Friday, July 03, 2009

Sarah Palin Is Bugfuck Crazy

This is really weird. Palin's statement was virtually incomprehensible, riddled with self-contradiction. To stay in office would be the path of a quitter? Huh? A point guard dribbles through the press with her head up? Huh? Her presence in office wastes the taxpayers' money? Huh? "The world needs more children like Trig." WuzzafuckHUH?

I agree with Sasha who has not, as of this second, published this theory (and who, to my unbounded giggling delight, has finally renounced the savior I worked so hard to get her to reject, failing because, as best I could tell, Bill Clinton gave her herpes), but seems pretty convinced that Palin's getting indicted on Tuesday, or that the other shoe is otherwise going to drop hard, soon. The content of Palin's attempt at coherence certainly supports this notion; her tone was unbelievably paranoid and defensive, in addition to just plain weird. It sounded like the sort of thing that will click into place as a point-by-point defense in a few days. Sorta like Mrs. Cake forgetting to turn off her precognition. Except less charming. Okay, except not-at-all charming.

While I do favor major scandal as the most likely option I maintain that, given Palin's nearly complete disconnection from reality, it's possible that she actually thinks that this utterly bizarre behavior will help her preznitential bid. That's loonier than a barrel of Canadian dollars, but that's really never stopped her before.

It's also a little weird that someone so determined to pick fights was so clearly determined to back away from them. A subtext of her rambling statement was that she thinks that her continued ventures into public ridicule (every one of them self-triggered and self-exacerbated) are some sort of a distraction, that as the governor of one of our smallest states, she was drawing fire. Uhm...no. As a self-marketed national political spokesperson for an opposition party that just got its ass kicked and seems to be doing its best to self-destruct, Palin will remain a target for as long as she chooses to do anything public as a profession.

And she'll deserve it. Her behavior has been shameless, self-promoting, detrimental to her family, and a disservice to her state. She's an intellectual lightweight and a paranoid bully who has wasted unquantifiable energy taking revenge on real and perceived enemies, and on every perceived slight. Guess who was thinking about pedophilia in relation to a talk-show host's joke about one of her daughters getting knocked up in Yankee Stadium? It wasn't David Letterman. Palin chose to ignore the obvious about her daughter, the unwed teenage babymama, and hold up her younger daughter in connection with the concept. Any suggestion to the contrary is either idiotic or contrived.

Palin's every bit as unconcerned about the welfare of her state as she is about the welfare of her family. She fought a losing battle to reject federal stimulus money for her state (that alone should've gotten her impeached, or shot from a helicopter, or whatever it is they do to inept state officials in Alaska), did psychotic pinwheels in her positioning over former Senator Ted Stevens and his legal issues, and attempted to appoint a Republican to a seat that, under state law, had to go to a Democrat. LGM, with a Juneau-based contributor, has done a fabulous up-close job of covering Palin's ineptitude as governor.

Of course, it's all mightily entertaining. Watching Palin flail away in public appearances is like watching her struggle with a Chinese finger puzzle. The only way for her to beat the thing is to destroy it. The same applies to her political career. Had she simply stayed in place, shut the fuck up, done a little studying, and waited for every one of her potential rivals other than Pawlenty and Huckabee to ejaculate themselves out of contention, she'd have had a really good chance to beat Mitt Romney for the 2012 Republican nomination and lose in a 1972esque landslide to Barack Obama. It's actually a shame; the lunatic fringe of the right wing needs to be led by a crazy person (which Huckabee isn't--quite--and we'll have to hold out for the continuing emergence of Bobby Jindal). It's potentially bad for our side, since pushing the extreme right's head under water and holding it there for 4 years is the only chance the Republicans have of reclaiming the White House for a very long time. But all that needs to ripen.

Thanks, Sarah. And just like my wife's former colleagues at Yes, I'm Packing, So What? High School were grateful to the other county school that had a stabbing incident a week later, Mark "I Finally Bagged A Chick That Likes Sex" Sanford thanks you, too.

Update: It's possible that, in my fascination with the bizarre, I overlooked the simple. The Anchorage Daily News, which has long been one of the best news sources in the world for Palinalia, quoted Mike Hawker, a Republican state senator from Anchorage as stating that the resignation "gives her unfettered ability to pursue her economic interests, whether it be a book deal or speeches, that type of thing, without being cluttered by state ethics law."

If it's that simple--and I'd opine that it seems as likely as any of the other possibilities bandied about so far--it's less bugfuck crazy than I thought, which makes her statement's rambling incoherence all the more bizarre. But that may just be a reflection of her utter discomfort inside her own skin. The manic urgency of her narcissism has, since her rise to national attention, seemed to drive that sort of scary pseudopositive blather, that transparent and inept attempt to portray ignorance as wisdom, to portray deep, all-consuming paranoia and outright crazy behavior as serving the public interest.

It also doesn't do her political ambition (assuming she still has some--she's been acting pretty desperately defeated) any service. Y'know, I try not to revel in other peoples' mental illness, but this person really challenges my principles.

5 comments:

Whispers said...

Here's my $.02 about Palin's fall: good riddance. I know a lot of liberals/intellectuals are crying, saying "she was so incompetent and corrupt that she would automatically bring down the GOP". How can people be so arrogant after 8 years of Bush's blunders? Good governance doesn't happen automatically, and the fewer idiots on the public stage, the better. (This is part of why I was so happy to see George Allen shoot himself in the foot.)

The ruling theory of the day in the Democratic party appears to be "you have to be nice to the stupid people or nobody will vote for us". Sadly, this has led to a complete paralysis in Congress as wet noodles like Harry Reid and the Treacherous Five bargain away Democratic principles in a pre-emptive move that makes the Polish Cavalry of 1939 look fearsome by comparison.
(Who are the Treacherous Five, you ask? People like Kent Conrad, Joe Party of One, Blance "I Love Walmart" Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Kay Hagan, Arlen Specter and/or the unfortunately named (and poorly spelled) Mary Landrieu. You know, the Democratic Senators who rake in corporate contributions and try to figure ways to scuttle the liberal agenda without attracting too much attention. Of this lot, Specter is probably the smallest problem, because he is so self-interested he might actually do what Democrats of PA want him to do. (In contrast, Lieberman continues to thumb his nose at the Democrats of CT - thank you Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer for not backing Ned Lamont!)

As for Obama, I like him about as much as I ever did. Well, that's not exactly true. Let's just say I'm not surprised that he's gone along with so much of the Bush agenda when it's come to secrecy and foreign policy. I never illusioned myself to believe he would wave the magic wand and clean up DC to the point where it would meet with my approval.

Mostly I preferred Obama over Clinton (and esp. McCain) based on my feeling that he would at least be competent. He may lack political courage (more likely he is a bit short on principles) but at least we can count on him to do the competent thing when it is a politcal no-brainer to do so.

Why is he being such a jackass on the detainee issues?

a) he's going to do everything he feels he has to do to avoid releasing KSM. From a due process standpoint, there is little reason to continue to hold KSM. But there's ample reason to think that any line of process that led to releasing him (such as, say, a fair trial that threw out all the evidence the government has because it was obtained via torture) would be political suicide.

b) he doesn't have the belly to take on either the military or the CIA black ops crowd head-on.

b) is disappointing but hardly surprising, as Obama is far more concerned with maintaining his 63-65% approval rating than he is with rocking the boat on secrecy issues.

Having watched Clinton sell out the gays so quickly in his first administration, it is not surprising to see Obama do the same thing. It's unfortunate, because it really isn't 1994 any more (not to mention 1984). A tiny bit of leadership on this issue would have gone a long way.
For example, all he had to do was keep one of these gay Arabic translators on the job. And then anybody who questioned his decision could have been justly criticized for putting prejudice ahead of national security.

Oh well. Really, it could be a lot worse.

At least I'm no longer completely ashamed of the country when I go abroad. Let's face it - Bush and Cheney really set a pathetically low standard there, didn't they?

Whispers said...

A bit more about KSM: we really have no idea what KSM was guilty of or not guilty of. That's part of the problem with a torture-driven interrogation process. Allegedly, KSM has confessed to the beheading of Daniel Pearl, even though independent analysis suggests that he was nowhere near that act. Seeing that KSM was waterboarded a few hundred times, I don't doubt that he confessed to a lot of things he didn't do. But, conversely, he may have actually been guilty of a lot of things he was accused of. That's part of the problem with torture - it's crap from an epistemological standpoint. The purpose of good interrogation is to find out the truth. The purpose of torture is to elicit confessions.

This comment grew too large. It grew too large and should possibly be posted at my own blog, but really it seems so obvious to me that I don't bother.

I probably should bother. But I'm so self-absorbed that I often fall into the trap of thinking that things that are obvious to me are simply obvious in general.

But the problem is figuring which of the things that I consider to be obvious to me are not obvious to the population in general.

I've learned to add
- spatial reasoning
- more generally, things mathematical
- musical tone identification (I'm a human tuning fork)
to this list, but it's harder to feel that level of confidence for things political.

Also, I feel constrained that a lot of my opinions are opinions, not logically derived facts. But dammit, I've been right about every major issue over the past eight years!

Thor bless the Internet. People who think the current situation lacks enough negative pressure on leaders who are doing truly idiotic things need to keep a historical perspective on things. (Not to mention a geographical perspective.) When Stalin or Mao made a major screw-up, they simply jailed anybody who had the temerity to point that out. And yes, it is fair to point out that Bush's failure to be as complete of an asshole as those guys could be seen due more to the system we have than to any particular virtue that Bush himself has. [Or...Bush would have fit very nicely in a banana republic setting, had that been where he'd been born.] But we do live in a system where at least there is some curb on the potential for decades of horrible mismanagement a la Bush-Cheney.

OK, I've completely lost my point here. Maybe I should be blogging more.

Landru said...

No, it's our fault. We haven't fed you in days. You've got nothing but cereal and peanut butter in your bloodstream.

Sasha said...

You did a terrific job of covering Palin -- less so on Sanford but I think that is a male/female dimension thing -- and Whispers deserves an in-person discussion of his perceptive and cogent points, so I'll stick to my road to Damascus conversion.

And no, Bill didn't give me herpes. I don't have sex with right-wingers.

The video I posted of the Savior made me realize that his fatal flaw is that he is an "F" as in a Myers-Briggs feeling type. And, of course, their feelings are all about them. (Bill was just a phoney actor; Barack is a sincere feeling type. ICK!)

Digby said it well today when she referred to his current effort to get all Democrats to agree as "simplistic kumbaaya bullshit." And that is the main thing he is about. That's why he wants everybody to agree, not because it is a practical political strategy but because it is so much nicer when we all get along.

*spit*

Feed Whispers.

Whispers said...

Anonymous Liberal does a very nice takedown of Sarah Palin here