HuffPo: Today, Sarah Inc. took to its Twitter account to offer some lessons about What The Gulf Oil Spill Teaches Us. Her bottom line: don’t trust the foreign oils! And many thanks to an emailer named Ben, who reminds me that for eighteen long years, that dodgy, not-to-be-trusted foreign oil company known as British Petroleum employed one Todd Palin.
One of the McCain-Palin campaign’s strangest moves in the 2008 campaign was the release of an attack ad against Barack Obama that attempted to marginalize him by casting him as a celebrity. It even made visual references to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
Since then Sarah Palin has been on a long strange trip — from losing the United States vice presidency to quitting halfway through her term as governor of Alaska, from landing a phone-it-in gig as a propagandist on Fox News to publishing a best-selling ghost-written memoir, and from making $125,000 per year as governor to charging $100,000 per gig on the rubber chicken circuit.
Now ABC News is reporting that since she walked away from her job as governor in July 2009, Palin has raked in $12 million.
Sarah Palin is not the only failed politician out there cashing in on political stardom, of course. She has largely co-opted Newt Gingrich’s playbook. After being forced out as House Speaker because he was having an extramarital affair with a staffer at the same time he was leading the charge to impeach Pres. Clinton for having an affair with a staffer, Gingrich has built a lucrative career writing books, giving speeches and as a Fox on-air propagandist based entirely on a perpetual tease that he might run for president — despite the fact he has a less than zero chance of winning.
Like Gingrich, Palin is unelectable, and like Gingrich, she is manipulating the media by dangling the possibility out there that one day she might just give it a go, and run for the big chair. What the heck.
But she is no longer a politician. She’s too dense, incurious and inarticulate to be a real pundit. To call her an author defiles the word. So, besides “half-term governor,” what should we call her?
Simple. Sarah Palin is a celebrity.
For example, a copy of the celebrity rider to Palin’s speaking contract that ennumerates her demands and requirements from event hosts was found in a trash can and released to the media. According to the rider (PDF), Palin requires:
One possible omission: Palin also requires a teleprompter, which she likely requires to be hidden from view — unlike the 20 or so photos of Palin with teleprompters we dug up.
Tina Fey caught the spirit of Palin’s new status in a parody on Saturnight Live last week, in which she, as Palin, announced that she was starting her own broadcast channel, similar to Oprah’s.
“Ever since I won the Silver Medal in last year’s vice presidential election,” says Tina Fey in another portrayal of Sarah Palin, she has done her best to connect with everyday Americans.
“It just seemed like the next logical step was to launch my own network,” Fey said on Saturday Night Live — with a premier “network” report about the “Obama death panel” declaring that her daughter’s ankle injury was too costly and that they would have to put her down.
Given she’ll never be president of the United States, maybe Palin’s strategy is go for something bigger: Maybe she wants to become an Oprah Winfrey-style celebrity empath and impresario for the tea-bagger set.
Sarah Palin’s latest gaffe started last Tuesday when she tried to rally her troops in the face of her party’s crushing defeat on health-care reform by posting a United States map with gunsight icons marking districts of Democratic congressmen she has targeted for defeat in the fall.
Along with the map of gun targets, Palin added, “Don’t Retreat, Instead — RELOAD!”
Now, in one of the most transparently false attempts at spin we’ve seen since the Bush administration left town, Palin is trying walk back what she intended to convey by releasing a map that certainly appears to be a hit list.
She rolled out the walk-back in Bush country — at a rally in Midland, Texas. “‘Take up your arms’ means voting,” Palin told the adoring crowd.
Of course, she didn’t say “Take up arms.” She said, “RELOAD!”
At a campaign rally in Arizona for her running mate in 2008, Sen. John “Grampy” McCain, she read the line again:
“We know violence isn’t the answer. When we take up our arms, we’re talking about our vote.”
What we learned during the Bush administration is that normal Americans have limited patience with this sort of horse hockey — especially instances like this when it’s obvious the spinner is working on the assumption that everyone listening to her is stupid.
Of course, Palin’s spin is not, sorry, targeted at regular Americans. She thinks she’s speaking just to the half-wits who worship her. It doesn’t matter to her now that the rest of us are listening — but we are.
More evidence that Sarah Palin’s hand isn’t going away. A new Valentine’s Day card design is available from my favorite free ecard resource, someecards.
Palin’s cynical hypocrisy has been highlighted repeatedly during her short but riveting time in the national eye. In her speech to the Republican convention after being named John McCain’s running mate, she boasted that she refused funding for a proposed public works project that came to be known as the Bridge to Nowhere. In fact, Palin lobbied for the money. Her expensive, donor-funded wardrobe, make-up, and personal stylist during the presidential campaign flew directly in the face of her claims of humble hockey momdom, as did the tanning bed she had installed at taxpayer expense in the Alaska governor’s mansion. Then there was her book tour, which utilized a Lear Jet between stops, with Palin climbing into a bus only to pull up to her adoring fans. And most recently, there was the matter of the $100,000 speaking fee for the Tea Party convention itself, which Palin claims she will spend not on herself but on other candidates and causes (she just hasn’t named any). I could go on, but it would take too long.
At the same time, Palin’s fierce defense of sheer dumbness over what she terms “elitism” has been shown to be personally motivated. Her claims to CBS’s Katie Couric that she read tons of newspapers and objected to scads of Supreme Court rulings, yet couldn’t name a single example of either, is the stuff of legend. The staged pardoning of a turkey during her aborted tenure as Alaska governor took place as another bird was slaughtered on camera in the background. She showed how easily she could be pwned when she took a call from a prankster claiming to be the president of France, and failed to catch on to the rouse. Again, I could go on almost without end.
As quickly as each of those news cycles ended, it looks like there is something enduring about the scribbled notes in Palin’s hand as she snarked away at Obama with sour teleprompter shots. Like the “changey-hopey” line Pain stole from the Tea Baggers themselves, the teleprompter meme is so ten minutes ago. Obama himself dispelled it forever* when he appeared at the recent House GOP retreat and answered hostile questions extemporaneously – and nimbly – for 90 minutes. Not once during the exchange did he duck his head to peak into his left palm.
Like her claim of foreign policy experience based on Alaska’s proximity to Russia’s Chukchi Peninsula, Palin’s ink-stained hand provides ample and abiding evidence that she is not so bright. For those who share that trait, Palin is a rock star. For all others, we don’t need to visit Madame Ruby to see Palin’s future: it holds more of the same tired, faux opposition to any progressive thought, and more successful manipulation of those who were telling the truth when they said in 2008 that they “weren’t ready” for a black man to be president.
*”Forever” in the sense of appealing to rational minds, so this would exclude Birthers and Tea Baggers
With the mid-term elections looming, it is clear that the Tea Baggers’ populist, anti-Obama energy is being channeled into the the formation of a new national political party. With funding from wealthy right-wing extremists, including the Koch brothers and others, political operatives like former House Majority Leader-turned lobbyist Dick Armey have masterfully astroturfed the Tea Baggers into a new power base comprised of the most easily duped and manipulated segment of American society: poorly educated, white Southerners and their counterparts in other regions.
The objective of the astroturfing is to organize working-class opposition to government regulation of the sources of corporate wealth — energy, health care, the media, etc. — and roll back and eventually kill government policies and programs such as Medicare, Social Security and Civil Rights protections that help, yes, working class Americans. It could be said that the corporate oligarchs are attempting to create a 21st century version of the Dixiecrat Party, which, in 1948, had a platform that is nearly identical to Tea Bagger positions today: local control, shrinking the federal government and — although this goes unstated, it’s there in the optics at the rallies — racial segregation.
The connections between the corporate oligarchs and their rent-boys like Armey are relatively easy to research. But Tea Baggers themselves are oblivious to their roles as the pawns in this new power grab. They have been kept in the dark because, over the past decade and more, conservatives have trained their base to trust only right-wing media outlets like hate radio and Fox News, and these outlets scrupulously avoid reporting on who is pulling the strings and why.
For regular Americans, however, the connections are hard to miss. In the weeks leading up to the Koch-funded Freedomwork’s Tea Bagger rallies last summer, for example, right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News gave the rallies hundreds of hours of free promotion. On the day of the rallies, Fox covered the live events wall-to-wall, frequently displaying racist anti-Obama signs on its air without comment. Just last month, Bill O’Reilly, the senior propagandist at Fox, did a segment cheerleading the formation of the Tea Bag Party (TBP), citing a poll that found that 41 percent of Americans favor the TBP over Democrats (35 percent) and Republicans (28 percent).
“Well, look,” O’Reilly told his panel of TBP supporters — no representative of the other parties were included to make the discussion, you know, “fair and balanced” — “if you want a viable third party, you got to break it down. I mean, you just got to kick the door in like [1992 third-party candidate Ross] Perot did and other people did.”
There’s even a Tea Bagger social-network group on Murdoch’s Wall St. Journal website promoting the formation of a national political party because — speaking of easily duped — the GOP and Dems are too cozy with corporate interests:
This is good news for the nation. Both the Republican and the Democrat party have been serving the private corporations for a long time. Everyone sees what has happened to this country are [sic] both their watches; they have failed. Leaving, or not running again is best for the USA. The ststaes [sic] need to fill out the proper forms and certify the TEA polictical [sic] party in their state. Do it, stop talking and blogging about it, actually do it and register a few TEA candidates for 2010. The time to act is now, not later. Returning to the American Constitution is correct, turning away from corporation bylaws is correct, watching these unAmerican kickbackers leave in [sic] good for the country. Jorge Lovenguth TEA Florida
At least one state group has made it official. Last November, right-wingers in Florida filled out the paperwork to register the TBP as an official political party in the state.
Around the same time, organizers announced that Tea Baggers would be holding a convention, Feb. 4 – 6, in Nashville. As it stands now, Sarah Palin has agreed to address the mob as the keynote speaker for the closing-night banquet. (There will be bibs.)
Palin is, of course, most famous for quitting and/or not showing up, and one pro-Tea Bag insider (he says he believes that “Palin and the grassroots Tea Party efforts are forces for good”) reports that Palin will be paid as much as $100,000 for the gig.
This calls into question the legitimacy of the Tea Baggers’ meeting in Nashville. Is it a step toward the birth of a national racist political party, or is it just a for-profit mass meeting to shake down America’s most hapless half-wits — a political version of an Amway convention?
If it is the former, it represents the first time a putative front-runner presidential candidate required payment to address her party. If so, it also shines a light on the astroturfing of this movement. If the Tea Baggers were a legitimate grass roots movement, they could have easily invited Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., a whackjob easily as looney-tunes as Palin, who would have spoken for free.
Writing back in November, even the Tea Bagger sympathizer is suspicious about the real purpose of the convention:
The schedule mentions break-out and discussion sessions with no topics, no list of moderators, etc. It’s unclear what anyone will be doing in Nashville for three days other than waiting for Sarah Palin. On top of that, the planning looks to be very poorly done.
The conference sessions, whatever they may be, end at 12:30 PM Saturday afternoon. There’s nothing happening again until the banquet at 6 PM that night. In most cases, all that will achieve is driving up participation costs due to the need for another night in a hotel. Attendees traveling any distance to the event would be all but forced to travel home on a Sunday. That may be fine if one is looking to maximize revenue for the area and some hotels. But it doesn’t seem to take Tea Party goers interests in mind at all.
But if the past is prologue with Palin, the controversy over whether she’s being paid to speak to her followers will soon be shoved aside for the eternal question about her: Will she show up, or will she quit the event before Feb. 6?
It’s a dead cinch that none of the folks screaming “Read the bill!” at members of Congress at health-care reform town hall meetings this month have actually read the bills themselves.
By not reading the House bills — in particular, the one called “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009” — town hall disrupters who have also been railing about a purported provision in the bill that establishes “death panels” have revealed themselves to be hypocrites as well as willing dupes in a campaign by the medical lobbies and Republican leaders to kill reform in order to protect health-care profits.
Top Republicans, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, House Minority Leader John Boehner, former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey and others — and just today Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa — are lying about the contents of Section 1233, “Advance Care Planning Consultation,” which they say requires elderly and infirm people to be evaluated by “death panels” every five years.
What the bill actually does is extend payments to Medicare recipients who seek professional counseling on end-of-life issues like setting up a living will and issuing “do not resuscitate” instructions to their families.
Facts do not matter to right-wingers, of course, but normal Americans who might take the Tea-baggers’ and Birthers’ venting about euthanasia at face value instead of seeing it for what it really is — rage over having a black president — need to know the truth.
The full text of Section 1233 follows:
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
