Category: Sarah Palin

Palin’s Radical Pals

David Neiwert and Max Blumenthal have an intense investigative piece on Salon about who Sarah Palin has been pallin’ around with: radical right wingers and separatists. It goes far deeper into both the secessionists she has worked closely with for the last fifteen years or so and what their relationships have looked like.

This isn’t the only issue floating towards home plate at batting practice speed that could further derail McCain-Palin (Troopergate & Palin’s unpaid taxes are out their too), but it is certainly made more important by the McCain-Palin campaign’s decision to turn their events into Tour de Hate ’08, which has (un)hinged on attacks on Ayers and Wright.

Video Bonanza

 A few morning videos, just because I haven’t had the time to give each their own post.

Obama PWND McCAin on foreign policy, Marty McFly-style.

One of the most creative, effective ads I’ve seen this cycle, courtesy of the Courage Campaign and the NO on Prop 8 crowd in California (which would ban marriage equality).

Finally, what I think is the best attack ad I’ve seen anyone make on Palin. It needs a couple tweaks in verbiage, but I’d love to see a 527, the DNC, or even the Obama campaign making this hit. It is a winner and it’s time the Palin’s ties to the Alaska Independence Party receive top-line attention. It could finally put this campaign to bed.

The Palin Amendment

From James Fallows, we have the 28th Amendment, to be filed under Wishful Thinking:

“No Person shall be elected President or Vice President without accepting a session of questioning by the press, such session to last no less than one hour and to be open to normally accredited members of the press in the same fashion as at Presidential news conferences. The questioning shall occur and the results shall be made freely available to the public at least one week before an Election is held.”

As great as it would be to have an amendment in the US Constitution to ensure that candidates for President and Vice President is scrutinized directly by the Fourth Estate, it would be a lot easier if presidential nominees simply picked running mates who were capable of holding a press conference and did not to be sequestered from the media to avoid politically damaging moments.

Inciting Violence Against Obama

The McCain campaign has puffed up its chest recently about its headfirst dive into the mud. Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment last night provides as concentrated a deconstruction of this strategy as I’ve seen in any medium.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/27057346#27057346

Going beyond Palin’s role as a mud slinger, in the past few days rhetoric coming from McCain and Palin has lead to multiple instances where audience members volunteer that Obama is a “terrorist” and the response should be to “kill him,” Jeffrey Feldman takes a look at the consequences of the words Palin and McCain are using.

The ‘dangerous road,’ however, is not just a generic attack on Sen. Obama’s trustworthiness or honesty. Rather, the McCain campaign has chosen to stand before campaign rallies and accuse Sen. Obama of hiding sympathies with domestic terrorists–to accuse their opponent, essentially, of being a terrorist.

With the McCain campaign now using the Palin stump speech to accuse Sen. Obama of hiding a terrorist agenda, the McCain campaign has staked its future on rhetoric that skirts the boundary between character assassination and incitements of actual violence against their opponent.

Meanwhile, while McCain is not yet accusing Obama of terrorism in his own stump speech, the crowds at his rallies are.

In a recent video clip from MSNBC, McCain asked a rally, “Who is the real Barack Obama?” In response to McCain’s rhetorical question, a voice from the crowd can be clearly heard to shout in response, “Terrorist!” (link)

Since the start of the election campaign well over a year ago, voters have been subject to ongoing smear campaigns in emails and push polls accusing Sen. Obama of ties to and sympathies with domestic and foreign terrorist groups. No matter how many times these smear campaigns have been exposed, they continued. Now that John McCain and Sarah Palin have echoed these accusations–the idea that Sen. Obama is secretly a terrorist has the stamp of approval of a presidential campaign, but of a multi-term U.S. senator and a U.S. governor.

One wonders at this point how the various agencies charged with the responsibility of protecting the Presidential candidates from violence will respond to this latest tactic from the McCain campaign. If, for example, a McCain supporter threatens the life of Sen. Obama by shouting ‘Kill him!’ at a Palin rally, should Sen. Obama’s Secret Service contingent launch an investigation? Having been accused of terrorist ties by the McCain campaign, will Sen. Obama’s name be put on the ‘No Fly’ list, effectively making it impossible for him to engage in normal airline travel?

I don’t think it’s possible to understand how dangerous the line McCain and Palin are walking is, especially as Palin in particular deliberately crosses it. While free speech is protected in the Constitution, the Supreme Court has ruled that no protection exists for yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. What we’re seeing from McCain-Palin is approaching such a situation. Words mean things and when we are a country in two wars — one in response to terrorism, the other marketed as a response to terrorism — the word “terrorist” is one of the most potent words, to be used in the most particular situations, grounded in fact. As McCain and Palin play the fear card, their diction speaks more to their reckless desperation than to any meaning connected to the words they use have to reality.

Update:
Naturally the Obama hatred hasn’t stopped today. Huffington Post has the details.

Funny In A Car Crash Sort of Way

More Palin-Couric:
http://www.cbs.com/thunder/swf/rcpHolderCbs.swf?partner=userembed&vert=News&autoPlayVid=false&releaseURL=http://release.theplatform.com/content.select?pid=sByat0WiIVNB84uEvP1glblHkJ_wqTc4
Not much to add other than to say that, well, this is beyond painful. Not only is Palin incapable of distinguishing the merits in naming an actual vice president versus a candidate, but she picks one of the most recent Republican VP outside the current administrations and only cites Bush Sr. because he succeeded in moving from VP to President. So she’s a dim bulb with aspirations. Great.

Drop Outs

Amy Schatz of the Wall Street Journal tweets:

If it goes really, really badly tonight could a VP candidate still drop out?

Schatz then links to June Krunholz’s post on WSJ Washington Wire, which opens:

What would happen if either Joe Biden or Sarah Palin decided after, say, a mediocre performance in Thursday’s debate to withdraw from the campaign and spend more time with the family? Washington Wire put the question to election-law experts. Their answer: No problem.

Krunholz goes on to cover the relevant legal ground for replacing a VP pick now. But let’s be clear, “Joe Biden” appears in her first sentence only as a requisite placeholder.  No one is expecting a performance so catastrophic that Biden would be forced to drop out. Hell, short of pinching Palin’s ass or exposing himself on national TV, I don’t think it is even conceivable that Biden would commit a verbal gaffe so damaging that he could no longer be on the ticket.

Palin, on the other hand, is a different story. The only reason two Wall Street Journal reporters are researching and speculating on what would happen if a VP candidate dropped out is because it is a conceivable reality with Palin. She has bombed every interview with the press in spectacular, if horrifying, fashion.  The fear isn’t mediocrity, it’s the continuation of her propensity to reveal in toto her lack of preparedness for the office she seeks. With Palin, a mediocre performance would be a huge step forward.

No, these questions are being posed because Palin is dancing along the cusp. She is hurting McCain.  And up against an incredibly qualified opponent in Joe Biden, Palin may walk away from tonight as the modern Republican Party’s biggest goat. From Day One I’ve thought Palin was at risk of being dropped from McCain’s ticket. We shall see if tonight’s debate is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Two New Palin/Couric Clips

I just saw two new snippets from CBS’s Katie Couric interviewing Sarah Palin. Needless to say, they’re disastrous.

First, in a clip that clearly is pulled straight from the image of Sarah Palin that America is getting to know and fear, she is unable to name a single newspaper or magazine she regularly reads.

I lived in Alaska and while getting a copy of the New York Times isn’t as easy in Anchorage as, say, 42nd and Broadway, it’s still doable. On top of that, the Alaskan press is robust for a small state. The Anchorage Daily News, Fairbanks News-Miner, and Juneau Empire are all substantial papers that pull heavily from wire services to fill out national and international news content. Naming these papers would not have signaled a lack of global awareness in my view — they contain much of the same news content that papers across the Lower 48 have. But Palin didn’t name them, or any other paper. It’s startling and it’s not the first time this week Couric has stumped Palin on a fundamentally simple question.

Second, Couric asks Palin if it really was her view that a 15 year old girl who was raped by her father should not be allowed to have an abortion.

Palin’s position represents about as radical a position as any mainstream American politician will hold on any issue. That said, a commenter on YouTube nails Palin for refusing to be clear about what she believes when challenged by Couric:

She says she’s pro-life and then grants that women make their own choice.
I am not convinced she knows what “pro-life” means, as a political position.

Heh, indeedy. Though I think it’s more likely that she is consciously choosing to mask her extremist views from voters who would find them unpalatable and repulsive.

It’s hard to understate how fundamentally qualified Palin is to be a vice presidential candidate.