You really have to read this Noam Scheiber piece, and once you do, you will begin to understand better the divisive populism that so disturbed Noonan yesterday:
The episode might serve as a compelling, if small-bore, example of Palin’s reformer instincts. Except that, according to those who were present, Carney wasn’t quite the crooked trash magnate Palin makes him out to be. For one thing, Carney couldn’t have proposed the ordinance because he’d recused himself from the matter. The council, in fact, had asked him to appear as a kind of expert witness on the relevant rules and regulations. “I looked at it as we actually had an expert on the council sharing the information,” recalls Laura Chase, a fellow councilwoman. “Not … conspiring over a contract. There was no way that was happening.”
So if it wasn’t a sinister garbage conspiracy that put Carney in Palin’s crosshairs, what was it? At first glance, the two would have appeared to be allies–both had spent most of their lives in Wasilla and had attended the same high school. But, beyond that, they were sociological opposites in almost every respect. Whereas Palin had bounced around several no-name colleges before graduating from the University of Idaho, Carney held a degree from Dartmouth. Palin seemed preoccupied with her family and church when she entered politics. Carney was preoccupied with histories of the Civil War and World War II (he later contributed a self-published book to the genre) and savored the New York Times crossword puzzle. By the time he joined the city council, Carney had traveled to Asia, Australia, and Central America. He’d run the Anchorage office of Alaska’s economic development agency and had served as the state’s agriculture director. “I’d dealt with larger budgets by far than the city of Wasilla,” he recently told me.
Carney had a wry sense of humor. He was fond of joking that he’d graduated from Wasilla High School in the “top 20 percent”–by which he meant he was valedictorian of his five-person class. Sometimes Palin was the only colleague who didn’t get his jokes. “I don’t think he had too much patience for her lack of understanding,” says John Stein, then the town’s mayor. In internal discussions, Carney would be relentlessly logical while Palin was vague and intuitive. “Nick had a way of being direct and to the point, something that Sarah was uncomfortable with,” recalls Chase. Which is to say, when it came to garbage removal, what Palin seemed to have chafed against was less the substance of Carney’s position than what she felt was his elitist, Ivy League bearing. And, over the next few years, she found ways to get him back.
Yes. Those damned Franklins. That wink at the debate wasn’t designed to give Rich Lowry an erection, she was actually wincing in pain from the chip on her shoulder.
This person needs to be kept away from the White House. And for a preview of the next month with Sarah Palin on the campaign trail, look back to 1996:
Within a few months, Palin was officially challenging Stein and exploiting the cultural shift masterfully. She welcomed a national anti-abortion group in to carpet bomb Wasilla with pink postcards affirming her pro-life bona fides. She orchestrated an NRA endorsement and a mailing from the group falsely proclaiming Stein, a lifelong hunter, “anti-gun.” (Stein complained to the local newspaper that Palin was telling voters he wanted to “melt down” all the firearms in the state.) And, in a move practically out of Karl Rove’s playbook, she dwelled on how Stein’s wife used her maiden name, going so far as to demand a marriage certificate as proof of their nuptials. Palin’s campaign literature proclaimed her “deeply devoted to conservative family values”–all in the context of an ostensibly nonpartisan election. (Stein himself was a moderate Republican.)
Like I said- this woman needs to be kept out of Washington. She is everything the “old” John McCain used to pretend to despise.
4tehlulz
Sarah Palin + Nuclear Football = OH SHI-
Raenelle
More Bush in a skirt–not just ignorant and dull, but actively and spitefully anti-intellectual.
Stuck in the Fun House
Sarah Palin = Walnut Brain + White House = THE End
Napoleon
I think it says something that when the committee that is handling that Troopergate investigation, which consist of 2 Dems and 3 Rep, voted to continue the investigation a week or so ago the Rep who flipped and voted with the Dems was from her home town.
In a way I think Palin is going to end up being one of the greatest gifts the Rep. have ever given the Dems..
Stoic
George W. Bush in pumps and a skirt. Same sense of entitlement, same lack of qualifications.
cleek
DJIA < 10,000
this is good news for McCain
NonyNony
DJIA under 10,000
Woo-hoo! Party like it’s 1999!
Conservatively Liberal
Palin is on the attack against Obama, but now she is using Rev. Wright for her next hit.
Yup, they are going there.
Josh Huaco
Dow under 10K? I though we gave Wall Street their $700B so this wouldn’t happen. ThymeZone lectured us on how we had to give the Randian Ubermenschen what they wanted or else we would all die!
Fulcanelli
Paging Pastor Muthee, call for you on the red courtesy phone. With the video of her laying-on-of-hands session in her church with fundamentalist witch-hunting Pastor Muthee all over the net, Palin is going to exhume Rev. Wright?
Ye gods, this is going to be a circus maximus, and I have a strong suspicion that the MILF from Wasilla, after the election is over is going to be a fixture on the right wing media circuit for a long time, seeing how she has no brains, no shame, the spotlight likes her, and she loves it. Nauseating.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
Too fucking funny!
The Other Steve
Wow, she would be a disaster to this country. She embodies everything that is wrong.
I admit coming from a middle class to poor family structure, and I am not too keen on elites who think they’re better. But I don’t hold a grudge to punish them. I just try harder.
The Other Steve
Palin sounds like a typical Republican.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
I already anticipated that! ;)
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
NO worries TOS, I came from a family if Republican elites who I turned my back on because I didn’t like them very much.
I kept saying throughout my teen years that I’d been born into the wrong family or else they had kidnapped me. They were the worst bunch of louts (still are) I’ve ever met, with the exception of those in Washington.
I’d much rather have your upbringing than mine.
Barbara
She’s thin skinned and makes decisions based on intuition. Yeah, like GWB. Except that she’s even less educated.
And I hope Rich Lowry finds himself subject to permanent ridicule for that disgusting paragraph that he obviously was typing with one hand.
jake
OK, I didn’t hear the racist dogwhistle in Palin’s "Paling around with terrorists," remark but my ears are ringing from the anti-Semetic shrieks in her campaign v. Stein.*
Maybe I need to get my hearing checked.
*(I don’t know if he’s Jewish or not, I do know a lot of rednecks would assume he is based on his name)
Marshall
According to the IHT he is Lutheran.
Chet
So, just want to be clear on the rule, now.
Ask your married opponent to cough up his marriage license as a political stunt – no problem.
Ask a candidate for VP why the hospital has absolutely no record of the birth of "her" son, the most famous child to be born at that institution – you’re a histrionic, HIV-addled disgrace to journalism.
Check.
Funkhauser
Ah, resentment, grudges, and anti-intellectualism. This brought me back to the classic obit for the monster who brought forth generations of Palins.
It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.
timb
Also, I want to be first to tell you what will soon become obvious.
This lady is the second coming of Reagan. She will retreat from this election and enter a conservative underbelly of speaking engagements, which will enrich her further, and she will surround herself with the new "cons in exile" from Washington. They will give her her policy positions and the facts and lessons in foreign affairs and she will emerge in four to eight years with a Morning in America theme ("The Obama recession is over and it’s time to bring back pride in America").
I used to be pretty confident Obama would change the game and the new 40 million Hispanic democrats (thank you, republicans, for the gift of them…keep up the racist demagoguery!). But, sans an economy, with two wars, and a crushing national debt? He is the second coming all right; the second coming of Carter! Oh sure, he’s a better politician than Carter, but Carter never had THIS to deal with.
And that sets the stage for Palin redux.
Lastly, I don’t think this idea goes is inconsistent with the fact that she is an anti-intellectual half-wit. So was Ronnie. But, when all you have is three things and you can tap into a bunch of resentments, you are, in this America, a contender