In polling terms, this is what a train wreck looks like:
That was deep in the .pdf of the recent CBS poll. If the voters have their say, Sarah Palin will have a lot of time to eyeball Russia from her house.
by John Cole| 29 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Lies, Damned Lies, and Sarah Palin
In polling terms, this is what a train wreck looks like:
That was deep in the .pdf of the recent CBS poll. If the voters have their say, Sarah Palin will have a lot of time to eyeball Russia from her house.
by John Cole| 25 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Lies, Damned Lies, and Sarah Palin, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?
The Alaska Daily News comes out swinging:
Sarah Palin’s reaction to the Legislature’s Troopergate report is an embarrassment to Alaskans and the nation.
She claims the report “vindicates” her. She said that the investigation found “no unlawful or unethical activity on my part.”
Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian.
Page 8, Finding Number One of the report says: “I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.”
In plain English, she did something “unlawful.” She broke the state ethics law.
Well, yeah. I have to admit that of all the things that have happened the last eight years, Palin’s response the other day still stands out to me. At least the Bush administration paid lip service to appearances and couched their lies in bullshit in an attempt to confuse people. Palin would have none of that- she just came out and flat out denied what the report said. It was and is stunning.
In other news, via Andrew Halcro, Walt Monegan is, as Halcro notes, returning fire:
In a bold move, former Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan filed a request with the personnel board on Monday for a “Due Process Hearing To Address Reputational Harm”, inflicted by Governor Sarah Palin.
Monegan’s attorney Jeff Feldman wrote in his filing that while Monegan does not contest the goveror’s right to discharge him from his position as commissioner, the governor is not entitled to make untrue and defamatory statements about her reasons for discharging him.
You can read the request here (.pdf), and, as always, this is good news for John McCain.
by John Cole| 68 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Lies, Damned Lies, and Sarah Palin, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?
The guy you love to hate and hate to love chimes in on the McCain/Palin ticket with his usual flair:
Last week’s so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.
***I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign’s choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it’s only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—”My friends”—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven’t felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot’s running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America’s most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn’t qualify him then and it doesn’t qualify McCain now.
The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.
That will leave a mark.
This post is in: Lies, Damned Lies, and Sarah Palin, Clown Shoes
Even after the last eight years, this stands out as brazen:
Despite the finding of a legislative report that she had broken the state’s ethics law in the scandal dubbed Troopergate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said Saturday that the report actually cleared her of any “legal wrongdoing or unethical activity.”
***The investigation said she violated Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act, which states, “… each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.”
Palin said she’s happy the report affirmed her right to fire Monegan. But she said she still doesn’t think she abused her power like the report says she did. In fact, she said she considered herself vindicated.
In a brief conference call with press reported by the Anchorage Daily News, Palin said, “I’m very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing … any hint of any kind of unethical activity there. Very pleased to be cleared of any of that.”
Maverick!
I don’t know how to react to this. I really just don’t. When someone is that willing to look at you and just flat out make shit up and reject facts, there really is nothing you can do without driving yourself insane. I would just love to see a press conference with her, but the McCain campaign knows better than to let that happen.
*** Update ***
Heh:
McCain campaign spokeswoman Meg Stapleton dismissed the report as the product of “a partisan-led inquiry run by Obama supporters.” But there could be more land mines ahead. Some weeks ago, the McCain team devised a plan to have Palin file an ethics complaint against herself with the State Personnel Board, arguing that it alone was capable of conducting a fair, nonpartisan inquiry into whether she fired Monegan because he refused to fire Wooten, who had been involved in a messy custody battle with her sister. Some Democrats ridiculed the move, noting that the personnel board answered to Palin. But the board ended up hiring an aggressive Anchorage trial lawyer, Timothy Petumenos, as an independent counsel. McCain aides were chagrined to discover that Petumenos was a Democrat who had contributed to Palin’s 2006 opponent for governor, Tony Knowles. Palin is now scheduled to be questioned next week, and the counsel’s report could be released soon after. “We took a gamble when we went to the personnel board,” said a McCain aide who asked not to be identified discussing strategy. While the McCain camp still insists Palin “has nothing to hide,” it acknowledges a critical finding by Petumenos would be even harder to dismiss.
Indeed. Maybe what she could do is just release another report from the McCain campaign clearing herself right before the State Personnel Board report is released. Because having her release a report clearing herself as a rebuttal to the State Personnel Board report that was completed because she filed an ethics complaint against herself would be a superb ending to this.
This post is in: Election 2008, Lies, Damned Lies, and Sarah Palin, Republican Stupidity
I expect you will see more and more of this:
In the end, I couldn’t do it. My California ballot arrived in the mail today, and I opened it fully intending to vote for John McCain. I filled out the state propositions first — yes on 8, no on everything proposing a new bond or new spending — then the local offices, straight Republican excepting Kevin Johnson for (nonpartisan) Sacramento mayor. Finally, the vote for President of the United States: an academic exercise in California, where Barack Obama will surely win by a crushing margin. But good citizenship demands voting as if it matters. Do I believe in John McCain? Not as much as I used to. Do I believe in Sarah Palin? Despite my early enthusiasm for her, now not at all. Do I believe in the national Republican Party? Not in the slightest — even though I see no meaningful alternative to it. So, my choice for President in 2008, scrawled in my ballot as an act of futile protest, is Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. If nothing else, I am confident this is the first of several votes I will cast for him in years to come.
Josh Trevino, co-founder of Red State.
by John Cole| 73 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Lies, Damned Lies, and Sarah Palin
Pitbulls don’t know when to stop biting:
With his electoral prospects fading by the day, Senator John McCain has fallen out with his vice-presidential running mate about the direction of his White House campaign.
McCain has become alarmed about the fury unleashed by Sarah Palin, the moose-hunting “pitbull in lipstick”, against Senator Barack Obama. Cries of “terrorist” and “kill him” have accompanied the tirades by the governor of Alaska against the Democratic nominee at Republican rallies.
Mark Salter, McCain’s long-serving chief of staff, is understood to have told campaign insiders that he would prefer his boss, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, to suffer an “honourable defeat” rather than conduct a campaign that would be out of character – and likely to lose him the election.
***“Sarah Palin is no fool. She sees the same thing and wants to salvage what she can. She is positioning herself for the future. Her best days could be in front of her. She wants to look as though she was the fighter, the person with the spunk who was out there taking it to the Democrats.”
***Palin has continued to lead the charge against Obama’s alleged lack of candour. At a rally in Wilmington, Ohio, she mocked him for attending a supporters’ meeting in Ayers’s home when he was seeking to become an Illinois state senator in 1995. “He didn’t know he launched his career in the living room of a domestic terrorist until he did know,” Palin said.
“Some will say, jeez Sarah, it’s getting negative. No it’s not negativity. It’s truthfulness.” The crowd bellowed its appreciation with chants of “Nobama” and “Go Sarah Go!”
Who could have imagined that if you take an ethically challenged know-nothing religious nut from backwoods America, have Bill Kristol and the Rove 2000 team whisper in her ear for weeks, that she would turn into a vicious political opportunist with no regard for the country and an eye on her personal future?
Most vetted candidate ever.
by John Cole| 52 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Excellent Links, Lies, Damned Lies, and Sarah Palin
The Kung Fu Monkey reacts to Rich Lowry’s sparklevision:
Modern American Conservatives have sunk to the intellectual and emotional level of the guy who thinks the stripper really likes him.
Palin terrifies me. She is Warren Ellis’ Smiler, in a way Bush never was. I cannot sense any core beliefs except … well except nothing. All I can see is the winking, giggling folksy void. They tell her to spew some bullshit, and she salutes smartly and sells the hell out of it. Asked to go forth and spread old canards about Senator Obama being a “friend of terrorists”, something she never seemed to show any interest in before, she does so not just efficiently but with a perky glee. The proper human response, when asked to say things like this about a political opponent and Senator of the United States is so fundamentally “fuck no” that it is the unheard test question immediately following “You’re in the desert, you see a tortoise lying on its back, struggling, and you’re not helping — why is that?”
There’s no shame, no consideration, no apparent native curiousity … but even more creepily no resentment at being treated like a prop, no chafing at her handlers assuming she’ll say absolutely anything they put in front of her. How can a human exist so fueled by hubris but without an ego? My lizard brain is screaming.
Bladerunner reference FTW.
BTW- Atonement on HBO tonight- worth watching?