There are a lot of great bloggers in Minneapolis this week, but I think we all have to admit that there’s only one who is considered to be the premiere historian of the conservative movement. Yes, Perlstein is on the scene and you’ll want to check in frequently to see what he’s up to.
You might also enjoy the Campaign For America’s Future TV ad, which they are bringing especially to the Republicans gathered in Minneapolis. When they are snug in their rooms, kicking back and getting ready to watch “Cops” (before they turn on a little porn brought to them by their good pals in Big Telco) this is what they’ll see:
You can help keep this ad on the air during the convention by going here and kicking in a few bucks.
God how I loathe and despise this sanctimonious jackass. How dare he call himself a Democrat and presume to LECTURE and harangue us to vote for a rightwing nutcase for president.
And what’s the first thing out of Wolf Blitzer’s mouth? “Anyone who knows Joe Lieberman, knows that he speaks from the heart.” Sure he does — he’s always been a prick, even when he was a Democrat and he is even more of one today. He is a perfect Republican — hypocritical, bloodthirsty and completely full of shit. Enjoy GOPers, he’s all yours.
It’s good to have him back. He seems to have had a couple of cups of strong coffee — he’s not so gaunt and he sounds a lot more alive that during his glorious campaign for president:
Twenty-four minutes after he began speaking in a small restaurant the other day, Fred D. Thompson brought his remarks to a close with a nod of his head and an expression of thanks to Iowans for allowing him to “give my thoughts about some things.”
“Can I have a round of applause?” Mr. Thompson said, drawing a rustle of clapping and some laughter.
“Well, I had to drag that out of you,” he said.
He was a little bit more on script tonight. The crowd loved him. He gave a stirring recitation of McCain’s life story (yet again…) saying:
Being a POW doesn’t qualify anyone to be president, but it does reveal character. This is the kind of character that civilizations from the beginning of our history have sought in their leaders — strength, courage, humility, wisdom, duty, honor.
I’m not sure if dishonest, corrupt, reckless, hot tempered know-nothingism has been as highly valued, but you have to take the whole package.
It’s clear that they are going to reanimate the maverick reformer image and make the case for this guy:
“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’” said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.
And he’ll take the Republicans and the Democrats in a room and knock their heads together too.
They’re working the refs, hard. And the “Librul Media” are on the defensive:
Time’s Mark Halperin has posted an advance copy of the cover of US Weekly magazine, the tabloid published by Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner. That cover shows a smiling Sarah Palin, holding her youngest son Trig. The screaming headline: “Babies, Lies and Scandal: John McCain’s Vice President.”
Wenner has contributed $5300 to Obama’s campaign since 2007.
The cover was sent to select news organizations by Mark Neschis, the head of corporate communications for Wenner Media and former director of television in the Clinton White House. An email from Neschis that accompanied the cover read: “Thought I would send over our Us Weekly/Sarah Palin cover story, on stands Friday, if helpful in your coverage. Might be useful as an illustration of how the news is playing out. (Us Weekly has 12 million, mostly female readers)”
“How the news is playing out.” That’s an interesting way of putting it. In one sense, it’s accurate. The mainstream media have been focused on pseudo-scandals about McCain’s running mate. Does it really matter at all that Palin’s husband, Todd, had a DUI in 1986? Who cares? And yet I’ve seen and heard news organizations mention — even discuss — the issue several times over the past couple of days.
The “news is playing out” that way because irresponsible journalists publish cover stories promoting “Babies, Lies and Scandal,” without any evidence of an actual “scandal.” Maybe US Weekly will publish news of an actual “scandal” by Friday, when the magazine is scheduled to hit the newsstands. But the three it mentions on its cover are not scandals. (“Under attack, admits daughter, 17, is pregnant” and “Investigated for firing of sister’s ex-husband” and “Mom of Five: New embarrassing surprises.”)
There are legitimate questions about how Palin was vetted. But many news organizations are using the vetting issue as an excuse to make insinuations about Palin’s family and her role as a mother. Instead of asking whether McCain knew that Palin wanted “an exit plan” from Iraq in December of 2006, for example, reporters are obsessing about Bristol Palin’s fiancé and whether Sarah Palin can serve as vice president and be a good mother.
It’s ironic, of course, that the same establishment news organizations consumed by such tabloid issues not long ago refused to investigate reports that John Edwards was having an affair and had a child out of wedlock. Why? The story was originally broken by the National Enquirer and deemed too tawdry to touch. And, perhaps as important, Edwards was running for the Democratic nomination for president, with an agenda favored by the liberal media establishment.
I’m sure Bill Clinton will get big laugh out of that one.
Psuedo-scandals have always been around in politics, of course. But the modern Republican party is the first to build an entire industry devoted to creating them and feeding them to the mainstream media. It’s more than a little bit ironic to see them whining about it now that the corporate media is taking its gossipy sustenance from wherever it finds it.
They trained them to chase these juicy personal scandals over the course of many years of constant feeding. As ye sow, fellas.
The Sarah Palin story gets more and more sickening the more you find out about her. Turns out the founder of the secessionist group Palin and her husband joined – the one discussed by Digby in this recent post – and which Palin courted after she was governor literally hates the American government and the flag. Here is the ideology of the woman St. John McCain, the straight-talking maverick bullshit artist extraordinaire, chose as his running mate:
The founder of the Alaska Independence Party — a group that has been courted over the years by Sarah Palin, and one her husband was a member of for roughly seven years — once professed his “hatred for the American government” and cursed the American flag as a “damn flag.”
The AIP founder, Joe Vogler, made the comments in 1991, in an interview that’s now housed at the Oral History Program in the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
“The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” Vogler said in the interview, in which he talked extensively about his desire for Alaskan secession, the key goal of the AIP.
“And I won’t be buried under their damn flag,” Vogler continued in the interview, which also touched on his disappointment with the American judicial system. “I’ll be buried in Dawson. And when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home.”
At another point, Volger advocated renouncing allegiance to the United States. In the course of denouncing Federal regulation over land, he said:
“And then you get mad. And you say, the hell with them. And you renounce allegiance, and you pledge your efforts, your effects, your honor, your life to Alaska.”
Y’wanna listen to this creep spout his garbage? Go to Josh’s post linked above; he’s got a link.
Because the political cost to the Republicans is so steep, I’m pretty sure she won’t go, but my God, I wish she’d conclude that she must, for once telling the truth that she’s doing it for her family. But she won’t. She’s too far down the rabbit hole. She’s a little like Jerry Boykin seeing God’s Divine Will directing her life.
She has absolutely no business – none whatsoever – being in national politics.
Update: Democratic Strategist adds a new wrinkle: direct ties between Palin’s ex-party and some radical theocrats.
The Democratic convention appears to have helped solidify support for Barack Obama among former Hillary Clinton supporters, with the percent saying they will vote for Obama in November moving from 70% pre-convention to 81% after the convention, and the percent certain to vote for Obama jumping from 47% to 65%.
Who’d a thunk it. Why you’d almost think that’s what conventions are designed to do or something.
I mentioned the other day that I went to school in Fairbanks Alaska and I still have a lot of ties up there, so I have some knowledge of the strange Alaskan political world. It’s an odd amalgam of libertarian, populist, exceptionalism and yes … socialism. They have a tremendous sense of pride in the state and consider themselves rugged individualists but also can’t survive without a large amount of oil profits, federal largesse and military spending. But there is a strain of political weirdness that exceeds even that odd mixture and it’s the secessionist movement started by a freaky guy named Joe Vogler who I knew from his notorious letters to the editor and his petition drives to secede from the union.
(1913-1993) was the founder of the Alaskan Independence Party and active in politics, regularly running for public office in Alaska for many years.
Vogler was born April 24, 1913, on a farm outside Barnes, Kansas. Joe Vogler attended the University of Kansas on a scholarship in 1929. He graduated with a law degree in five years and was admitted to the Kansas State Bar. Vogler moved to Alaska in 1942 and worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Ladd Field (now Fort Wainwright) in Fairbanks until 1951 when he began mining on Homestake Creek. He filed for 80 acres of homestead land off the Steese Highway and acquired 320 acres near Fairbanks off Farmers Loop Road, but did not farm. He spent fifty years as a miner and developer in Alaska. He was noted for an antipathy toward aspens, and the term “Voglerizer” for highway brush trimmers has come into the informal vernacular around the Fairbanks area.
Vogler was murdered under suspicious circumstances in 1993. Manfried West confessed to the killing the following year. Vogler was buried in Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada, fulfulling a wish that he not be buried under the American flag. His second wife, Doris, who died of cancer in January 1992, is buried next to him.
Political career
Vogler’s involvement, some may say notoriety, as a political figure began in earnest in 1973. Early in that year, he began circulating a petition seeking support for secession of Alaska from the United States. Alaska magazine wrote a piece at that time, in which Vogler claimed to have gathered 25,000 signatures in 3 weeks. This petition led Vogler down a path of activism which he would pursue for the remainder of his life.
During the 1970s, Vogler founded the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP) and Alaskans For Independence. He also claimed to have organized the meeting which led to the formation of the Libertarian Party in Alaska. The AIP and AFI, as Vogler explained, were intended to function as strictly separate entities — AIP primarily to explore whether the 1956 vote by Alaskans authorizing statehood was legal, and AFI primarily to actively pursue secession for Alaska from the United States.
The Alaskan Independence Party quotes Vogler as stating “I’m an Alaskan, not an American. I’ve got no use for America or her damned institutions.”
Vogler would serve as the AIP‘s standard-bearer for most of the party’s first two decades. He ran for governor in 1974, with Wayne Peppler as his running mate. Jay Hammond was elected over incumbent governor William Egan, with Vogler trailing far behind. Typical political discussion of the day contended that Vogler was a “spoiler,” and that the result would have been different had he not been in the race. However, this campaign opened up the doors for non-major party candidates to run for major offices in Alaska, and generally this accusation is leveled during every election cycle.
Vogler switched to run for lieutenant governor in 1978, with Don Wright running for governor. Wright was also the AIP‘s nominee for governor in 2002. This campaign for governor was dominated by the extremely controversial primary race between Hammond and Walter Hickel. There was also an independent candidate in the race, Tom Kelly, who was a cabinet member under Gov. Keith Miller (1969-1970). There was little hope for the AIP ticket to gain much attention due to these factors.
Vogler also ran for governor in 1982 and 1986. Several incidents during these campaigns raised his profile as a “colorful character.” In the 1982 race, Vogler was taken to task for comments made during a debate. The issue of moving Alaska’s capital appeared during the election, as it has on and off since 1960. The media and political pundits took great fun over Vogler’s debate remarks that Alaska should “nuke the glaciers” along the coast of the Gulf of Alaska and build a freeway to Juneau. Vogler would later contend that what he said was misinterpreted.
Vogler’s running mate in 1986 was Al Rowe, a Fairbanks resident and former Alaska State Trooper. Rowe took out a series of newspaper ads, fashioning himself in the image of Sheriff Buford Pusser. These ads were a major attention getter during the race. Between Rowe’s ads and the turmoil existing in the Republican Party over the nomination of Arliss Sturgulewski, the AIP ticket was able to garner 5.5 percent of the vote, gaining the AIP status in Alaska as a recognized political party for the first time.
Now all states have their political weirdos and Alaska excels at creating them. But if the rumor is true that Palin once belonged to this party, or even attended their convention as alleged by two different people who were there, it’s hard to see how they explain it away. These people have as much in common with a fringe militia movement group as a political party, even by red state standards.
According to Pat Buchanan, Palin was a member of his Pitchfork Brigades in 1996 so it isn’t all that unlikely that she would have ridden the extremist wave that crashed over the country during the early and mid 90s and culminated in the Oklahama City bombing in 1995. Being for Buchanan after that would have been a natural progression for such a person. If she attended the 1994 Alaska Independent Party convention then she was walking perilously close to Tim McVeigh territory.
This woman seems to have come from the radical fringe of the conservative movement and if she had run for Governor in a state less tolerant of eccentric extremists, she probably could not have won because of it. It’s not just the social conservatism, although she’s way out there on that. It also appears that she may have traveled in some strange and sometimes violent far right circles that were prevalent in the Western States a decade and a half ago. It isn’t just John McCain’s judgment we should be worried about.
Let Somerby explain how Palin “basically lied” about one more thing she’s done. The story has an interesting twist at the end:
In this passage from Friday’s speech, she gives an absurdly bowdlerized account of her vastly heroic work on behalf of Alaska’s tax-payers:
PALIN: Along with fellow reformers in the great state of Alaska, as governor I stood up to the old politics as usual, to the special interests, to the lobbyists, the big oil companies, and the good old boy network. When oil and gas prices went up so dramatically, and the state revenues followed with that increase, I sent a large share of that revenue directly back to the people of Alaska.
What a champion of the people! But Palin vastly misstates this heroic tale too. Once again, she has basically lied.
What’s wrong with Palin’s account? She makes it sound like “state revenues” soared because “oil and gas prices went up so dramatically.” But this omits a fundamental part of this story; in fact, state revenues soared because Palin and the Alaska legislature raised taxes on the oil companies! Plainly, Palin’s statement was designed to suggest that state revenues increased because oil and gas prices went up. But that isn’t what actually happened; that omits what she herself did. In reality, she imposed a new tax on the oil companies, then handed the resulting free money to voters. For a concise news report from August 10, just click here and read the first ten paragraphs. (Note: When this Seattle Times report appeared, Palin was still three weeks away from being named by McCain.)
A windfall tax on the oil companies? With the revenues given to tax-payers? That, of course, is what Obama is now proposing on the national level. It’s hard to square with Republican politics or messaging—so Palin again played games with the truth. Rather baldly, she misled voters about what actually happened.
Palin’s propensity to lie and mislead seems to be of pathological proportions. In other words, she’s a typical 21st Century Republican.
Former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, who stepped aside as John McCain’s campaign co-chairman in July after an uproar over comments that those worried about the U.S. economy are “whiners,” today revisited that sentiment.
“If you’re sitting here today, you’re not economically illiterate and you’re not a whiner, so I’m not worried about who you’re going to vote for,” Gramm told supporters of McCain at a Financial Services Roundtable event in Minneapolis on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention.
Gramm, 66, stepped down as a senior adviser to McCain in July after telling the Washington Times that the U.S. is a “nation of whiners” facing a “mental recession.”
Most important part of this: he was speaking to McCain supporters, essentially as a surrogate for the McCain campaign. He says he’s just a supporter, but he clearly says “We went through a process of vetting all possible candidates,” in referring to the process of selecting Sarah Palin. Phil Gramm is back!
I’m looking to scrounge up a few bucks to send Gramm on a nationwide speaking tour, telling as many people as he can find what whiners they are for not understanding basic economics. Anyone want to pitch in?
I can see that everyone’s been vastly engrossed and downright obsessed by all these revelations about Sarah Palin’s bad parenting, reproductive decisions, daughter’s sex life etc, over the past few days, but I doubt any of that will persuade people to vote against McCain. Indeed, I think the religious right will find the liberal sniping at her personal choices to be galvanizing while everyone else will see it as a lively sideshow, but unimportant in terms of their vote.
Anyway, the only people who make a fetish of other people’s reproductive choices are social conservatives and they will forgive her anything because she’s a right wing Christian. There are, of course, many many other things about Palin and her selection that are very damaging, but in my view this Jerry Springer, Jamie Spears stuff may even help her more than hurt her. (This whole thing has a bit of that old “dragging 100 dollar bills through trailer parks” vibe, which actually ended up making Clinton more popular, not less.) Here in Murika, people love to gossip about others’ foibles and they love to compare their own lives to those who have made other choices —- but they don’t hold ordinary everyday problems against them. Redemption R Us.
Today I hear that the media is asking if she will stay on the ticket, because of all the “problems” her pregnancy story has caused. barring something else, I think she’ll stay. The memories of Eagleton are fresh enough that nobody wants to repeat them — McGovern was the one who suffered for both the choice and the removal of him. And this one is even more dicey. Palin’s a woman, she’s from a rural state and she’s become the poster child for the religious right.
This was always going to be a turn-out election and without the churches to counteract the Obama campaign’s modern ground operation, they don’t stand a chance. They can’t risk angering James Dobson’s army and I don’t think they will unless something a lot more damaging than the mundane news of a knocked up seventeen year old comes out:
Sarah Palin already has energized conservative religious leaders who had fretted that John McCain would pick an abortion rights supporter as his running mate. The Alaska governor was raised in a Pentecostal church and has called herself “as pro-life as any candidate can be.”
To Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religion Liberties Commission, Palin is “straight out of veep central casting.” Land said he had urged the McCain camp to consider the political unknown.
Gary Bauer, one of McCain’s most enthusiastic evangelical supporters, said the Arizona senator had hit a “grand slam home run” and that adding Palin to the GOP ticket is “guaranteed to energize values voters.”
The 44-year-old mother of five, who led her high school chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, was baptized as a teenager at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church, where she and her family were very active, according to her then-pastor, Paul Riley.
She now sometimes worships at the Juneau Christian Center, which is also part of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, said Brad Kesler, business administrator of the denomination’s Alaska District. But her home church is The Church on the Rock, an independent congregation, Riley said.
(If the “liberal media” is suggesting that she be removed, so much the better for GOTV. That just means the elites hate her, which is the most galvanizing force of all.)
This is my sixth RNC, and I’ve never seen anything remotely like the excitement Palin has unleashed. Some compare it to the enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan in 1976 or 1980. Even among the GOP’s cynics, there’s a kind of giddiness over John McCain’s tactical daring in selecting the little-known Alaskan.
Readers of National Review Online — a reliable bellwether of conservative sentiment — flooded the site with e-mails throughout the long weekend. The messages ran roughly 20-1 in almost orgiastic excitement about the pick. On Friday, one reader expressed Christmas-morning delight over the gift of Palin, proclaiming that McCain had just “given us our Red Ryder BB gun.”
Hundreds of NRO readers announced that they were finally donating to McCain after months of holding out. Many had hard feelings toward the senator, who too often defined “maverick” as a willingness, even an eagerness, to annoy conservatives. They weren’t kidding: Between the Palin announcement Friday and Monday morning, the McCain camp raised $10 million. This enthusiasm reflects how, although the party wants Barack Obama to lose, it is just now getting excited about a McCain win.
The naysayers argue Palin undermines McCain’s core message since he locked up the nomination: “experience” and the necessary foreign policy expertise for a dangerous world. They contend choosing her was a gimmick that runs counter to McCain’s mantra about country before politics, particularly given his age and health record.
If Palin fumbles badly in the next few weeks, the critics will likely be proved right. And one doesn’t have to be an obsessive about liberal media bias to feel confident that the press corps will be eager to Quayle-ize her.
But what if she doesn’t fumble? What if McCain’s gut was right?
Then picking Palin just might go down as one of the most brilliant political plays in American history.
Right. George W. Bush is a genius too.
I think the pick did two things for McCain: it stopped any strong Obama momentum coming out of the convention and it shored up the religious right. But the downsides of having an untried, unknown, unqualified person on a national ticket with a an elderly nominee are immense and we don’t know yet what the consequences of that are. I suspect “brilliant” isn’t going to be what people say about it. Unless he wins, of course.
Many have observed that all this is a reflection of McCain’s bad judgment, but I think it’s more than that. It’s a reflection of his reckless temperament, which is not something you want in a president, particularly one who has spent most of his life as a warrior and has a violent temper. (Just think about the Cuban missile crisis for a minute and consider what would have happened if an erratic, impulsive president had been in charge.)
This, to me, is the central problem with McCain, and his VP choice reflects that. It’s as if he woke up and said “fuck it — let’s do it!” and didn’t think through the consequences. After all, he is far more likely to die in office than most because of his advanced age — to choose someone with a gargantuan learning curve, along with all the baggage of being an unknown “first,” is an act of extreme recklessness. It’s almost as if he did it to defy his own mortality. (He can’t die and leave the country in the hands of this neophyte.) You can’t get more arrogant than that. Or less patriotic.
“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents,” Sarah and Todd Palin said in the brief statement.
It’s a great day when The Palins and McCains both agree that women do have the right to choose. Here’s the McCain camp:
Senior McCain campaign officials said McCain knew of the daughter’s pregnancy when he selected Palin last week as his vice presidential running mate, deciding that it did not disqualify the 44-year-old governor in any way.
McCain made a similar statement back in 2000, you’ll recall:
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, when asked Wednesday what he would do if his 15-year-old daughter Meghan became pregnant and wanted an abortion, said it would be a “family decision.” “The final decision would be made by Meghan with our advice and counsel,” McCain said, speaking of himself and his wife Cindy. “I would discuss this issue with Cindy and Meghan, and this would be a private decision that we would share within our family and not with anyone else,” McCain told reporters in New Hampshire on board his campaign bus nicknamed “The Straight Talk Express. “Obviously I would encourage her to bring, to know that baby would be brought up in a warm and loving family, but the final decision would be made by Meghan with our advice and counsel.”
She did say it. So did he. The implication is clear.
I for one am very pleased that they both believe their daughters have a choice. They can’t possibly believe that your daughter shouldn’t have the same right, could they?