Call the waaaaaambulance

So there's this right wing dipshit named John Ziegler who's very upset that Barack Obama won the presidency, so he's determined to explain to the American people how dumb the 53% of them who voted Democrat this year are.

To this end, he commissioned the notoriously unreliable Zogby polling outfit to conduct a survey, of sorts, of self-described Obama voters and test their awareness of a bunch of Fox News-generated B.S. about Obama. You see, if you aren't aware that Barack Obama "started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground", you aren't just skeptical of the right-wing echo chamber, you're ill-informed!

Or if you thought the candidate who said she could see Russia from her house was Sarah Palin, you're wrong! It was actually Tina Fey. You see, Palin said that "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska". It's such a shame that Obama supporters were so ignorant of the important issues in this campaign.

Anyway, recently, our hero Nate Silver called foul on this nonsense and characterized the whole exercise as a "push poll", or a poll intended to sway the opinion of the person being polled.

Well, big, bad right-wing John Ziegler wasn't going to stand for this so he gave this wonderfully infantile, expletive-laden interview to Nate (via FiveThirtyEight.com):

An Interview with John Ziegler on the Zogby "Push Poll"

Cracking the Sarah Palin code

Here's another Palin doosy from Daniel Larison's helpful post about cracking the Palin code:

Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.

Camille Paglia still hearts Sarah Palin

Oh, please (via Salon):

"I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist."

Yeah, jazz! That's it! Here is Palin apparently riffing like Coltrane on the economy:

"That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh -- it's got to be all about job creation too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, um, scary thing, but 1 in 5 jobs being created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that."

Ms. Palin, you insult our intelligence, and Ms. Paglia, you insult be-bop.

Republican meltdown postmortem: Palin didn't know that Africa is a continent

Wow! I wonder if she knows that Led Zepplin is a band...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/05/palin-didnt-know-africa-i_n_141653.html

Thank you, Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens can be a real pain in the ass, particularly for a few years after 9/11 which he spent being sort of a neocon, but he hit the nail on the head on Slate today eviscerating Sarah Palin:

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

Absofuckinglutely.

Sarah Palin's War on Science

Camille Paglia: Palin's Not Dumb!

Professional contrarian Camille Paglia has a long respond-to-emails piece on Salon that, among other things, heaps praise on Sarah Palin. Paglia has long used the discourse of academia and feminism to attack academes and feminists, so I wasn't surprised to see her sycophantic fawning over Mrs. Palin. But, for chrissake she just sounds so inane! How can you so vociferously defend the intellect of someone who cannot name one newspaper or magazine she reads? It may be chic in conservative academic lesbian circles to tout Palin as some sort of amazon warrior goddess or whatever, but this is just ridiculous:

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.

Yeah, whatever, Pags.

Nobody’s dummy (via Salon)

In defense of average

Quoth Sarah Palin:

"Oh, I think they're just not used to someone coming in from the outside saying you know what? It's time that normal Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency, and I think that that's kind of taken some people off guard, and they’re out of sorts, and they’re ticked off about it."

Yeah, it's about time that we had someone of average to below average intelligence in the White House. Who wants some smarty pants elitist dealing with foreign leaders and making complicated decisions on policy? Just crack open a PBR, put on the monster trucks and run the country. What could possibly go wrong?

But Sarah, don't you mean Josephine Six Pack?

The Miss South Carolina/Sarah Palin mashup

Love it:

Sarah Palin explaining (at length) why everyone who lives in Alaska is a foreign policy expert

I would like to point out two things to Sarah Palin:

• Putin is no longer the president of Russia.
• New York is closer to Moscow than Anchorage is.
  

Something funny happened on the way to the global financial meltdown

So we are now in the throes of the final fuck you by Bush and Co. to the American people and the world. After destroying just about everything we used to associate with the United States, everyone thought they would go out with a literal bang in Iran or Russia or somewhere. But they had a smarter, more demonic plan: why not just blow up the economy?

You see, this way they can cry "crisis!" (like they did with Iraq) and the American people will hand over all their money to the Executive Branch and their rich friends.

Or will they?

People in this country support some really stupid ideas (laws against abortion, the drinking age, Sarah Palin), but when it hits their wallets they draw the line. As someone famous once said, "it's the economy, stupid."

So finally we have people on main street actually thinking and coming to the conclusion that it may not be a good idea for every American to donate money to the New York Rich Guys' Mansion Fund.

Bush and Co. have been remarkably successful correctly estimating the level of stupidity in this country so far. This time, it looks like they misfired. Because if there is one thing people in this country care about more than gays, guns and God, it's money.

The McCain-Palin Gossip Challenge

Okay, so we are learning (again) that "facts" and "issues" don't really resonate with a great number of American voters. If you look at the last two presidential elections, they resemble this one in that the facts and issues were clearly on the Democrats' side, but the Republicans successfully diverted voters' attention to mischaracterizations of the candidates' personalities.

In 2000, it devolved into which candidate we would most like to have a beer with (or in Bush's case a Shirley Temple, I suppose). In 2004 it was framing Kerry as a French, flip-flopping windsurfer.

These tactics are highly effective in swaying American voters because in general the electorate is woefully uninformed and is trained to consume media based on an Us Weekly type personality profile format. This format has two modes: poignant, regular-person fawning and gossipy freak mongering.

So far the Republicans have been very effective at propping Sarah Palin up as a "just like us" angry small town mom and deriding Barack and Michelle Obama as sly, deceptive political insiders.

Our challenge as liberals is to forget about the issues and go for the gossip. The people who vote on issues and facts made up their minds months ago and are voting Democrat. The hardcore Republicans were never going to vote rationally anyway. It's the uninformed/undecided/independent voters that are up for grabs. These people really don't hear issues or facts. That stuff is, like, really boring. Independents liked the People Magazine profile of the Palin family with its whiskey-tango-friendly, messy baby drama. This helped Sarah Palin gain a 90% name recognition within like a week.

We can't win this election relying on Americans' sober analysis of the issues, obviously. So the challenge is, liberal bloggers, go out and find the freaky dirt about McCain and Palin and repeat it over and over.

The following have been tried and not worked:

• Cindy McCain was a drug addict
• The McCains are really rich (only Democrats aren't allowed to be rich because that makes them - gasp - hypocrits)
• Sarah Palin is a scary Jesus freak (that's a plus in the United States)

New and new-ish stories the outcome of which is unclear:

• Track Palin was a drug addict
  
• Bristol Palin smoked pot
• Sarah Palin used a (now hacked) personal email account to conduct state business to cirumvent public disclosure laws
  

But we need something really, really freaky. Did Sarah Palin have sex with her teenage daughter's baby daddy? Did John McCain, Larry Craig, and Ted Haggard have a meth and Viagra-fueled threesome? Did Cindy McCain let her dog die due to neglect?

Come on liberals, you do gossip better than anyone. Take your sights off of Britney and Mylie for a minute and set them squarely on McCain-Palin.

UPDATE:

• Sarah Palin's Other Man
  

Sarah Palin/Miss South Carolina: The Cringe Factor

Compare:

Fear Not, Democrats, We Always Win in the End

There is a lot of anxiety floating around Democratic circles lately and everyone seems to be freaking out except for Barack Obama (he's an old pro, folks, he's already thought through your angles). But I have come to bring you the good news: liberals/progressives/Democrats/whatever always win in the end.

Take Sarah Palin. Is this not just a shameless aping of the Hillary Clinton campaign? Without the historic Clinton candicacy within the Democratic party, do you think Karl Rove would give Palin the time of day? I'm kind of surprised they didn't just shoot the moon and go with Condeleeza Rice.

On pretty much every issue, Democrats get it right, Republicans get it wrong, and everyone comes around to the Democratic position in the end. Examples: civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, environmentalism, the Iraq war...

The vast majority of people agree wholeheartedly with the Democrats, so the Republicans create noise and sideshows to distract people. Eventually, though, even the Republicans are forced to change and come around to our side.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said so prophetically, ""the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."

Just What Is This "Community Organizer" You Speak Of?

So all day I've been hearing Republicans, including Laura Bush, say they just don't know what a community organizer is. One guy on NPR actually said, "No one's told me what a community organizer is."

You see Barack Obama was a community organizer before he was an Illinois State Senator and United States Senator, and Republicans say he's really unqualified to be President because they are baffled by the term "community organizer".

What could this community organizer possibly be? Is that even English? I think I've heard of "community": it's like this thing where people live among one another, not separated by vast amounts of land or gates and they somehow manage to coexist, generally without killing each other. Okay, check.

Now, "organizer": let's see, we used to have these books that we would put calendar and address entries into called organizers. So if a person is an organizer, maybe he or she would sort of set up dates and places for people (or the "community") to meet and put their concerns into some sort of order.

Come on Republicans, stop playing dumb. Or are you not playing?

Poor little Republicans

A running theme through this presidential campaign is the defensiveness of Republicans. We democrats are elitist. We think they are stupid. We don't respect their family values. Christianity is under attack.

So the minute they get someone "like them" like Sarah Palin (although I doubt many of her supporters charge their state $60 a night to sleep at home), they are energized! She's a mother! She shoots animals! She speaks their language! She talks to God!

You know what red staters? Go ahead and vote for these dipshits. Vote with your God and your family and your guns. My economic outlook in my blue state looks pretty good actually. I can still afford to shop at the Whole Foods cheese cave. You don't even know what that is, do you? I walk to work so I don't really give much of a shit about gas prices. I'm actually looking to remodel my kitchen. I'll be fine. You red state folks on the other hand will be even more fucked than you are now if we get 4 more years of this nonsense.

Ooh, you can't afford to drive your Chevy Tahoe to work anymore? Vote McCain-Palin! Your prefab 2 bedroom just got foreclosed? Vote McCain-Palin! You don't have any health insurance or savings or beer money? Go ahead and vote Republican.

What do I care? Hit yourselves over the head with a hammer some more. A lot of us blue state elitists will come out smelling like fucking Chardonnay.

What will you smell like?

You lie, Hockey Mom, you lie!

I am starting the think that this Sarah Palin lady is kinda crazy. Granted, crazy is the Republicans' stock and trade, but seriously what kind of nutjob accepts the veep nomination and a couple of days later goes, "Btw, my 15 year old is pregnant. Totes not a problem, right? See you at the convention!"

Now we get the outrageous lying about her position on the bridge to nowhere and her charging the state of Alaska $50 a day to live at home while governor, both of which decimate the entire theme of the McCain campaign, and what have you got left? The poignant, People-Mag-ready, hockey-mom-raises-a-Down-syndrome-baby weepfest. Is this enough to sway an election? For the Republicans, sure. For the general electorate...doubtful.