Posts Tagged ‘GOP’
Bachmann Waves Wand: Suddenly Sarah Palin is Yesterday
Sarah is in danger of becoming only the second most disgusting Republican woman who wants to be president.
Bachmann’s performance in New Orleans tonight was pure (if there is any such thing) Palin, from vicious attacks on Obama down to calling male attention to her underwear.
Referring to the recent New Hampshire debate, she said:
“I didn’t know if they were going to ask boxers or briefs – a girl never knows.”
It’s reported that she got a standing ovation for that line. Which figures, given her audience.
If you look at my most recent post, you’ll see I mention that an informed source told me recently that the one thing most likely to draw Sarah into the race would be Bachmann claiming her turf as GOP’s new sexpot loudmouth provocateur.
Memo to Sarah: it’s happenin’, babe. By Labor Day your theme song could be from the Beatles:
Now I need a place to hide away,
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
We’re not halfway through 2011 yet and already Bachmann is the Sarah Palin of 2012.
Will our gal just sit back and let that happen?
Stay tuned.
A year ago, Sarah’s worst problem was having me for a neighbor—though it was a problem only in her own disordered mind.
Now she’s at risk of sinking into the quicksand pit of obscurity that consumes used up political hucksters who haven’t noticed that they’re no longer tomorrow’s main course at the banquet, but only yesterday’s breakfast.
It happens fast, Sarah. Just like your arrival from nowhere happened fast.
By next year you could be doing Sunday morning infomercials for “Sarah Palin Scottsdale SPF 100 Sun Block.”
I wonder if she’s placed an advance order for THE ROGUE.
Probably she’s hoping for a free copy.
It won’t come from me.
Even the version shown to magazines this week for possible first serial excerpt in advance of Sept. 20 publication was redacted.
Just like the Palin emails.
There are revelations in the book that Random House/Crown just won’t risk having leaked prematurely.
Let me put it this way: if Sarah doesn’t announce her 2012 decision before Sept. 20 when THE ROGUE is published, I predict she won’t run.
And I know why.
Sarah Palin and The Seven Dwarfs: Clear-eyed view from across the pond//UPDATE: sending a message?
I often think that Beltway pundits are so close to the screen that they can’t see the picture for the pixels.
And once they reach a collective opinion (i.e. the conventional wisdom from mid-January to April that Sarah’s disastrous plunge into the pool of Narcissus following the Tucson shootings of January 8 had finished her as a force in American politics), they cling to it the way Obama said that embittered poor whites in Appalachia and the Rust Belt “cling to guns or religion.”
Granted, Richard Adams works in The Guardian‘s Washington bureau, which puts him technically inside the Beltway.
Coming from England, however, he’s also a foreign correspondent and thus–unlike the blind men in the Indian fable— able to see the whole elephant.
In today’s Guardian, Adams points out that there are two strong indicators that Palin will run for president: “everything she says and everything she does.”
Including the fact that her bus tour will take her to New Hampshire this week and to Iowa next month.
You can’t hardly get much more definitive than that.
As Adams writes:
Palin would be crazy not to run for the Republican nomination. Just look at the rest of the field.
UPDATE:
Nothing subtle about this:
NY Times Front Page: “Signs Grow That Palin May Run”
Nothing I haven’t been saying all along, but it’s suddenly the new mainstream meme.
Read it here.
Are there still doubters?
Why Is This Not A Surprise?
The poorer and less educated you are, the more likely you are to like Sarah.
More from Andrew Sullivan Soon: UPDATE: He’s Delivered…
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.
Is Sarah Palin at the Tipping Point?
Chris Cilizza, who writes The Fix at the Washington Post, is one of the most reliable purveyors of the political conventional wisdom of the moment. He writes today that Sarah “may have peaked, politically speaking.” He cites recent polls as evidence of “Palin fatigue” among Republicans and says the most likely reason for the dimming of Sarah’s star was her churlish and ill-advised response to the Tuscon shootings in January.
Even my friend Geoffrey Dunn (his book, The Lies of Sarah Palin, will be published next month) now puts the likelihood of Sarah running for president at only fifty-fifty.
I disagree. There is a natural ebb and flow in the tides of politics, and not even Sarah (or maybe especially not Sarah) can always be at high tide. The primaries are still almost a year away. She stumbled badly with her needless–did I mention that it was also churlish and ill-advised?–response to the Gifford assassination attempt, and at the end of January another CW spinner, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, declared February a “Palin-free” month. Even Sarah could tell she was over-exposed.
So she’s retreated to the high grass temporarily. But let’s remember that it was only two months ago that her hiring of Michael Glassman to head Sarah PAC was seen as a strong indication that she was preparing to challenge Pres. Obama next year.
Then she went to India and Israel when she could have made just as much money closer to home.
So, no, I don’t think we can yet write her off as a fallen star. If nothing else, her old Wasilla High point guard instinct will not allow her to stay on the bench as Michelle Bachman becomes the Tea Party’s new darling.
One thing about tides: whatever direction they’re flowing in, they’ll soon move in the opposite direction.