Khmer Rogue

Like just about everything else this fucking dingbat does, I had to check around to make sure this wasn't some sort of late April Fool's Day goof:

Big hair, white jacket. And now a salute to the “beautiful people working so hard in Nevada.”

Heck yeah, I want to speak at this convention! Three bad wine puns in a row: “Going rosé”, “stand on a wine box (instead of a soap box)”, “in good spirits”.

Apparently Todd is in a snow race this weekend. Wow, this woman could have been president. Shudder.

[Editor: What is the crowd's reaction?]

TOTAL SILENCE

She just made up a Ronald Reagan quote. And now she’s talking about the deficit, using “heck” a lot. If her commercial fishing business is in trouble, she’d fix it, not borrow money.

She is avoiding any sort of industry specific comments, but seems to be all about deregulation. In Wasilla, she fought regulations that would dictate whether barber poles could rotate.

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I think she would make a fantastic elementary school principal.

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“Think of cultured yeast as a mentor.” That was an attempt to link winemaking with the habits of successful people.

She keeps focusing on small business. An interesting choice, given the crowd.

Indeed, but no doubt the distinction is completely lost on her. (And hey, awesome new tagline. She really is the gift that keeps on giving.) This is that "shows up to the opening of an envelope" thing I mentioned before -- she's just there to grab a check, run through her usual schtick, make a few fat white middle-aged closet cases who can't get it up anymore anyway slobber over her, and move on to the next mark. Not a bad gig, so long as it stays on the usual rubber-chicken circuit.

The problem is when this bozo thinks she knows something about anything, and arrogates unto herself the right to tell the adults -- people who actually have skills and knowledge about the great big world, not beauty-pageant-scholarship-winners who took five years and six cow colleges to slap together a fucking communications degree, ferchrissakes, and have learned nothing since -- how to do their jobs.

Palin, whom Obama dismissed recently as "not much of an expert on nuclear issues," fired back at the president, mockingly referring to "all that vast nuclear expertise he acquired as a community organizer, a part-time senator and a candidate for president." She said Obama had accomplished "nothing to date with Iran or North Korea."

Okay. What do you want to do, Sarah, li'l miss armchair tough-chick? Start wars with Iran and North Korea? No problem, so long as your kid is in the first attack wave. See how that starty-fighty thing works out for ya, since the two wars we're still in have gone so smoothly this past decade.

There is never going to be a point where any serious, truly non-partisan observer of world or domestic politics is going to take a tomato-lobber like Palin seriously, anymore than such a person could take George W. Bush seriously. It's hard to say whether she actually realizes that part of it or not. Probably a little of both; like any other person who manages by luck and circumstance to transcend their normal Peter Principle boundaries, the desire to believe the hype has to be at least internally tempered by the knowledge that they're in way over their heads. All that's left, since they know they are incapable of dazzling anyone with their brilliance, is to baffle 'em with bullshit.

The problem is the effect they can have on truly stupid people, which every country has in no small measure (especially in the realm of politics), but who are especially empowered in the media-stirred swamp of American politics. It devolves into the slop of dishonest, hypocritical rhetoric being received as some sort of gospel:

"Don't retreat. Reload!" she said, invoking a slogan that has lately earned her some criticism. The crowd cheered deafeningly as she added, "And that is NOT a call for violence!"

Like everything else she bleats, this is too clever by less than half. The goal here is twofold -- one, to evoke clearly revolutionary jargon with implicitly violent choices of words ("reload") and images (the crosshairs on "targeted" congressional districts). This is of a piece with the rest of her nonsense, dating back to the very of start of her being foisted on an adipose, reality-teevee-addled electorate, all but calling Obama a domestic terrorist outright. The other goal, of course, is more prosaic -- to jab libruls with their usual "fuck you" posturing, creating opportunities to do so if needed.

But the fact of the matter is, while the "left" (whatever that encompasses, other than people with triple-digit IQs) have mercilessly lampooned and roasted her, none of them (afaik) have even rhetorically or satirically advocated violent actions, or used implicitly violent catch-phrases. The tough talk, death threats, garment-rending over issues such as abortion funding, etc., are part and parcel of the right's reactions to pretty much everything.

It's a very frustrating phenomenon to watch, over and over again, primarily because it is impervious to factual argument -- indeed it thrives on its capacity to establish and populate a consistent alternative narrative, no matter how ludicrous. It achieves its most clear expression in its implications of violent overthrow, an endless Red Dawn fantasy of defending the divinely-anointed motherland against an unceasing series of Dolchstosslegende usurpers and traitors.

Never mind that there was indeed an election, and it was far too much of a blowout to be subject to the contested counts of the previous two. Never mind that, even had McCain and Palin won that election, they would have -- get this -- done the xact same thing with the banksters that Obama did, which was, let's recall, initiated by the Cheney regime in the first place. Remember, McCain's primary economic adviser was Phil Gramm, who personally engineered the regulatory unraveling that precipitated the destruction of the economy in the first place. Anyone who seriously thinks that McCain, Palin, or Gramm would have just told Goldman Sachs to piss up a rope knows fuck-all about the issue or its players.

The thing is, Palin may actually think that she would have struck some heroic, principled stand for the little guy in the face of Wall Street. She does seem to have a bit more invested in her own hype than most at that level. This is more a result of her not having even the foggiest idea about what she doesn't know, than of any noteworthy amount of intestinal fortitude.

Indeed, for someone who flashes their "maverick" credentials more than drunk coeds flash their tits at Mardi Gras, Palin's path is remarkably establishment -- Republican party, appearance on Oprah to pimp transparently ghost-written "memoir", shameless know-nothing and calumniator, mau-mauing the opposition with schtick and fabrications for the highest bidder. Doesn't get much more predictable than that.