The Tea Party

[MrsSpringsteen]

Much of the tea party thing seems to be about victimhood-the same exact thing that they probably decry in other people

 

[coolian2]

I'm told by TIME colleagues that Judson Phillips – the convention's main organizer – was at first taken aback when an al Jazeera correspondent introduced herself to him. “Do you have a problem with my outlet?" she asked when he didn't shake her hand. “Yes, I'm an American,” Phillips responded.

it's taking a lot not to drop the c-bomb here.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

She should have just taped it on her wrist like the quarterbacks do- that would have been even folksier and even more down to earth. We may never know


Think Progress � Fox News: Palin’s ‘Telepalmer’ Notes Were A Clever Plot To Call Attention To Obama’s Teleprompter

On Fox & Friends this morning, the hosts defended their colleague’s Telepalmer notes. Carlson suggested that it was a brilliantly clever plot to draw attention to Obama’s use of a teleprompter:

CARLSON: I think she did it on purpose. I think she did it on purpose, yeah. Because it’s an exact opposite of reading off the teleprompter with a script written for you with every word in a sentence and here’s she’s just taking crib notes on her hand. It makes her look like she can just talk off the cuff and she just jotted down a few couple notes before she went out to give a big long speech.

DOOCY: I think she did it because she probably does it a lot. I do that all the time. [...]

KILMEADE: But to sit there and look at, and do the interview and look down at her hand, I think that is — like you said before, Gretchen — folksy, absolutely, down-to-earth, I can identify. But if you’re going to write on your hand, why not just say, ’staffer, hand me a card.’ And then it would be okay.

CARLSON: Nah, like I said, I think it was on purpose. But anyway, we we may never know.

 

[coolian2]

On Fox & Friends this morning, the hosts defended their colleague’s Telepalmer notes. Carlson suggested that it was a brilliantly clever plot to draw attention to Obama’s use of a teleprompter:

oh ho ho, how clever! damn she's so smart.





and because on other president has ever used a teleprompter. jesus fuck i hate these people.

 

[BVS]

Think Progress � Fox News: Palin’s ‘Telepalmer’ Notes Were A Clever Plot To Call Attention To Obama’s Teleprompter

On Fox & Friends this morning, the hosts defended their colleague’s Telepalmer notes. Carlson suggested that it was a brilliantly clever plot to draw attention to Obama’s use of a teleprompter:

CARLSON: I think she did it on purpose. I think she did it on purpose, yeah. Because it’s an exact opposite of reading off the teleprompter with a script written for you with every word in a sentence and here’s she’s just taking crib notes on her hand. It makes her look like she can just talk off the cuff and she just jotted down a few couple notes before she went out to give a big long speech.

DOOCY: I think she did it because she probably does it a lot. I do that all the time. [...]

KILMEADE: But to sit there and look at, and do the interview and look down at her hand, I think that is — like you said before, Gretchen — folksy, absolutely, down-to-earth, I can identify. But if you’re going to write on your hand, why not just say, ’staffer, hand me a card.’ And then it would be okay.

CARLSON: Nah, like I said, I think it was on purpose. But anyway, we we may never know.

Holy shit!!! These people are going to put The Onion out of business, for there will be no need for them...

This is the lowest of low, defending anti-intellectualism with flat out stupidity.

The whole teleprompter argument makes you look like you're living with your head in the sand.

 

[martha]

"Folksy."

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

Those two come across as the biggest himbos on tv, sorry. And she's just..well I'll be nice.

Who watches that show in the morning? I'd rather gouge out my eyeballs.

And I'm not an "elitist", not by any stretch. I have written things on my hand, but I think that stopped around the age of 12 or 13 (ok maybe older when I had lapses) and I wasn't a possible Presidential candidate.

 

[coolian2]

Those two come across as the biggest himbos on tv, sorry. And she's just..well I'll be nice.

Who watches that show in the morning? I'd rather gouge out my eyeballs.

thanks to the time difference between new zealand and new york i've ended up watching it drunk once or twice. it's funnier that way.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

"Folksy."

I want to be folksy-it's the in thing. But I guess you have to be born with it, no matter how much moose stew you eat or how much you write on your hands.

Shucks

 

[kramwest1]

I want to be folksy-it's the in thing. But I guess you have to be born with it, no matter how much moose stew you eat or how much you write on your hands.

Shucks

You could still fake a folksy accent.

 

[anitram]

These people are celebrating stupidity as if it is a trait that we should aspire to. It is absolutely mind-boggling and sometimes I have to wonder whether it is uniquely American to actually assign pride to being ignorant like Palin. Do people give birth to children hoping that they will grow up embracing a disinterest in the world around them and a complete lack of intellectual curiosity?

But yes, let's slander people by calling them bloody elitists; I sure wouldn't want my kids to grow up wanting to go to such elitist snobatoriums as Cambridge or Harvard, or reading books or newspapers or being able to form articulates thoughts that don't consist of "also," "changey-hopey," and "you betcha!"

 

[Irvine511]

These people are celebrating stupidity as if it is a trait that we should aspire to. It is absolutely mind-boggling and sometimes I have to wonder whether it is uniquely American to actually assign pride to being ignorant like Palin. Do people give birth to children hoping that they will grow up embracing a disinterest in the world around them and a complete lack of intellectual curiosity?

But yes, let's slander people by calling them bloody elitists; I sure wouldn't want my kids to grow up wanting to go to such elitist snobatoriums as Cambridge or Harvard, or reading books or newspapers or being able to form articulates thoughts that don't consist of "also," "changey-hopey," and "you betcha!"

you clearly come from a recent immigrant background that embraces the narrative that you arrive in the New World, you work hard, you send your kids to school, and through education, you better your situation. that's what i grew up with. but i will say that there is an impulse in parts of the US that embrace the myth of a more "authentic" way of being an American. a man-of-the-people -- someone unpretentious, who clings to guns and religion -- who has established his homestead and wishes to be left alone so that he can create his own little utopia without anyone telling him he's doing anything wrong.

there's also a fantasy about this individual going to hoity-toighty WDC and showing those pinheads a thing or two about running a country. all it takes is some classic American gumption, a winning can-do spirit, and elbow grease.


this is a great write-up about Palin, and i think it explains a lot.

Getting Sarah Palin's Paradigm

"If the primaries were this year, I suspect she'd be nominated," a senior adviser to one of Sarah Palin's potential rivals confides. It's easy to see why: no one who's thinking of running beats the enthusiasm she generates among Republican activists. But there is more to the case for Palin than just the confluence of her personality and a vacuum within the Republican Party: there is a method to her management of her public image. It strongly hints that she has pretty much decided to run for president in 2012, unless something knocks her out of the race; it is more organized and structured that it appears; and it is something that Republican insiders, in particular, will ignore at their peril.

Next week, Palin will be a VIP guest of honor at the Daytona International Speedway for the Daytona 500. She'll walk among the campers and RVs set up infield. This summer, she's agreed to speak at an international bowling expo. In April, in Las Vegas, Palin will keynote the Wine and Spirit Wholesalers Convention at Caesar's Palace. She will make choices in Republican primaries -- she campaigned Sunday with Rick Perry, bearing a "Hi mom!" on her palm -- more on that in a bit -- and an eloquent jab at the President: "'We will proudly cling to our guns and our religion."

Palin, writes Jonathan Raban in an excellent essay in the New York Review of Books, has an "exceptionally canny political instinct for connecting with her own kind." It has been noted that her conservatism is resentment-based, and is fueled and nourished by the specter of elite mistreatment. (Palin is savvy enough to tease back.) But it is more than that. More than a list of grievances, Palin mixes Nixonian derision for those who think they know better with an aspirational dimension that motivates the middle class to vote. Out of the tony leagues of Washington and New York, she is -- well, an Idahoan by birth, an exurbanite mother, able to expurgate the Republican Party of its own cosmopolitan tendencies. (This is one reason why the McCain campaign could not tend to her.) She is, as my friend @thetonylee says, "a hybrid of Nixon and Buchanan."

The only presidential candidate who is able to put the boots to Obama and get away with it. What's she running for? Not the question. What's she running against? Not just Rockefeller Republicanism and the media, or pointy-headed law lecturer presidents, or Katie Couric: she wants to relitigate a bunch of issues that once were settled but now seem to be unraveling. The unrestricted embrace of immigration and the dilution of an American culture. Overweening Greenism. A complicated socially engineered tax code. A much larger role for government (embraced by the president who said that the era of Big Government Was Over and his successor, who was a Republican). The rule of experts. Even the concept of bipartisanship itself.

In Searching for Whitopia, Rich Benjamin defines of a geo-racial balkanization that gives Palin-like candidates a natural base: towns like Couer d'Alene Idaho, with a "diversified economic base," a pro-business regulatory environment, a commitment to "quality of life" issues, and -- a 95% ethnic homogeneity. Coeur D'Aleners were migrants from the California of the 1990s; they live now in Colorado and the suburbs of Phoenix and are slowly pushing their way around the Sunbelt. Benjamin notes the "cultural, ancestral and implicitly racial" bond to their communities. The new residents come looking for land and living space; the long-time residents just want as little disruption as possible. Right now, there is enormous disruption. It is the same disruption that Democrats believe redounds to their benefit; depressed wages, exotic financial deals, government spending cuts (which feeds the disruption), what one Palin watcher calls the "downstream effects" of a country that has lived beyond its means for 60 years.

George W. Bush never spoke this language. He was an evangelical convert, more influenced by his advisers Catholicism than by, say, Palin's Assembly of God charismatics. She is pure in ways the rich son of Connecticut could never dream of.

These simple folk of Idaho aren't so simple. They get their news from talk radio and new media; and Palin speaks in 140-word epigrams: fragments that are icky to the ears of more polished speakers but convey meta-data -- she understands this. What's most appealing about Palin to these exurbanites, I think, is that the big Elite Crucible tore her apart -- and she rose again, stood up, straightened her dress, and is now confronting her tormentors. When it was pointed out that Palin had scribbled some policy points on to her hand during the Tea Party Q and A, she was widely mocked. The next day, Palin wrote "Hi Mom!" on her palm. Palin doesn't like to be mocked, but she doesn't like to be beaten, either.

Not a single other Republican presidential candidate can build a crowd like Palin, can run against something like Palin (be it Washington, the media, the McCain campaign or Obama); no one speaks to the resentment/aspirational conservatives like she does; no one's life has better exemplified the way they perceive their struggle against the elite. We like to think about presidential primaries in paradigms, but candidates who fit with the times often find ways to completely subvert established paradigms.

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2010/02/sarah_palins_presidential_strategy.php

 

[VintagePunk]

Colbert: "Sarah Palin Is A F--king Retard" (VIDEO)


Using Sarah Palin's defense of Rush Limbaugh against her, last night Stephen Colbert proudly pronounced that "Sarah Palin is a f--king retard."

After mocking Palin's speech at the Tea Party Convention (taking the obligatory jabs at the notes on her hand) Colbert moved on to Palin's reaction to Rahm Emanuel's use of the word "retard." Palin not only called for his Emanuel's firing, but also defended Rush Limbaugh's use of the word, deeming it acceptable because it was satire.

After playing the clip of Limbaugh's "subtle" satire, Colbert jumped on the opportunity that his own satirical show presented. An opportunity to call Palin a "f--king retard." Colbert added that her reasoning also explained the note on her other hand: "Retard = sometimes funny."

 

[Diemen]

I love that man.

 

[VintagePunk]

I do too. I'm very, very uncomfortable with that word being tossed around by either side, and by Palin co-opting it to make herself into the victim again. But that *really* needed to be said.

 

[U2Fanatic4ever]

did anyone see this?

White House Hits Palin with Open Hand Slap | TMZ.com


Gibbs FTW...

 

[deep]

yeah, I posted it earlier

I think it is a net gain for Palin.

the fact that the spokesperson for the leader of the free world is so worried about her he has to take a pot shot at her

also, and many of you won't get this, but the piling on will rub many people the wrong way

I remember saying this when there were "free for alls" on Hillary in the 1990s, most people thought she was down and out.

 

[PhilsFan]

I wouldn't say that Barack Obama is worried about Sarah Palin, as much as he's worried about the frightening number of people who still think she's a worthy politician. And not even for the purposes of getting elected, just for the sanity of this country.

That's certainly how I feel. I KNOW that Sarah Palin can never be elected president. That doesn't make me any more comfortable with the fact that there still exist a good number of people who would vote for her.

She just epitomizes everything I hate about America: stupidity and dishonesty.

 

[deep]

or a second thought

perhaps the Obama people are trying to influence or choose the 'conservative' / GOP , spokesperson / leader

 

[martha]

I remember saying this when there were "free for alls" on Hillary in the 1990s, most people thought she was down and out.

The difference between Hillary and Sarah, and the reason why Hillary came back: Hillary isn't a fucking moron.

 

[coolian2]

or a second thought

perhaps the Obama people are trying to influence or choose the 'conservative' / GOP , spokesperson / leader

if the obama camp is trying to make the gop choose her to run, it's genius. look at her track record so far. she's already made the most electable republican in a long time (moreso than bush, who actually won) a complete laughing stock.

 

[Irvine511]

Hillary isn't a fucking moron.

more importantly, Hillary is interested in governing. Palin couldn't even make it through a single term as governor of AK.

Palin wants the celebrity, none of the hard work.

privately, she scares the life out of the GOP power players. they feel the same way about her that they did about post-Katrina Bush.

 

[deep]

The difference between Hillary and Sarah, and the reason why Hillary came back: Hillary isn't a fucking moron.

I started to write that I do not think Hillary and Palin have the same abilities

but then I thought I would leave it out, to see how long it would take for someone else to respond to the obvious

and we do have morons getting elected over much more competent opponents

 

[deep]

more importantly, Hillary is interested in governing. Palin couldn't even make it through a single term as governor of AK.

Palin wants the celebrity, none of the hard work.

privately, she scares the life out of the GOP power players. they feel the same way about her that they did about post-Katrina Bush.

she scares the life out of the GOP power players.
they feel the same way about her that they did about McCain in 2000 and McCain in 2008

 

[PhilsFan]

I started to write that I do not think Hillary and Palin have the same abilities

but then I thought I would leave it out, to see how long it would take for someone else to respond to the obvious

and we do have morons getting elected over much more competent opponents

George W. Bush is more intelligent than Sarah Palin.

 

[Irvine511]

she scares the life out of the GOP power players.
they feel the same way about her that they did about McCain in 2000 and McCain in 2008

i don't agree at all. it's completely different.

 

[BVS]

i don't agree at all. it's completely different.

I agree, I don't see this at all...

 

[Diemen]

the fact that the spokesperson for the leader of the free world is so worried about her he has to take a pot shot at her

I think it's pretty presumptuous of you to say that Gibbs did that because he's "so worried about her."

also, and many of you won't get this, but the piling on will rub many people the wrong way

That's right. We should all just keep quiet when someone angling to possibly become the leader of the free world displays traits that compelling display why she's unfit for the job.

I understand what you're saying, because in this political climate it's very easy to turn any justified negative reaction into a victimhood complex, but sometimes you've got to call a spade a spade.

 

[deep]

I think it's pretty presumptuous of you to say that Gibbs did that because he's "so worried about her."

The jibe drew groans from reporters present.

I saw this on C Span

you could hear the groans from a press corp that has been pretty friendly to the Obama Administration

White House mocks crib-note Palin

A White House aide has appeared at a briefing with the words "hope" and "change" written on his hand in a jibe at Republican Sarah Palin.

Mrs Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate, had been shown reading crib notes from her hand at a question and answers session on Saturday.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs also appeared to have his shopping list written on his palm.

"Hope" and "Change" were the key themes of President Obama's election campaign.

Eggs, milk, bread

Mr Gibbs was speaking at the White House shortly after the president had been stressing the need for a bipartisan approach to politics.

Showing his left palm, Mr Gibbs said: "I wrote a few things down."

The list read in vertical order - eggs, milk, bread [which had been crossed out].

"And then I wrote down 'hope and change', just in case I forgot," he said.

The jibe drew groans from reporters present.

BBC News - Sarah Palin crib notes mocked by White House aide

 

[PhilsFan]

I'd have preferred if he was more subtle about it, but there's no subtlety in politics unless you're Fox News trying to infer that Obama is anti-America.