The Vet Who Did Not Vet

Palinteriology

Rumor has it that Sarah Palin is planning to decorate the Veep's residence to coordinate with her favorite painting.

They Spent HOW MUCH on WHAT???

Remember the week-long media fixation John Edwards's $400 haircut?

It appears that that's just Democrat chump change.

The Republican National Committee(RNC)just announced that it spent $49 THOUSAND at Saks Fifth Avenue, $75 THOUSAND at Neiman Marcus, $9 THOUSAND at Macy's, and miscellaneous additional THOUSANDS for wardrobes, accessories, hair, and make-up for the Palins.

The Washington Independent, via Politico, reports that the Republican National Committee appears to have spent $150,000 for clothes, hair and makeup for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her family, following her pick as Sen. John McCain’s running mate.

According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.

The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.

The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.

The records also show nearly $10,000 paid to Macy’s in Minneapolis, nearly $6,000 to Barney’s and Bloomingdale’s, and $295 to Steiniauf and Stroller, a high-end baby store — even little Trig got in on the action.

On the bright side, even if McCain loses the election, the Palins will still look fabulous.

Palin on the Vice Presidency: Pay Attention, Please

There's an insightful article over on Salon about Palin's comments about the vice presidency. As the writer notes, that was, oddly, the one subject she seems to have thought quite creatively about--inspired, of course, by Vice President Dick Cheney and his constitutional revisionists.

This deserves to be read. Actually, Palin's comments deserve amplification far and wide, and detailed analysis, but I don't think we'll be getting either, do you?

How to Follow Palin Talk

Pretty darn good, wot? Well done, Adennak. (This, seized from Adennak on Daily Kos, with thanks.)

Fight Book Banning

What you can do

Stick it to Sarah: Buy a banned book for the Wasilla library.

The Debate

I'll take my crow well seasoned and grilled on high heat.

She didn't quit, as I had predicted. Moreover, she did an excellent job given the expectations and within the staged constraints of a debate. I think she may have transfused the McCain campaign, however temporarily, and I will give her credit for guts and for manuvering very well in a difficult situation.

That said, her performance confirmed what I wrote here earlier: She's W in drag. Because she has no genuine intellectual depth, she has no sense that the global stage is too big for her. By "intellectual depth," I don't mean native intelligence. I've never said she ain't smart. What I mean is that there's a world of competing ideas out there to which she has never, ever been exposed. What's far worse, however, is that she never will be exposed to that world because her ideology precludes that exposure. Palin is a study in conviction without exposure, certainty without experience. She reminds me of any late teenager: all mouth and no wisdom.

Palin is the perfect successor to George Bush because she is George Bush, in drag. The guts they share? It's bluster. The attractive, folksy persona? It's cultivated in contradiction to the privilege they devote their lives to achieving. It's fake. The tenacity her followers admire? It's not adherence to a course of action because it is wise and effective. It's adherence to a course of action because it fits nicely inside her ideological cake pan.

She let slip a couple of fearsome views. The notion that the Vice President can expand his or her role in and outside the Senate is an endorsement of the Cheney-Addington Unitary Presidency theme. We're not surprised, of course. But surely, by now we know we don't want any more of that. The notion that global warming might not all be man-made leaves open the probability that under a Palin presidency, doing anything about it would be regarded as a slap in God's face.

And of course there's the part about how her actual record in Alaska bears scant resemblance to her telling of it. The astronomical debt, the fascistic abuse of power, the sports arena built without title to the land it's built on, the road to the bridge built before there's a bridge, the nepotistic installation of friends and family into positions of power without regard to competence. All these, too, are scenes she's stealing from the same one book that George reads.

It bears noticing, surely. I hope Americans can read between well rehearsed lines, but my hope for Americans' ability to distinguish between beef and bullshit is stretched pretty thin these days.

She rarely answered the questions, and often misrepresented the facts, and spoke often enough in theo-code to leave me absolutely as revolted tonight as I've always been by this ticket. It isn't how she performed, in the theatrical sense. It's what her values are.

Palin Failin'

I'm fairly sure that Palin will be finding it in her heart to step down between now and the VP debate. I could be wrong, God knows. Many people have wrongly underestimated the depth of Republican incompetence and stupidity--with consequences that we're doomed to endure for the foreseeable. But still.

What, she's going to debate Joe Biden? If she does and he plays it as he should--straight, no condenscion, no meanness, simply presidentially--she's DOA and so is what's left of McNasty after last night's debate.

If she doesn't show for the debate, she's going to be looking at quite a consolation prize. She'll very likely depart for family reasons, which means that her dignity at least will not be shredded for all eternity. She'll also have the undying gratitude of the party, and quite likely the promise of a slot in a future senatorial campaign--very lucrative, that, as her predecessor's indictment demonstrates. But she'll almost surely also take home a couple million bucks from some source untraceable to the campaign.

If you were Sarah Palin, what would you do?

For McCain, either option is suicide, but he should have figured that out before he even thought about naming her. He deserves to lose for that reason alone. The idea of putting her a heartbeat from launch code shows such gaping contempt for the country's wellbeing that it's one step from treason.

If she leaves, he can save what's left of his face after last week's bizarre, erratic, not to say unhinged performance. If she doesn't, man oh man, he's going to reap the whirlwind of Americans' wrath. In that scenario, let's just hope he reaps it before we are forced to reap any more bitter fruits of Republican "governance."

I think she's out of here, and I hope she drags Rove's carrion-fed brain with her.

Paranoid Pastures, Part II

At the moment, it looks like the Republicans in Congress, led by Boehner, are positioning to make it look as if McCain rode in on his white horse and brokered a deal that no other mortal could broker. We all know that's BS, but that's the McCain way. Ever since he took the credit for breaking a filibuster on Bush's judicial packing, he's been racing to upstage everyone else in Washington at every opportunity. Why should we expect him to do anything decent now?

So as it stands, if a consensus measure emerges, the Republicans will claim McCain did it. If a consensus measure fails, the Republicans will clain the Democrats did it. Which will be tricky, since the hardcore opposition is coming from the core de-regulator, free market witchdoctors. They're all GOP. We'll see.

We have a broken dollar, a crashing market, the all-time petroleum crisis, global warming, with dire predictions of global starvation and global population shifts, and a nation mortgaged to the tune of $11 Trillion--which, to my mind, means that Bush's proposed $1 T bailout is throwing more borrowed money at the root of the crisis, which is too much borrowed money. We also have home values tanking just as the boomers are retiring and more than ever dependent on home values to finance assisted living and long-term care, and 3/5ths of retirees financially unprepared to retire, even as jobs are flowing out of this economy like blood out of a sliced artery. That's a whole other crisis we haven't even begun to address. Think riots in the streets.

McCain's 1,000-page medical file suggests that his days are numbered, and yet it is against that scenario that he's chosen to bring Palin one heartbeat from launch code.

Does that make sense to anybody? Well, besides the Bush Davidians, I mean.

No. It doesn't. So maybe Palin is about more than galvanizing the Christianist fascist theocrats. Maybe her presence on the ticket, is also, or will turn out to be, yet another plank in a coup d'etat platform.

It works like this.

Even Bush knows that he personally cannot risk a Palin presidency. Every Republican in Washington knows the same thing. No one with even remote awareness of and concern for the nation's monumental problems can seriously contemplate Palin at the wheel.

At the same time, the GOP/Wall Street Elite (to risk redundancy)literally cannot afford to see an Obama presidency, either. Their wealth depends on continuing de-regulation and tax cuts for the top 5%, and on the kinds of fraud and piracy that gave us $8 Billion cash pallets in Iraq, and no accounting. Nor did they consolidate power in the Executive in order to give it to a Democrat. Do the math.

It therefore strikes me as plausible that either outcome could trigger exactly the kind of Seize the Moment moment that the Christo-Fascists have been praying for.

Now comes the question posed by reader Morning Angel, in her comment to my last post: "Can we allow the deconstruction of democracy altogether?"

Well.

One, who will lead the revolution?

Two, for the 30 years we've all been pretending that the Christo-Fascists are a lunatic fringe, they've been busily organizing our military academies and our active forces, creating dozens of happy little battalions convinced that Bush Himself is the Will of God. And then there's Blackwater, and hundreds of thousands of indoctrinated police, not to mention the folks at "Justice" and in the FBI and the CIA. Or the radically expanded domestic espionage tentacles of Das Homeland Security.

Get my drift?

Hang on. It really could be a very bumpy ride.

Or I could just be a certifiable, paranoid, dotty old Chi.

We're Beyond Lies. This is PsyOps: Pre-Emptive War on American Voters.

Finding the cure depends on making the right diagnosis.

Maybe in the 1970s, we could still reasonably think of political campaigns as equal mixtures of truth, lies, and video tape. Maybe in the 1970s, both parties did it in approximately the same measure.

Not now. We're way past mere business-as-usual lying.

The reality is that, in addition to "a blizzard of lies," the GOP is using bona fide psychological operations---psyops---to manipulate US elections.

Time to call this what it is. No matter how subtle it may be, this is a massive orchestrated war on our constitutional democracy.

Follow me here. I'm angry but there's good reason to be.

When, month after month, facts bounce off voters like raindrops on car tops, sensible people see that something else is going down.

When even felt, experienced disasters--Katrina, Saddams's WMD, home foreclosures, tanked retirement savings, astronomical unemployment rates, unbridled domestic espionage, homeland concentration camps, and the culture of corruption--when even these count for nothing in voters' reappraisal game, a sane observer must consider that something worse than mere lying is at work.

Everybody knows that in a normal, healthy environment--whether at work, at home, in the old-fashioned police or medical investigation--lies simply don't prevail. In normal, healthy conditions, lies always crumble, and liars almost always lose serious market share. Nixon was forced to resign. Bill Clinton was almost impeached.

On the other hand, when fact after fact fails to make even a dent--when no quantity of lies is enough to shame the mainstream media into investigating and reporting reality--then it's pretty clear that we're no longer playing in the weedy pastures of politics as usual.

I began to tip to this a day or two ago, in a post titled "The Lord of the Flies: Karl Rove, John McCain, and Sarah Palin." If you haven't read it, check it out.

Digging deeper, I looked up "psy-ops." Here's what I found:

"Psychological operations (PSYOP, PSYOPS) are techniques used by military and police forces to influence a target audience's value systems, belief systems, emotions, motives, reasoning, and behavior. Target audiences can be governments, organizations, groups, and individuals, and are used in order to induce confessions, or reinforce attitudes and behaviors favorable to the originator's objectives. These are sometimes combined with black operations or false flag tactics.

This concept has been used by military institutions throughout history, but it is only since the twentieth century that it has been accorded the organizational and professional status it enjoys now.

The word is commonly used by governments, such as the government of the United States, who do not wish to use the term propaganda or brainwashing to refer to their own work. The word propaganda has very negative connotations, and by calling it psychological operations instead, more sophisticated methods of psychological manipulation are accurately incorporated by the terminology. This euphemism for mind control is ironically an example of psychological operations--i.e., using psychological techniques to persuade [manipulate] a large number of people to support something that they wouldn't normally support." [Emphases added. See original for additional links.]

It's been solidly established that the GOP uses messaging that targets deep-seated fears to reach down far beneath the rational level to the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of our brain. Add to that intentionally deploying made-up stuff up--the word is propaganda--to reinforce those fears (he's a closet Muslim) and to appeal to our primitive, most infantile longings for Good Daddy and Good Mommy. Soon it's plain that, thanks to Karl and John, the American public is deliberately being "manipulated to support something we wouldn't normally [rationally] support."

It's also well known that the GOP uses the "false flag" strategy, as well. Here, the Party itself can deny responsibility when third parties launch scurrilous psyops attacks on Democratic candidates. We call this "swiftboating." (Interesting, all this military jargon, isn't it? It, too, points directly to a warfare model.)

None of the fundamentals I've described is news. What's missing is the correct diagnosis.

This is deviance at depths unprecedented in the USA. This isn't campaigning. This isn't Chris Matthews' happy little battle of ideas. This GOP campaign strategy is authentic military psy-ops, and guess what? We're all IT.

Republicans, Democrats, independents, all of us are on the verge of losing our democracy. Psyops isn't the conduct of free elections in any sense of the word. There is no such thing as a free election when the public is being systematically, relentlessly manipulated with certifiable, powerful psychological weapons, backed up with rigged boxes, suppressed ballots, caged voters, 8-hour voting lines, no more ballots, and voter ID laws targeting minorities and Democrats.

This isn't an election. This is warfare. This isn't merely a direct hit on American democracy.

It's a treasonous, pre-emptive nuclear strike. It's the Bush Doctrine turned on Americans ourselves. WE are the enemy in its sights, the reasoning, reasonable American public capable of tossing Republicans out of power and entitled to do so. Unless we are stopped.

The GOP's psyop campaign has been deployed with the full support of the mainstream media (radio, tv, and print). That's evident from simple deduction and from contrasting the likes of Wolf Blitzer and Sean Hannity with Walter Cronkite and Edwin R. Murrow. The Constitution empowers a free, vigorous, investigative media. History teaches that our radio, TV, and print outlets can ably defend democracy when they choose. The question now is, why aren't they?

What do we do now? We--and I mean you, too, moderate and decent Rightwing Republicans (if there are any)--have the power to stop it. Together, we can file lawsuits, boycott advertisers, expose the psyops for what it is, demand issues coverage, not lipstick BS, and continue to flag the lies.

If we don't, if we lose this one, I don't think we'll have another opportunity, if only because advertising, marketing, and the military have compelling interests in refining psyops ad infinitum, and the beneficiaries of Bush's still unfathomed corruption have a compelling interest in ensuring that nobody else get close to their pile of booty. Four more years to refine illegal domestic espionage, four more years to wreck the economy and trash the federal government (see The Wrecking Crew), four more years of for-profit prisons needing ever more prisoners, four more years of homeland concentration camps, four more years defining political protest as terrorism, four more years of war, and war, and more war, four new years of arch-Christianist Sarah Palin near or at the launch button?

I'm just not seeing how we survive that. I'm not seeing why the vast majority of Americans of any stripe would want to, short of mass psychological manipulation.

Strategies, anyone?

A Silence that Speaks Volumes

Unbelievably, and without being called on this sorry sack of garbage by anybody in the mainstream media, the Republican Party has declared that nobody from the media can interview its Vice President candidate for two weeks.

Can you imagine what would happen if Obama declared that he would be off-limits to reporters' questions for two weeks a mere six weeks before election day?

Or Hillary? The din from the howls on the Right--that is, from CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and of course Faux would be paralyzing and without end.

Unless she's back in Alaska scrubbing human bloodstains out of the RV, or buying off everybody she's ever known, or having a baby, the only reason the Republicans don't want Palin to meet reporters for two whole weeks is that she doesn't know squat about anything that might reach the level of national policy.

But how can this be? Weren't we assured that she's been thoroughly vetted, that she's ready to be Veep right now and to be Leader of the Free World on Day 1 should anything happen to McSame? Haven't we been told that she's even more qualified than Obama and Biden?

They weren't sequestered to cram for two weeks. They've run the (hostile) media gauntlet for years. Obama just took on that rabid ignoramus O'Reilly, yet.

This reminds me of Bush, who wouldn't allow members of the Senate to interview him without Unca Dick by his side. What's with these people? Don't they know this kind of thing screams "I was a teen-age flunkout"?

We're told repeatedly that campaigning at the national level is its own vetting, its own essential part of preparation for high office. But if there's no need for her to endure a full term of campaigning, then obviously either she's fully prepared or there's something to hide.

What's being hidden is her phenomenal unreadiness. The decision, then, is part of a continuing fraud on the American people perpetrated by Karl Rove and John McCain in service of a Republican victory at any cost. In these two weeks, senior GOP handlers and advisors will attempt to pour into this empty vessel all the substance, judgment, insight, and wisdom of a George Bush. Who else? That's where th advisors come from, after all. For some reason, even if she's a talented empty vessel, a willing sponge, I'm not reassured.

Beyond that, Andrew Sullivan put this well. It's creepy. It's eery. It's frightening. It's shades of The Manchurian Candidate, where Palin is the candidate and phalanxes of Christianists, Neocons, Bushmen, and Rove are the brainwashers.

Come to think of it, this is fitting for a woman of the Christianist Far Right. After all, she's supposed to be a willing receptacle. She's not meant to teach or lead persons of the male gender. She's only supposed to do as she's told.

Is there a worse example for America's girls?

Since W was "elected," has there been a more transparent travesty of truth?

Don't Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. And Then Get Busy.

Thank God Kos is on it. Maybe he has the leverage to help get this into the mainstream media. In any case, it's the responsibility of the Left blogosphere to make this THE issue of this election in the mainstream mind. If you have a blog, get informed and start writing about what's at stake in the coming election.

The Dominionist/Reconstructionist/Extreme Christian Right agenda is not a joke, not an exaggeration, not a made-up horror story, not a myth.

For more than 20 years, I've been following it closely, writing about it, and warning about it.

The hardest challenge has been to persuade sane people to believe it for the simple reasons that (a) it sounds insane, (b) they think the Christian Right is a small, lunatic fringe, and (c) they believe it cannot happen here.

Au contraire. If you're sane, take heed NOW. Fight any inclination to dismiss this as exaggeration. It isn't. It's deadly serious, and it's real, and it could be coming to a White House near you.

The extreme Christianist Far Right movement is huge, enormously wealthly, and extraordinarily powerful. Its followers--in varying degrees of conviction, and with certain theological differences--are in the White House, the Supreme Court, and the US Congress, to say nothing of state governments. The intentions? To remake the United States into an Old Testament theocracy (that means that Old Testament law as fundamentalists interpret them will be the law of the land) and hurry the Second Coming by any means necessary.

Much has been written about this horrifying phenomenon by numerous reputable scholars, biblical scholars, journalists, and former cult members. It's here, it's real, and Sarah Palin is their dream candidate. Visit Kos for an overview focused on Palin's connections.

See the links at the right side of this blog, under Heads Up, for reliable information about America's deadly serious, enormously influential, militant, extremist Christian Right. See also my series on the long march to US Christo-Fascism, starting here.

Do you really want Sarah Palin a heartbeat from Launch Code? If not, what are you willing to do to elect Obama and Biden instead?

"Palin's Speech to Nowhere"

Here's your hero, Rightwingers, a mean-spirited, lying bitch whose own classmates called a "barracuda." No stateswoman here, no leadership for the 21st Century, and nobody I'd want my kids to emulate.

Palin's Speech to Nowhere
Thursday 04 September 2008
by: Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Daily News

Sarah Palin delivered a great speech tonight--for her party, for John McCain, for herself, for what she set out to accomplish. This was America's first real glimpse at the Alaska governor, and what we saw was a boffo politician who speaks in a plaintive prairie voice that channels America's Heartland like a chilling breeze rippling a field of wheat, who knows how to tell a joke, how to bring down the house and bring a tear to a few eyes.

She is proud of her family, as she should be, and there is much to admire in her own "personal journey of discovery" (don't we all have these, by the way?) including her efforts to raise her son Trig. It is indeed nice to think that there would be an advocate for such children inside the corridors of the White House, although I'd surely like to hear what--if anything--she's done for special needs kids as governor of Alaska.

But. . .it was a great speech--written for someone else, a male in fact, days before the Palin selection was even a gleam in John McCain's eye, but a great speech nonetheless. The pundits are fawning over it as I write this--Tom Brokaw said she could not have been "more winning and more engaging"--and in a world that is dominated by horse race journalism I can understand why, because I agree that Palin's one-of-a-kind story has given her long shot running mate a decent chance now of pulling this one out at the finish line.

It's a good metaphor, a horse race, because in the end it finishes right near where it started -- just as it will be for America if John McCain and Sarah Palin are sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009. Yes, it was a great speech politically, and a great night for her family, but an empty speech for America--and for America's families. It was defined by its lowest moment, Palin's shameless lie about "the Bridge to Nowhere."

This was a Speech to Nowhere.

It was a Speech to Nowhere when Palin said that "I told the Congress 'Thanks but no thanks' on that Bridge to Nowhere," because that was a lie, and the worst kind of lie in American politics, a blatant falsehood that showed utter contempt for the American people that Palin pledged to serve, assuming we are too stupid to look up or know that truth, that she pushed for those funds in Congress and while she got great political mileage out of announcing that she was killing the project, she still has not returned the funds to American people.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because Palin also boasted seconds before her lie of fighting against wasteful earmarks in Congress, even though she pushed for and accepted $27 million of such grants when she was mayor of Wasilla.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because Palin said that "we've got lots" of oil and gas this country, and while one supposes that all depends upon what you definition of the words "lots" is, the production of oil in the United States has been irrevocably on the decline since 1970, and with her words she showed this nation that she and John McCain will perpetrate the dangerous myths that began with Ronald Reagan at his acceptance speech in 1980, that sunny optimism is the solution to all our energy woes, and not a posture that put energy research on a war footing, or requires moral leadership on conservation, mass transit, or any other common sense answers whatsoever.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because Palin boasted that "I stood up to the special interests, and the lobbyists, and the Big Oil companies," and the audience cheered --after eight brutal years of the same crowd's cheering two oilmen in the White House who fiddled while $4-a-gallon gas burned and while American men and women died in a needless war fought on top of an oilfield, and while lobbyist friends like Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed got rich at the same time.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because Palin had the nerve to talk at length about John McCain's "torturous interrogations" in the very same speech when she all but condoned the continuation of similar, abhorrent practices that have been directed for eight years by our own U.S. leaders, when she stated that Democrats are "worried that someone won't read them [terrorism suspects] their rights."

It was a Speech to Nowhere because Palin belittled "community organizers"-- thousands of Americans who work long hours for little pay in some of the toughest neighborhoods, trying to assist the American Dream that even the poorest among us can pull themselves out of the muck with a helping hand. Palin and other GOP speakers have turned a noble job into a dirty word tonight--shame on you! Listen to what CNN's Roland Martin said after Palin's speech was over.

My two parents are sitting home in Houston, Texas and they are both community organizers and the GOP and Sarah Palin might have well have said "being community organizers doesn't matter" to my parents face. I'm disgusted. Community organizers keep people in their homes, keep their lights on, keep food in the fridge.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because it made no mention of the men that Sarah Palin and John McCain are running to replace--their names are Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, in case you've forgotten this week--and no acknowledgment that as many 80 percent of Americans believe this country is on the wrong track, or that you can't solve a nation's problems when you deny they exist.

It was a Speech to Nowhere because. . .well, I urge everyone to read the text, without Palin's sharp delivery or her adoring fans in the crowd and in the press box, and tell me where there is any kind of policy at all--except for the short boilerplate passage on energy--or any mention of the issues that concern everyday Americans, including the No. 1 issue of the economy. Show me the part where this "grand slam" of speech touches on how citizens can afford health care or sending their kids to college.

But more than anything else, it was a Speech to Nowhere because for all the acclaim, the great bulk of it was devoted to one thing, and that is the one thing that millions of Americans are talking about in 2008 when we talk about "change"--to the ugliest kind of "pit bull" politics, to use Palin's words, that tear down the other side with cheap ad hominem attacks, surrounded by a cloud of half-truths (uh, those "Greek columns"...did you actually even watch Obama's speech? Because there weren't any) and ridiculous innuendo about "parting the waters" which means nothing but fires up a big hockey rink full of Dittoheads. These kinds of vicious attacks--without having the grace to acknowledge that, despite some real differences on issues with Obama, that he has already accomplished something impressive that says something positive about America and the progress we've made--were utterly lacking in class. And this is what Tom Brokaw considers "winning"--have we really sunk that low as a nation? The people of America want and deserve a real debate, now trash talk from the basketball point guard who was once called "Sarah Barracuda."

I hope America wakes up tomorrow and realizes that Sarah Palin's words were rousing--and completely empty, that they offered no road map (let alone bridge) for America other than more of the bogus partisan name-calling that has gotten us into the mess that we're in now.

Actually, let me rephrase that.

I hope America wakes up tomorrow.

[Reprinted here courtesy of The Philadelphia Enquirer. Emphases added throughout.]