Category Archives: Republican Party

Palin’s First Interview

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I didn’t watch Sarah Palin’s interview last night because, frankly, I wasn’t in the mood. I watched “House” reruns instead. Hugh Laurie is a hoot.

So what’d I miss? I’m catching up with the reviews now. The consensus on the Right is that Charles Gibson asked unfair trick questions, like “What is your favorite color?” The consensus on the Left is that Palin was unaware there were such things as “foreign countries” until last week.

Seriously, Jack Shafer found this exchange, um, unworthy of a serious candidate for national office:

Gibson: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?

Palin: In what respect, Charlie?

Gibson (refusing to give her a hint): What do you interpret it to be?

Palin: His worldview?

Gibson: No, the Bush Doctrine, enunciated in September 2002, before the Iraq War.

Palin attempts to fake it for 25 seconds with a swirl of generalities before Gibson, showing all the gentleness of a remedial social studies teacher, interjects.

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

Of course Palin agrees with the Bush Doctrine, but she can’t come out and say so, having just admitted that she doesn’t know it by name. At every point in the Q&A, Gibson had the right follow-up questions to elicit more from Palin, including after he asked the Bush Doctrine cringe-maker. He asks her to give thumbs up or down to the U.S. military’s recent forays into Pakistan from Afghanistan. He asks her several ways. But she can’t answer the question, and she won’t dismiss it. Instead she slows the interview to a crawl again, dribbling and dribbling the ball but refusing to take the shot.

James Fallows rightfully points out that Gibson should have used the word preventive rather than preemptive. But he also said that anyone who understood the doctrinal underpinnings of the invasion of Iraq would have known this and would have asked Gibson to clarify.

I don’t know that this interview would have changed anyone’s minds. Non-Palin supporters were underwhelmed, but Palin’s fans think she shouldn’t be expected to bother her pretty little head with boring foreign policy issues, and Gibson was a meanie to ask such hard questions. After all — Palin has never had an abortion!

If elected, maybe Palin could send just her righteous and holy uterus to Washington, and the rest of her can stay in Alaska.

Elsewhere, in another context, I got into a discussion of whether Palin or Palin supporters can be called “feminists.” I say it’s absurd; Palin is to feminism what the invasion of Iraq was to spreading peace and democracy.

See also Steve Benen, John Cole, and Greg Sargent.

They Must Really Be Mad

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Howard Kurtz did something remarkable in his column today. Here are the first few paragraphs; see if you can spot what it is.

The media are getting mad.

Whether it’s the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches.

Maybe it’s a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated (not that there’s anything new about that).

News outlets are increasingly challenging false or questionable claims by the McCain campaign, whether it’s the ad accusing Obama of supporting sex-ed for kindergartners (the Illinois legislation clearly describes “age-appropriate” programs) or Palin’s repeated boast that she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere (after she had supported it, and after Congress had effectively killed the specific earmark).

The McCain camp has already accused the MSM of trying to “destroy” the governor of Alaska. So any challenge to her record or her veracity can now be cast as the product of an oh-so-unfair press. Which, needless to say, doesn’t exactly please reporters, and makes the whole hanging-with-McCain-on-the-Straight-Talk era seem 100 years ago.

It goes on like that. I kept scanning the paragraphs for the “balance” section — You know, the part that says “The Obama campaign likewise accused Governor Palin of [some trivial thing taken out of context and blown up into a controversy], so it’s just as bad, blah blah blah.”

It turned up, finally, in the 14th paragraph, and even there Kurtz was quoting someone else. The point is that the first 13 paragraphs are about the lies coming from the McCain campaign, and only the McCain campaign. This is extremely unusual behavior coming from Kurtz, long a reliable tool for the Right. Usually, when the Republicans do something outrageously bad, the first 13 paragraphs of his column are about why it’s the Democrats’ fault.

The media must really be mad.

The wingnuts are calling Kurtz’s column a “descent into madness” and an example of “rabid partisanship for Obama.” That Kurtz, for once, is just plain telling the straight-up truth is not considered, nor have I found any rightie blogger who could refute the facts damning McCain in Kurtz’s column. Some things don’t change.

Honor

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I was reading a diary on DKos from “Sgt Major Meyers” on the subject of honor. It gave me an understanding of a word we often hear, but typically gloss over – an understanding from a career military perspective:

Throughout my life growing up in a military family and in my military career, one predominate trait or quality was emphasized and driven home by both my family and every leader I have ever met. That trait or quality was honor. Just to refresh your memory the dictionary defines honor as: honesty, fairness, or integrity in one’s beliefs and actions – a man of honor.

From the time I had what I believe was probably my very first logical thought about the subject I do not believe that there was ever any doubt in my mind of what the meaning of honor was, nor was there ever any doubt of what actions honor required. There was a second thing that I never had any doubt about, and that was that once one’s honor was compromised it was a permanent and oft never fading blemish. I know this from personal experience and from my own personal failures against which I struggle to this very day. I point this out because I believe that even the most honorable and well intentioned people with the most hard earned sense of honor can fail and that they can be guilty of being dishonorable, and I believe that this has happened in the presidential race.

This is what Obama should challenge McCain on – his honor, or lack thereof.

A parallel challenge could be made to Sarah Palin, and to her inch-deep Christianity, along the same lines, but this is a much more difficult tack in the current climate, with the current players. And Sarah, like George Bush, is a much more devious and skilled manipulator, able to turn back any such attack with ease.

Most of us during these last few days are once again, awakening to the sad realization that good ideas and good character are not enough to win an election – otherwise we’d probably be wrapping up the final years of the Gore Administration. Lying and bullying behavior has to be confronted and effectively rebuffed. If it isn’t, no one will respect Obama, no matter how great his ideas or his character.

For someone as high minded as Obama, and who is operating with a distinct handicap – “Jackie Robinson rules” – this is his greatest challenge: to move past “merely” being able to bring people together over good ideas, and to boldly confront the white establishment about its shameful lack of honor, and to make it stick. This is the next level, the next step in his growth as a leader and as a human being. And I think the Republicans know this – they know they’re dealing with a squeaky clean class nerd, who, for many reasons has difficulty fighting them effectively. They found his weakness.

I’m reminded of what it was like in high school to be a nerd. I may have been good at various scholastic subjects, but in the larger scheme of things, the jocks ruled. Had I known then what I know today, I never would have tolerated the bullying and abusive behavior of these jealous boors. And as Kurt Vonnegut so aptly pointed out, life is nothing but high school:

When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realize you are being ruled by people you went to high school with. You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing BUT high school. You make a fool of yourself in high school, then go to college to learn how you should have acted in high school, then you get into real life and that turns out to be high school again – class officers, cheerleaders, and all.

“Honor” and “Shame” are emotionally laden words, that Republicans, including John McCain are sensitive to, even if they don’t fully get their meanings. They’re powerful weapons waiting to be used, to turn back the far right’s wall of bullshit. Will Obama understand the challenge he faces right now, that good ideas and good character aren’t enough by themselves to get through this high school kind of world we’re in?

Circus Nation

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I stayed quiet when the National Enquirer broke the Edwards story and didn’t comment on it until Edwards confessed. This I will submit without comment, except to ask, could this cover swing an election?

I think this is the damnedest presidential election campaign I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a few of ’em, buckaroos. E.J. Dionne is stunned for the same reasons, and he’s seen at least as many campaigns as I have.

Meanwhile — as goes the Palin family, so goes the Department of the Interior.

As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

“A culture of ethical failure” besets the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

I can already hear Keith Olbermann comparing this to that classic Department of the Interior scandal — Teapot Dome.

People used to speak of Teapot Dome in hushed, shocked tones, stunned that such a thing could have happened in the United States. Now it seems rather mild. Just business as usual in the Bush Administration.

(Singing)

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain’t it hard when you discover that
He really wasn’t where it’s at
After he took from you everything he could steal.
How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Sorta fits my mood.

The Children’s Hour

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The future of humanity, and possibly of our planet, may hinge on the results of the November election. And this being America, the campaign has devolved into adolescent accusations that one candidate called another candidate a “pig.”

I can pretty much guarantee that many hours of television programming today will be dedicated to serious discussion of whether Barack Obama intentionally called Sarah Palin a “pig” — a phony controversy generated by the McCain campaign that could be dismissed in a few seconds with a simple review of what Barack Obama actually said.

I can pretty much guarantee that at no time today will any of the major cable news networks dedicate even a few seconds to substantive discussion of the candidates’ positions on health care, even though Americans place health care very high on their list of concerns.

The McCain campaign consists mostly of frantically throwing red herrings in all directions, hoping no one notices that John McCain and his moose-shootin’ sidekick have no idea how they might govern. And this is working very well for them, it seems. The American public has gotten so used to content-free campaigns they think this is normal.

Over the years Americans have been conditioned to respect utter nonsense, because they see our national leaders and the “pundits” in mass media respecting utter nonsense. If by some miracle we woke up tomorrow morning in a world where our leaders were engaged in sincere, factual, and substantive discussion of issues, most Americans would be dumbfounded.

Because of the way Americans hold elections and declare winners, it is impossible for a third party to challenge the Big Two. And one of the Big Two has become more of a social pathology than a party. The American Right has taken over the Republican Party, and the American Right does not want to govern. It wants to destroy. Years of cheap political demagoguery have filled a large part of the American public with a seething resentment of just about everything — other nations, racial minorities, religious diversity, cultural diversity, intellectuals, the poor. And on and on.

Most of all, they resent American liberalism, which these days seems to be defined as “any doctrine that calls for running the government responsibly and in a way that addresses the real-world needs of American citizens.” Can’t have that.

Many Democrats have contributed to this sorry mess, of course. But, basically, we’re looking at America’s extreme Right; the descendants of Richard Hofstadter’s pseudo-conservatives. These are the people of whom Hofstadter wrote back in the early 1960s,

The difference between conservatism as a set of doctrines whose validity is established by polemics, and conservatism as a set of rules whose validity is to be established by their usability in government, is not a difference in nuance, but of fundamental substance.

Today’s Republican Party is entirely about polemics. It has nothing to offer in the way of responsible government, either in domestic programs or foreign policy, but fantasy narratives, tired slogans and ideas that have already failed. No amount of real-world examples showing why their ideology is inapplicable to governing can sway them.

Hofstadter continued, quoting Theodore W. Adorno:

“The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

And finally,

Writing in 1954, at the peak of the McCarthyist period, I suggested that the American right wing could best be understood not as a neo-fascist movement girding itself for the conquest of power but as a persistent and effective minority whose main threat was in its power to create “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”

Back in 1954, Hofstadter didn’t believe pseudo-conservatives would ever win elections. Here his vision failed him. Because once they had created “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible,” they were able to win elections.

What Hofstadter didn’t foresee was that in the 1970s pseudo-conservatism would join forces with old money — right-wing family foundations and wealthy individuals — to build a media message machine that would utterly confound rational political discourse in America.

Thus, in November, Americans will march to the polls without having once had the candidates’ stands on issues clearly and factually and un-hysterically explained to them.

It’s true that citizens can learn a lot by reading candidates’ web sites and party platforms, if they bothered to go there. But most won’t. And many have bought into America’s whackjob political culture and don’t see why it should change.

Worst of all, after more than 25 years of nonstop right-wing demagoguery coming at them from every media outlet, Americans have been conditioned into a kind of learned helplessness. Government doesn’t work. We mustn’t even think about using government to solve national problems, because it won’t. We’re on our own. That’s the American way.

See also: Read Jonathan Freedland, then take a glance at some of the typically adolescent wingnut reaction to Freedland. I don’t need to comment; it all speaks for itself.

Update: See Glenn Greenwald.

Update: The wingnuts are in such a state of hysteria they twist obvious compliments into insults.

Update: Joe Klein is disgusted. A miracle.

The Novelty Candidate

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Yes, there’s a Sarah Palin action figure doll. Those of you who still have your George W. Bush fighter pilot action figure doll will want one. Just don’t tell me what you do with them.

I don’t know if Gary Kamiya saw the Palin action figure before he wrote “The dominatrix” for Salon. Readers are complaining that the article is sexist. Personally, I think Kamiya has a point.

At a conscious level, the Republican duo are masquerading as reformers who will “clean up Washington.” But their unconscious appeal may be more important. By choosing Palin, McCain and the GOP have elbowed the Democrats off the dance floor. In a bizarre turnaround, the uptight Republicans are suddenly the party of sex, women, fun. They’re all about spontaneity, bucking convention, letting their freak flags fly. If it feels good, do it! Let Mr. Dignified, Obama, drone on about the economy or the resurgence of the Taliban or whatever boring downer of a subject he wants to lecture us on. Let that long-winded Joe Biden carry us back to that Poli Sci 201 class we fell asleep in. Hey, did you check out Palin’s rack? It’s party time in America!

Kamiya also suggests that “Drill, drill, drill” has a subtext I hadn’t thought of.

McCain’s rise in the polls appears to be almost entirely a reaction to Sarah Palin. As everyone keeps saying, she has “energized the base.” That’s another phrase that’s taken on new meaning for me after reading Kamiya’s article, but never mind. There is disagreement over how much bounce McCain got, and whether it will last. (For discussion see this and this.)

I have no doubt that the wingnuts will love Sarah Palin forever. After all, we’re talking about people who are still angry that the Senate bounced Robert Bork’s SCOTUS nomination more than 20 years ago. If the Palin-McCain ticket loses, the loss will be added to their Grievance Hall of Fame.

What remains to be seen is whether Palin can keep the affection of those swing voters who have swung in her direction. Maybe, but I think it’s more likely she’ll end up being a novelty toy that amuses for a few days but quickly ends up in that box of random junk in the basement.

As Josh Marshall points out, Palin’s “reformer/maverick” persona is built entirely on lies. And, for a change, the MSM actually is reporting on some of these lies. Current headlines:

“Palin Billed State for Nights Spent at Home: Taxpayers Also Funded Family’s Travel” (Washington Post)

“Record Contradicts Palin’s ‘Bridge’ Claims” (the bleeping Wall Street Journal, believe it or not)

I like the Obama campaign’s response ad. It even uses the “L” word — lying. Whoa!

The McCain campaign’s issue-free ads tout the ticket as a pair of “reformers” and “mavericks” who will bring “change.” All image, no substance. Will that work? I’ve seen similar campaigns fail in the past, and I’ve also seen them succeed. I think a lot depends on what mood the electorate is in.

The GOP marketing strategy is essentially the same one they used to sell Dubya in 2000. Al Gore is a bore. George Bush is fun. Hey, America — are we having fun yet?

Mean Girls

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Last week I questioned whether Sarah Palin would appeal to small-town women as much as the GOP assumes she will. This was a criticism coming from my own small-town roots.

Although I realize anecdotal evidence needs to be taken with a big grain of salt, I call your attention to “Sarah Palin’s appeal to working-class women may be limited” in today’s Los Angeles Times. The reporters, Faye Fiore and Peter Wallsten, interviewed women in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and found them to be, um, underwhelmed by Sarah Palin. Many were turned off by Palin’s meanness and sarcasm.

When Palin belittled Obama’s history as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side — suggesting he was a do-little activist while she, as the former mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska, had “actual responsibilities” — Sandy Ryan, 59, clicked the remote.

“That’s enough of that. I switched over to ‘House Hunters,’ ” she said with some disgust over dessert with a group of women from the senior housing complex she manages. …

… Patty Tobal, a 63-year-old retired nurse and lifelong feminist, shut off the TV set and went to bed. The promise of a woman on the ticket had piqued her curiosity, but she found Palin’s sarcasm offensive and her priorities out of touch.

This was not the reaction Republicans were expecting.

But Republican strategists hope that Palin’s middle-class roots, union-member husband and love of hunting will help her connect to rural and small-town folks in battleground states such as Pennsylvania.

This is, after all, a place where schools close on the opening day of deer hunting season, people are conflicted about abortion rights and racial bias still simmers.

Sara Taylor, former Bush White House political affairs director, described Palin as a “living, breathing replica of the middle class” who “connected with people in a way we haven’t seen a national figure do in a long time.”

Usually, a “replica” is a “fake.” Possibly a bad choice of words. But what does it say about the GOP that they think all small-town people are alike, and that they’re all such hayseeds they’ll swoon for the pretty governor who shoots her own venison?

I mean, who’s the real elitist here?

This is interesting —

Recent surveys suggest that Palin, who opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest, is not necessarily poised to help McCain with moderate women. A National Journal/Hotline daily tracking poll released Friday found that 49% of male voters say Palin is prepared to be president but that only 41% of female voters think so.

There may be something like a Bradley Effect among those male voters. Women may feel more free to say to a pollster what they really think about Palin — that she is not prepared to be president — than some men, who may be reluctant to say it even if they think it.

More evidence she’s not prepared — some of Palin’s record as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, from the Wall Street Journal:

The biggest project that Sarah Palin undertook as mayor of this small town was an indoor sports complex, where locals played hockey, soccer, and basketball, especially during the long, dark Alaskan winters.

The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it had unchallenged title to the land. The misstep led to years of litigation and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for a small municipality with a small budget. What was to be Ms. Palin’s legacy has turned into a financial mess that continues to plague Wasilla.

But, y’know, it doesn’t matter that someone who can’t get a bleeping sports complex right might become President of the United States. All that matters is that she annoys liberals.

Josh Marshall:

There’s a lot of complaining that the McCain campaign won’t allow anyone to interview Sarah Palin. And for the major news outlets that would be in line for such an interview there’s a logic to keeping up the drumbeat. But McCain campaign manager Rick Davis is right: It’s their campaign to run. They can do it how they want. Everyone else should just shut up, stop complaining and call the reality for what it is.

Davis says Palin won’t give any interviews until she feels “comfortable” giving one. And this morning he added that she wouldn’t give any “until the point in time when she’ll be treated with respect and deference.”

Sarah Palin could be the President of the United States in four and a half months. We tend to think of this as an abstraction; but it’s true. And yet today she’s so unprepared and knows so little about the challenges and tasks facing the country that she can’t even give a softball interview.

Since when have Americans treated politicians with respect and deference? Lady, if you want to be treated with respect and deference, be a nun. Otherwise, learn to roll with it like the rest of us.

Why They Love Her

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The Right has pinned on Sarah Palin its fantasies of vengeance on the Left. That’s why they love her.

Their sudden adoration has little to do with her stand on issues, other than abortion. They’ve slapped the label “reformer” onto her without knowing, or much caring, that she really hasn’t reformed much.

All you need to know about Palinmania is summed up in this headline: “Why They Hate Her : Sarah Palin is a smart missile aimed at the heart of the left.”

First, I have examined myself carefully and asked myself, “Do I hate her”? I can’t say that I do. I don’t feel much of anything for her, personally. I hate the mean-spirited and dishonest politics she engages in, however.

The writer of the above-linked article, Jeffrey Bell, writes,

From the instant of Palin’s designation on Friday, August 29, the American left went into a collective mass seizure from which it shows no sign of emerging. The left blogosphere and elite media have, for the moment, joined forces and become indistinguishable from each other, and from the supermarket tabloids, in their desire to find and use anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her family. In sharp contrast to the yearlong restraint shown toward truthful reports about John Edwards’s affair, bizarre rumors have been reported as news, and, according to McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt, nationally known members of the elite media have besieged him with preposterous demands.

Sorry, Jeffrey, I don’t feel particularly “seized.” Yes, there has been some under-sourced speculation about Palin on the web, although IMO the speculation never reached full blogswarm intensity. And several of us leftie bloggers were actually attempting to get the speculators to chill before the Palin campaign itself dropped the Bristol bomb.

There was “yearlong restraint” toward “truthful reports” of l’affaire Edwards? The Enquirer didn’t break the story until this summer, did they? I know I had heard nothing about it before then.

As far as the “preposterous demands” go, however, Jeffrey doesn’t tell us what they are. I can only guess they have something to do with Palin clearing up inconsistencies in her record as a politician. How dare they!

After accusing us of “disproportionate, crazy-seeming rage,” Jeffrey continues,

The most important thing to know about the left today is that it is centered on social issues. At root, it always has been, ever since the movement took form and received its name in the revolutionary Paris of the 1790s. In order to drive toward a vision of true human liberation, all the institutions and moral codes we associate with civilization had to be torn down. The institutions targeted in revolutionary France included the monarchy and the nobility, but even higher on the enemies list of the Jacobins and their allies were organized religion and the family, institutions in which the moral values of traditional society could be preserved and passed on outside the control of the leftist vanguard.

Today’s American liberalism is just a continuation of the French Revolution? Let me say I don’t think Jeffrey is crazy-seeming. I say he is certifiable.

Jeffrey rambles on, trotting out all the old bugaboos of the Right — Marx, socialism, communism, and sex — before he finally gets to feminism, another evil, without noticing that were it not for women’s lib Sarah Palin’s political career wouldn’t have gone beyond PTA President.

What you don’t see in Jeffrey’s little screed is the least interest in how Sarah Palin might actually function as POTUS, given her lack of experience. Such things don’t matter to the Right. All they care about is acting out their emotional pathologies and their obsession with a Left that exists only in their own imaginations.

Update: See Joe Klein, “No, Actually, It’s that the Economy Is Falling Apart” :

It has been fascinating to watch the right-wing press lap up the anti-media nonsense put out by the McCain campaign’s Steve Schmidt regarding Sarah Palin. The latest is Jeffrey Bell, in the Weekly Standard, who makes the media’s attempt to find out just exactly who Palin is part of a seamless, anti-clerical cloak that goes all…the…way…back…to…the French Revolution:

It has been fascinating to watch lapdogs like Klein slowly realize that the Right’s public intellectuals are all a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

Getting Real

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Happy Black People

Pulling back the curtain on the Republican fantasy machine….

CBS News: On Tuesday night, 15-year-old Victoria Blackstone, a sophomore at the St. Agnes School in St. Paul, led the crowd at the Xcel Energy Center in the Pledge of Allegiance. The audience heard her 434-word essay, “Pledging myself to the Flag of the United States of America”… The RNC turned that essay into a three and a half minute video, a visually stirring montage rolling over Victoria’s words about sharing the Pledge with Americans who have stood at important moments in history.

It was a video that was supposed to elicit soaring patriotism and real emotions about the Pledge of Allegiance. But to do that, it used fake soldiers and a staged military funeral instead of the real thing…

DailyKos: Apparently, the Republicans couldn’t find very many African American supporters to show on the Big Screen Of Triumph, when introducing McCain… so they simply put up stock photos of black people. You know, riding bicycles and appreciating their moms and stuff…

At Drinking Liberally last night, we counted to 12, the total number of non white people spotted at the RNC during McCain’s speech, out of about 20,000 attendees. Guess that explains the need for stock photos. At least they didn’t, to our reckoning, pepper the XCel Center with cardboard cutouts.

Remember that weird image of a large building on a green lawn that briefly flashed behind McCain last night? TPM reports: “It has been brought to the school’s attention that a picture of the front of our school, Walter Reed Middle School, was used as a backdrop at the Republican National Convention. Permission to use the front of our school for the Republican National Convention was not given by our school nor is the use of our school’s picture an endorsement of any political party or view”, declares principal Donna Tobin.

TPM continues: The California Democratic Party is actually holding a press conference in front of the school… where Dems will hit McCain for not knowing the difference between the school and Walter Reed Medical Center, which is believed to be the backdrop the McCain campaign really wanted.

These people used to be very good at this sort of thing. Are they getting sloppy, or are we getting smarter? Or do they think nobody will notice anyway?

UPDATE: More pulling back the curtain – Rachel Maddow, uses the “L” word, at long last. I cannot tell you how long I’ve been waiting for someone, anyone, in the media to tell it like it is.

When Resentment Isn’t Enough

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There is widespread consensus today that McCain’s speech sucked out loud. And it wasn’t just McCain’s clunky delivery, which featured creepy smiles at inappropriate times (Dubya does that too, come to think of it). Attaturk asks,

So I say with some incredulity, how could his speech — which he had MONTHS to work on and was written especially for him (as opposed to Palin’s being adapted for her) SUCK. SO. VERY. MUCH?!

I say there’s something weirdly unfocused about the McCain campaign. It’s as if no one is really in charge, and the worker bees in it are just stumbling along as best they can.

The convention showed a video of 9/11 last night. I didn’t watch it. You may know I was in lower Manhattan that day, and I don’t care to relive the experience, thank you very much. As soon as the video came on I switched channels. Now some are saying showing the video crossed a line.

Yes, probably so. However, I wonder if 9/11 packs much of an emotional wallop to most people any more. Those of us who were there will always have a raw spot about 9/11. Righties cling to it because it stokes their much-cherished sense of righteous victimhood. But what about the rest of the country?

This misleading headline to the contrary, we won’t really know what effect the GOP convention had on the electorate until Tuesday or Wednesday. I’m no good at predicting these things, but I will be surprised if the Republicans get much of a bounce out of that mess of a convention.

Today Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein both talk about the politics of ressentiment. We know the one thing that fuels the Right, their raison d’etre, is their seething resentment of everyone who isn’t them.

Most of all, they resent liberals. Back when there was at least some part of the federal government they didn’t control, they got a lot of mileage out of scapegoating the “liberal elite” for everything that seemed to go wrong. Now they are singing the same song, as if they themselves hadn’t controlled both Congress and the White House and the entire federal bureaucratic apparatus for most of the past eight years. Tom Shales wrote,

He [McCain] used the word “change” at least 10 times in his bombastic speech — the convention’s emotional climax — but since the Republicans have controlled the White House for the past eight years, what does McCain want to change from? And to? It really is an audacious ploy, to tell people that the country’s got to correct the mistakes made by a political party when that’s the very party you represent.

It’s like staging a revolution against yourself — saying that the Republicans have got to go so the Republicans can move in and clean up the mess.

So, the pundits say, they are attempting to “rebrand” the GOP, to persuade America it’s not the party of George W. Bush any more. So McCain uses the word “change” a lot, and speaker after speaker called him a “maverick” (or “mavrick” according to one delegate with a home-made sign). But what do they offer?

  • A video of 9/11. Yeah, that doesn’t remind us of Dubya.
  • Tax cuts.
  • Lots of tributes to Ronald Reagan.
  • Tax cuts.
  • Tough talk against our enemies, whoever they are this week.
  • Tax cuts.
  • And seething, pulsing, sneering resentment of liberals.

This is “re-branding”?

They find one outsider, one fresh face, in Sarah Palin, and they gave her a speech to deliver that Karl Rove could have written himself. It was all sneer and snark. Same old product with a new product spokesperson. This is not “re-branding.” It’s not even “re-packaging.” But it’s who they are.