if the Obamas had adopted a white  child.

You  could easily add to this list.  If these questions reflected  reality, do  you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they  are?

This  is what racism does.  It covers up, rationalizes and  minimizes positive  qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative  qualities  in another when there is a color  difference.

Educational  Background

Barack  Obama
Columbia  University -  B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in
International  Relations.
Harvard  – Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum  Laude

Joseph  Biden
University of  Delaware -  B.A. in History and B.A. in Political  Science.
Syracuse  University College of  Law – Juris Doctor (J.D.)

vs.

John  McCain
United  States  Naval Academy -  Class rank: 894 of 899

Sarah  Palin
Hawaii  Pacific University – 1  semester
North  Idaho College – 2  semesters – general study
University of  Idaho – 2  semesters – journalism
Matanuska  – Susitna  College – 1  semester
University  of Idaho – 3 semesters – B.A. in  Journalism

Education  isn’t everything but this is about the two highest offices in  the land as well as our standing in the world.

You  make the call.

Know any undecided voters? This might be a good thing to send them.

Palin Is the Future of the GOP

Heh:

Facing the unhappy prospect of defeat, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin indicated Wednesday that she will not disappear from the national political scene if the GOP ticket loses on Tuesday.

“Absolutely not. I think that, if I were to give up and wave a white flag of surrender against some of the political shots that we’ve taken, that … that would … bring this whole … I’m not doing this for naught,” Palin said in an interview with ABC News, according to excerpts of a transcript released by the television network.

In response, three words: No Fucking Way.

GOP’s Present and Future

I am loving this:

Aides to George W.Bush, former Reagan White House staff and friends of John McCain have all told The Sunday Telegraph that they not only expect to lose on November 4, but also believe that Mr Obama is poised to win a crushing mandate.

They believe he will be powerful enough to remake the American political landscape with even more ease than Ronald Reagan did in 1980.

Considering that Bush won by one or two percent in 2004 and called it a landslide, it’s fun to read that Bush’s minions are freaking out about a likely five percent or more win by Obama.

I know schaden freude doesn’t look good on my, but it’s damn fun!

The prospect of an electoral rout has unleashed a bitter bout of recriminations both within the McCain campaign and the wider conservative movement, over who is to blame and what should be done to salvage the party’s future.

My advice to the GOP is that if they want to be a viable party in the future, they need to dump the religous right and go back to being a party that supports smaller government, but stays away from social issues. No one wants the GOP in their bed rooms.

Snip.

“It’s hard to see a turnaround in the White House race,” he (former Bush speech writer David Frum) said. “This could look like an ideological as well as a party victory if we’re not careful. It could be 1980 in reverse.

“With this huge new role for federal government in the economy, the possibility for mischief making is very, very great. One man should not have a monopoly of political and financial power. That’s very dangerous.”

I agree with Frum on that one. I prefer an executive branch controlled by one party and the legislative branch controlled by another, but Bush and the GOP failed so badly, the Democrats deserve at least a couple of years of one-party rule.

In North Carolina, where Senator Elizabeth Dole seems set to loose, Republicans are running adverts that appear to take an Obama victory for granted, warning that the Democrat will have a “blank cheque” if her rival Kay Hagen wins. “These liberals want complete control of government in a time of crisis,” the narrator says. “All branches of Government. No checks and balances.”

Um. Didn’t we have six years of one party GOP rule recently? There were no checks and balances from 2001-2007. How did that work out for us? The Democrats will probably fuck up one party rule, but let’s let them try to deal with our nation’s problems. If they fuck it up, they’ll be out by 2011.

Snip.

But the real bile has been saved for those conservatives who have balked at the selection of Sarah Palin.

In addition to Mr Frum, who thinks her not ready to be president, Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s greatest speechwriter and a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, condemned Mr McCain’s running mate as a “symptom and expression of a new vulgarisation of American politics.” Conservative columnist David Brooks called her a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party”.

Snip.

Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin’s critics as “cocktail party conservatives” who “give aid and comfort to the enemy”.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: “There’s going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?”

Mr Frum thinks that Mrs Palin’s brand of cultural conservatism appeals only to a dwindling number of voters.

He said: “She emerges from this election as the probable frontrunner for the 2012 nomination. Her supporters vastly outnumber her critics. But it will be extremely difficult for her to win the presidency.”

Mr Nuzzo, who believes this election is not a re-run of the 1980 Reagan revolution but of 1976, when an ageing Gerald Ford lost a close contest and then ceded the leadership of the Republican Party to Mr Reagan.

He said: “Win or lose, there is a ready made conservative candidate waiting in the wings. Sarah Palin is not the new Iain Duncan Smith, she is the new Ronald Reagan.” On the accuracy of that judgment, perhaps, rests the future of the Republican Party.

Schadenfreude is a dish best served cold.

That being said, I am starting to think that Palin will be the GOP frontrunner in 2012 as the GOP rallies behind their socially conservative soulmate. By that time, I imagine that Obama will have had a relatively successful first term that will have the fundies up in arms over something.

Their two most viable candidates will be Palin and Romney. Huckabee may also play a role.

GOP voters will have to decide between a pro-business Romney and a pro-fundie Palin.

I have no idea which direction they will pick, but it will be a lot of fun to watch.

Something about Sarah

Yes, that’s our Ms. Palin wearing a red, white and blue donkey scarf. I wonder if the scarf was part of the $150,000 the campaign paid for new clothing for her and the family.

Oh, and I can’t forget this:

Palin said if she and husband Todd had had a sixth child, they had already picked a name for a boy joining siblings Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig.

“I always wanted a son named Zamboni,” she said.

Sigh.