Kristi Noem, Dog Assassin

 

SD Gov. Kristi Noem is getting a roasting over her depiction of killing a backwards "untrainable" puppy as well as a smelly goat that came from her political memoir No Going Back: Descriptive Stuff After the Colon. A lot of people on social media are posting pictures of their own good doggos--and that's great. But to give her her due, sometimes a dog just is either traumatized or dimwitted, or for some other reason has misplaced aggression issues, and they aren't fit to their environment. You could try rehoming them with a family--hopefully in a "single pet, no small children" situation, but once they have demonstrated they will kill livestock, like a neighbor's chickens, there's a real chance they aren't "fixable". She may have simply made a pragmatic choice with the dog because she didn't want to see it turn and attack a human--especially not a little one. 

There's more humane ways to put down an animal, though--we aren't living in Little House on the Prairie times. And also killing (poorly) a goat because it is smelly and misbehaved just feels gratuitous, because what do you expect from adult goat? And wasn't she responsible for how the dog was trained and controlled (crated or fenced?) Feels like she might have set that pup up by not preparing it for success.

Roy Moore Won The AL Senate Primary Despite Trump's Strange Endorsement

It's easy to look at the picture of Roy Moore, above, and just see a man with a big flag, a tiny gun, and a middling hat. But he is a genuinely fascinating creature in that he seems to be entirely the worst of old-fashioned Bible-banging demagoguery. He's virulently anti-gay.  He seems confused about geography, current events, religion, and law, despite once upon a time being a judge.  He's of course anti-choice when it comes to women's reproductive choices, and he's also a creationist who even considers the teaching of evolution incompatible with the Constitution.  He is mostly known as the judge who took on the "Establishment clause" regarding religious speech to the effect of basically offering himself up in service to a graven image, which sort of cluster-fuckedly makes a mockery of both the First Commandment and the First Amendment. He thinks the 9/11 attacks were a punishment from God (which I think would align quite nicely with what Osama Bin Laden thought, too.) And he has nice words for Vladimir Putin. 

He's almost a parody of fringe right-wing whackadoodledom, and was endorsed by Ben Carson, Steve Bannon, Sarah Palin, and not by the actual US President, Donald Trump, who gave a rally for "Big Luther" Strange.

I don't pretend I know what this means. This is Alabama, which is not my neck of the woods at all. But if Moore's genuine unfitness* for anything at all could be adequately articulated, I'm thinking this culture war grudge-vote against the "DC establishment" might have maybe made a Doug Jones win vaguely possible? He's a civil rights lawyer and seems like a real stand-up guy.

*No, I am serious, this guy should not be a Senator.

UPDATE: Trump is purging Tweets about his support for Strange like a sad loser-baby:

UPDATE ALSO, TOO: Roy Moore was also a Birther, just so we can fully take in his up-fuckedness.  But that, at least, he has in common with Trump.

Sarah Palin is Suing NYT

The recent shooting of a US Congressman and others by a deranged individual who seems to gotten radicalized against the GOP online resulted in an editorial about dangerous political speech in The New York Times, which included an unproven claim that was subsequently scotched, namely, that Sarah Palin, former half-term Alaska Governor and VP candidate, somehow encouraged Jared Loughner in his 2011 gun rampage that left several dead, and a US Congresswoman with severe head trauma. Sarah Palin, indignant that her exercise of free speech has been, however temporarily, maligned in this way, seeks suit against NYT for their intentional "blood libel", I guess. 

Her lawyers are the Gawker-killers who represented Hulk Hogan over the Bubba the Love Sponge cucking sex tape. (I describe it this way although I haven't seen it. The last thing I saw Hulk Hogan in was that show he had for a little while with Jack Lemmon's kid. I really don't want to mess up my memories of that or those WrestleMania's of the 1980's where a Very Large Human would be fluffed as a person who would totally wreck Hogan, and then they failed to do that thing at WrestleMania because they were Very Large Stiffs. ) I guess they feel good about this one, but...I dunno.

See, I don't think the case can really be made that they intended to harm Sarah Palin because I don't know why they even would--would they be trying to end her career? Because I think you have to have one. I don't know what she does. Her PAC is pretty much moribund. She posts stuff on Facebook, but that isn't a job. And I think, more than trying to put Sarah Palin's name in the NYT mouth to do her harm, the editorial was just misremembering what everyone was talking about: there really was a discussion about the crosshairs back in 2011.  But Sarah Palin had already by 2011 been established as a person who gravitated towards violent rhetoric. In 2008, she was accusing then-candidate Obama of "palling around with terrorists" and ginning up anger with her talk about how he was "Un-American". (She remind me of a current political figure in that...)  Regarding the Obama first term health care battle, she continued to be incendiary, even promulgating a gigantic lie regarding Obamacare and "death panels", as if she was insinuating that the health care reform bill would somehow result in a sort of...genocide?

I recall my own response from 2011 (because I wrote it down!) and I felt like Palin was welcome to her free speech so long as other people were welcome to criticize it, but using the term :"blood libel" was absurd and wrong.

I think the NYT made an error in overlooking the lack of a direct connection between violent rhetoric and Loughner's actions (Loughner appears to have been more mentally-disturbed than politically-motivated, although politics and anti-government sentiment did comprise a part of his mania). They tried to rectify it swiftly. I don't know that malice can be proven, here, to be honest. Also, I think discovery might bring out that Palin had a pattern of what looks like deliberately inflammatory speech that could be construed as dangerous as a matter of opinion, as in, the words in an opinion piece not intended as a hard-news story.

We're living in a time of some reckless speech. Some of my recent posts have been trying to find context for Kathy Griffin's fairly dumb and gory performance art, and trying to defend the interpretations of the Bard from the ham-fists of barbarians at the ticket-gate. I have recently been disturbed to discover that there is an Elliot Rodger fan club, of sorts, and that the froggy denizens of KEKistan have hashtagged #freedylann . There are examples of "Ander Breivik had a point" online--I fully believe that some exercise of speech is clearly meant to exhort people to do horrible things. I think a person who gives into that rhetoric is soft-headed, but this is a potential that free speech of necessity contains.

I don't think there is a connection between what Palin was putting out and Loughner, per se. I do think some language is inflammatory and can lead to violence. I think the NYT was not even thinking of Palin when they let her name slip through the cracks. And I don't think this suit will go well, because again, hard to connect the dots to see why they'd do that.

An Apology Would Be Inappropriate 2

It's sort of hard for me to fathom the kind of steadfastness to a meme that conservatives have for the notion of an "apology tour". Admitting that former US administrations have done things that did not sit well with other nations, or even with populations within the US, is not to apologize for them, but to acknowledge the truths of the broad sweep of history. It is an adult thing that President Obama does in his speeches (which are intended not for a specific, home-based audience, but for the world, which is something the PEOTUS might want to learn is necessary), and an honest thing, but what it is not is a puling offering of apologies for things hat happened outside of the scope of his administration.

So it is even harder for me to see how even the conservative hindtitterati (is that pageview thingie in the upper right hand corner for real even?) or the 2008 GOP VP candidate's Twitter feed, can somehow imply that President Obama is apologizing for Pearl Harbor--which is, um, something the Japanese did and that Japan PM Shinzo Abe came as close as we'll get to an apology for (previous attempts by former Japanese governments having been denied the opportunity to apologize--as we deemed it inappropriate). Which I pointed out when I noted that Obama had not actually apologized for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.(In the comments.)

What seems to actually rankle is the idea that Obama had the audacity to note that "We must resist the urge to demonize those who are different." Because that, even for conservatives, has to be a reference to Trumpism, no?  After all, who else was on about Mexicans being rapists and Muslims being terrorists and African-Americans being violent and unemployed and living in ghettos, right?

Well, if you want to see it that way, okay--he was pointing out that a future Trump administration would probably be all about discrimination and that's really regrettable--thanks, conservatives for pointing it out! Why did you vote for the guy? (Ha ha! Kidding!)  But no, he was pointing out that FDR--our liberal hero, singled out totally innocent Japanese-Americans on the basis of what another nation did, and that that thing was pretty damn unfair. Preconceptions about whole peoples get in the way of treating them fairly. Dunno why it would be read some other way.

Anyway, this is just a reminder that Trump isn't some weird asteroid that crashed into the middle of the GOP and made everyone go all "pod people" in some 1950's B-movie fashion. He is the end result of viewing history through a very smudgy lens.

How Trumpian, Senator McCain!

As you all probably know, Senator John McCain is facing his second re-election race since Obama beat him in the 2008 race for the White House. It hasn't been easy. And it might not get better. The fact of the matter is, the top of a national ticket matters, and if the AZ Sen race seems to be close (or has his opponent, Ann Kirkpatrick, with a slight lead) the reality is, a fairly unpopular, not to say unqualified, GOP 2016 presidential candidate like Donald Trump--the man who got something like five Vietnam deferments and had the nerve to question McCain's own war hero status--could have a negative impact on his re-election chances.

But that doesn't mean the long-time Senator, with an underserved record of consistency and "Straight Talk", can't try to capitalize on Trump-sounding rhetoric. What McCain tried today was a bit of a Muslim-bait and switch--he blamed President Obama personally for the Orlando attack, calling him "directly responsible" for the murders. Then, before everyone had the chance to work out that the roots of ISIS started with the Iraq War and that the SOFA Obama was adhering to was for total withdrawal by 2011 and was signed by President George W. Bush, McCain tried to backpedal and explain. In a way that basically reinforced why what he was saying was bullshit. But as I linked to back in my 2008 criticism, there's a precedent for that kind of weasel-y Muslim-baiting.

Which is all just my round-about way of pointing out that while some Trump comments appear unique--they have a solid GOP lineage. McCain has been part of the problem long before the "Trumpening" of the GOP. Heck, he damn-near prepared the way.

An Apology Would Be Inappropriate

The image of President Obama, the first US president to visit the site where the nuclear age was unleashed, embracing the survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, marks a moment of an extraordinary acknowledgement of the enormity of nuclear weapons' use--without constituting an apology.

What president now living could apologize for an act which caused such casualties? How would we or could we place such an event in its historical perspective and re-litigate why it ever took place? It is not possible to entirely do so, but the correct approach is what Obama has done--acknowledge what happened, and point to a task to prevent the use of these devastating weapons from ever happening again.

This does not stop his insane detractors on the right, of course, who ignorantly decry an "apology tour" that has not ever happened in the course of Obama's presidency. What such ignorami reveal is a disgraceful inability to respect the idea of soft or even smart power--a total lack of appreciation for the very idea of diplomacy at all, or an understanding that the place of the US as first among nations and its standing and respect must flow from our adherence to some standard of decency. That we ought not torture, or detain without charge, or go to war without valid interest, or commit atrocities abroad should be a matter of our highest interest--on which our national reputation rests. That we reject nuclear attack or the idea of "total war" is a matter of principle.

It would be great if both parties understood this intimately and did not play the unattractive game of calling out our President as somehow being Un-American for trying to do what is fundamentally decent. But this is not how it is. This is not how it is at all.

The current GOP Presidential candidate is in favor of nuclear proliferation and torture, and has the full support of his party, with only some tepid reservations expressed by useless dupes who think the real problem with their guy is his "tone".

This image above is what America should be--big enough and strong enough to embrace the history we have made. I am sorry, myself--sorry that so many Americans are so very, very small.

The Trump Problem 2: What the Elites Don't Know, but the Base Understands

This morning, the Oracle of Wasilla Sarah Palin made a curse against Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and all his doin's, to the effect of her being in support of Rep. Ryan's being primaried and cast in the place of darkness, there to wail and gnash his teeth, like Eric Cantor was. 

This is not an absurd thing to say. There is a Republican challenger for Ryan's seat, and if I know anything about the good folks of Wisconsin, it's that they voted for Walker three times and produced a Glenn Grothman, so? Maybe the pride of Janesville should feel a little discomfort. (Or maybe, if freed from having to appeal to everybody as the guy both begged to become Speaker of the House and arm-twisted until he had to deny wanting to make a run at the convention for president in the event it was contested, the sigh of relief.) But how vast this former VP candidate's (Ryan, I mean, not Palin) heresy is depends on your POV.

After all, when I derided Paul Ryan's response to Trump's nomination as he was "just not ready" as being willing to be brought to "yes",  I considered that he was going to get there, eventually, but it was just possible that he was aware of a certain ticket with a flashy, but under-informed VP candidate with great right-wing bona fides, but which, nonetheless, lost to a celebrity-quality POC with a funny foreign name and a gaffe-prone 70's vintage Democrat Congresscritter.  And even Sarah Palin knows the weaknesses of that particular ticket. In other words--Ryan is just being cagey about whether the entire country is ready to swallow what the GOP base drinks in every day.

I remember when that very question was very much on the minds of a handful of high-profile names in the GOP circa 2009. Rep. Eric Cantor, former Gov. Mitt Romney, and former Gov. Jeb Bush were all keen to take what they learned from the post-mortems of the 2008 election and try to reconcile it with a listening tour of the Republican base.

There's a pretty impressive "Where are they now?" Romney lost in 2012, Rep. Cantor lost in a primary, and Jeb Bush's 2016 Presidential Primary bid was a subject of pity and awe. Whatever they were listening to--it could not help them.

Things that make you go "Huh?"

Palin: Trump "not bragging about his own ability to make America great again" https://t.co/4xH3ZBUsx3 pic.twitter.com/gimONnQAU0

— The Hill (@thehill) April 2, 2016

I saw this clip on the news at my parents' house, and I thought, "There she goes again." I know what Sarah Palin means is that she believes Trump can deliver on the things he promises--but really? The Donald Trump--"not bragging"?!

(He's hugely modest. Bigly. No one is as...you get the drift.)

Of Course Sarah Palin Endorsed Donald Trump

I could talk about the superficial comparisons between the two reality television stars as explaining the reason why Palin is throwing in with Donald Trump, but the one comparison that fascinates me is the way they both can stimulate a crowd. They make an interesting pairing. In a way, I don't see the Trump campaign as being possible without the spectacle that the McCain campaign became when she joined the ticket. Saying the right things took precedence over knowing the right things.

Does she want a possible cabinet position? Meh--if she found out what it entailed, she'd say "Thanks, but no thanks." But her endorsement in Iowa helps Trump with evangelicals and gives validation to her relevance as a political player who doesn't have to run to have power. You could call what she does a grift--but it's based on authenticity. (And, as always, there is her family, not always at her side, just, awfully near...who wants to be strongly vetted by the lamestream media all over again?)

It's at least the most interesting endorsement since Senator Graham endorsed Jeb.

That Political Thing in Iowa

You know what the Democratic Party seems to be missing? Shindigs. We do not seem to have neat gatherings like CPAC and traditions like the Ames straw poll, and hosting religious groups like The Response, or doing that very interesting "Freedom Summit" in Iowa--you know, shindigs. I watch them as a political observer, but have to admit--not my team, looks like fun. I mean, there's Netroots Nation. It's blogger-oriented so I should be able to really get behind that. But that's a wonkfest. Where's our uncovered nekkid id triumphialization? Where's our scattering of red meat for reubens? (Why is Blogger's spellcheck so madly unaware of the correct spelling of the perfectly jake 1930's slang for gape-jawed hayseed? Or even the perfectly cromulent term "jake"?)

Anyway, I digress. Dave Weigel over at Bloomberg notes what "serious" 2016 candidates Mitt, Jeb, Bobby, Marco and Rand have missed.  What I believe they missed was associating too broadly with Rep. Steve King, whose blue eyes always seem to carry the faraway milkseed pollen drift of a person whose thoughts take him back again and again to the border and the constant battle against the cantaloupe-calved drug-runners whose backpacks full of Acapulco's finest hops have once again consigned a generation to jazz music, sloth, and backtalk. There are people who think he might be a little bit too racialist to actually be an appropriate association.

And yet there are so many who do not!

Left bloggers have noted that Sarah Palin's speech seems to have defaulted to Whargarble after her Teleprompter fail--but I listened and frankly think that although her sentence structure resembles nothing so much as an attempt at cut-up poetry using all the Republican memes, I tend to think that a sympathetic audience could have tracked what she was saying very well.

All in all--not really any surprises or over the top signifying that got my leftist goat--oh except Carly Fiorina.  She actually got my Irish up. She said:

“Like Hillary Clinton, I too have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe,” she said. “But unlike her, I have actually accomplished something. Mrs. Clinton, flying is an activity not an accomplishment.”

Iran is A Country With Which We Might Have Shared Interests

President Palling Around With Terrorists Good God, Mr. President. To partner with Iran is to trust the enemy,... http://t.co/RX1iu2sx3o
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) November 9, 2014

Good God, Sarah Palin! Did you know that there were contacts between Sainted Ronaldus Maximus and the Persian Menace?  The trading arms for hostages kind?

She realizes, does she not, that Iran shares an enemy with the US in ISIL--which is a vicious terrorist organization that no one should support, right? She doesn't think we should appease ISIL by cutting out their enemy, Iran, from our joint operations against them?

If she even knows where these countries are, or who these people are. A brainiac she isn't.

I'm just saying. She pals around with Alaskan separatists, John McCain pals around with who knows who in Libya or Syria, eh? Some of my ancestors felt some kind of way about sassanach. But no, the actual country of Iran isn't quite the same thing as terrorists at the moment. Because real terrorists are beheading Christians and Yazidis and all them in Northern Iraq. I can stand with even Iran to deal with the likes of them.

Is she trying to be some kind of ISIL-lover? I can't even...

Values Voters 2014 is a Commentary on the 2016 GOP Goat Rodeo

It's probably no coincidence that the Value Voters Hootenany considers Sarah Palin as much of a draw as CPAC does. They adore prop comedy. (Since Dennis Miller hasn't made regular folks laugh since the 1990's, I really think wingnut welfare should at least comp him a rubber chicken. If he can't incorporate it into his act, maybe he can bite it.)  Once again, Senator Ted "Tailgunner" Cruz is the beneficiary of the Bible-based zeitgeist. (Nota bene: Christie was not invited and finished behind Biden. Even us big-time lefties aren't putting Biden in our "sure thing" column. If he's winning over Christie in the VV14 poll, that's kind of a message, you think?) But I can't pretend that I know. I don't speak "Values Voters" lingo fluently.

I will say, I think Palin is irrelevant, but everyone has known that since 2009. She's there for schtick, and I commend the right wing for keeping vaudeville alive. But Santorum and Huckabee and Rand Paul and Cruz all spoke (and Anne Laurie at Balloon-Juice gives great re-cap of all of them) and all kind of gave a hint into the ways they aren't serious 2016 candidates.

I see things as an internetizen first and foremost--if it is on Youtube, it cannot die. I don't know how anyone can drop red meat at a VV do, and then pretend it doesn't exist in a general election. So if, say, Bobby Jindal, wants to allege Barack Obama doesn't understand American exceptionalism in a week where "we" are bombing ISIL in Syria just because--he's out on a ridiculous limb. Ditto Rand Paul on "personhood", or Cruz on a lot of things.

I see easily a time when the Values Voters' do is a thing to avoid, because I don't see anyone selected by it in a straw poll as viable in any general election. But I do see the GOP probably pandering to that crowd for some time to come, anyway.

John McCain's Shadow Has More Reflection Than He Does

Even if in jest, former half-term Governor Palin's admission that she may have contributed to the failure of the 2008 GOP Presidential ticket betrays a very real paradox:

“To claim last night, also, our president saying ISIS is not Islamic, um, ISIS says they’re Islamic,” Palin continued. “They are so full of deception that America should be concerned with the policies that are going on. And, as I watched the speech last night, Sean, the thought going through my mind is ‘I owe America a global apology. Because John McCain, through all of this, John McCain should be our president.’ He had the advice, today, still giving it to Barack Obama, and he will not listen to it, about the residual forces that must be left behind in order to secure the peace in Iraq that we had fought so hard for.”

The first sentence is absurd, and insulting to not only largely Islamic nations and groups that US interests intend to ally with, but to the hundreds of thousands of Muslim people slain by extremists boasting this murderous and unorthodox doctrine of indiscriminate slaughter. Leaving aside that Palin's syntax largely consists of intermittent dog-whistles and static mixed with uncertain subject/verb agreement, she makes the case that Senator McCain should be president, but is not, because she agreed to run with him.

She's being entirely too hard on herself. The only reason she was in a position to agree to that unfortunate bargain was that he asked. And he asked, because his campaign had begun in such a perpetual motion of fail-flail that she looked like a good life preserver anchor. (Recall, things got so bad at one point that he needed not only to be propped up by herself, but also a stand-in for Everyman in the form of Joe the Plumber.) She looked like a serious running-mate to him. The individual who went on to blustering with a struck-deer face though a relatively soft-ball Katie Couric interview and made Dan Quayle sound like Marcus Tullius Cicero whenever she opened her word-hole.

It could be worse, of course. Sarah Palin has hardly been the albatross to Sen. McCain's credibility that, say, wanting to arm Gaddafi or, say, ISIL, should be. And yet the fact remains that Sarah Palin is, as these things go, a guest on a putative news-related program doling out foreign policy critiques when she is far better versed with drunken brawls * than the intricacies of basic newspaper-content. And McCain himself is still left claiming that he knows very well who to arm in Syria.  And I would humbly posit this claim is murky at best. But probably less murky than whatever impetus allows for McCain still being put out there by news-outlets as expert in any damn thing when the legacy of his 2008 run, Sarah Palin, follows him like a very loud and wrong shadow.

She is the proof of how unsuited for office he ever was and is.

*About which--you'll find the link comprehensive if not obsessive regarding the Palin Clan's dead common behavior, with such appallingly déclassé touches as a "stretch Hummer", the tacky war-cry of the barely-been: "Do you know who I am?", and the mental image of Track Palin, tipsy and shirtless, as though auditioning for a role on that long-running FOX reality program--Cops. Yes, there is a touch of schadenfreude within that scene--but however did she and the family end up in such a scene? It would appear, a lack of even basic social diplomacy skills, tribal loyalty, and a predilection for violence. And yet, not once has Sen. McCain issued a "global apology" for elevating the status of this unique creature to serious consideration for the Oval Office.

Joe the Plumber Says a Really Weird Thing About Guns

I have a weird soft spot in my heart for people who get plucked up out of obscurity and find themselves accidental spokespeople for random things because it just seems like whatever it is that makes "good tv to watch" happen, is all over them. So I try not to really judge Joe the Plumber (AKA Samuel Wurzelbacher) the way I do elected officials with a real political job to do, because really--he kind of became the mascot of the McCampaign in a flash of that campaign's need to associate with the "Everyman".  But he blossomed into a real political fringe figure.  So, if mainstream news orgs pay attention to him like he's an actual politician, I sort of feel like I have to do the same.

So it happened that I ignored it when he said that the dead kids of UCSB didn't trump his 2nd Amendment rights; I winced, but let it go. Ever since Charlton Heston gravely intoned that he would relinquish his guns when they were taken from his cold, dead hands (which shows at least, some acceptance of what it might mean to be outgunned, no?) firearms enthusiasts have articulated some form of "over my dead body!" to describe their reluctance to relinquish any license to keep and bear their arms. It just seemed especially tacky to take an "over your kid's dead body!" stand. But so what? Into every life, some tackiness must fall.

But I really must remark upon the thing he said so very lately:

Wurzelbacher lists several reasons for owning a gun (home invasion, etc.) but says the best reason for owning a gun is to keep politicians from trying to take said gun. 

“Guns are mostly for hunting down politicians who would actively seek to take your freedoms and liberty away from you. Google ‘Hitler, Mao, Kim Jung-il, Castro, Stalin’ just for starters,” he suggests. 

“Whistles don’t protect women from rape – a Glock does!” he added. “When armed men come into your house to steal, a baseball bat doesn’t cut it. Unless you have an automatic-baseball bat. I want one of those – email me. 

“When a nut-job decides to go on a killing spree and the cops are 5 to 15 minutes away, you are screwed unless you are carrying a Colt.”

Luckily Not in Charge of Anything: Sarah Palin

I know. Has it really been a whole minute since the last time anyone paid her any mind? But fine--she baits us, we nibble. It's a vicious cycle:

"Do you know why those clownish little Kumbaya-humming fairytale-inhaling liberals want to be tough all of a sudden and control your guns?” she said. “It’s ‘cuz guys like [Sen.] Al Franken [D-Minn.] and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid [D-Nev.], they are not satisfied with just taking your money and your job, your truck and your property and your rights, your healthcare – they didn’t want to just stop at that.”

Sticks and stones and AR-15's, Sarah.  But in reality, there have actually been zero laws passed lately that restrict guns. And I don't know who is taking anybody's truck. Maybe she forgot where she parked it?

But the part that is supposed to make the ACLU card-carrying bunny huggers flip our shit is this:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) defended the controversial enhanced interrogation technique of waterboarding this weekend, and implied that the practice would still be commonplace “if I were in charge.” 

“They obviously have information on plots to carry out Jihad,” she said at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual meeting on Saturday evening, referring to prisoners. "Oh, but you can’t offend them, can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen. Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.”

Sure, you can make people uncomfortable. But not torture them. Treaties and all that.  Also, it isn't obvious that "they" have information on plots to carry out jihad, because sometimes we pick up the wrong guys.

But I absolutely agree that waterboarding is one way to baptize terrorists. It's just that, when you waterboard people, you just so happen to convert others to terrorism, elsewhere.  
I know she does it to shock but still...

CPAC 2014: McConnell with a Gun: Palin with a Book

I don't know how the conversation got on whether McConnell was holding a gun properly, but I will say Sarah Palin is holding the book the right way! No, really, she was funny. I found different parts funny from what her audience did. 

General conversation topic: the modern conservative movement is neither modern, nor conservative, nor a movement. 

Also, people don't use or want insurance? Wow. I did not know people didn't get sick or injured. Huh. And yes, someone pays. With Obamacare, we actually pay less. But why should people who are able to be responsible and pay for insurance take care of themselves? And why don't we think people should be cared for? Does she resent the idea that nothing is free--because seriously? Liberals aren't unaware of the idea that nothing's free. We don't all have oil companies giving dividends to most of our states to make up for what we can't afford and stuff though, so...

And she took my mind off of how the Tea Party was an intellectual movement. So there's that.  

Anyways, I'm busy shining up the boot that will...whatever. I recognize the words, but sometimes I don't understand the language.

Microaggressions, Colorblindness and Trying Harder

I decided not to post anything on Monday, not necessarily to honor anybody, but just because I wasn't up to figuring out how to best address Sarah Palin's race card in the hole, or the pile-on of a black athlete who made the PR mistake of enthusiastically addressing his skills in an interview, like that never happens, with respects to a day honoring Dr. King. That was my silence. I don't like it. I wish I always knew what to say.

Sometimes the silence of allies is to make room for other people to speak. Sometimes I know I don't have the right understanding or experiences to address something, and so help me, I hold back for fear of doing it wrong. Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I need to be more prepared to stand corrected so long as I'm speaking out. I'm still working on that. And also, this post could have a fuck of a lot less to do with my process than what is wrong the world today--and don't tell me there isn't something, still

So I think I will take on what Palin said--and does anyone think she doesn't have a bead by now on how what she said would be judged when responses to her "blood libel" comments or "debt is slavery" comment went totally batshit in social media coverage? Does one snarkily suggest that the president is somehow throwing down the "race card" without any idea how wrong it would be, even now, if the first black president never addressed race at all when real discrimination was still a quantifiable thing in terms of arrests, sentencing, employment, opportunity, treatment by law enforcement and so on? Trying to create the conditions where all citizens get equal treatment under the law is kind of this Constitutional thing he and Eric Holder have been working on. It is a real tragedy that Sarah Palin does not get that. I blame the schools she went to and her environment, though.

Martin Bashir Said a Bad, Bad Thing, Then Left

Apparently, one of the ways to be too controversial for MSNBC is to imply that Sarah Palin should eat shit, no matter how many people may have said this to themselves, privately or among friends, one time or another. I don't believe Martin Bashir literally meant that she should eat shit. I'm reasonably sure that when he tried to describe the brutal and dehumanizing conditions that would result in a slaveholder thinking nothing of bidding one of the people he owned to defecate in the mouth of another, who had previously been lashed and had salt and pickle rubbled into his wounds, he was trying to paint a picture. He was attempting to show a side of slavery so incredible and appalling that the realization that it was not comparable to the national debt at all would descend with crystal clarity.

The point was that no one should ever be compelled to eat shit, and that it should have been unthinkable that this happened to any human being--that by not comprehending that the enormity of such degradation, occurring to millions of people, over centuries, was nothing like people maybe having to pay a little more taxes--Sarah Palin was shrugging off that reality. She was, figuratively, if you will, shitting on the memory of people who died in chains, or from the lash, or were hunted down with dogs. She was belittling the suffering of families uprooted and torn apart, people kept in ignorance and shame, people whose existence from birth was one of bondage, hard labor, and pain.

He could have done it differently, but the thing he missed entirely is realizing that it's a mistake to try to penetrate that kind of lack of empathy at all. By trying to, momentarily, have her make the mental step into that place, where she was subject to Darby's Dose, he made her a victim.

She doesn't need his help to feel victimized. And she can't use the insight. All his "lesson" did was make many people mad at him. So he had to resign. This should serve as a good demonstration of how not to address a foolish thing said by someone whose business is saying those things. His business is not saying foolish things--or even wise things in a foolish way. Yes--that does sound like there are two sets of standards. It is what it is.

Richard Cohen and the Racist Butt

I'm just going to take a swing at what surprisingly dim Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen said in his latest to get people so riled, because it actually follows on to my last post in a way, and in a roundabout fashion, addresses something that has long bothered me about how we talk about conservatism. I think everyone pretty much agrees that he was making an inane point about how NJ Governor Chris Christie might not necessarily appeal to the heartland, and then KAPOW--the thing that is kind of offensive:

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled—about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts—but not all—of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

It is by no means "conventional" to have to "repress a gag reflex" when thinking about a mixed race family. That would pretty much be viewed as racist, now. Also, just on the obvious--"used to be a lesbian"? He's using terms not exactly down with the idea of "born this way"  and tilting towards bi-erasure. Maybe he's trying to project these racist and homophobic viewpoints onto the cultural conservatives, assuming this discomfort is theirs, but he's describing it in a way that makes their discomfort normal.

She has no idea what she is talking about.

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She just doesn't. She is saying words that do not mean things when strung together in the order that she puts them. I think when people talk about complicated policies in front of her, she hears that "mwamwamwa" sound of adults talking from the Peanuts cartoons. She actually said she wants to lessen the threat of tort reform. I am not sure that is what the so-called independent grassroots Koch-backed Tea Partiers that use her as a mascot actually told her.

Also too, I don't really care much about the war on Christmas, but if you are on the side of Christmas and Palin is your spokesperson, I'm just saying, somewhere out there a reindeer is crying.

In other news, she thinks the national debt is just like slavery, but not in a racist way. I think it's really interesting that she's learned from the whole "blood libel" episode of a couple years back that appropriating the tragedy of other people to make a hyperbolic statement sounds racist, but hasn't actually absorbed why that is.