Dear Rightwing Media Noise Machine:
It’s the GOP that’s the pig and Palin that’s the lipstick.
DUH.
US politics
Life, Art; What’s The Difference?
Sarah Palin’s sudden rise to political prominence reminds me sharply of Nicole Kidman’s fanatically ambitious smalltown US weathergirl in the sadly underrated movie “To Die For”.
She’s a solipsistic provincial beauty queen who backstabs, (literally and metaphorically), manipulates and double-deals her way to power and fame on the back of anyone she can use to advantage:
Watch this:
That is scarily like.
Suzanne Stone (Maretto) knows exactly what she wants. She wants to be a television newscaster and she is willing to do ANYTHING to get what she wants. What she lacks in intelligence, she makes up for in cold determination and diabolical wiles. As she pursues her goal with relentless focus, she is forced to destroy anything and anyone that may stand in her way, regardless of the ultimate cost or means necessary.
To Die For (1995)
Family friends, colleagues, husbands; it matters not. All that matters is that she gets what she wants. The trouble is her lies become so blatant and so obvious there has to be a reckoning.
So far Palin’s narrative matches the movie too. She’s got everything she ever wanted and now she’s a rigged election and a flatlining EKG away from the presidency. We’re building up to the big denouement.
In the movies Kidman’s lies and manipulations begin to catch up with her. However, unlike ‘Suzanne Stone’, Palin can’t just physically get rid of inconvenient obstacles and people (not that that hasn’t been known in gubernatorial politics before) – there are laws against that sort of thing. But she may well be thinking she can up and off back to the frozen wastes when it all gets too difficult.
If her fallback position is to drop out of the race, return to Alaska in a blaze of almost-was-vice-presidential glory to reign as the undisputed Matriarch and Bitch Queen of all Wasilia, then she’s got another think coming. The thing about shitting on people on your way up is that unlike in the movies, you’ll see them again on the way down.
Enough of the drama
Submitted by Sylvia Plath (not verified) on Fri, 2008-09-05 08:23.There are those who say that we should fully support McCain just to get Palin and her “me first” dramas out of here so that the Karl Rove, Republican machine can groom her into what they want, which may include fresh dialog on ANWR and America First populist rhetoric. Many think that she help us more in that way. Yes, perhaps, but only if for once she takes the advise of others over her stubborn “don’t tell me what to do” attitude. There are those who said in 2006 that an “R” is an “R” and when the Republican party fully supports her to help her to Juneau, she would be beholding to the Republican party. They (we) were wrong in 2006. Why would she conform to expectations of a party now? McCain needs to dump her now. She needs to come back here and face the music of the mess she has left us. Is she planning to jet off to media star status land and expect zombie rat Frank Bailey take the blame and consequences for her? Or will she blame Todd or others? Expect anyting from her as she advances herself. We as citizens must not expect her to do the right thing. We must make her. Or else, Thomas Paine will be rolling in his grave.
And that’s a Republican supporter.
It’s always satisfying when the villainess gets their comeuppance in the movies, but it doesn’t happen so often in real life. Usually they just walk away and die quietly and comfortably in bed after a lifetime of treating people like crap. This time Palin may well get hers, if pissed off Alaskans have any say in it.
Palin is a distraction
John Scalzi gets a bit annoyed at the handwringing in liberal circles after Sarah Palin’s convention speech:
No, seriously: What the fuck is wrong with you? The GOP picks a woman VP 24 years after you do, for the same goddamn reason you did (a contentless call to shore up a shrinking base), and you act like you’ve never seen this movie before? I just don’t know what to say to you about that. Also: squirting yourself messy over a vice presidential candidate. Good fucking gravy, how off the fucking script can you possibly get. For God’s sake, she’s scandal-plagued Atwater spawn from a state with the population of Fort Worth, Texas, whose job it will be to work the lights of the Naval Observatory for four years. She’s a walking, taking advertisement for how easily placated religious conservatives are at this moment in history. She doesn’t walk on water, unless it’s frozen and the moose she’s hunting has wandered out on it. So will you please focus.
What’s more, she’s a distraction. What is Bush doing now everybody is captivated by the Palin McSame show?
Frog-Boiling Their Way To Victory
Arrgh, the Palin, it just goes on and on. Just when you think there couldn’t be anything worse…
The latest? Charging rape victims for the rape testing kits used in investigating the crime.
RNC operatives are adamant they thoroughly and comprehensively vetted this candidate and that they know all the skeletons in her closet. If that’s true (though Republicans and McCain aren’t known for their veracity) it leads one to the inescapable conclusion that revelations already known to the McCain press team are being deliberately drip-fed to the blogosphere to keep them distracted and to wear the public capacity for shock down. It’s war by attrition. Each new story lowers the bar; a pregnant teen daughter? Ho hum. So last week. Lies? Stale news. Racism? So what? Eventually they’ll expose Palin as a kitten-torturing suicide bomber and by that point the media response will be a shrug and articles on Obama’s kids’ hair.
Whilst I love all this stuff and I share emptywheel of Firedoglake’s outrage at the latest story –
Count me in among those who think that this is easily the single most disgusting thing I have seen since the 1600 Crew allowed Abu Gonzales to run the Justice Department. The village idiot of Wasilla could run up debts in excess of $20 million dollars during her tenure, but providing law enforcement (a government service) on a pay-as-you-go basis under the guise of “protect and serve” for women who have been raped hits a new low even among republicans who are law-enforcement junkies willing to toss a DFH in jail for a bad haircut.
What I actually want to know right now is what fresh hell Bush, Cheney and the rump of the neocons are wreaking while the media old and new are otherwise occupied salivating over the latest Palin outrage.
I’m also wondering what on earth the Democrats and Obama’s advisers are up to. Call this a campaign? It’s all very well putting out high-minded response videos but currently the Republicans are controlling the horizontal and the vertical.
“If Team Obama don’t pull their collective fingers out they’re going to lose this thing”, think some Democrats:
Thanks For That. I Think.
I will grudgingly admit that Sarah ‘Get your zygotes out for the lads’ Palin has done at least one good service for women – she’s made women in glasses publicly sexy, albeit in a weirdly fetishistic, libertarianism-gone-mad sort of a way. “All the better to look down my gunsights at you, my sweet…”
Clothes and accessories are of course political signifiers in a media age and in an election year no candidate’s clothing is chosen without consideration of what it says to the viewers. To wit: ABC News while Hillary was still a contender, with “A Look Back At Hillary’s Year In Pantsuits.” Now that the nation’s eyes are on Palin, it’s all “Are Palin’s Glasses the New Pantsuit?”
Those of us who are a bit nerdy or who are lucky enough to live with a geek already know about glasses being incredibly sexy, thanks very much. But this plain glass in frames thing (which Palin didn’t start btw, it was those bloody engineer-cap wearing, soul-patched hipster wannabes that litter up the place) is pissing me off. I didn’t used to mind being described as geeky. Girl geekdom was an online bulwark against the superficial consumerist tat that passes for women’s print media.
Now I loathe it.The trend mill has already ground up, consumed and discarded most of our stuff (here’s looking at you, Boing Boing) – now the fashionistas want to steal the last advantage of the geek girl over the highlighted, Ugg-booted, orange skinned airhead?
Bastards.
But thankfully fashion is fickle and hipness temporary; this too shall pass. The craze isn’t going to last long. The ‘Sexy Sarah Palin’. and ‘Geek Girl’ joke outfits are already in the stores for Hallow’e’en
Hah! Instant death to hipness. And the upside of glasses reverting to squaredom so fast is that the craze for Palin herself is likely to burn itself out with equal speed, now that the media have actually started fact-checking her lying ass.
Meanwhile we, the actually ocularly challenged women of the world, will continue to look over our sexy glasses at you while you speculate about what naughty ideas we’re having with that misty, faraway look in our eyes.*
[*”Potatoes or pasta?”, since you asked. But you go on with your fantasy if it gets you through the day.]