The passing strange resignation of Sarah Palin

I had forgotten how she speaks:



Oh, how she speaks. But I suppose it's all finally over. I can't believe how close she got to all that power.

Back in September, when it looked as though all of America--and not just the crazy, populist rump of the Republican party--might be in thrall to the Alaskan governor, I had written this:

Unlike the Bush/Wooster engagement with language--with its Bach-like contortions of content and form, its feats of pure imagination, ingenuity, and Dionysian playfulness--the Palin escape from language hints at something that's darker, more subversive, and undeniably absurdist. She seeks not to expand language, but to diminish it as far as possible, to render it alien and meaningless and somehow outside the boundaries of authentic human interaction. She wants to make the audience aware of the limits of language itself, and she wants the awareness to be visceral. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen is her political credo, but she makes us know it not by remaining silent about that which she cannot speak, but by speaking about that which she cannot speak.

...

Words, devoid of meaning, are consequently devoid of force, and their actions cease to cause equal and opposite reactions: words and rationales fly at Palin like bullets but she does not budge, and when she speaks there is no recoil. There can be no laws that govern data because there is but one datum: the fact of the datum. What particular shape that datum takes in any given circumstance is simply the one that most reaffirms itself. Yes. 1. Big. Go. Up. Bright. Fast. We hold on to it for dear life, and steadfastly refuse to accept that it can fail us. This steadfast refusal we call "American exceptionalism", and we have now invested it with so much significance that it keeps us from what ought to be our chief distraction: surviving.

Dude--Palin. Dude.

An interview with Sarah Palin in which a man distractedly slaughters turkeys in the background:



What I want to know is: when did we branch off into the alternate universe? Was it 9/11? I feel like nothing's been real since that happened.

Through the looking glass

A thing that struck me when Sarah Palin first came on the scene was that everyone's immediate reaction was: hey, she looks just like Tina Fey! And so from the get-go, there was this weird post-modern thing where Tina Fey--and by extension Fey-doing-Palin--was culturally prior to Palin herself. Because of this, I think that Fey's sketches lampooning Palin have had a special kind of authority to them, which has been good for Democrats.

Now, though, the whole thing is being taken a step further, because Palin has agreed to do a guest-spot on SNL a week and a half before the election. So the whole thing is sort of upsidedown--as if in the early 90s, Dana Carvey had appeared as George H.W. Bush, but on Meet the Press. Or something.

Beyond Wooster

Over the years, George W. Bush has been maligned as an idiot for his malapropisms, which I always thought was not quite right: Bush isn't an idiot, he's a nitwit. I think the difference is, whereas idiocy implies a definitive lack of intelligence, nitwitism implies a perfectly fine intelligence that, due to a certain kind of breezy temperament, is directed with 100% force towards utter inanity. The nitwit isn't unintelligent so much as incurious; not bloody-minded so much as cheerfully uninterested in reason. And so it is not uncommon for a nitwit to have a certain imaginitive capacity with language, but for it to reveal itself in ways that no serious person can countenance--for example, the ingenious stupidity of a line like, "they misunderestimated me".

The nitwit par excellence is, of course, PG Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, and many observers have noted the similarities between the chummy, Edwardian, blue-blooded bachelor and the 43rd US president (both would do nearly anything to help out an old pal--although whereas for the former this meant ruffling the feathers of an aunt or two, for the latter it meant the destruction of New Orleans). So George W. Bush's distinct style of buffoonery has a bonafide literary pedigree, and is one that can be appreciated, I think, as a subtle form of genius. After all, Wooster is a nitwit, no doubt--but he is a nitwit who has in him the capacity to utter such inspired prose as, "In these disturbed days in which we live, it has probably occurred to all thinking men that something drastic ought to be done about aunts."

In the last few weeks, we have had to come to terms with a new and more advanced type of linguistic trainwreck, in the shape of Sarah Palin. Palin doesn't seem to be a species of nitwit--indeed, her responses to questions are so excessively incoherent that the entire exchange barely qualifies as an act of human communication. The things that Palin verbally responds to--which we would normally think of as questions--are probably better understood more generically as stimuli. For example:

Reporter's verbal stimulus: “Do you think that our continued military presences in Iraq and Afghanistan have inflamed Islamic extremists?”

Palin's response: “I think our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will lead to further security of our nation, again, because the mission is to take the fight over there. Do not let them come over here and attempt again what they accomplished here, and that was some destruction. Terrible destruction on that day. But since Sept. 11, Americans uniting and rebuilding and committing to never letting that happen again.”

In another case, her response seems to press the Wittgensteinian limits of language's very ability to express any meaning at all:

Katie Couric's verbal stimulus: "Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?"

Palin's response: "That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade -- we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation."

Unlike the Bush/Wooster engagement with language--with its Bach-like contortions of content and form, its feats of pure imagination, ingenuity, and Dionysian playfulness--the Palin escape from language hints at something that's darker, more subversive, and undeniably absurdist. She seeks not to expand language, but to diminish it as far as possible, to render it alien and meaningless and somehow outside the boundaries of authentic human interaction. She wants to make the audience aware of the limits of language itself, and she wants the awareness to be visceral. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen is her political credo, but she makes us know it not by remaining silent about that which she cannot speak, but by speaking about that which she cannot speak. Random noise, after all, contains just as much information as no signal, but it is tactically advantageous for the signaler: it costs nothing to produce, but time and resources must be expended on the receiving end to verify the absence of information. In the strategic space thus afforded, she airs her true "argument"--which is not an argument at all, but something that eludes language and even reason: the fact of Sarah Palin. There can be no reasons or words about the fact of Sarah Palin, of her Downs baby, of her moose hunting, of her good looks, of her accent--the concept of transition from actual to ideal is transcended by the simple fact of her being, and this juxtaposed with the fact of her campaign suggests--not through any function of reason, but by a sort of directed free association--the fact of Sarah Palin in power. The linearity of reason is dispensed with in favor of the more primal, more visceral one-dimensional point that just is Sarah Palin, reformer--that just is John McCain, maverick. There is no space left for anything that would have meaning; motion is a conceptual impossibility. Words, devoid of meaning, are consequently devoid of force, and their actions cease to cause equal and opposite reactions: words and rationales fly at Palin like bullets but she does not budge, and when she speaks there is no recoil. There can be no laws that govern data because there is but one datum: the fact of the datum. What particular shape that datum takes in any given circumstance is simply the one that most reaffirms itself. Yes. 1. Big. Go. Up. Bright. Fast. We hold on to it for dear life, and steadfastly refuse to accept that it can fail us. This steadfast refusal we call "American exceptionalism", and we have now invested it with so much significance that it keeps us from what ought to be our chief distraction: surviving.

...

It appears that I have gone mad.

Circumstantial evidence

Tell me if the following twos ought to be put together:

• McCain--behind in the polls, paired with a floundering running mate, and desperate to sieze control of the campaign narrative--makes the grandiose gesture of suspending his campaign and postponing the debates--including the VP debate--until a bailout deal is worked out.
• McCain goes to Washington and--in conjunction with House Republicans--scuttles the bailout deal, thus regaining the initiative by appearing to be driving negotiations and pushing back the VP debate to give Palin (even more) time to prepare.
  

Admittedly, it's a leap. It could be that McCain didn't want to scuttle the bailout plan (although, curiously, he never lent it his explicit support), and McCain may yet show up to the debate even with no bailout plan in place. However, I am a big believer in the idea that cognitive dissonance and good old-fashioned self-delusion can exert a powerful--albeit unconscious--influence on a person's decision making. My little conspiracy theory does not require McCain to have evil intentions--it merely requires that he (perhaps with the help of his campaign advisors) has persuaded himself that these actions really are what's best for the country, and that it just so happens that they benefit him strategically in the campaign.

In the end, though, there's no way to know, so this line of inquiry is a non-starter.

McCain opens another front on the war on...everybody in the media

So McCain cancels on Letterman at the last second explaining that the economy is "about to crater" and that he is needed in Washington--and then turns around and does an interview with Katie Couric instead. Hoo boy:



Add Letterman to the McCain enemies list, I guess.

Let her remove all doubt

From a TPM reader post, some entertaining video and a knock-down Lincoln quote:

The best part is watching Campbell try to keep a straight face. The media knows darn well why the McCain campaign is keeping Palin away from reporters - and it is not because she is a "delicate flower".

I guess they are taking a cue from a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
" 'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."

I wonder how long this sequestering of Palin can last. A month? Six weeks? Till election day?

I stand corrected

Just a few hours ago I said that Andrew Sullivan's criticism of the McCain campaign's request to postpone the debate was bunk. Looks like I was wrong; it appears that the whole thing is a ploy to give Sarah Palin more time to cram for the VP debate:

McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there's no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

In this scenario, the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin would be rescheduled for a date yet to be determined....

The jaw slackens in disbelief.

Now it's personal

All out war has broken out between Andrew Sullivan and the McCain campaign.

Sullivan had been airing questions about whether Trig--the Downs Syndrome baby--is really Sarah Palin's biological son, and even a few weeks ago melodramatically let his blog go dark for a couple of days so that he would be free to do research and "figure it out". Eventually he sent a private correspondence asking the McCain campaign to give a response to his request for proof that Palin really is the mother. The McCain campaign did not respond to Sullivan, but they did divulge the private emails to Howard Kurtz at the Post as part of an effort to marginalize Sullivan and dismiss him as "the biggest one-man ego on the planet".

I hope that the McCain campaign's strategy doesn't work, and that Sullivan keeps his cool and stays hewed to the facts. Already, though, I'm nervous that the personal betrayal--of divulging private communications to the world in order to make him look like an arrogant gossip--has affected his capacity to rationally criticize McCain. For example, he has a post called "The McCain Meltdown" where he points to McCain's request to postpone the Friday debate as evidence that the campaign is in some way melting down. But it seems pretty clear to me either that McCain is telling the truth and needs to focus on the financial crisis instead of cramming for the debates, or that he wants to push the debate to a night that will have a larger TV audience (since the debate will be on foreign policy, one of McCain's alleged strengths). It's a pretty weak attack from Sullivan--an attack for attack's sake that will only cost him credibility on the right (although perhaps the ship has sailed).

In any case, this Washington soap opera stuff is extremely entertaining.

The mind boggles

I just now watched the "full interview" of Sarah Palin after having only seen a few clips here and there. Unfortunately the whole thing is very heavily edited, leaving us to wonder what was left out (and, really, why can't they just post the thing in its entirety somewhere on their website?).

Anyway--wow. The word "farce" comes to mind. She simply could not answer the questions. He'd ask a very specific question--what three changes will you make to the Bush economic policy? should the U.S. cross into Pakistan to attack Al Qaeda?--and she would repeat the same scripted phrases over and over, phrases that did nothing to address the question. And in the cases when she finally relented and did answer the question, she rarely made much sense. For example, one of the three "changes" she would make to the Bush economic policy is "cut taxes". Are you serious?

What a train wreck of an interview. So unprepared. So unqualified. So ignorant. Could you imagine her in a debate with Hillary Clinton?

Words are useless. Just watch it for yourself. I'll save you the YouTube search:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
  

Krauthammer's impressive rearguard action

In an interview with Charlie Gibson--her first with a serious journalist since being named to the Republican ticket--Sarah Palin revealed, in painful-to-watch manner, that she did not know what the Bush Doctrine is:



It is difficult to imagine what possible face-saving argument there could be that would explain away her initial failure to answer Gibson's question. However, Charles Krauthammer (who first coined the term "Bush Doctrine") makes an admirable attempt:

There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration -- and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

He asked Palin, "Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?"

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, "In what respect, Charlie?"

So Krauthammer maintains that she couldn't have answered the question, because it was ambiguous. However, this doesn't hold up, because Gibson disambiguated the question:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine? PALIN: In what respect, Charlie? GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be? PALIN: His world view. GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

So Gibson made it clear which "version" of the Bush Doctrine he was talking about. So it could not have been the case that Sarah Palin was knowledgeable about all the various incarnations of the so-called doctrine, and that she merely required some disambiguation from Gibson in order to answer the question.

However, maybe Krauthammer is not trying to argue that she knew about the Bush Doctrine but could not answer the question because it was vague; maybe, instead, he is arguing that it is no big deal that Palin doesn't know what it is because it's an amorphous, unuseful bit of foreign policy jargon. In other words: perhaps she does know her stuff, just not some of the jargon that comes with the territory. However, what argues against this is the fact that Palin actually proceeded to answer Gibson's question, and yet failed to talk about preemption, spreading democracy, unilateralism, or any other key concepts from any of the various versions of the Bush Doctrine that Krauthammer lists:

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

The "beauty of American elections"? If Sarah Palin had any kind of command of the basics of foreign policy, either she would have had the confidence to ask Gibson what he meant by the term or she would have given an answer that in some way touched upon one of the various concepts that the term could be used to refer to. Instead, Palin treated us to a cringe-inducing tapdance of an answer that began as a generic explanation of "what President Bush has attempted" and morphed, somehow, into a pladitude about civics. Anyone watching could clearly see: she just didn't know what she was talking about.

Even after Gibson finally threw her a bone, her response contradicted McCain's position on the issue:

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

The position Palin spells out--that a preemptive strike is justified if an attack on the country is imminent--has been the policy of the United States for decades. The Bush Doctrine--which is supported by McCain--is that preemptive war is justified, even absent the imminence of any attack. So for example if we think that country X might attack us five years from now, then according to the Bush Doctrine we are justified in going to war with that country today. It is a radical and dangerous departure from American tradition and, indeed, the norms of Western civilization--and all of it, apparently, is news to Sarah Palin.

Though I think Krauthammer ultimately fails to defend Palin's performance, it looks as though he has succeeded in giving her some much-needed cover in the media. Already there is an article in the Post with the headline "Many Versions of 'Bush Doctrine'" with the life-saving subhed "Palin's Confusion in Interview Understandable, Experts Say". Well. I imagine that Post staff writer Michael Abramowitz shouldn't be too surprised to find a mysterious fruitbasket waiting for him tomorrow from somebody called "S.P."

Also, as Matt Yglesias notes, many journalists seem to be going out of their way to observe that many non-vice-presidential candidates--such as ordinary Americans or they themselves--wouldn't know what "the Bush Doctrine" referred to, and so it is therefore understandable that Sarah Palin--a vice-presidential candidate--doesn't know either. It's all very odd.

In any case, I imagine the net effect will be significant damage to Palin's credibility as a potential head-of-state. YouTube, after all, is a slightly more powerful and visceral medium than Charles Krauthammer op-ed columns.

Nothing new under the bloggy sun

I was going to write a post called "Parity" in which I noted that according to the RCP meta-poll, 538, and Intrade, the race was about even--but then I saw that Paul Krugman has beaten me to it with a post called "Even Odds". Then I was going to write another post about how the McCain campaign is lying its pants off when it claims that Obama called Palin "a pig with lipstick", but half the internet has got that one covered.

For what it's worth, I think things are about to start turning around for Obama and the Democrats, and that this latest outrageously false claim from the McCain campaign is one outrageously false claim too far. Following Ezra Klein's insightful post the other day, the media renders the continuous onslaught of news data comprehensible to consumers by framing it within running narratives. I would add that--perhaps out of an obligation to "balance", or maybe just because of a bias towards closer and more interesting races--there is a somewhat pendular motion to press coverage, such that a week or two of positive coverage for a candidate tends to be balanced by a period of negative coverage.

I think the press is getting antsy with its rosy McCain-surging-from-convention-and-Palin-pick narrative, which is one that has emphasized Palin's star turn over the steady drumbeat of false claims eminating from the McCain campaign. However, in order for the shift to occur, there has to be something for the media to affix its narrative to. This pig/lipstick nonsense could be it. In the first place, it's a deception that is readily verifiable in print and on video, so mainstream outlets can comfortably show it without fear of seeming impartial: they can just run a clip of McCain people accusing Obama of making the insult, and then juxtapose it with footage of what Obama said in context, with no need for a reporter to connect any dots. Second, it plays into what has become a pattern of questionable or outright false statements from the McCain campaign, giving the story a direction to run in: does the McCain campaign have a truth problem?

Of course, these things don't happen entirely on their own. Obama is going to have to drive the narrative in speeches, through surrogates, and in campaign ads. He is going to have to actively call out McCain and Palin for campaigning on personal attacks, misrepresentations, and outright lies, and for their silence on issues like health care and the economy.

Biden is already sounding the notes (via Fallows):



And looking around the internet, some people have submitted some pretty good-sounding examples of "what Obama should say". From a Sullivan reader:

"Yesterday I talked to a group of voters about how the McCain campaign is trying to call their continuation of just about every single Bush-Cheney policy of the last eight years "change." In doing so, I used a common, hundred-year-old phrase that we all understand: You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. Now the McCain campaign demands that I apologize for saying this. Everyone, it seems, wants to hear my answer. Here it is: NO.

No, I will not apologize for telling the American people the truth: That McCain and Palin represent a stunning, and disastrous, continuation of Bush and Cheney's policies. Policies of sacrificing the middle class to give huge tax cuts to millionaires and big corporations. Policies that prevent Americans from getting the health care they need. Policies that would privatize Social Security and take away a woman's right to choose.

[...]

There's a word I've heard from the McCain campaign recently: "deference." No one is going to ask Sarah Palin a question, they say, unless they show her "deference." Joe Biden points out that they oppose all stem cell research, and they are offended he even mentioned it. I point out that their claim of bringing change is ridiculous, and they demand an apology. Apparently we are not showing them enough deference.

Let me explain something to Senator McCain and Governor Palin, as deferentially as I can: This is a democracy -- not a monarchy. You don't get to demand "deference" from the American people as if they were your royal subjects. You -- and I -- and everyone who seeks elected office must defer to the American people, and answer their questions, and fight for them even when it's politically inconvenient. That is what I promise to do. Thank You."

And from Nate Silver at 538:

My opponent's chief strategest just said, "this campaign isn't about the issues." Well, I've got news for you, America. The Republican Party is desperate. They are going to do anything to try and hold onto their power, because they know the damage they've done to our country, and they don't know how to fix it. They know that people are out of work, and they don't know how to help them. They know that people are dying because they don't have health insurance, and they don't know to save them. They know that families are struggling to put food on the table, and they know don't know how to provide for them.

So they're going to try and distract you, America, because that's the only thing they know how to do. They're going to try and scare you. They're going to try and tell you stories, instead of offering solutions. And yes, folks -- these are the same people that have been lying to you for the last eight years -- and they're going to lie to you again.

We'll see how it goes in the next couple of days. McCain has been in the driver's seat for the last week or so, but he's sold his soul to do it. If Obama can regain the momentum, he will be in a strong position heading into the final two months.

"She's gonna have to answer questions"

Sarah Palin has yet to submit to candid and adversarial questioning by the press, and there is virtually no record of her views on governing philosophy, the Iraq War, separation of powers, Constitutional rights during wartime, Guantanamo, free trade, health care, the role of the UN, US geopolitical strategy, China, deficit spending, tax cuts, education, and much, much more.

I wonder what her views are, and what percentage of them were formed in a cram session after she was chosen as McCain's VP.

From Kennedy to Clinton

From Bill Clinton's speech to the convention, a truly Kennedy-esque inversion:

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.

What a wonderful, succinct way of drawing the contrast between the demented Republican view of the world--in which we are forever serving up bluster and brinkmanship out of some abstract fear of "emboldening the enemy"--and the coolly pragmatic and principled view offered by Barack Obama. What an immense difference in maturity, pragmatism, temperament, optimism, and basic human decency there is between Clinton's speech and Giuliani's sneering diatribe against "liberals", against civil liberties, against imagined Democratic "elites" who, he fantasizes, spend their days looking down on their fellow countrymen and devising politically correct ways of saying the word "terrorist". One man is reasonable, says reasonable things, and is grounded in the empirical world; the other is completely unserious, says unserious things, and seems to be living in some kind of grotesque cartoon where upholding the Constitution comes in a distant third to eavesdropping on the American population carte blanche and unilaterally bombing the shit out of some distant country to show someone, somewhere, who is boss.

I mean--really. This has got to be the lowest, most ideologically bankrupt, most shameful moment in the history of the Republican Party. There are no ideas, only a Down Syndrome baby passed awkwardly from Palin to Palin. There is no acknowledgment of reality, only the bizarre and Orwellian spectacle of a ruling party calling for a "change" in Washington as if it hadn't had a stranglehold on power for the previous eight years. Stern promises that suspected terrorists will be tortured are met with whoops and energetic chants of "USA! USA!" Declarations that evil will be defeated are swallowed whole by an eager audience that is either unaware of or unconcerned by the fact that such statements contain virtually no information, that they are vapid, trivial appeals not to reason but to the raw emotions of nationalistic fervor.

That Republican convention hall is a crystal ball filled with dark, dark visions of a possible future that I hope with all of my being never comes to pass. And over the last few days, listening to the Clintons, Kerry, Gore, Obama--the decent ones, the right ones, the calm ones, the adults--I have never been prouder to be a Democrat.

Humdingers are easy when you just lie a lot

I imagine most people will say that Sarah Palin's speech went well, but it contained at least one cynically bald-faced lie.

Palin says:

I told the Congress "thanks, but no thanks," for that Bridge to Nowhere.

If our state wanted a bridge, we'd build it ourselves.

It turns out that Palin actually supported the construction of the $223 million bridge that would serve a population of a few dozen residents. According to Reuters, her support continued until the outrageous earmark became a national punchline, at which point she dropped her support for the project--but not really:

National fury over the bridge caused Congress to remove the earmark designation, but Alaska was still granted an equivalent amount of transportation money to be used at its own discretion.

Last year, Palin announced she was stopping state work on the controversial project, earning her admirers from earmark critics and budget hawks from around the nation. The move also thrust her into the spotlight as a reform-minded newcomer.

The state, however, never gave back any of the money that was originally earmarked for the Gravina Island bridge, said [Ketchikan Mayor Bob] Weinstein and [Mike] Elerding [a Republican who was Palin's campaign coordinator in the southeast Alaska city].

In fact, the Palin administration has spent "tens of millions of dollars" in federal funds to start building a road on Gravina Island that is supposed to link up to the yet-to-be-built bridge, Weinstein said.

Ah yes--she was so against the bridge in principle that she kept all of the earmarked money and began work on a road that would connect...to the bridge. Alaska state politics is awesome!

It's facsinating to me that Palin included her "opposition" to the Bridge to Nowhere right there in the middle of her big speech--an appluase line, no less--as if it weren't possible to expose the deception in literally one minute using an invention called "the Google". I wonder if whoever wrote her speech is hip to the internet thing. With the McCain campaign, I guess you never know.

Sarah Palin wreaks cognitive dissonance on us SF hipster types

The problem is that she looks like a cute Starbucks barista, but is in reality the Republican governor of Alaska and running-mate of John McCain.

But she looks like she's into Portishead, I swear...

To be anti-abortion is to be anti-abortion without exception

Sarah Palin opposes abortion without exception--even in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother's life is endangered.

Moderates point to this as evidence that she is on the fringe, but really I have always thought--and I know many of my friends agree--that if you are pro-life, then it would be incredibly odd not to oppose abortion in those instances. After all, you are presumably pro-life because you believe that fetuses are human beings and eliminating them is equivalent to murder. Within this set of beliefs, I don't see why a fetus being caused by rape or incest would make that fetus any less human or its elimination any less of a murder. Even in cases where bringing the fetus to term would endanger the life of the mother, I think it would be difficult to make an argument that would justify killing one human being in order to save another.

And so I think Palin's stance on abortion is perfectly normal and consistent (albeit one I happen to disagree with).

Free the bear

Probably the weirdest bit of news that's happened since I went incommunicado for Burning Man is the fact that McCain has chosen for his running mate someone who was once a member of a party that advocated Alaskan secession from the Union. Hopefully views like this will continue to find their way into the mainstream, so that we Californians can realize our lifelong dream of a roaring, progressive Bear, unrestrained by a parasitic federal government and the vote-diluting bullshit that is the electoral college.