Is Palin failin' ? or OMG McCain wins with Palin !! pt. 2

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I don't see why whether or not a given person(s) calls Sarah Palin a feminist has any import. Plenty of people argued over whether to apply the label to Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro, too; it's not like there's some universally agreed-upon definition of which specific beliefs the term entails. They've certainly all benefited from feminism to some degree or another.




Any thoughts on these?

yes, the 3 are feminists in their own right, because they are outside the box of traditional thought.

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Behold! The McCain Palin “Truth Squad!” � Mudflats


Behold! The McCain Palin “Truth Squad!”


The ‘Truth Squad’? Why is it that Republicans love to have these little names? I’ve posted previously about Alaska’s own Don Young and his “A-Team”, and his “Wolf Pack” of lobbyists. For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with Don Young, these are all the lobbyists that get immediately patched through to our Congressman in DCwhen they call the office. These guys are Don’s big guns. The A-Team was referred to as a separate group, but is also a subset of the Wolf Pack. So if you’re on the A-Team, you’re also by default in the Wolf Pack, but if you’re in the Wolf Pack, you’re not necessarily a member of the A-Team.

We’re not only corrupt, we’re silly.

And now, on the national front, we have the McCain-Palin “Truth Squad”, a group of spunky Republicans put together based completely upon party affiliation, and mostly on ovary ownership, to dispel the myths that are circulating about Palin. A couple of these myths had to do with figuring out budget line items and reallocations so it looked, at first, like Palin had slashed funding for special ed, and for homeless teen mothers. She didn’t.

But other things that are supposed to make us feel better on the list include the fact that Palin didn’t actually attempt to force public schools to teach creationism, but that she merely “wouldn’t oppose” teaching creationism in public schools.

And she didn’t actually fire the librarian who wouldn’t agree to ban books. She only tried to fire her. After public outcry, she agreed to let the librarian stay, even though she wasn’t being ’supportive’. And the list of banned books that’s been circulating? Bogus! We don’t know which books Palin wanted the public librarian to pull from the shelves for content she found offensive.

And most of all, she was NOT officially a member of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party, even though the Vice Chair said she was, (and called her out on video tape for infiltrating the Republican Party to get elected, while holding the AIP ideals). It was actually her husband that was a member of the secessionist group. She simply gave a supportive speech at their convention this year and told them to keep up the good work.

Don’t you feel better now? Phew! I was worried for a minute, but my mind is put at ease. It’s fortunate that the Truth Squad will be galloping across the land coming to the GOP’s aid. “We’re meeting it head on,” said Brian Rogers, a campaign spokesperson. All right! (fist bump).

Oh, and they dared to accuse her pastor of being a Jew for Jesus. That guy was only invited to speak by her pastor. And why should we care about her pastor, anyway. People shouldn’t be condemned for the views of their pastors. We learned that from Obama and Rev. Wright. We need to focus on what Palin herself believes. She’s just a normal sensible gal who thinks the world is 6000 years old, and that Jesus will come and rapture the faithful during her lifetime.

So knock it off, and quit with all this fringe, liberal, left-wing nutty blogosphere over-reaction, will you? Sheesh.

So, now that you have the Truth, are you pumped, and ready to meet the ‘Squad’?

National Members Of The Palin Truth Squad:

· Former Governor Jane Swift (R-MA)
· Governor Linda Lingle (R-HI)
· Lt. Governor Sean Parnell, (R-AK)
· Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN)
· Congressman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)
· Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV)
· Congresswoman Thelma Drake (R-VA)
· Congresswoman Mary Fallin (R-OK)
· Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC)
· Congresswoman Kay Granger (R-TX)
· Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)
· Congresswoman Candice Miller (R-MI)
· Congresswoman Sue Myrick (R-NC)
· Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL)
· Congresswoman Heather Wilson (R-NM)
· Jo Ann Davidson, RNC Co-Chair
· Rosario Marin, Former U.S. Treasurer
· Meg Stapleton, Former Aide To Governor Palin
· Kristan Cole, Lifelong Friend Of Governor Palin

State Members Of The Palin Truth Squad:

· Former Lt. Governor Jane Norton (CO)
· State Representative Amy Stephens (CO)
· State Board of Education Member Peggy Littleton (CO)
· State Representative Ellyn Bogdanoff (FL)
· County Commissioner Mildred Fernandez (FL)
· Former Iowa Senate President And Former U.S. Ambassador To The Eastern Caribbean, Mary Kramer (IA)
· State Representative Jackie Walorski (IN)
· State Representative Laura Brod (MN)
· Former GOP State Party Chairwoman And Former State Rep. Barb Sykora (MN)
· Jayne Millerick, Former NH GOP Chair (NH)
· State Senator Jennifer Beck, Honorary Co-Chair NJ Women For McCain-Palin (NJ)
· Assemblywoman Alison Littell McHose, Honorary Vice Chair NJ Women For McCain-Palin (NJ)
· Bergen County Clerk Kathe Donovan, Honorary Co-Chair NJ Women For McCain-Palin (NJ)
· DA Dona Ana County Susana Martinez (NM)
· Former Lt. Gov. Lorraine Bono-Hunt (NV)
· State Senator Barbara Cegavske (NV)
· State Assemblywoman Heidi Gansert (NV)
· Sue Lowden, Nevada GOP Chair (NV)
Kay Ayres, OH GOP Vice Chair (OH)
· Betty Montgomery, Ohio Women For McCain-Palin Chair (OH)
· Mary Taylor, Ohio Auditor Of State (OH)
· Margie Hughes, Clackamas County Chair Of Women For McCain-Palin (OR)
· Linda Neace, West Linn Small Business Owner For McCain-Palin (OR)
· Deanna Smith, Women For McCain-Palin Chairwoman (OR)
· Renee Amoore, PA GOP Deputy Chair (PA)
· Joyce Haas, PA GOP Vice Chair (PA)
· State Senator Lisa Baker (PA)
· Diana Irey, Washington County Commissioner (PA)
· Christine Toretti, RNC National Committeewoman and McCain-Palin Pennsylvania Co-Chair (PA)
· Kim Ward, Westmoreland County Commissioner and McCain-Palin Pennsylvania Regional Chair (PA)
· Former First Lady Susan Allen (VA)
· Lori Ann Miller, Young Republican Federation Of VA Chairman (VA)
· Former Lt. Gov. Margaret Farrow (WI)
· Peggy Oban Boze, McCain-Palin Chairwomen For King County (WA)
· Susan McCaw, Former Ambassador To Austria (WA)
· Della Newman, Former Ambassador To New Zealand (WA)

Wow. They’ve got everybody, from Palin’s own Alaska Lt. Governor Sean Parnell, to an RNC co-chair, from members of congress, to former ambassadors to nations in the southern hemisphere. Pretty impressive.

Now they’re all set to handle all those other nasty things people have been saying, head on!

I bet they’ll dispel all those horrible claims about her stand on global warming, reproductive rights, troopergate, promoting people who talk nice on Fox News, getting paid to stay at home, intimidating staff, raising taxes, not properly funding troopers, her actual executive experience, her real position on bridge to nowhere, the state of the small town where she was mayor, and being called the Queen of Earmarks! They’ll really clear the air. Right guys??

Right, Squad?

Squad?

hello?

(cricket)

Maybe they’re already on the “Straight Talk Express”?
 
Joe Klein writes what i've found to be the most insightful column yet on the Palin phenomenon (and he gets at why people like me are completely confounded as to what her appeal is). an excerpt:


We haven't been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food. But Palin's embrace of small-town values is where her hold on the national imagination begins. She embodies the most basic American myth — Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness — updated in a crucial way: now Mom works too. Palin's story stands with one foot squarely in the nostalgia for small-town America and the other in the new middle-class reality. She brings home the bacon, raises the kids — with a significant assist from Mr. Mom — hunts moose and looks great in the process. I can't imagine a more powerful, or current, American Dream.

Nearly 50 years ago, in The Burden of Southern History, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued that the South was profoundly different from the rest of America because it was the only part of the country that had lost a war: "Southern history, unlike American...includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social and political life." Woodward believed that this heritage led Southerners to be more obsessed with the past than other Americans were — at its worst, in popular works like Gone With the Wind, there was a gagging nostalgia for a courtly antebellum South that never really existed.

During the past 50 years, the rest of the country has caught up to the South in the nostalgia department. We lost a war in Vietnam; Iraq hasn't gone so well either. And there are two other developments that have cut into the sense of American perfection. The middle class has begun to lose altitude — there isn't the certainty anymore that our children will live better than we do. More important, the patina of cultural homogeneity that camouflaged 1950s suburbia has vanished. We have become more obviously multiracial. There are lifestyle choices that were nearly unimaginable in 1960 — the widespread use of the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion, the feminist and gay-rights revolutions, the breakdown of the two-parent family. With the advent of television, these changes became inescapable. They intruded upon the most traditional families in the smallest towns. The political impact was a conservative reaction of enormous vehemence.

Enter Reagan. His vision of the future was the past. He offered the temporal pleasures of tax cuts and an unambiguous anticommunism, but his real tug was on the heartstrings — it was "Morning in America." The Republican Party of Wall Street faded before the power of nostalgia for Main Street...at least a Main Street that existed before America began losing wars, became ostentatiously sexy and casually interracial. In his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan talked about an America that existed "when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem." The blinding whiteness and fervent religiosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of the myth of an America that existed before we had all these problems. The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest iteration of that myth.

The Republican Party's subliminal message seems stronger than ever this year because of the nature of the Democratic nominee for President. Barack Obama could not exist in the small-town America that Reagan fantasized. He's the product of what used to be called miscegenation, a scenario that may still be more terrifying than a teen daughter's pregnancy in many American households. Furthermore, he has thrived in the culture and economy that displaced Main Street America — an economy where people no longer work in factories or make things with their hands, but where lawyers and traders prosper unduly. (Of course, this is the economy the Republican Party has promoted — but facts are powerless in the face of a potent mythology.) Obama is the precise opposite of Mountain Man Todd Palin: an entirely urban creature. He lives within the hilarious conundrum of being both too "cosmopolitan" and intellectual for Republican tastes — at least as Rudy Giuliani described it — while also being the sort of fellow suspected of getting ahead by affirmative action.

The Democrats have no myth to counter this powerful Republican fantasy.
They had to spend their convention on the biographical defensive: Barack Obama really is "one of us," speaker after speaker insisted. Really. Democrats do have the facts in their favor. Polls show that Americans agree with them on the issues. The Bush Administration has been a disaster on many fronts. The McCain campaign has provided only the sketchiest policy proposals; it has spent most of its time trying to divert the national conversation away from matters of substance. But Americans like stories more than issues. Policy proposals are useful in the theater of presidential politics only inasmuch as they illuminate character: far more people are aware of the fact that Palin put the state jet on eBay than know that she imposed a windfall-profits tax on oil companies as governor and was a porkaholic as mayor of Wasilla.

So Obama faces an uphill struggle between now and Nov. 4. He has no personal anecdotes to match Palin's mooseburgers. His story of a boy whose father came from Kenya and mother from Kansas takes place in an America not yet mythologized, a country that is struggling to be born — a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity. It is the country where our children already live and that our parents will never really know, a country with a much greater potential for justice and creativity — and perhaps even prosperity — than the sepia-tinted version of Main Street America. But that vision is not sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans. They live in a place, not unlike C. Vann Woodward's South, where myths are more potent than the hope of getting past the dour realities they face each day.
 
It's an excellent article. I hadn't seen it yet, but I've been thinking a lot about this topic recently--that is, the political mythology of "small town America" and especially of "small town values," not Sarah Palin as such--as I often have cause to do during campaign season, simply because so many politicians haul that trusty old trope out for the stump (Democrats included, but yes, Republicans seem to do this more). The anecdote from the Reagan-Carter debate is especially amusing--"when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem"...I guess when you're a smalltown boy from 1920s Illinois you can say that; when you're a smalltown boy from 1930s Georgia, you know better.

I grew up in a town less than half the size even of Sarah Palin's hometown, and have spent nearly two-thirds of my life in towns with populations under 10,000. (80% of Americans, according to the Census Bureau, live in metro areas, i.e. cities + suburbs > 50,000.) And I have no idea what "small town values" is supposed to mean. You can certainly talk about small town lifestyles, which are mostly a list of "what-not"s--no shopping mall, no Wal-Mart, no nightclubs, no, uh, Cheesecake Factory :wink: , no "local media," no "trendy neighborhoods," etc.--with a few "whats" thrown in: yes, you really do know pretty much everybody (when I first moved to NYC, the most amazing thing to me was the concept that people get on the subway every day with complete strangers who they'll never know at all and that's totally normal to them); and yes, chances are a lot of your neighbors, maybe you too, often hunt or fish or both in their spare time. And of course people from small towns everywhere have in common that they don't appreciate being stereotyped as coarse know-nothings on account of that, just as city people don't appreciate being stereotyped as cutthroat and snooty. But distinct small town "values"? I don't see that. In my experience, people in small towns don't love their families any more or less, they're not at all innocent about sex or drugs or theft or assault, they may be more likely to go to church (hey, it's something to do on the weekend) but are no more or less likely than people elsewhere to be either pious or irreverent personally, they don't love the idea of America any more or less, there are some things your stereotypical urbanite wouldn't have a clue how to do that seem commonsensical to them and then there are some things your stereotypical urbanite would know exactly how to do that it'd scare the shit out of them to try. I haven't found there to be distinct "small town personality" types, either--you find the same familiar assortment of recognizable basic human personalities there as anywhere. I recognize, I think, the basic personality type Sarah Palin belongs to--the gal you can have a beer with, simplistically put--and it's a familiar one, but it's not familiar to me from "small town life" in particular; it's one you'll find everywhere. Likewise Barack Obama, "unusual" parentage notwithstanding, has always seemed to me like a sort I've come across plenty of times, in all kinds of places--a person characterized by a certain dignity and reserve, no more or less innately "good" or "bad" or kind or concerned for others than the dude-you-can-have-a-beer-with sort.

But politically, yeah, "small town" codes for comfort and reassurance and moral certitude, and "urban" codes for restlessness and challenge and adapting to changing circumstances. The reality is that all of us speak both languages no matter where we're from, but campaign rhetoric ain't about reality.
 
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on the nostalgia note, a telling quote:

Robert Kagan, a foreign policy adviser to McCain, derided criticisms of Palin as elitist.

“I don’t take this elite foreign policy view that only this anointed class knows everything about the world," he said. "I’m not generally impressed that they are better judges of American foreign policy experience than those who have Palin’s experience.”

it's a celebration of ignorance masquerading as a tale of heroic gut-level nationalism.
 
Got nothing against a big town
Still hayseed enough to say
Look who's in the big town
But my bed is in a small town
Oh, and that's good enough for me
 
Democrats will think:down:

Republicans will think:up:

Undecideds will either be:applaud: or:doh:...or:hmm:

and many men will be:heart:

Nothing new hear.



there's also the part where she is totally ready to go to war with Russia over Georgia or Armenia.

i mean, i know that many Republicans (and FYM posters) are totally interested in foreign policy for the bloodshed and vicarious thrills of pseudo-empire and the movie "Red Dawn" moves them to tears, but doesn't a war with Russia seem like a really bad idea?

what does Ms. Palin think? "Perhaps, Charlie."

Ms. Palin couldn't hold her own on FYM.
 
"It doesn’t have to lead to war and it doesn’t have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries."



:sick:
 
Holy shit, she makes your current President look brilliant, genius in fact. I assume that if the rest of the interview is like that, there will be a lot of Republicans privately going :doh: too.
 
Wow, she really has no clue at all.

Honestly, I didn't think she'd do that badly. I thought they would have spent the past week or so prepping her, and that she'd be tossed a few softballs. But wow. That was abysmal.
 
I was half expecting her to hit it out of the park - be really well drilled and get soft treatment - and do so in front of a massive audience, i.e. 'hiding' her from the media being a clever strategy to get as many people tuning in to watch the village idiot as possible, and then what they see is her just killing it. Looks like I might have been wrong...
 
Well she's not an idiot...that's not the shortcoming you're seeing there.
 
Well she's not an idiot...that's not the shortcoming you're seeing there.



no, not at all. i think she's shrewd and is an effective politician and is/was on her way to bigger and better things in the Republican Party.

but she doesn't have the depth of knowledge about the world that one requires in a president.
 
She was very well rehearsed in the neo-con talking points. Very well rehearsed. But she wasn't rehearsed at all at answering questions. She'll do fine with the Republicans!!!
 
She was very well rehearsed in the neo-con talking points. Very well rehearsed. But she wasn't rehearsed at all at answering questions. She'll do fine with the Republicans!!!



it was interesting how she kept repeating specific phrases, showed just how much she's been drilled by McCain's inner circle.

oh, and she thinks Saddam Hussein plotted 9/11:


Palin Links Iraq to Sept. 11 In Talk to Troops in Alaska
By Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 12, 2008; A01

FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Sept. 11 -- Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

"America can never go back to that false sense of security that came before September 11, 2001," she said at the deployment ceremony, which drew hundreds of military families who walked from their homes on the sprawling post to the airstrip where the service was held.
 
God is sending them to Iraq to fight bin Laden.

Don't you tell me that she doesn't get it.
 
Q: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?

A: ... which part?

Q: The Bush Doctrine of 2002.

A: [insert Neocon talking point here]

Q: Do you agree with it?

A: [insert Neocon talking point here]

Q: Is that a yes or no?

A: [insert neocon talking point here]


Wow. Just... wow.

Clearly someone well-versed in the hard issues that face us today.
 
She was very well rehearsed in the neo-con talking points. Very well rehearsed. But she wasn't rehearsed at all at answering questions. She'll do fine with the Republicans!!!

That's what I'm afraid of, that those less politically aware won't parse her statements to see that she didn't come anywhere close to answering the questions, and that she in fact really doesn't know the answers.
 
Q: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?

A: ... which part?

Q: The Bush Doctrine of 2002.

A: [insert Neocon talking point here]

Q: Do you agree with it?

A: [insert Neocon talking point here]

Q: Is that a yes or no?

A: [insert neocon talking point here]


Wow. Just... wow.

Clearly someone well-versed in the hard issues that face us today.

You missed the part where she didn't know what the Bush doctrine actually was so he had to explain it to her.
 
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