September 9, 2008
You knew it would come to this, didn’t you? Someone claiming to be Bristol’s paramour and the father of her unborn baby has come forth – and on You Tube, no less! Of course, the young man lives in LA and is struggling to launch his career as a – you guessed it – rapper! The video is shameless act of cheap, sleazy self-promotion.
But we’ll bite anyway.
Here it is, for your viewing pleasure…Kevin, Bristol’s baby’s father (and, don’t forget, aspiring musician.)
September 8, 2008
Sarah Palin’s whole “naughty librarian” shtick has not passed beneath anyone’s notice. She’s hot, mates for life, evidently has had sex at least five times, and likely has a pistol secreted somewhere on her person at any given moment. What’s not to love?
While Palin has been largely embraced by conservative Christians, she’s poses a new problem: inspiring Christian men to impure thoughts and their correlative actions: fornication and masturbation.
This from the blog, Calvinists 4 Conservatism (you know, as opposed to those Calvinists who favor anarchy): “McCain’s VP choice, Sarah Palin, suddenly made me want to vote for him, as long as the LORD smites him while he’s in office. She’s consistently conservative on all the issues, and if she’s good enough forThe Forerunner, she’s good enough for me. The Forerunner agrees with me that McCain must be smitten, as well, so I’m obviously not alone in my viewpoints. The only thing that worries me is if I will be drawn into temptation to masturbate and fornicate by her charming, stunning looks.”
September 8, 2008
I’ve received a lot of comments from readers and friends asking why I write about Sarah Palin in every. single. recent. post. What are your thoughts on Russia’s promises to withdraw its troops from Georgia within a month, they ask? And what about the economy, stupid?
In reply, I just yawn.
Fact is, Sarah Palin, for all her detestable qualities, is the most interesting thing to happen to politics since, well, Barack Obama. Together, they’re making this campaign one for the ages and the single weirdest presidential race in history. So what’s a blogger to do? Ignore it? Drone on about an erstwhile superpowers sphere of influence?
Oh, and also, my posts about Palin’s pregnancy are the most popular posts on this site. So…
Let’s look at where we stand. The New York Times and it’s expat sister publication, the International Herald Tribune, have published a smarmy, sentimental story about Palin’s pregnancy with Trig, her infant son. However, if anyone had any hopes that this would lay to rest the DailyKos-inspired conspiracies that Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, is Trig’s real mommy, well, I guess you don’t know DailyKos.
The echo chamber of the lefty blogosphere is still at it, trying to dig up receipts for a fat suit they accuse Palin of buying to fake her pregnancy. (There is nothing more dangerous than a conspiracy-theorist backed into a corner. One should back away slowly, waving one’s arms to appear as large as possible.)
Now, the formerly-relevant-but-now-just-kinda-sad Vanity Fair is putting the final nail in the coffin of its journalistic integrity by publishing a timeline of the Trig-gate conspiracy.
Why hasn’t this story died? Because it’s a nearly perfect storm of things the public loves: celebrity, gossip, scandal, and babies. Evidently, if it bleeds amniotic fluid, it leads.
September 4, 2008
As Americans, we’re used to hearing politicos of every stripe prattle on about their faith. Most of the time, I get this vague sense that they don’t really mean it, that they’re just going through the motions, that they’re too smart to be true believers. Then someone like Huckabee comes along and we’re presented with the contradiction of an intelligent, erudite man who seems to actually believe the earth is 4,000 years old and that Adam and Eve had a pet dinosaur.
Sarah Palin is another such example. We’ve all heard about how she opposes abortion and stem-cell research and is, herself, a church-goin’ Christian. Except she seems too smart for that, too clever. Her positions, I believed, were crafted for the political advantage they provided. But not so.
A video has surfaced of her speaking before the Wasilia Assembly of God church at what seems to be a commencement ceremony of some sort. No, she doesn’t go off about Jews or gays or Mexicans. No one speaks in tongues or channels the dead. It’s more banal than that. She gives a longish, rambling speech about Alaska and Jesus and growing up in the church. At the end, the pastor says Alaska is one of the “refuge states” to which people will flock during the “end times.” End times which are apparently expected soon because he admonishes the parishioners to prepare to minister to those of us who will soon be headed there.
Maybe it’s all very ordinary to churchgoing types, but reinforced in me a real discomfort that Sarah Palin is not just going through the motions when it comes to her fundamentalism.
(Apologies for my inability to embed the video directly in the site. Click here instead.)
September 4, 2008
So sue me, my sources were wrong. What can I say. Turns out, someone got McCain and Palin on tape at the exact moment when he dropped the news on her that she was his choice for VPILF.
And, by the way, you probably don’t want to play this too loudly at work or around easily-offended ears.
September 4, 2008
Though she’d succeeded in keeping the news cycle all to herself for these past six days, few of us had actually heard Sarah Palin speak. Tonight’s performance at the RNC introduced us not only to Gov. Palin and her family, but to an entirely new political brand.
Amid a sea of pasty delegates in bad suits and idiotic hats, she delivered a speech that was notable not for its soaring, grandiloquent rhetoric, but for its lack of it. There was no riffing on the great political orators, no high-minded invocations or classical references. Rather, Palin’s speech was by turns folksy, sarcastic, mean, and, finally, damn powerful. It was delivered in Palin’s odd drawl, in plain language that was less political careerist than, appropriately enough, small-town mayor and PTA board member.
I have written before that it is Palin’s blue-collar street cred even more than her gender that endears her so to the Republican base. Which is why it would have been impossible for any candidate but her to strike the nerve of cultural discontent that has been rumbling beneath the surface for some time.
What the media and political establishment has gotten wrong about the so-called “culture war” – and will probably continue to get wrong – is that religion and race have little to do with it. Rather, it’s an issue of mutual misunderstanding between city and country, the highly-educated and the merely educated, the coasts and flyoverland. This is the chord Palin managed to strike so perfectly tonight, mocking Obama as an effete dilettante who condescends to those who own guns, or believe in God, or work with their hands, while simultaneously believing his experience as a “community organizer” is so special that it qualifies him to lead the free world.
Palin, along with the other speakers tonight, were generally freer and more vicious in lampooning their opponents than the Democrats had been with them. Again, this plays into the anger at Obama’s perceived condescension and the contempt of the “elite” for the rural unwashed. Thus Palin’s speech took on the air of a folksy rejoinder to the Democrats – the country mouse teaching the city mouse a thing or two.
At the end of the speech, to thunderous, nearly manic, applause, Palin was joined on stage by her family, including her pregnant teenage daughter, Bristol, and infant son, Trig. While trotting out the families of candidates is old hat, with Palin it was masterful. Suddenly, the ruthless and capable Sarah Barracuda (as she was known in high school) became Sarah the mother and wife. It was, in a single moment, the crystallization of what the Republicans would like their brand to be: tough yet loving, strong yet gentle, certain but tolerant.
In short, Sarah Palin is the new face of the culture war – and a far more attractive one than Pat Buchanan.
September 2, 2008
Debating hypotheticals is what political nerds do when they’re sitting at a bar since they’re too shy to talk to women. Such debates are always an asinine waste of time. Except when they’re not. On rare occasions they’re necessary. Today is such an occasion.
The prospect of a John McCain presidency – less and less likely, but a prospect nonetheless – now means the prospect of a Sarah Palin presidency. As has been repeated ad nauseum, Palin would be a mere “heartbeat away” from the White House daddy chair. Since McCain is 72 and a four-time survivor of skin cancer, the hypothetical seems less hypothetical.
How would this hockey mom, grandmother, and newbie governor of our 47th most sparsely populated state handle herself when confronted with, oh, let’s just pick something wild and crazy out of a hat: a testosterone-mad Russia invading one of her neighbors? Call it Sarah Palin vs. Vlad “the Impaler” Putin.
Palin with gun
We hear that a good portion of the Republican base – the gun nuts, the Jesusheads, maybe even a part of the “Remember Ruby Ridge” camp – find Palin irresistible and even sexy. A true VPILF. She’s tough, they say, strong, intrepid, principled. Indeed, comes off that way. Exxon, BP, et al got their asses handed to them when Palin was chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. . Stories of how her the bodies of her political enemies litter the Alaskan landscape have filled the airwaves of conservative talk shows. Even The New Republic has published a piece calling her “a true political savant” whose accomplishments in office “routinely outperform her resume.”
We can have little doubt that Sarah Palin is a tough woman, even an admirable woman. In fact, if you’re of her political bent, she may even make an excellent president one day. But not today.
China is ambitious and growing, Russia is resurgent, the EU presents complicated problems for our own economy, and the Middle East is, well, the Middle East is as it always is. These problems are intertwined and pose grave strategic risks; move a pawn there and your knight may be in jeopardy; don’t move the pawn and you risk your bishop. The calculus involved requires experience and training as well as a lifetime of study. Is Sarah Palin prepared to play at this level? No.
Putin with gun
Then again, few presidents in recent history have entered the office with the sort of foreign policy experience that would seem to be a prerequisite for the job. Neither Bush nor Clinton nor Reagan had much besides their wits, their advisors, and, yes, their experience as governors to inform their decisions. Only George H. W. Bush could brag of having the home numbers of princes and prime ministers in his Rolodex before setting foot in the White House. In short, nobody can really have what it takes to be president until, gray and haggard, their term is up and they slink off to write their memoirs.
September 1, 2008
I just got off the phone with one of my friends, a hardened cynic and one of the brightest marketing minds of his generation. His voice was virtually quavering with excitement about the Bristol Palin “scandal.” I use quotes because, in my friend’s assessment, it is not really a scandal at all, but an act of sheer political genius that makes Karl Rove’s strategies seem like the work of a rank amateur.
While McCain was clearly gambling when he chose Palin, I doubt he’d have vetted her knowing her teenage daughter was pregnant. My friend disagrees. Call it the Springerification of presidential politics; if you can’t win on substance, give them a prurient story with an uplifting moral ending. Give them a sympathetic heroine – an outsider every(wo)man, sticking to her values come hell or high water or vicious attacks on Daily Kos. Give them a beleaguered daughter whose family rallies around her in a show of breathtaking cohesion. Give them bathos.
Thus, my friend’s thinking goes, is the Republican boilerplate of family values and the sanctity of life reified. Arch-conservatives disaffected by McCain will now turn out in the millions to cast their vote not for a candidate, but for a story.
McCain learned this trick of mastering the electorate’s emotions from Obama himself. Not that there’s anything prurient about a Harvard-educated lawyer turned community activist. But Obama’s ability to inspire, both with his words and his personal story, have already brought legions of new voters to the polls while creating fanatics out of the formerly apathetic.
So crank up the emotionalism and turn down the class. Forget the local boy who made good against all odds, let’s talk about the local girl gone bad. The morality-tale narrative will unfold as it always does: we can turn an unfortunate situation into something positive by sticking together, making the right choice, and, don’t ya know, keeping the faith.
That’s my friend’s thinking, anyway. His prediction: McCain in a landslide.
In my view, it could all backfire, smashing McCain’s campaign permanently. The Republicans are so off-message now that they’ll have a hard time finding their way back. Besides, stories of poor decisions that turn out well in the end only look good in hindsight. The message from the voters to Palin may well be: we like you, sister, but it sounds like you have some personal stuff to work out first.
September 1, 2008
The Palin campaign confirmed only moments ago that Bristol Palin, the daughter of Governor Sarah Palin, is currently five months pregnant. This puts to rest rumors that Bristol is actually Trig’s mother, but raises a whole range of other, more perilous issues for the McCain/Palin campaign.
The news first reached us through an article in the venerable British rag, the Independent. According to Governor Palin’s press release, McCain knew about the pregnancy before naming Sarah Palin his pick for VP, but decided to go ahead with the announcement, anyway.
According to the press release, Bristol plans to keep the baby and will marry the child’s father.
This just in: the 2008 presidential campaign is now being turned into a made-for-TV movie for the Lifetime channel.
September 1, 2008
The always upstanding Daily Kos is reporting that Sarah Palin is not, in fact, the real mother of the infant, Trig Palin. Rather, the real mother is Palin’s 16 year old daughter, Bristol. Kos contributor ArcXIX, in a mawkishly indignant and poorly written exposé, entreats: “Sarah needs to answer for her lies, promptly.” Right. Because apparently the lefty bloggers have just stepped out of a time machine and their Victorian morals can’t countenance the idea of an unwed teen having a baby and a family covering for her.
Daily Kos publishes a series of photos showing Gov. Palin around the time she announced her pregnancy. She clearly isn’t pregnant, says ArcXIX who is apparently also a forensic obstetrician. Personally, I dunno. Some women show, some don’t.
Palin, 7 months pregnant
It’s one thing to scrutinize the shape of a 44 year old woman – quite another to give a pixel by pixel examination of that woman’s 16 year old daughter. ArcXIX cites the picture below as proof-positive that Bristol Palin, Sarah’s daughter, was pregnant. This is his analysis: ”Bristol is pregnant in these pictures. She is not carrying belly fat, which grows outwardly wide, and does not become dome-shaped. That’s because fat is generally evenly distributed around the abdomen and a fetus is not. Bristol’s chest is sticking out, a normal body reaction when sucking in stomach muscles.”
The "pregnant" Bristol Palin
Ah. I see. Thank you, Daily Kos, for that creepy analysis of a teenage girl’s anatomy. I’m sure she, for one, deeply appreciates your implication that she is so fat she must be pregnant. With one careless post you managed to sentence poor Bristol, a normal-looking teenager, from what I can tell, to a future eating disorder and a decade of psychotherapy.
For those unfamiliar with ArcXIX, don’t feel bad. His last post on Daily Kos was about gay cowboy wizards, and that was all the way back in December, 2005. In other words, ArcXIX smells like a shill identity. In just 48 hours, ArcXIX turned up countless old photos of the Palin family and even Bristol’s school records. In other words, this is not the work of an occasional blogger, but that of a serious opposition research team meant to make sure Gov. Palin’s political life is nasty, brutish, and short.
Way to class up the presidential race, Kos.
