Whether and when and how the Obama campaign decides to "go at" Palin
will be an interesting test of their political instincts and their
skill with the propaganda knife. Can they define and demolish her
without turning into the bullies, picking on a delicate flower of
Caucasian Christian womanhood? Or will they just let Sarah be Sarah,
and see what falls out of the Alaskan corruption and craziness tree?
Stay tuned.But, the politics of it aside, by picking a woman as his running
mate McCain has performed at least one service: He’s made it possible
to precisely calibrate just how far behind the curve of history the
Republicans really are — and it’s 24 years, the exact length of time
since the Democrats put the first woman on a presidential ticket.Billmon: Gettin’ some of that "RE-form"
thank you b…
And as I said before, and as emotions are high and appreciatively shared of late, I’ll share one that made me have my own lump in the throat:
U.S. Marines/Iraq War Veterans Cornered & Threatened By Gestapo Storm Troopers at DNC
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 30 2008 6:42 utc | 1
Some conservatives are not at all amused by Palin. The WaPo editors:
But the most important question Mr. McCain should have asked himself about Ms. Palin was not whether she could help him win the presidency. It was whether she is qualified and prepared to serve as president should anything prevent him from doing so.
…
In this regard, count us among the puzzled and the skeptical.
The Palin selection completely undercuts the argument about Obama’s inexperience and readiness to lead — on the theory that because Palin is a maverick and a corruption fighter, she bolsters McCain’s claim to be the reformer in this campaign. In her rollout today, Palin spoke a lot about change. McCain is now trying to steal “change” from Obama, a contest McCain will lose in an overwhelmingly Democratic year with an overwhelmingly unpopular incumbent Republican administration. At the same time, he’s weakening his strong suit — readiness vs. unreadiness.
They will of course come around somewhat again, but for now the Obama campaign does not need to attack her at all. The paleao conservatives and religious nuts will love her, the neocon crowd not so much. That will certainly hurt her for a while.
McCain’s minions have done something very cruel, very exploitative, to this woman. Her cooperation shouldn’t blind us to this essential fact. It’s not a pretty picture.
We should attack the appointment, but not the appointee.
The exploitation and the cooperation both are analyzed very lucidly by Andrea Dworkin in her Right Wing Women (1983).
Posted by: alabama | Aug 30 2008 8:07 utc | 3
She’s no dummy alabama, her acceptance says as much about her as the offer by McCain says about him. He’s saying the race is a beauty contest, and she just happens to have some experience, so is willing to oblige.
Posted by: anna missed | Aug 30 2008 8:20 utc | 4
Merci, bama
checking it out now…
meantime, had to share this…
McCain will talk about patriotism.
Obama will talk about hope.
Biden will talk about that time he knocked back beers with world leaders and all his time in the Senate.
Palin will talk about … talk about … umm … ?
Palin will talk about how the doctor told her that her child will have Down syndrome.
How she discussed the issue with her family.
How she made a decision.
How she held the little baby in her arms and it was sooo sweet and she realized it was the right decision (which she knew all along).
And the whole country will go: Awwwwww…
How she can’t understand that anyone can even consider murdering such a sweet little baby.
How hundred thousands are killed every year. Not in Iraq, but in our hospitals.
How it is now your turn to make the right decision on election day.
Thereby giving you the choice to vote for her ticket or for the baby killers.
brilliant pick; even more brilliant given the fact that many, many Hillary voters saw Hillary as a step in the direction of women’s rights. These voters aren’t policy voters; they’re visceral voters. That’s why people still don’t understand why Kerry lost in 2004 (aside from diebold). Voters are more visceral than most think; instead of fighting that ( like dems do), republicans embrace it, and win. Our voting populace may be stupid, and we may elect corrupt bastards, but Dems have been so inept at understanding voter thinking that they think they’ll win on the issues. McCain has such a great shot now.
America can’t tell from celebrities.. she’s this season’s America’s next top model, stagecraft brought to you by the magnificent Rove… You wanna be on top?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 30 2008 8:33 utc | 5
Antifeminism is a direct expression of misogyny: it is the political defense of woman hating. This is because feminism is the liberation movement of women. Antifeminism, in any of its political colorations, holds that the social and sexual condition of women essentially (one way or another) embodies the nature of women, that the way women are treated in sex and in society is congruent with what women are, that the fundamental relationship between men and women — in sex, in reproduction, in social hierarchy — is both necessary and inevitable. Antifeminism defends the conviction that the male abuse of women, especially in sex, has an implicit logic, one that no program of social justice can or should eliminate; that because the male use of women originates in the distinct and opposite natures of each which converge in what is called “sex,” women are not abused when used as women — but merely used for what they are by men as men.
– Andrea Dworkin, Right-wing Women
Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 30 2008 8:57 utc | 6
Everyone will cast about for the real ‘take’ on Mother Palin for a few days now.
Gentle Reader, the ‘take’ has two sides to it.
First — whodunnit? Who actually made this choice? Was it Karl Rove? Was it a consensus choice of the inside campaign advisors? Or was this entirely the eccentric work of Mister POW himself? Knowing whodunnit will tell us whether this is an impetuous Harriet Miers choice, a political fling, or an act of political genius. Knowing the author will tell us who really runs the erratic McCain campaign, and knowing that will tell us even more.
Second — the public’s reaction will take a few days to come back as well. Their gut reaction will determine if any benefits arrive. She’s been picked, by somebody who think they are really clever, to shake things up, to roll the dice.
Rolling the dice can go either way, ya know. Them dice can bite you, or bless you. You have to wait and see.
On the positive side, she’s got motherhood, good looks, and that great American value of being New on the grocery shelf.
On the negative side, she has a painfully shrill voice, she’s a rabid Christianist with no regard for our Constitution, and she’s a generic Republican crook entitled by Heaven to use her office on behalf of herself, and her kind. The public perceives this much right off, without needing CNN to tell them what to think.
Whatever truth comes out about who really picked her, and however the public responds to her charm offensive, to Mother Palin now falls the onerous task of charming her way through 66 days of hanging n’ hugging with Grandpa McCain, while defining herself as someone useful to the country. If she can.
She’ll do okay during the GOP convention, since that’s just a beauty pageant. But by week’s end, it will come out that she’s got less idea of how our economy actually is, or should be, or could be, than Mister Pow does.
And that’s about all them folks who vote have in mind.
Posted by: Antifa | Aug 30 2008 12:40 utc | 7
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 547-548
Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin. Coward-McCann, New York, 1983. (Perigee,paper, $6.95.)
Snip:
The American right today,she argues, is “controlled most totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women” (p34). That fear is primal-fear of uncontrollable, unpredictable male violence. In a country where a woman is raped every three minutes, that fear is also real and abiding.
The right offers women form: “a simple, fixed, predetermined social, biological and sexual order” (p22). Vowing to protect the home and womans place in it, the right offers shelter, safety, and a set of rules that men too agree to observe. It even offers love: the love of a husband and the love of Jesus.
The left has no better progran. As radical women learned in the 1960’s leftist men also see women as a class set apart by sex. They differ from rightist men largely in that they “value whores too much and wives to little”(p68). No wonder countless women believe quite correctly that they are safer on the right. There they are valued more
in the home–for their sex, labor, and reproductive capasity–than they are in the job market.
Fot protection they trade subservience.Through conformity and manipulation–called femininity, total womanhood, motherly love,–they convert subservience into a life’s work, a purpose. They become perfect foot soldiers (p35) of the Right.
Right -wing women fear and oppose all that threatens is accommodation. They oppose abortion not because of any fetal Fourteenth Amendment rights (afterall, women aren’t protected by the Fourteenth Amendment), but because abortion makes promiscuity easier, devalues the”good” woman, and negates the only leverage women have (pregnancy) to make men accountable for what they do to women. Right wing women are beguiled bt fem talk of “controlling our bodies.” Since they have only sex to trade for shelter in marrages that legalize rape, they know who controls women’s bodies. They also hate homosexuality because, quite simply, it makes women all but obsolete-except for child-bearing capabilities.
Now new technologies (such as artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and cloning) will put child bearing also under the control of men. It is no coincidance that the new birth technologies are opposed chiefly by the Right. Nevertheless, in their anxiety about abortion, right wing women would han over to the state the power to determine when life begins. That acquiescence (again to men) may be their undoing., marking the final obsolesce of women.
In the meantime, Left and liberal women, half blind, strike compromises. They campaign, for example, for equal pay, a seemingly moderate reform that Dworkin sees as truly revolutionary and “impossible,” since equal pay would save them from sex labor, from their essential identification as a sex class(p67). Fems may fight valiantly for a single standard of human justice, but they remain powerless. Only the right offers temporary saftey.–pending the eventual obliteration of wopmen.
Dworkin elaborates these hard truths with admirable grace and wit. She is one of the most tough minded feminists theoreticians writing today, and this is her best book.
Ann Jones
NYC
Wow.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 30 2008 12:44 utc | 8
@7
whodunnit ?
This selection was probably “sponsored” by someone who has a good understanding of what might be called scrutiny-skew & also how to exploit it: In general, Men tend to scrutinize women more than they do other men & likewise Whites tend to scrutinize Blacks more than they do other Whites.
Now if we were to break-down support for Obama on the basis of scrutiny, the most “softness” will be found in the segment that has over-scrutinized him and the most distinctive sub-segment within will comprise female Hilary-primaries-supporters. But there will be other not so distinctive segments in there too. And someone in the McCain camp is betting that this “over-scrutiny” segment is overall sufficiently large that it is Obama’s most exploitable weak point in terms of bangs for the bucks.
Further, Palin takes a lot of scrutiny off McCain and if she weathers it well, its a major plus. Curiosity (& also scrutiny) are reasons why a lot of people who might have ignored the Republican convention are going to tune in when Palin makes her address. If a lot come away with a generally favorable impression of Palin, the plan has already started to pay off. They are counting on her to be highly scrutiny-proof. In fact they are also hoping that she is that most rarest of candidate who actually benefits from excessive scrutiny.
This looks like Rove.
Posted by: jony_b_cool | Aug 30 2008 15:42 utc | 9
Karl Rove wanted Mitt Romney. This would have maintained the white hierarchical fascist male tradition. The maverick in John McCain, seeing he was losing, shook apart US politics. The rise of evangelistic Christianity is in direct correlation to the decline of society and corruption of the American State. The USA now has a very good chance of having a female true believer as President whose only qualification is screwing over the good old white boys. Of all of the vice president choices, she is a vote getter.
Posted by: VietnamVet | Aug 30 2008 15:46 utc | 10
this is an extremely dangerous appointment. the right wing cannot win w/out the christianistas. they could care little about foreign policy. their goal is for biblical rule in this country. their main issue is ‘right to life’. their underlying goal is to fill the supreme court w/fundies. this appointment will get them out to vote in droves.
we know the dangers of a mcCain presidency. but the horror of a palin presidency on domestic policy.. we might as well just throw the constitution out the window all together.
that said she is perfect. she looks like a fox news broadcaster. regardless if he has enough votes to win it makes no difference, all they need is the illusion she won, and with the fundies on their side it’s a clinch. romney could never have sufficed as he is a mormon and that would be simply unacceptable to the fundies. mcCain doesn’t have the christian qualifications to carry the vote on his own because of obamas christian credo.
thank god i am prepared to accept my coubntry is going to be thrashed, because if i was hanging on the edge of my seat as i have been for the last 2 elections i would be very nervous right now. as it stands i know exactly what to expect come november. endless war and the possibility of being thrown into the dark ages or shades of the handmaiden’s tale for our daughters.
Posted by: annie | Aug 30 2008 17:20 utc | 11
annie
contrary to your expectations – i think there is an inter elite struggle – between those who want to manage the empire ‘reasonably’ & ‘within limits’ who are represented by the politcal apparatus that is the democrats & there is an elite – i would think primarily – the oil business which has the most to lose believe or want to believe exactly what the neocons in all their forms have told them. even when on a practical level all the ‘theories’ have been catastrophic
i do not know who will win but it seems clear to me that for the interests of either elites (& of course it is not limited to 2) it is necessary for them to pursue military rather than political force
tangerine, who clearly has the balls of buddha is not frightened – but i am, with what is happening in the caucasus. & from what i’ve been reading in the israeli press – there are clearly elements who want to bomb iran while others think that it will mark israel for 100 years. in pakistan & egypt – they seem to have no practical idea of the real situation & i think it will because much more intense very quickly
the situation with food, alimentation worldwide is critical – the costs & i think that situation is going to be even more dramatic
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 30 2008 17:41 utc | 12
I think the simple message of the Palin choice is that the people behind the scenes who make the decisions will continue to make the decisions. By picking a poster child of the right instead of a real person, Cheney is just picking himself again.
Billmon seems to be getting up to speed again, in style if not substance. We’ll have to see how short-lived his ‘getting religion’ lasts. Not that he owes anybody anything, I just hope it’s shorter than Dylan’s Saved period.
Posted by: biklett | Aug 30 2008 17:56 utc | 13
This McCain/Palin campaign poster is a candidate for photoshop-disaster of the month.
He pictured under (arificial) sunlight with a healthy, slightly red complexion and top light from the right and behind. She with a frontal flash picture and to much blue light and a pale skin.
His head is a bit to the right and her head a bit to the left making them seem to be orientated in different directions.
Who ever did that shouldn’t get money for playing graphic designer.
> she’s a rabid Christianist with no regard for our
> Constitution, and she’s a generic Republican crook
> entitled by Heaven to use her office on behalf of
> herself, and her kind
As opposed to being a rabid Progressivist with no regard for our constitution (please look up the flimsy constitutional justification for most of what Congress passes), and being a generic Democrat crook entitled by “Science” (in quotes because a lot of the scientific work involved ranges from slanted to shoddy, especially in the so-called “social sciences”) to use one’s office on behalf of oneself and one’s kind?
Sadly, the choice there is not a pretty one, and hasn’t been in a while. Our best hope is a president from one party an a congress controlled by the other, plus perhaps voters getting some guts and actually standing up for the Constitution. Not that this is likely.
Posted by: Boris | Aug 31 2008 18:36 utc | 15
I can’t help thinking about the people.
It’ll soon become clear whose baby it is in any case. They cannot ‘disappear’ it, and one thing you cannot control with a baby is the disposition of its bodily fluids. It only takes an old nappy or drool on a collar (or a blue dress!) and a sample from the daughter OR mother to clear up all doubt. Surely this knowledge has penetrated even the anti-science crowd by now; though perhaps they will argue that God created DNA that matches the daughter in order to test their faith.
So if it IS the daughter’s baby THEY already know it, AND they know it will come out. Which means they’ll try and cast this as a heroic (grand)mother protecting the reputation of her poor daughter, and a la the Bush AWOL story or the Cheney daughter deflect any discussion of the substance of the hypocrisy into outrage at the mere reporting of it.
I can’t help thinking about the people, and by that I mean the innocent ones – the baby and the girl. I hope the real father is taking precautions – I wouldn’t be flying any small planes or going on any long hikes just now. (Please don’t let the DNA match the girl and HER father.)
How does her poor daughter feel about her life being made a political football at the age of 16; and having her baby – HER baby – her BABY – taken away like that. I believe that adoption is pretty traumatic even without the overtones of ambition, secrecy, hypocrisy and guilt. To be forced to live a lie and sacrifice the beauty and wonder of motherhood; not in order to protect her reputation (which would never have spread beyond her school and church, or at most the small town papers in Alaska) but to merely conveniently further her mother’s political ambition. And worse, to further the political ambition of a senile old creep and his political masters. She looks like a nice girl, and I’m sure things would have worked out just fine with some support and understanding and a bit of honesty all around.
I find myself hoping that it really was a ‘miraculous’ pregancy and delivery; the alternative is just too ugly and depressing.
Posted by: PeeDee | Aug 31 2008 21:28 utc | 16
PeeDee, have you stopped to think about how the girl will feel if it’s NOT in fact her baby? Whose political ambitions are being furthered by dragging her through the mud, exactly?
Even if the baby is hers I don’t see how national press involvement will make the situation any better, for her or for the baby. In this case, I’m not sure why you think that the girl’s reputation was not involved. Some people do still value that sort of thing, even if you don’t.
Posted by: Boris | Aug 31 2008 22:14 utc | 17