For the Grinches Among Us

If the whole “Peace on Earth, goodwill to most” atmosphere is starting to grate on your hard little cinder of a heart, here’s an antidote from Wonkette:

Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like the exciting news that 20-year-old Bristol Palin — known for getting pregnant as a teenager and not knowing how to dance at all — has bought a house! Hooray, Bristol! Times are tough for everyone, but somehow she scraped up $172,000 from under Sarah’s burrito wrappers on the couch and now Bristol is the proud (?) owner of some utterly random foreclosed tract house in some abandoned Arizona exurb. We cannot even begin to make sense of this…

Remember, this is Maricopa, Arizona. This is not a resort area. This is not Scottsdale or Sedona. This is the flat, awful, very far edge of the Phoenix sprawl. The two-lane highway that doubles as Maricopa’s “Main Street” is lined with the decrepit shacks of cotton pickers and lonesome old people waiting to die…

Beyond this tragic strip of cracked blacktop, there are a handful of vulgar tract home developments — mostly abandoned now, a grim enough situation that ABC’s Nightline program did a special report on Maricopa and called it the “poster child of the housing crisis.”

Wonkette operative “Steve M.” suggests there’s something more to Bristol’s WTF home purchase than her congenital need for a shoddily constructed exurban stucco travesty she can fill it up with babies and unused Bow Flex machines just like back home in Wasilla. He says this means she has political ambitions, beyond all her other obvious talents such as being able to get pregnant without a condom…

Click the link for the awful celebu-political possibilities, not to mention a Googleview map of the new Palin snowbird compound. The wealth of snark at both Wonkette and the original Arizona Republic squib should make your politicially-paleolithic inlaws and spoilt screaming larval relatives just a little bit easier to bear.

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Blow Me

I don’t even know how to make sense of this:

This is it. This is the last time I’m going to write the name Sarah Palin until she does something truly newsworthy, like declare herself a candidate for the presidency. Until then, I will no longer take part in the left’s obsessive-compulsive fascination with her, which is both unhealthy and counterproductive.

She’s the Zsa Zsa Gabor of American politics. She once did something noteworthy, but she’s now just famous for being famous.

She was a vice presidential nominee. But she lost. She was the governor of Alaska. But she quit. Now she’s just a political personality — part cheerleader, part bomb-thrower — being kept afloat in part by the hackles of her enemies and the people who admire her resilience in the face of them. The left’s outsize and unrelenting assault on her has made her a folk hero. The logic goes that if she’s making people on the left this upset, she must be doing something right.

Yet the left continues to elevate her every utterance so that they can mock and deride her. The problem is that this strategy continues to backfire. The more the left tries to paint her as one of the “Mean Girls,” the more the right sees her as “Erin Brockovich.” The never-ending attempts to tear her down only build her up. She’s like the ominous blob in the horror films: the more you shoot at it, the bigger and stronger it becomes.

Yes, she’s about as sharp as a wet balloon, but we already know that. How much more time and energy must be devoted to dissecting that? How is this constructive, or even instructive at this point? What purpose does it serve other than inflaming passions to drive viewership and Web clicks?

It isn’t “the left” who is obsessed with her. It is you idiots in the media. We just want her to go away.

I can’t believe Blow even quoted the Politico as evidence of the “left’s” obsession with Palin.

Where does the NY Times find all these clowns?

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Republicans Demand Transparency and Accountability, But Only From Consumer Advocate

We may get to hear more from Elizabeth Warren here shortly:

House Republican lawmakers fired the opening salvo Monday in a war they plan against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created by this year’s overhaul of financial regulations.

Republican Reps. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the leading contender to take the reins of the House Financial Services Committee, and Illinois Rep. Judy Biggert, the top Republican on the panel’s oversight and investigations subcommittee, sent letters to the inspectors general of both the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, directing them to conduct an investigation into the work being done to establish the new bureau.

Ms. Warren’s contacts with industry participants will be covered by the Treasury’s disclosure policy because she is a special adviser to Mr. Geithner. However, a Treasury official said Ms. Warren’s schedule will be more regularly on the consumer agency’s website once one is established. A treasury spokesman added that Ms. Warren is also willing to testify before Congress.

The lawmakers signaled they planned to scrutinize Ms. Warren’s every move, writing that they “are concerned that Professor Warren will be approaching this task without any experience managing—or creating—an organization of this scale and importance.”

I think she’ll hold up fine. With any luck, conservative activists can turn up a memorable one-liner (wise WASP?) and GOP House members can spend the whole hearing repeating it 5,000 times.

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Business is Good

For my own sanity, I’ve laid off the McCardle reading for a while, but I just wanted to see what kind of nonsense is going on over there. Currently on the front page from the last week:

1.) a Mental Health Break (don’t get your hopes up, it is a video, and not her resignation).

2.) a “both sides are bad” post about the Rand Paul curbjaw incident.

3.) a personal blog spat in which she explains that it is ok that her rhetoric today is diametrically opposed to her rhetoric in 2003 because she apologized or something in 2008.

4.) Another mental health break.

5.) Megan fainting over a blog post by Jon Chait.

6.) Two posts about gentrification and her new house, including her famous bus anecdote.

7.) Navel-gazing about the Supreme Court.

8.) Megan fainting over a mistake a tv host made.

9.) Another mental health break.

The Atlantic is really getting their money’s worth. And I might suggest more mental health breaks. One every three posts doesn’t seem to be working.

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Open Thread: Values!

If you need an excuse to jump-start your weekend drinking, Dave Weigel at Slate is covering this year’s “Values Voter Summit“, the annual fanfest for dog-torturers, luggage-lifting-rentboy-buyers, and Talibangelical-ticklers. Here’s a taste of his coverage on St. Gidget of Narnia:

... One hundred hours ago, the Republican establishment and a large number of the conservative movement’s thinkers were in agreement. O’Donnell was an unacceptable candidate. She had falsely claimed to have a college degree in hand when she didn’t, falsely claimed to have won two counties against Joe Biden when she didn’t, sued one of the citadels of the movement—the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—and in that lawsuit, mentioned a Princeton program she was supposedly in that no one heard tell of ever again. She had paid her family and herself from campaign funds. Most unforgivably, she had converted the Delaware seat from a sure Republican gain to a sure Democratic hold.

The establishment pointed this out. The base decided to create a new reality. In this reality, O’Donnell was a maltreated, misunderstood Average American, a Christian attacked for her faith. Going after her was going after them. They responded to the negative coverage of her by crashing her website with more than $1 million of donations—this for a candidate, again, who has paid her mother from campaign funds, the kind of offense that lights up talk radio when it’s committed by Democrats.

The media covers the reality that the base creates, and so O’Donnell arrived at this conference as a superstar. Top talent from ABC News, Fox News, and NBC News waited outside to get a chance to talk to her. A capacity room waited for her to speak, and more than a dozen cameramen splayed onto the floor to capture the moment…

O’Donnell walked onstage and gripped the papers containing her speech. The gist: She was the embodiment of the Tea Party movement. She experienced “the despondency” that they felt when Barack Obama came to Washington, and was mocked like they were mocked.

“There’s something about our national DNA,” said O’Donnell, “that stands up and shouts at our would-be masters, you’re not the boss of me.” She compared the movement, and by extension herself, to Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia: “Of course he isn’t safe, but he’s good.”

Fortunately for Tony Perkins, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has no mandate to prevent the ‘values-based’ parting of fools from their money…

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“Palin-Beck Death Porn In the Land of the Midnight 9/11″

The very serious so-called papers of record failed to staunch my curiosity, but Wonkette’s “Northern Terrortories Warblogger” Bill Scannell has a trio of hilarious (yet depressing) posts on the Nine-Eleven Grifters Gala in Anchorage. The pics in the “Palin-Beck 9/11 DeathFest Crowd Haunted By Weird Protesters” dispatch add a special surreality—why is the guy wearing a bunny costume and a ‘Scream’ mask being patted down by security guards?—but the event itself seems to have been underwhelming:

It was a classic case of bait and switch. The Palin/Beck NineEleven™ Porno Deathfest was a LIE. They promised masturbatory delights beyond the wildest dreams of even the most ardent exurban WTC pr0n junkie. Instead, the close to 4,000 attendees were served up something far more profitable in the long term to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin: a Messiah myth…

For the next 20 minutes, Beck and Palin did their shtick, chastely fondling the aura of one another’s genitals and bantering on about Alaska and how Grifter Girl has caribou blood under her salon fingernails and the Spirit of Alaska must renew A’murka until finally, FINALLY they got to The Point. Glenn Beck announced that he will not run for public office while Sarah Palin thrice refused (hear that Christian dog whistle?) to say whether or not she would run for President in 2012…

Glenn Beck may have made seventeen separate references to his own insanity during the course of the evening, but he is no nut job. This wily huckster, this greasy purveyor of shallow dreams and crocodile tears, set the pick tonight on what will be his biggest score yet: a years-long never-consummated and congenitally impotent dry hump on a ghost candidate. For at least another several years, we will all have to watch these two grifters roll.

I do love a nicely-turned phrase, and little gems like “a years-long never-consummated and congenitally impotent dry hump on a ghost candidate” may have to serve as my only consolation during the next couple of political months. As Wonkette commentor MiniMencken summarizes:

Wow! This really is good old-fashioned American revival tent grifting. Beck announces he is going to be in Alaska on 9/11 for a big announcement. Palin tweets out to her fans that she will be there for this really, really huge announcement. They fill a drab meeting room with far fewer people than what I would imagine the word stadium implies, collect a pile of cash and don’t actually do anything apart from show up. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you—the Hope and Crosby team of the wingnuts.

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How’s It Going, Eisenhower?

This, via Sadly No, is sheer genius:

Palin’s view of nuclear weapons was shaped by her stint as the commander in chief of the Alaskan National Guard, our first line of defense against Soviet nuclear weapons. Obama has held his same views since he was a stoner college student and has showed no signs of maturing.

Which of the two would you trust?

That’s Baghdad Bob, the Confederate Yankee, bringing the funny. Is it possible that all of these blogs we’ve been reading and laughing at are all elaborate spoofs, and the joke is on us?

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Another Reason Not to Pay for Cable

Bad enough the Discovery channel gorped the BBC’s “Life” by replacing David Attenborough with Oprah Winfrey for fear of the creationists, but now they’ve completely destroyed their remaining shreds of credibility. Ken Layne at Wonkette explains:

All Sarah Palin ever wanted to be in her whole life was a teevee host. This is Documented Fact, and the whole “politics” thing simply grew out of her failure to get a full-time spot on the local news in Anchorage. It didn’t work out, of course, because Sarah Palin was too dumb and untalented for the local news in Anchorage.

And so she became mayor of a gravel pit behind a strip mall and next thing you know John “I will literally try fucking anything at this point” McCain went ahead and chose her as the GOP candidate for Vice President of the United States of America, in 2008. And then, that same day, the entire global financial system collapsed. It still hasn’t recovered! But she has. Sarah Palin always recovers, because she has her Eye on the Prize, and that Prize is whatever they call the basic cable version of a Daytime Emmy.
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Anyway now she’s got a deal to make a Discovery Channel show about Alaska, land of helicopter hunting and tattoo parlors. Majestic! It will air once a year or whenever she decides to show up for work, before the “History’s scariest UFO drawings” program and right after the one about the mysteries of pizza — apparently, it is made of different “foods” that are “cooked” before the weird middle-aged guy with a balding ponytail and a limp delivers it to you in a cardboard box covered in logos. THE END.

Bring on the Brawndo™ ads! It’s what plants, and the Doughy Pantload, crave!

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Hand Jive

This cracked me up:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took a swipe at Sarah Palin Tuesday, mimicking the former vice presidential candidate’s decision to use her hand as a notepad at the National Tea Party Convention last week.

At the daily press briefing, Gibb showed his left hand with writing on it, which apparently was his grocery list to purchase ahead of the expected snowstorm.

On a scale of one to awesome, I give it an 11, but Sullivan is pissed:

Really: this stunt is pathetic, demeaning and stupid – a disgrace to his office.

After Ari Fleischer, Dana Perino, and McClellan (who spent the last year informing everyone that he is as disgusted with himself as we were with him), I’m really not sure how you disgrace that office.

Again, I’m rocking the emotional maturity of a nine year old after a six pack of Dr. Pepper and three sticks of cotton candy, but I think what Gibbs did was awesome. These guys have been running around screaming Obama is a socialist and weak on terror and pals around with terrorists for two years now- a little joke at their expense is no big deal, in my book.

Aside from that, I’ve noticed Sullivan just doesn’t like Gibbs all that much, so it is personal now.

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Please Let This Happen

I’m begging:

INGRAHAM: Would you agree to a debate with Al Gore on this issue?

PALIN: Oh my goodness. You know, it depends on what the venue would be, what the forum. Because Laura, as you know, if it would be some kind of conventional, traditional debate with his friends setting it up or being the commentators I’ll get clobbered because, you know, they don’t want to listen to the facts.

So help me ALLAH, if Gore sighs once in this debate I will punch him in the neck and kick him in the junk. But wouldn’t you love to see that moron up there just winking and blushing and making shit up?

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