There’s not much to smile about in the papers this morning except David Hockney in The Grauniad’s letters page, who deserves a special prize for cleverly piggybacking his pet cause onto a crisis :
Could it be that the smoke-free rooms of New York bankers are not working as well as the old ones. Smoking a cigar or pipe makes me ponder, whereas the replacements can make prudence go out of the window. Just a thought.
David Hockney
London
As any smoker knows the real business of meetings is done outside in the rain while sharing a convivial fag. He has a point there.
Last night Martin and I were discussing the US election and I floated the admittedly tinfoilhatted idea that it was in fact McCain who’d been the stalking horse for President Sarah Palin, Palin being secretly picked by the entryists in the dominionist religious insurgency that’s trying to take over the party. My theory was that they had to push herfor veep only, because had she tried a proper run for President she’d’ve been laughed off the ballot and they know it. Though of course they’d’ve probably blamed their failure on demonic forces.
For that to be true there would need to be a modicum of certainty in fundie quarters that McCain’d die shortly after taking office. The power of prayer perhaps…
Not that I’m ever surprised at any kind of political ratfuckery from the GOP, particularly the evangelical wing, but that does seem a conspiracy too far even for me.
McCain has proven that he’s a brilliant strategist by putting Palin on the stage just when his chips were down. He looked at the demographics, he looked at the polls, and picked the woman who would pull in a max of votes.
Remember, everyone said he was crazy when he announced it (not just Tomasky, even GOP’ers did).
By playing the Palin card, McCain demonstrated that he was a master, innovative strategist who can perform miracles under great pressure. He is the candidate of a party that ran the country into the ground. He voted 95% of every bill George Bush, the worst US president in history, signed. Normally, he should have been obliterated from the polls. He was short on funds because the corporations were backing Obama. He was disliked by the Rush Limbaugh riht and the bible-banging right. But with one fell stroke, he turned an imminent rout into a blitzkrieg attack, leaving his opponets flailing.
I’m not writing a puff piece for McCain. I’m just trying to impress on my reader that this man is not one to be jerked around by some airhead from the boondocks, no matter how ambitious she is. If you think McCain actually likes Palin, you haven’t looked at his face when he and his wife cindy have to watch the pitbull-woman steal the show, dutifully clapping and smiling, except those smiles become more like a rictus every day.
McCain detests Palin. She represents the very divisive, bigoted, greedy, ruthless, and intolerant type of Republican that he has always sneered at and sometimes openly insulted. His abhorrance of the christian right is so well known that they were preparing an open rebellion at StLouis, which instead turned into a party. And it’s not just McCain who hates her in the GOP. And if Palin is a pitbull, McCain is a great white shark. He will come out of nowhere and rip you apart, like he is doing to Obama.
What does all this add up to? I would bet money that once in the White House, McCain will cut Palin down and kick her into the gutter. Of course he’ll make it look like he had nothing to do with it. Palin has so many skeletons in her closet that any one of them could get her impeached and there’s a dem-controlled congress there ready and willing to do it. In fact you can bet your tushy McCain picked her precisely because those skeletons would guarantee that she would have a very short shelf-life. All that McCain has to do is stand aside, or rather discreetly use his presidential powers to light a fire under the Justice Department.
And what happens if Palin gets impeached? McCain simply picks the veep he really wanted in the first place: Lieberman.
I wrote here before anyone else that Palin would get McCain into the White House. Now you’re hearing it from me first again: Palin is nothing but a disposable tool, a sexy model hired to sell a product whose usefulness will end on November 4. She will be yesterday’s news within a year, just as those action hero dolls they are making of her will end up in the dumpster a few months after Christmas.
Obama is hearing the message and the campaign is getting the justified anger part right – trouble is it’s being wasted on Palin and whatever her latest outrage is. Enough; people know what she is now and they’re shooting at an open goal.
Palin, the commenter says, is just a diversionary sideshow, and a temporary one at that, though I have to admit it’s been a hell of an enjoyable one. The Obama campaign certainly was diverted by it, egged on by the reaction of liberal bloggers to Palin, which was universally and understandably derisive (but can you blame us when presented with such a tempting target?).
This culminated in an ad which asked, riskily, ‘Do the Republicans think you’re stupid?’. Oops. Cue accusations, shock horror probe, ‘Obama says voters stupid’, etc and so on ad infinitum until the next McCain-manufactured crisis, which was of course the lipstick thing.
Being presented with such a tempting target as Palin should have been reason enough in itself to be suspicious. The GOP is not prone to giving free shots to the opposition; there is always an agenda.
The new ad attacking McCain’s out-of-touchness is not going to win him the votes of the zimmer-framed ‘get off my lawn’ brigade. Has the team made a strategic decision to campaign generationally and write off the senior vote altogether? Because that’s what’ll happen.
To the staunch Republican – who has to pretty damn staunch to still be one, after everything that’s happened – the ad comes very close to insulting age. It won’t take long for that to morph into ‘Obama has no respect for our greatest generation’ – if it hasn’t already. Oops, it has.
I do think the Obama campaign got the anger thing right re Palin, the media and the lies – the Republicans are insulting the public’s intelligence and they’re absolutely right to be angry.
But as the man himself said, enough already. Anti-Palin anger’s only temporary and it’s also media-led. What the Democrats could be tapping into is the simmering, slow-burning rage felt by hard-pressed Americans at a Republican party administration that’s ruled so disastrously all these years, that’s ruining countless lives at home and abroad, destroying whole cities and countries and pushing us to the brink of global war with its arrogant ineptitude. So why aren’t they?
I want* to see the Democrats make them take responsibility for that; I want Obama to say ‘look what you people did’ not ‘look what that woman might do’ and tie both of them, McCain and Palin, inextricably to each other, to Bush and Cheney’s crimes, to the lousy economy, to the disastrous, endless wars, to the accelerating changing climate and last and most especially, to the utterly corrupt GOP.
Palin is nobody. She’s a small-town mayor who managed to get into the Alaskan Governor’s Mansion in 2006 for being less somewhat less corrupt than Alaskan Republicans. That’s it. People were ticked off at Republican corruption, she positioned herself as a non-corrupt Republican, and got voted in in a traditionally Republican state. I could see her becoming a good Governor in time, better than most Republicans at any rate, but this is not that time.
And she could have her finger on the button if anything happens to McCain. It would be like that one Heinlein story in Expanded Universe, except somehow LESS plausible.
In the story refered to, it was a Black woman who got to be the token vice-president and then the real president got assasinated and the real powers in the party expect her to give up her job because she obviously wasn’t expected to actually govern (which some commentators also expect of Palin if McCain kicks the bucket). In true Heinlein fashion she of course refuses, kicks out the corrupt elements and starts putting the country back on the right track, which IIRC meant getting back on the gold standard, putting the navy in charge of nuclear power because they had such a good track record with it and finally getting the colonalisation of space going properly. Somehow I doubt Palin would do as well.
Screw Sartre, nuts to Nietztche, I think I may have finally found my philosophical guru in the comments at Sadly No:
Doctorb said,
August 28, 2008 at 23:18
Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, or a loud farting sound, or an offscreen clatter of utensils followed by an irritated-sounding cat yowl, is funny.
Also words that sound like bad words but aren’t, like “fricative” and “mukluk”.
