“Her agenda was not necessarily to show me in the best light.”
– Sarah Palin to Oprah Winfrey, complaining about Katie Couric’s 2008 interview that revealed her to be an uninformed pageant sash, as quoted at NBC’s Today Show website, Nov. 16, 2009.
As this quote shows, Sarah Palin still has no idea what the role of the news media is in a Jeffersonian democracy, apparently believing that reporters should have the ‘agenda’ of lobbing affable Wiffle balls that make her look good rather than exposing a candidate’s fitness for office. That she was so vexed by Couric’s mild inquiries – asking her what she reads, for instance, becoming in Palin’s mind a ‘gotcha’ question without parallel – and then whining to Oprah that she had just been ‘pumped up’ by walking a rope line of enthusiastic followers only to encounter the bummerooski of Katie the ‘Perky One’ with microphone and camera ready to pounce on her with school-test interrogations suited to a spiteful teacher – well, it was just too much to bear!
This, then, is the Beauty Pageant Contestant (BPC) view of the world; you memorize certain attractive-sounding answers, such as advocating world peace or groceries for the hungry, and it’s not fair of the judges to delve into what particular set of policies you would promote to achieve those goals. Isn’t it enough that you have shown yourself to be a really good caring ‘people person’ by just desiring such cures for the world’s ills?
In the same way, Palin thought it was sufficient that she merely presented herself as informed on a daily basis by newspapers and magazines without actually having to bother to learn some by name or talk knowledgeably about their contents. Isn’t it enough that she said she reads all that intellectual stuff, for Pete’s sake? Hey, Real America doesn’t care – they’re too busy shooting wolves from circling Cessnas.
She showed a similar BPC understanding of the law in the campaign of 2008 when she failed to come up with any Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade that entered her memory – but, then, come on — a real leader can always call on her staff to review such inane details for her, as befits a princess with a yen for higher office, such as Ms. Vice President of America.
As for calling Couric ‘The Perky One’ – the giddy Sarah often gives irony a hernia from too much stress, but this was an entry worthy of an Olympic record.
The late Kurt Vonnegut would have heartily appreciated the alternately peevishly snippy and wholesome Hockey-Mom vacuity of Sarah Palin. The Tattler can picture him with his kindly grin, the world-weary eyes twinkling in satirical amusement, a Pall Mall with a droopy ash poised in mid-air, observing one of his more incongruous characters come to life and dominating the American political landscape – always slightly absurd, now keeled over into open farce — promulgated by a national news media that is no longer paid to tell the difference.
For incongruity is the Barracuda’s calling card – she supports the infallible efficacy of sexual abstinence for teens while her own 16-year-old daughter swells in unwed pregnancy; she bleats about clean government while papering over her own administration’s manifold corruptions; she assaults small-minded cruelty while delivering velvet-gloved blows to those who dare criticize her; she talks of lofty Christian ideals while she’s perpetually immersed in petty paybacks; she decries government bailouts while the citizens of her home state accept nearly twice as much in federal money than they pay in taxes; she insinuates darkly of the evils of socialism and nationalization while Alaska annually divides its energy wealth equally among its inhabitants; she natters on about responsibility while refusing to own up to her own mistakes; she deplores politicians abusing their power while she used her office to settle personal scores; she hails freedom while sentencing other members of her gender to do without it; she supports the troops while wanting to prolong their agony in lost wars; she respects tough people who stay in the race, and then quits halfway through her stint as Alaska’s governor when either her ambition or her malfeasance, or both, catch up with her. Most of all, she admires honesty while practicing its opposite, either the result of intentional deception or the BPC’s natural tendency to slap sweet frosting on the ugly realities of human existence, especially when those realities are embedded in one’s own character.
The Tattlesnake – Yankee Doodle Kydoodles and Other Yowling Yowfs of the Teabaggers Pox Americana Edition
“What then is freedom madness? God forbid. For freedom and madness exist not together.”
– Epictetus, “Golden Sayings,” No. XXIX
Non-corporate dissectors of the political scene, and Board Certified (in the Rand Paul sense) observers such as myself, have learned to read the stray tea leaves crushed beneath the corporately-financed circus wagon of this year’s New, Improved Tidal Wave GOP (“Democracy’s Detergent!”) and the occasional bits of actual useful information that drop off the Big Media buffet table of parboiled conventional-wisdom offal determined fit for the rustics by the over-paid ‘two legs good, two legs with money great’ crew that pounds a dismal beat between Beltway Washington and the glass canyons of New York.
A pattern has emerged as clear as the unblinking eyes of Karl Rove when he’s lying through his teeth; despite the noises made by national pollsters — whose questionable practices include antiquated techniques from the ‘one ringy-dingy’ age of rotary-dial Bakelite phones, and a habitual penchant for loading poll questions with such baloney as, “If you had to vote for a really fantastic Republican candidate or a Democrat who nightly dines on dogs and cats, which would you prefer?” or “Yes, I know it’s the headquarters of Koch Industries; I wondered how you planned to vote this election?”– it’s now plain internal polling done by the GOP has revealed that their bumble-brained Teabagger candidates are losing far and wide, and by more drastic margins than the MSM Silly Swillers of Echo Valley would have us believe. Hence, nearly a week before the actual election, we have Republican charges of ‘vote fraud’ and the vow that voter intimi – er – ‘integrity’ squads will be dispatched to those areas rife with denizens who made the poor choice to be born with skin darker than Sarah Palin’s and, unlike politely accommodating indigent whites in certain parts of the country, insist on voting against those who would gladly serve them up by the shovel to feudalistic Chinese-style capitalism.
Your Tattler could not avoid sketching out what these Teabagger ‘voter integrity squads’ might look like. Will they be in full 18th century drag from tricorn hat to knee-britches with silk stockings and ask questions of voters in the formal English of two centuries past? “Hark thee, fair citizen! Dost thou possess the required credentials to participate in this seemly exercise of democracy?” If so, I dost predicteth a spate of hilarity as laughing voters push by the costumed lunkheads, most probably thinking they are hawking the opening of a new Long John Silver’s rather than checking voter identification.
Of course, Ohio’s Republican House contender Rich Iott may dispatch his Nazi re-enactors to prevent any chicanery at the polls. Will they be dressed in complete SS regalia and posing their queries in a fake German accent, ala Col. Klink? “I must zee your papers now, schweinhundt!” This, too, affords too much room for risible ridiculousness, if not danger for the Nazi imposters – some unamused WWII vet might grab a rifle and take potshots at them from his wheelchair or walker.
But then, the Teabaggery may appear in yellow t-shirts with the affable “Don’t Tread on Me” embossed in acrylic on the front, accompanied by a gun strapped to their leg in one of those goofy Velcro thigh holsters. Sure, they seem to mean business, but the thigh-holster can be a knotty problem – if the straps are too loose, the pistol humiliatingly falls down on your foot and resembles nothing so much as a public depantsing; if the straps are too tight, it cuts off blood flow and the Teabagger tough guy is reduced to hopping around on one foot, trying to intimidate minority voters while restoring circulation to his numb leg. “Hey – Ow! Ow! – you got legal identification to vote – Ow! Ow! – here?” That path, too, leads to nothing other than comical YouTube videos and an excuse for some droll Jon Stewart barbs on The Daily Show.
But no matter what garb the Teabaggers don — whether it’s grim ‘Men in Black’ mufti like Joe Miller’s amateur-hour security guards in Alaska, or the simpler straw hat with hanging teabags stapled around the brim – the fact is that most Teabaggers hail from rural, caucasian areas of the country. While they are confident they intimately know the psyche of black people from long exposure to lawn ornamentation and Bill Cosby reruns, and no doubt believe they will be greeted in Inner City regions by courteous men and women emulating our gracious president, such may not be the case. I can think of several black folks of my acquaintance who would not take kindly to being confronted by some rude peckerwood demanding their papers. They would definitely not refrain from putting the ‘Mr. T’ in Tea Party, so to speak.
What’s more, if Hispanics are the vicious beheading drug gangsters the trembling Teabaggers have been told they are, how many of Beck’s Crusaders will want to hang around in front of polling places in Latino neighborhoods, waiting for the Machete of Death to fall? These Tea Partiers are, after all, gullible ante-bellum conservatives who are scared of almost everything, including any concept hatched after the Dark Ages, and unlikely to chance confronting the living representations of the actors Sharron Angle sticks in her Halloween Party TV ads.
There will be intimidation at the polls — the Teabaggers will be terrified into sitting in their vans with the doors locked, hunched down, trying not to wet themselves. This GOP ‘project’ will be as big a bust as Rove’s electoral math in 2006.
Add to that the number of voters who find criminally stomping on a passive woman’s head at a public event offensive, and you have an upset for the Democrats in the making, and the Teabaggers quickly jettisoned from the GOP ranks damned with the only epithet the cynical Republican elite consistently honors, ‘loser’.
Contrary to the news-cycle fantasies of Media Conventional Wisdom to which would-be president Rudy Giuliani succumbed, mostly a confection of giddy press releases, past performance, and inbred cocktail party jabber, the fanatical Teabagger GOP – a small minority never much more than empty rage, incoherent ideas, and shifting wind, financed by fools with more money than brains — peaked months ago and has been in decline ever since as Democratic candidates rose in even the archaic landline-phone polls that favor older, whiter, more rural, and more conservative voters – in other words, the core of the Tea Party movement. If the Punditocracy that has for the past year woven the fiction of massive GOP gains in 2010 were not so obstinate in supporting their own discredited imaginings, and getting a pat on the head from the large corporations that dispense their paychecks, they might look at this information from a different angle, and I don’t mean Sharron: Around the country, the Democrats have pulled even or ahead with the voters the desiccated, weakened GOP desperately needs to get elected.
Hang down your bulbous Chuck Schulz head, Charlie Cook.
Sure, it’s possible that Dems will stay home in droves to teach Obama some kind of obscure lesson, which is reminiscent of the story about the boy who chopped off half his foot with an axe for attention. He got the attention he craved – his family thought he was nuts and stuck him in a mental hospital, and he had to live out his life limping around with half his foot missing. And disgusted independent voters might decide to commit economic suicide by entrusting their futures to babbling goofballs like Angle and Rand Paul, and corporate vipers like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, and complete the job of obliterating our Constitution, rewarding the rich at the expense of the rest of us, eliminating social programs, and shipping what’s left of our jobs overseas or forcing us to work for slave wages.
Then, I’ll hang down my head, but I won’t be alone – millions of Americans, in a few years, will feel the full impact of Reverse Robin Hood Republicanism and be doing the same, and what’s left of America will depend on the thin thread of ink flowing from the president’s veto pen.
If it comes to that point, you’d better hope Obama doesn’t hold a grudge and decide to teach the country a lesson.
© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
Kydoodle: To make loud, meaningless noise.
(From the book “Words” by Paul Dickson.)
Yowf: One whose importance exceeds [their] merit. Rich or influential fools.
(Coined by Gelet Burgess who also invented the words ‘blurb’ and ‘bromide.’)