More media shark jumping

Sarah Palin pardons a turkey at a farm, then shows her stupidity and callous insensitivity to liberal pussies by conducting an interview with a backdrop of death.



Or something like that.

You can call this reason #8,966 why in spite of living in NYC I have more affinity for a woman who shoots her own dinner, has worked on a commercial fishing boat, played basketball, has a husband who is a steelworker and Iron Dog champion, sent her first born to Iraq, runs a state and still cleans up pretty fucking good.

Hardy people them Alaskans. Then again when you spend a good part of the year in darkness, experience unimaginably frigid weather and wolves and bears are constant reminders that a trigger shy human ain't at the top of the food chain, the idea of a turkey meeting its maker is not something you bat an eye over.

But if you're a fey, insular, neurotic liberal pussy like MSNBC's David Shuster, well, processing food is apparently something on the order of clubbing baby seals or squeezing Jews into a cattle car headed for Auschwitz. And this is most especially true if you have a visceral, over-the-top, obsessive contempt for the woman at issue. With any luck some of them will choke on their Thanksgiving tofurkey.

I'd love to say that I'm surprised by the indignation the left has expressed, but I'm not. I live among these people. I work with them. Socialize with them. I even fornicate with some of them. And the truth of the matter is that, much to my personal shame, I have one foot firmly planted in the pussy camp myself. Among other things I shop at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. I listen to indie music and have occasionally whined about a band I like selling out to a major label. I suffer through horribly self-indulgent art films. I hang out at hipster bars. I even have an ironic tee shirt or two.

This blog ain't called Cultural Schizophrenia for nothing.

But in spite of my many acoutrements of pussydom there are lines that I simply won't cross. I still refuse to separate my garbage - except to make sure nothing that would identify me goes in - because, well, fuck you eco-freaks. And even though I rarely have the opportunity these days, fishing, shooting and other outdoorsy pursuits were a huge part of my life growing up, and my apartment's decor is reflective of that.


The offensive fish in my living room.

I only wish I also had a pic of the deer antlers and steer skull in my bedroom and assorted other things to provide the full effect, but anyone who lives outside of precious liberal environs like mine would die laughing over the comments these items have elicited over the years from people - girls usually - ranging from indignation to one chick who made me remove the deer antlers - the dead animal staring at her - before we could get jiggy.

I wish I was joking.

The irony is that I'm perceived to be one of them, so to the best of their knowledge I am only nominally heretical. But to watch the obsession with Sarah Palin is to see the left's contempt for "otherness" in full flower. To your average liberal you are either one of them, a member of a pet victim class or you are some shade of enemy. And as they've made rather obvious, Palin represents about the darkest shade there is.

Tim Blair of the London Telegraph assembled a hilarious compilation of reactions on the left.

My personal favorite, the New York Times ediitorial writers' blog:

We’ve differed with Sarah Palin a great deal on substance. We don’t agree with her hardline approach to the Iraq War, her harsh anti-government rhetoric, and her style of negative campaigning.

But we also worry a bit about, how should we put it, the persona she has brought with her to national politics. We did not care at all for the swipe she took against community organizers at the Republican National Convention.

And then there’s this. You don’t have to be a huge animal lover to question why Governor Palin chose to be interviewed — while issuing a traditional seasonal pardon of a turkey — while turkeys were being executed in the background.

Governor Palin reportedly declined an invitation to hold the interview at a different spot, though some are arguing that she was unaware of the turkey carnage going on behind her.

Take a look for yourself, here: [referring to the above video]

It isn't easy for the Times to make me laugh my ass off because I simply don't take the paper seriously enough. But this did the trick.

Translation of their commentary:

Cheeseball hack-lawyer-style setup about how their dislike of her has been high-minded and substantive.

Criticism of a few of her "radical" positions in spite of having invested a few months into the notion that she is mindless and has essentially read the scripts the McCain camp put in front of her.

Then they transition to the real purpose, attacking her personally. They use as an example a line in her convention speech which playfully mocked community organizing, Obama's rather ambiguous early career choice, as a response to his camp's dismissive cracks about her being a small-town mayor.

Then, of course, they contrive a way to wrap the turkey incident as the ultimate manifestation of why the infinitely serious Times was troubled by her all along.

The Times falls deeper into self-parody while their ownership goes ever deeper into the red. Too bad their unintentional comedy is lost on the bulk of their declining readership.

CNN officially jumps the shark

What do a drawing made by a politician with too much free time on his hands and a sheet of paper containing notes from a campaign brainstorming session have in common? Well, if you're a Rhodes Scholar, a high school dropout or a vaguely attentive tropical fish then the obvious answer is not a fucking thing. But an intrepid reporter/enterprising moron at CNN named Jeanne Moos thought the two things were so much alike that it merited analyzing what each suggested about its author.

One of these days I'll get around to a fully-formed opinion about Sarah Palin. Thus far I've been too busy feeling protective in light of the nakedly obvious malice, bad faith, dishonesty and abject buffoonery which has characterized her coverage by most of the media. And the contrast with the sycophancy that has enveloped Obama has made it all the more nauseating. Both have been the object of creepy media obsessions and this quirky and ostensibly innocuous story thus becomes a classic summation of everything vile that has transpired.



This is a doodle.


This is a page of campaign brainstorming ideas.


This is a page of campaign brainstorming ideas and doodles.

Moonbats du jour

It is a pity I can't find a picture of the blithering idiot who tried to bomb the Republican convention. Though I doubt it requires much imagination to visualize your standard-issue progressive ball of gloom and despair.

Part deux: Wacky New Yorkers living la vie boheme.



This here ... is art! And the genius who conceived this lets you participate by picking up a gun and symbolically offing Sarah Palin and her children. Pagan Power has the whole story.

Living in New York I've seen enough shiteous art to last five lifetimes. And I don't even seek it out. As a point of example, I've been to lesbian poetry slams to support a friend. I have another friend who is a well-known (in such circles) conceptual artist or performance artist depending on her inspiration. Both are likable enough weirdos I've met through work. The poetry is always full of emotional torment laced with a surface level of faux cleverness and a heavy dose of look at me! With the artist, her work is always juvenile, moronic, irony-laden and just like the poetry, a heavy dose of look at me! And hers is better than most I have been subjected to. It isn't hard to see how this same shallow-thinking therapy masquerading as art can go the extra mile into vile, violence-inciting political speech. But it isn't to be taken literally, you see. You're just dealing with emotional infants.

If you want performance art elevated to the next level, the moron bomber above is filling the same psychological needs as the subsequent and "ingenious" Palin hunter. One of the great dividing lines between left and right is that we conservative/ libertarian types have tended to see liberals as good-hearted but goofy, emotional and deeply misguided. By contrast, the left, especially progressives see us as evil. Nothing is out of bounds in the cause of destroying us or our illegitimate views. And I have to say that I am beginning to lose whatever generosity of spirit I once possessed with regard to the left. I feel a performance art piece coming on.

More hopey changeness from the rage-free community

Rhiannon-Marie Volpe - the double-bagger pictured in a preceding post - actually contacted a conservative blogger when news of these shirts was spreading to suggest she was not a Democrat but a Libertarian. Clearly she was attempting to mitigate the damage. But as evidenced by the fact that divulging her identity led to a quick discovery of her subsequently scrubbed Obama page, she's as dim-witted as she is dishonest.

Democratic party hacks are probably no more dishonest than Republican ones, but progressives are fucking moonbats for whom the truth is an inconvenience easily dispensed with. Everything about the manner in which progressives conduct themselves, and, in fact, how Obama has, feels eerily like life behind the iron curtain. It brings to mind Vaclav Havel recounting his efforts to pierce the fog of bullshit which had enveloped Czechoslovakia. And while I couldn't give a fuck what a young twenty-something thinks about politics, let alone a nobody, methinks a gym membership and a little face work would help ease poor little Rhiannon's emotional torment more than electing the next president.


Not since Whoopie Goldberg asked John McCain if she'd be a slave if he were elected have I seen a more pathetic display of racially-centered stupidity. Or was New York Times columnist Bob Herbert's suggestion that a McCain ad used "obvious" phallic imagery to stoke racial fears after that? Who am I kidding? There is, at this point, a thousand-way tie for first place in the racial grievance assclown bake-off.

The irony is that I have a rather dopey liberal haze about racial matters. Just tonight I ripped the Pakistani who owns the liquor store on my block because he'd locked up the store to take a dump and made his black assistant wait outside on the sidewalk. Truth is the guy always gives work to people who look like good-natured crackheads and they've stolen from him repeatedly. So he is rightfully paranoid. Still, it was an affront to this man's dignity and I felt the need to speak up. Just as I have on the many occasions when a taxi has passed a waiting black person by to pull up beside me. That blacks are notoriously shitty tippers is hardly the world's best-kept secret, but I simply refuse to be the beneficiary of that calculus at another individual's expense.

Yet I wonder.

Is there a point at which the left's barking at race phantoms like Scooby Doo on acid will cause my generosity of spirit to dissipate? It is already a struggle to see why Obama's racist, marxist preacher of twenty years - he of the $2 million house - is off the table in a campaign featuring a man with so little track record. Ditto the ACORN stuff, his other associations and the truth about the financial crisis. For millions of Americans to be told that they are angry bigots due to convictions, sincerely held, which have nothing to do with race at all is a little hard to stomach. Race is being used both as a weapon and a shield and it is severely putting millions of peoples' sense of fair play to the test.

Where will this all lead? I can't say for sure but at a moment where up is apparently down and the sky is purple, it is hard to see how this will lead us as a nation anywhere good.

Best article about the election thus far comes from ... London?

Melanie Philips of the UK Daily Mail offers the most lucid, compelling article I've yet come across about the election. Not a ringing endorsement of McCain but a hot steaming cup of wake the fuck up about the free ride Obama has gotten and the savagery with which the left has gone after Palin.

Everyone is out to destroy Palin - but it's Obama's past we should examine


With all eyes glued to the collapse of global capitalism as we know it, attention has been somewhat distracted from the race to lead what still remains the most powerful nation on earth - the United States. We ignore it at our peril.

From the shockingly partisan presentation by the pro-Obama media on both sides of the Atlantic, you'd think this was a contest between twin pillars of rectitude and inspirational high seriousness on the Democratic side, and a joke Republican ticket consisting of an erratic old man and a brainless, wacko, gun-toting beauty queen, who in a fit of madness John McCain picked as his vice-presidential candidate.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the beauty queen in question, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, has struck an enormous chord with Middle America. As a result, Barack Obama's media supporters are making a huge effort to destroy her.

Inquiry

Now the Left thinks it has shot its moose. It has been crowing that an inquiry by Alaska's legislature has found Palin abused her office by firing Alaska's Commissioner of Public Safety for refusing to fire in turn Palin's former brother-in-law, Trooper Michael Wooten.

This really is a case of half-baked Alaska. First, the inquiry's conclusions were ambiguous. It found that Palin had violated public trust through using official action for personal interest; but it also said the firing was a proper and lawful exercise of her authority, and that personal interest had only been a contributory factor in the Commissioner's firing.

And just what was that personal interest? Palin wanted a state Trooper fired because he had assaulted his 11-year-old stepson with a stun gun, been caught drinking alcohol in his patrol car, and the Palins say was threatening to kill a member of their family.

Certainly, there was a conflict of interest because Wooten was the Governor's sister's ex-husband. But shouldn't the real question be why such a man was not fired?

What is really astounding, however, is the hue and cry over this non-event in Alaska while a raft of disturbing evidence about Senator Obama's connections is being either glossed over or not reported at all.

This may come as a shock to most people, but Obama is at the centre of a network of radical associations which he has tried to conceal.

Take for example his relationship with William Ayers, founder of the terrorist Weather Underground which bombed federal buildings in the 1960s and who has consistently maintained his radical views ever since.

Obama's own political career was actually launched in Ayers's Chicago house at a fundraising-event in 1995 which fired the starting gun for his run at the Illinois Senate.

Not only that, Obama and Ayers both sat on the boards of two organisations, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund. These organisations put into practice Ayers's revolutionary ideology by channelling money supposed to fund regular educational projects into extreme radical groups instead.

Obama now says he didn't know of Ayers's terrorist past and never endorsed his views, simply working with him on an educational project. But it defies belief he didn't know about Ayers, who was notorious in Chicago. In 2001, indeed, Ayers told a magazine: 'I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.'

The crucial point was that this educational project was itself a vehicle for subversion; in the view of Ayers, its driving force, education was 'the motor-force of revolution'. Moreover, Obama wrote a rave review about Ayers' book on criminal justice, which compared America to South Africa under apartheid.

Read her full article here.

What passes for introspection among feminists

There's something almost adorable about how insular liberal academics are. Here's a woman, Jane Marcellus, who is a professor at a third or fourth-tier directional Tennessee school, has the look of someone who utterly depends on being perceived as intelligent for any semblance of self-esteem and is so enmeshed in a masturbatory ideological struggle that even when she displays a modicum of independent thought she lacks the security to couch it in anything other than the snark of conformity.

There have been all manner of loony pronouncements from feminist academics with regard to Palin, but I find those who posture as though breaking the chains of groupthink to often be more revealing. From her commentary:

I know the V.P. debate is an old story already, given the billions more in bad financial and economic news we've had since then, topped off by a new face-off between the two ticket-toppers, Barack Obama and John McCain Tuesday night.

But I keep thinking about the Palin-Biden face-off. I watched it at a hotel bar in Seattle, where I was attending an academic conference. Some of us slipped up to the top floor where we could see Sarah Palin and Joe Biden on a big screen over good ales and margaritas.

Certainly, we felt guilty about it; we were missing a major speaker and a fundraising auction to help students. But who could resist? After all, if it was anything like the Charles Gibson and Katie Couric interviews, it promised to be funnier than a Tina Fey skit.

So yes, here is a journalism professor, a feminist no less, who apparently wasn't perceptive enough to be offended by the double-standard by which Joe Biden's career of rambling idiocy is judged in the media. Who apparently lacked the intellectual honesty to be appalled by the way Palin's Charlie Gibson interview was conducted and edited. Imagine the burden of shaping young journalists falling to someone utterly oblivious to the fact that Gibson deliberately distorted a quote of hers while addressing a church and when she called him on it he maintained that those were her exact words. Imagine not being appalled at the pomposity of his question regarding the "Bush Doctrine" (which the fever swamps of the left had so much fun with) when foreign policy experts don't even agree on what it is. And imagine being a journalism professor who finds the reaction of her and her peers so emotionally satisfying that reading the full transcript of the interview to ascertain just what a hatchet job it was had no chance of being baked into the DNA of her perception. That's hardly intellectual rigor.

Of course, we told ourselves we watched because the election is important, but get real: We watched because we wanted her to fail. We wanted to watch her fail. What better place than the Roman Colosseum of modern times--a bar with a good TV?

I admit it. I wanted her to fail.

I am a feminist researcher. I write about historical stereotypes of women in the workplace, am not usually afraid to speak up about what I think and I still have my handwritten notes from the first women's studies course I ever took, circa 1978.

Still, I wanted this woman, Sarah Palin, to fail.


... So it's pretty natural that we would be angry that Hillary was superseded on the national stage by an unknown self-proclaimed "hockey mom" who opposed abortion rights and wore her hair in a 1950s poof. ...

You simply have to love this. Hillary Clinton, while an obviously bright woman, rode her more charismatic and politically savvy husband's coattails to power. She has grown on me, but how about a little dose of truth? She benefited from pity. Yet feminists like Marcellus, no doubt, went to great pains to throw every feminist principle under the bus in rationalizing Bill Clinton's conduct. Lest anyone has forgotten he was ensnared in a web of laws on workplace harassment (and evidence gathering) which these people themselves brought to fruition. And while being unembarrassed about how Hillary launched her political career is to be expected, also down the memory hole is how her handlers hid her from the press in her first campaign while she worked on learning about a state she had never lived in as well as on properly presenting herself. And this when faced with what was hardly a hostile media like that which awaited Palin.

With regard to her characterization of Palin, one of course has to wonder if this is some kind of mea culpa about how stupid this perception was among her kind. That's not entirely clear. I certainly travel in hipper, more sophisticated circles here in NYC than Marcellus does in Tennessee or elsewhere and can assure her that she displays a remarkable lack of self-awareness in mocking Palin's physical appearance in light of her own. And an almost comical lack of perception in using the abortion issue as a cudgel. Palin has her own personal beliefs but only a reflexive lefty could fail, upon close inspection, to discern the libertarian streak in Palin's philosophical outlook.

... What's wrong with this picture? Is no one concerned with how easily we replaced the story about the powerful, brilliant woman with the safer, more familiar one about the ditzy airhead, and more important, how that happened?

Within days of Hillary's speech we had a woman on a major presidential ticket whose family life we could compare to Brittany Spears'. And we did. (You heard, right, that the baby may be her daughter's?) It's a paradox that John McCain would bring the American people this scenario, given that earlier in the summer he compared Barack Obama to Paris Hilton.

What has happened here?

I don't claim to have it figured out. I don't entirely blame "the media," because as cultural studies theorists tell us, media and culture are as interconnected as beehive 'dos and hairspray. ...

And here we have more contrived pseudo-intellectual social commentary. As I recall the Clinton family was replete with Jerry Springer Show imagery. From the spectacle of Bill Clinton playing vagina hockey with a cigar and a fat, homely 21-year-old intern, to his substance-abusing redneck brother being camped in the White House trying to sell pardons to Hillary's rise in benefiting from the madness which surrounded her, and which she enabled. With all the smears Palin was subjected to you'd think a journalism professor would note that while the mainstream media aided and abetted all manner of anonymous ugly rumors and distortions, the circus that was the Clinton era actually featured a rape charge and assorted affairs and harassment charges where the accusers at least had the courage to show their faces in public. Then again, like understanding how we arrived at our current financial crisis, that would require something on the part of Marcellus's kind which I keep hearing that Sarah Palin grossly lacks. As Barack Obama himself might put it Um, uh, um, uh,um, uh, ah, um intellectual curiosity.

Read Marcellus's full article here.

That I'm gutting a writer and thinker so inconsequential that she likely Googles herself and will find this may be harsh. But her very ordinariness - in being typical of breed - is what I found so amusing in her pained effort to overcome her ideological prism and engage in rationality. The contrast with Camille Paglia's efforts at doing likewise in a recent Salon column made it all the more stark. Paglia writes:

The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin’s brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don’t we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.

And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don’t think sex — I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry — including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is “dumb.” Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can’t see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism — the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

See the full Camille Paglia article here.

Sure, Paglia is the enfant terrible of feminism. She is a contrarian by nature. But still she has a quality of mind which is not held hostage to the value system which makes an effort at similar generosity on the part of Marcellus so rife with chattering class buffoonery. Paglia must have had a happy childhood. Or perhaps it is her understanding that feminist thought is cartoonishly rigid and anchored by the big lie that they hold the moral high ground on abortion. That's something most normal well-adjusted people know to be an absurdity, even if, like myself, they are pro-choice.

And the winner is ...

I saw this coming. The left has created their narrative with relentless smears and a media willing to aid them. Her first interview with Charlie Gibson was a display of bad faith questions and deceptive editing which anyone who has read the full transcript of her interview can attest. The Couric interview was a train wreck, no doubt in part due to inexperience and excessive caution on her part in light of the first go-round. It certainly bolstered the left's narrative about her and had a lot of conservatives nervous about how knowledgeable she'd come across in the debate.

Here's what I posted in a thread on Commentary's blog before the debate:

Enough with this talk about comparative knowledge bases. When Palin has made me cringe it hasn’t been due to her not knowing the intricacies of policy and has had everything to do with the fact that she has been on perpetual defense. Yes, she’s had to introduce herself in the face of innumerable smears. Yes, she is facing a hostile media which will do everything in their power to make her look like an idiot by editing or the manner of questioning. And yes, it is a rather onerous task to master the language of BS that is inherent in speaking on behalf of a running mate rather than simply expressing your own beliefs. This is especially true when her career thus far has been in an executive capacity where she’s had the comfort of speaking for herself, and she doesn’t have Biden’s “luxury” of talking out of his posterior and contradicting his own campaign with impunity. That’s a lot of land mines for her.

But the bottom line as far as I’m concerned is that what makes her compelling is that she represents an extraordinary example of the millions of regular people who are sick of Washington and yet she is coming across as someone who is letting them squash her. She hasn’t lost her personal narrative because she has failed to provide wonkish prattle but because her whole raison d’etre is being nullified by her being on the defensive. She’d be a polarizing figure no matter what, but the opinions that matter are not those of the bone smugglers in the chattering class. Hopefully they’ve figured this out and we’ll see her let loose tonight.


She was set loose and she came through in spades. She more than held her own and while Biden had the command of "facts" you'd expect from a 35-year Senate veteran, a lot of his rhetorical points were bullshit. His account of Lebanon was nonsensical. His characterization of his vote for war authorization with regard to Iraq was a lie. His adamant suggestion that Obama never called for face to face meetings with Ahmadinejad was laughable. His suggestion that McCain voted down funding the troops in Iraq was grossly misleading. His continuation of the Democrats mantra that the financial crisis is the result of deregulation defies reality. And so on. Palin had a few flubs, misnaming the General in charge of Afghanistan and characterizing the troop numbers currently in Iraq as being at pre-surge levels. But the fact that they were peripheral matters as opposed to the crux of her 90 minute argument makes a world of difference. If only the media was being honest and objective in their fact-checking. Thus far it appears they're letting a lot of Biden's demonstrable falsehoods slide, and the cyber moonbats are actually trying to spin the fact that Palin didn't call him on every last one of his lies as proof of her lack of knowledge. Interesting argument.

Ideally people like Palin, Biden and Obama never get this close to the White House but I can hardly fault a woman with a bright future who was tapped prematurely when she's on a ticket running against an aging buffoon and a narcissistic lightweight leftist with good packaging who has been rehearsing his talking points longer than she has.

Why Palin is doomed in the debate

More at: Jim Treacher