Posts Tagged ‘Andrew Sullivan’
New York Times calls Sarah Palin: “The Woman Who Might Be President”
May 30, 2011
She shows up in black leather with a Harley helmet on her head, and, yes, her talking points written on the palm of her hand, and mainstream media—-as exemplified by this story in The New York Times, (featured at the top of their home page, which is equivalent to above the fold on page one, back when anybody actually read the print edition)—-rolls over giddily and begs her to scratch their collective belly.
For sheer mastery of celebrity theater, Sarah Palin cannot be beat.
Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska, let the anticipation build for hours on Sunday in the Pentagon’s North Parking Lot, where thousands of bikers (and their rumbling Harleys) had gathered for the annual Rolling Thunder rally ahead of Memorial Day.
And then, suddenly, there she was: Ms. Palin, with her husband, Todd, and the rest of the family. Wearing matching black Harley-Davidson helmets, they rode motorcycles toward the front of the procession through a crush of cameramen, photographers, reporters and leather-clad bikers, all jostling for just a peek at the woman who might be president.
It’s long past time for those of us who believe that Sarah continues to represent a real threat to the (largely) rational discourse that has been a hallmark of our democracy for 235 years to keep blaming her and recognize that it’s the enabling by mainstream media, desperate for page views as print circulation plummets, that keeps her not only afloat, but aloft.
MSM argue that they have to cover her because everything she says and does is “news.”
But it’s only news because they make it news.
Granted, as a candidate for vice president in 2008, Sarah was news. But since November, 2008–and even more so after she quit as Alaska governor in 2009–it’s been MSM’s presenting her as a serious person, even while deriding her in the snobbish fashion that allows her to call them “lamestream”–that has kept the helium in Sarah’s balloon.
What’s clear from the weekend is that nobody has learned a thing.
She starts a “bus tour”—one for which her organizers refuse to say where she’ll be tomorrow— on the back of a motorcycle, and she’s hailed for her “mastery of celebrity theater,” and praised for outFoxing (pun intended) the MSM journalists who chase after her, tongues hanging out.
Okay, but cover her in the entertainment section. Even as the solemn debate about whether she’ll actually be a candidate next year continues, The New York Times calls her, without apparent irony, “the woman who might be president.”
And Chris Matthews, who stated the obvious last week by saying, “she’s profoundly stupid,” said more recently:
“She is really good . . . she’s fantastic on a stage. When she walks out on that stage there’s something kinetic happening. She looks great, look at her, she’s alive, she’s smiling, she’s doing stuff, she’s moving around. You can’t take your eyes off of what she’s doing.”
God help us, his leg is tingling again.
And both John McCain and Andrew Sullivan said yesterday that given the right set of circumstances she could beat President Obama next year.
Hey, if exchanging nasty comments about Sarah on this or any other blog makes you feel good, by all means keep on doing it.
But don’t kid yourself that it’s having any effect in the real world, where media memes are created, where elections are decided, and where the moral, ethical and political contours of our country are being shaped.
Seeing the gleeful embrace that MSM is giving Sarah as she returns from self-imposed, post-Tucson exile, I don’t quite despair, but I worry.
And in my head, I replay Bob Dylan’s lyrics from “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” which he wrote and first performed in 1965, in the wake of the John F. Kennedy assassination:
You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue…The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
Sarah hops on a Harley at the Pentagon and MSM falls back in love with her again.
Happy Memorial Day.
Posted in 2012, Andrew Sullivan, Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, Obama, Palin children, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, The Rogue | 
Tags: Andrew Sullivan, bob dylan, chris matthews, d.c., harley davidson, it's all over now baby blue, mainstream media, memorial day, new york times, pentagon, rolling thunder, sarah paliln, washington | 
80 Comments »
If only Sarah weren’t Sarah, She Coulda Been A Contender//UPDATE: John Podhoretz in Commentary
May 10, 2011
That’s the thesis propounded by Joshua Green in the June issue of The Atlantic.
The magazine, however, went with the classier title, “The Tragedy of Sarah Palin,” and illustrated the piece with the striking image above of Sarah in full presidential mode.
“But over the past few months, Palin has begun fortifying her profile by visiting foreign countries and delivering speeches that extol her record as governor, especially on energy, as she did in March to an audience of international business leaders in India….She seems to be reintroducing herself.”
Given that I’m presently writing the last chapter of THE ROGUE I’m not going to critique Green’s piece, though I’m sure some will take issue with his conclusion that Sarah was a great governor of Alaska, who accomplished extraordinary things.
I find it interesting that during his week in Alaska Green spoke to the same people I talked to two-and-a-half years ago about Sarah’s accomplishments as governor–Gregg Erickson, Pat Galvin, Hollis French, Les Gara–and came away with conclusions very different from those I reached and published in my 2009 Portfolio cover story.
I will say that I hope Howard Kurtz reads Green’s story. In the current Newsweek, Kurtz writes about the end of the Sarah Palin phenomenon in a piece titled, “Is Sarah Palin Over?”
Kurtz says she’s toast. Green says she just might be a soufflé only starting to rise.
Maybe Andrew Sullivan, formerly of The Atlantic and now with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast-Newsweek behemoth could moderate a Kurtz-Green debate on The Dish.
UPDATE:
Even Commentary compares Sarah to Daryl Strawberry.
Even while pining for what might have been, Podhoretz writes her off. But who will win his heart next?
Or can Sarah lure him back by offering lunch on the concrete block on Lake Lucille, the way she seduced his buddy Bill Kristol over lunch at the governor’s mansion in Juneau?
Posted in 2012, Andrew Sullivan, Joe McGinniss, The Rogue | Tags: 2012 gop candidates, ACES, AGIA, Andrew Sullivan, howard kurtz, joshua green, natural gas, newsweek, oil, palin for president, Portfolio, Sarah Palin, the atlantic, the daily best, the dish | 27 Comments »
More from Andrew Sullivan Soon: UPDATE: He’s Delivered…
April 25, 2011
He writes today: “I’ve been struggling to write a long new post on this entire thing, and am almost happy with it.”
I can say this about Andrew: he recognized from the start that the combination of Sarah Palin and the bedazzled media’s failure
to expose her for the fraud she was and is represented a genuine and grave threat to democracy. At the time, the 2008 election result was far from certain. In her Christian dominionism, her ignorance, her willfulness, her petulance, her spitefulness and her unbalanced belief that God really had annointed her to impose her narrow view of Christianity on a sinful, secular nation, Palin posed a clear and present danger to our way of life.
And we are by no means out of those woods yet. I have no doubt that she is currently preparing for a Fall Offensive that she thinks will carry her into next year’s primaries on a wave of fresh momentum. Given the weakness of the GOP field (Donald Trump?!!) , she could still become the Republican candidate.
The campaign that would follow that calamity would tear this country apart as maybe nothing has done since the Civil War.
So be grateful that Andrew Sullivan is standing watch.
UPDATE
…and many won’t like what he says.
From the start, Andrew has made an effort to be scrupulously fair about the Trig question. For being willing to consider even the possibility that Sarah’s story was a hoax, he was derided. Today’s post is further evidence of his scrupulousness, and although I disagree with him about many things (he is a Republican, after all) I’ve never found him to argue from false premises.
However, I’m less persuaded than he is by the belated first-person accounts of Quinn and Loy.
Loy wrote the original ADN story that said what a shock it was to learn that Sarah was pregnant, because she never looked it.
Now, three years later, he suddenly remembers that, yeah, actually, she did look pregnant, I just didn’t notice it at the time? A good cross-examiner could have fun with that in a courtroom.
As for Quinn, it was widely rumored that he was romantically involved with Palin aide Ivy Frye while covering Sarah as governor for AP. He doesn’t work for AP any more. I don’t know why, but I’ve heard the story of his relationship with Fry often enough and from enough different people without axes to grind that, at the least, it gives me pause in regard to Quinn’s credibility.
But set aside questions about the motivation of these two, suddnly key “eyewitnesses,” who decided in unison to go public last week. As all cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys know, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. How about eyewitness testimony three years later?
I’m a Trignostic. I don’t have a dog in this fight. But I don’t agree with Sullivan that the “recovered memories” of Loy and Quinn (neither of whom I know, by the way) should be accepted as having significant weight.
Not only is eyewitness testimony unreliable, but these were young male reporters covering the most dazzling & sexy political figure in Alaskan history. Sarah invites them to view her (veiled) belly in private? And now–contradicting what they wrote at the time–they both decide retroactively that she was obviously pregnant?
Something about that smells like fish to me: and not like fish that even Todd Palin could sell commercially.
Sullivan says the Loy and Quinn accounts “buttress–powerfully–the case that this whole thing is a tempest in a spatula.” He finds Loy and Quinn “persuasive.” I don’t.
He’s also persuaded by this conversation that Laura Novak had with a pediatric specialist, who argues that Sarah Palin is not “weird” enough to have fabricated her whole story.
Hmm. I’m not so sure. That reminds me of the argument that friends of Jeffrey MacDonald made in his defense: he couldn’t have murdered his wife and children, because he’s not the kind of man who could have done that. Turns out that he did, and he was. So a long-distance psychological evaluation of Sarah by a pediatric specialist who’s never met her doesn’t rise to the level of evidence either.
My verdict? Jury still out. But we thank Mr. Sullivan for his testimony.
Refreshing Rationality from New Yorker’s Amy Davidson
April 24, 2011
Finally, someone who personally believes that Sarah Palin gave birth to Trig respects the right of
Andrew Sullivan and others to ask legitimate questions. Amy Davidson, a senior editor at The New Yorker posts on her Close Read blog.
This is like a breath of pure oxygen after choking on the aggressive contempt spewed by Salon, HuffPo, etc. over the past few days.
I can understand skepticism. But what’s fueling the anger of MSM toward those like Andrew Sullivan, who simply keep asking questions because no one is giving answers? You would think journalists would applaud Sullivan for doing his job. Instead, so many try to marginalize and demean him. I would expect this from hack polemicists like Breitbart, but I’d really like to know what’s behind the defensiveness at MSM sites such as Salon, Slate, and HuffPo. They laugh at and scorn Sarah for everything else she says, but on this one issue she’s declared beyond reproach and taken at her word? And the thoughtful and diligent Sullivan is ridiculed for saying it does matter if Sarah’s whole bit of performance art with Trig was only that?
What could matter more? This woman almost became vice president of the United States, and still harbors hopes (because God will open the doors for her) of becoming president.
I suspect, and certainly hope, that we’ve not heard the last from Andrew Sullivan on this question. I know we haven’t heard the last from me.
Posted in 2012, Andrew Sullivan, Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, Palin children, Sarah Palin, The Rogue, Trig Palin | Tags: amy davidson, Andrew Sullivan, huffington post, joe mcginniss, MSM, salon, Sarah Palin, slate, the new yorker, the rogue, Trig Palin | 29 Comments »
Blodget Pokes a Stick at the Sleeping Bear
April 14, 2011
Henry Blodget, CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider, writes that Northern Kentucky University professor Brad Scharlott alleges Sarah Palin “probably staged a gigantic hoax about being Trig’s mother,” but “our media has been too wimpy and pathetic to investigate.”
The sleeping bear is awake now and starting to growl.
To be clear: I am not at this point accusing Sarah of staging a hoax in regard to Trig.
I am, however, like Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast and Jesse Griffin at The Immoral Minority, saying that mainstream media, as well as Alaskan media and some otherwise progressive Alaska bloggers, gave Sarah a free pass re Trig in 2008, and have continued to denigrate anyone who suggests that the issue–a cornerstone of her political identity–is worth exploring.
The question now is whether the mainstreamers will revoke the pass, given that they’ve written Sarah off for 2012.
Professor asks: Trig hoax? Sarah Palin spokesman enraged
April 8, 2011
A journalism professor at Northern Kentucky University has written a research paper titled, “Palin, the Press, and the Fake Pregnancy Rumor.” The professor, Brad Scharlott, asserts that there was enough evidence of a possible hoax to have warranted closer scrutiny by mainstream media during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Sarah’s former spokesman, Bill McAllister, has gone ballistic in response, threatening to commit assault and battery on the professor and writing that he’d like to challenge him to a duel. Calling Scharlott “despicable” and “a scoundrel,” McAllister forwarded his response to faculty colleagues, saying, “he should be fired.”
Rest assured, the question of whether Sarah is really Trig’s mother, or whether she faked the pregnancy and lied about the birth is not an issue I ignore in The Rogue.
Posted in Sarah Palin, The Rogue, Trig Palin | Tags: Andrew Sullivan, fake pregnancy, hoax, journalism, mcallister, Northern Kentucky University, Sarah Palin, Sarah pregnancy hoax, Scharlott, the rogue, Trig Palin | 49 Comments »
Right Wing Rallies Round “The Tragedy of Sarah Palin”
Pen a fantasy about how Sarah Palin could have been Barack Obama if only she weren’t so:
a) selfish
b) filled with anger, resentment and hate
c) greedy
d) stupid and uneducated
e) all of the above
and you tap into a deep vein of right-wing nostalgia for the Sarah-Who-Never-Was, which will prove of immense benefit to your personal brand and career.
I’m not impugning Joshua Green’s motives for writing his “Sarah-We-Hardly-Knew-Ye” paean of praise in the June issue of The Atlantic.
I’m sure he felt he had a legitimate, counter-intuitive, against the flow argument to make. He’s proven himself to be an excellent and fair-minded reporter in the past. And nobody should knock him just because his first job in “journalism” was at The Onion.
It may be that with “The Tragedy of Sarah Palin,” Green is returning to his satirical roots. Although if you read some of the comments in response to my earlier post, “If Only Sarah Weren’t Sarah, She Coulda Been a Contender,” you’ll find some strong fact-based arguments against Green’s hypothesis.
In any case, I’m sure Green was perspicacious enough to sense the likely windfall that would result from a “St. Sarah, The Fallen Star” story.
And he’s knee-deep in peaches and apples already, as the huzzahs arrive from all the obvious right-wing shills:
—John Podhoretz in Commentary
—Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post
—Ross Douthat in The New York Times
This chorus sings in only one key: the key of sorrow, for the loss of a Sarah Palin who never existed outside the realm of their collective yearning, and who ever existed only as a figment of their collective imagination.
Andrew Sullivan wrote a bracing response yesterday and today added:
Josh’s piece will serve as balm to the right. And it will allow them to believe that their choice of veep in 2008 was not an indictment of them or the media – but just an unfortunate decision by Palin to change her colors. The only problem with this argument is that it is manifestly untrue. But we know that Palin lovers, like Palin herself, must perforce be wedded to mountains of untruth.
Amen.