US POLITICS: AMERICANS, PLEASE WELCOME YOUR NEW PRESIDENT... SCOTT BROWN!

well, i figure there are ignorant/illiterate/etc people pretty much everywhere. sullivan seems to think palin's empty populist nonsense is enough to win over a lot of voters & i think most people have better sense than that.

Whatever.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4069/4339260778_bee08d423a_o.jpg

the thing a lot of the Palin Will Come To Rule Us All stuff smells like Oh No, People Like Wrestling y'know

and it's like yeah they do, but guess what, that doesn't mean football better watch its back

President Obama made a dramatic attempt to jump-start the stalled health care debate Sunday, inviting Republicans in Congress to a half-day summit on the subject to be televised live later this month.

― Mr. Que, Sunday, February 7, 2010 10:59 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

watchin the game or

the thing a lot of the Palin Will Come To Rule Us All stuff smells like Oh No, People Like Wrestling y'know

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Monday, February 8, 2010 12:51 AM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

she got so super-close to being VP though...

what's the ilxor consensus on 2012? The Mittster?

you know, i did hear somewhere that obama invited a bunch of republicans over to watch the super bowl, for real

2012? pawlenty? or what's his name, paul ryan from wisconsin? whoever it is will lose imho.

i think GOP in 2012 is gonna be like dems in 2004. gonna blow a good shot at toppling incumbent prez by being forced to run a lame ass candidate

See guys the talk here that Sullivan is overstating Palin cause he hasn't visited flyover country doesn't really ring true for me. Every conservative I know, by blood or acquaintance, loves the hell out of her. Most love her for who she claims to be, a couple love her out of a sense of realpolitik, thinking she's great for the Republican Party even if she is leading a populist movement they find unappealing.

I do think Sullivan gets a little shrill klaxony, but I don't think she should be underestimated as a force either.

what's the ilxor consensus on 2012? The Mittster

i'm hoping so (i mean, a Palin nom would be without a doubt the awezomest thing ever, but it ain't going to happen). wathcing the GOP rank & file/ teabag nation hem & haw and basically treat him like an asshole (bcz he's Mormon y'see) and then try to yammer their way around the obvious will be loads of fun.

Every conservative I know, by blood or acquaintance, loves the hell out of her.

Yep, same here. My county in Ohio is generally safely Democrat, but just east of me it's Palin County all the way to the PA border. My mother in law loves her, my boss loves her, my family loves her, a bunch of my old HS friends love her. Anyone who thinks Sullivan is overestimating how much rank-and-file heartland conservatives like this woman is out of touch with reality.

nobody's saying rank-and-file conservatives don't love her. we're saying she's not really a threat. she embarrassed herself terribly throughout the campaign, then she resigned her governorship for no reason. she is unelectable. if they run her, they're conceding to Obama whether they know it or not.

by the way, you guys need to read Rick Perlstein's "cultural" biography of the period between 1960 and 1964, when Barry Goldwater, blinkered and confused, suddenly became the avatar for a large segment of the country -- and was destroyed by LBJ's landslide.

(that the sequel Nixonland chronicled how the liberal hegemony collapsed in subsequent years makes the decade all the more depressing)

j0hn i guess i was more responding to daria

sullivan seems to think palin's empty populist nonsense is enough to win over a lot of voters & i think most people have better sense than that.

― kicker conspiracy (b. favre ha ha) (daria-g), Sunday, February 7, 2010 11:24 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

she is unelectable. if they run her, they're conceding to Obama whether they know it or not.

http://1heckofaguy.com/wp-content/photos/goldwater1964poster.jpg

sullivan seems to think palin's empty populist nonsense is enough to win over a lot of voters & i think most people have better sense than that.

This isn't true at all -- Nixon won two elections, one of which was a landslide. But these revolutions always sputter and end in ignominy; they can't continue.

Pancakes, she probably had all those people the second she made fun of community organizers, because making jokes like that is how stupid/stubborn white people affirm and excuse their own complacency. Venality has its own momentum, and it is this force and not any intellectual push, combined with the self-satisfied god-bothering, that gives us what we have.

If I wanted to be all well-on-the-other-hand about it, FDR suffered the same fate after the court-packing nonsense and his personal crusade to purge Congress of disloyal Dems.

true story, a propos of nothing: i was raised in wrentham, hometown of scott brown. once upon a time, i wanted to be an eagle scout. he sat on a committee that told me that no, my stupid project to build a handicapped ramp at the library did not have enough merit to elevate me to eagle status. being the pissy teenager i was, i argued with him for half an hour , and finally got him to give in. he was unfailingly polite and super friendly afterward, and i think he seemed like a very capable fellow.

So you could have swung the election by publicizing that he hates cripples.

Ned's frisky tonight.

alfred.. hmm.. nixon was before i was born (and i haven't gotten around to reading that copy of nixonland i bought), but wasn't he at least.. somewhat well informed about the issues? i mean, if one isn't already enamored of palin, i don't see how she wins anyone over, she has nothing of substance to say.

Garry Wills on Nixon: "No man ever did more to undermine his own considerable intelligence."

Nixon was a liar. Such congenital, compulsive, shameless liar through his career that it's impossible to understand, even now when we understand him better, what he tried to say.

Nixon was an almost pathological liar and a bad fucking dude, but he was also a really smart guy. Could speak extemporaneously on a large variety of topics capably, hold his own in conversation. In private conversation, he was a paranoid racist consumed by a thirst for power. But he was bright as fuck, for sure.

Sarah Palin speaks well but is insane and cynical. It's depressing how many people like her, but if she actually poses any threat at all, then guess what, the bigger loss is already behind us & there's hardly any point worrying about it. I do not believe that she does, but I may be an optimist.

Those two books that acolyte Monica Crowley published after the Great Man's death show him struggling with Hegel and Schiller into his eighties ("Those Germans were so complicated!")

she probably had all those people the second she made fun of community organizers, because making jokes like that is how stupid/stubborn white people affirm and excuse their own complacency.

This seems a remarkably offensive thing to say, and it certainly doesn't jibe with the Palin fans I know that are not white, stupid, or complacent.

Am I just a weird kinda dude for wanting to figure out why someone like Palin appeals to such a broad swath of people (nb that most of the Palin fans I know are nonwhite with college degrees) instead of being content to dismiss her adulators as stupid & not worth a moment's serious consideration? People who swear by Beck & Palin aren't a construction of bloggers to me. They're my family and my friends and my roommate and more. I want to find out what it is in them that Palin manages to tap into, and I don't think the answer is something as stupidly self-congratulatory as xenophobia or racism or personal laziness.

And suzy I am not, of course, calling you stupidly self-congratulatory. Anticipatory apologies for that and the brief interlude of quarterly hoos political identity crisis.

i don't think they're stupid. i think they think other people think they're stupid & are reacting against it..

i mean they do speak to the (entirely correct) perception that big-moneyed interests esp wall street have influence on the government to the point that it works in their favor, and not for the good of the general public..

i mean, if one isn't already enamored of palin, i don't see how she wins anyone over, she has nothing of substance to say.

Having nothing of substance to say is a major plus to a certain segment of Republican voters. It's how they manage to dismiss Democratic candidates as intellectuals, eggheads, out-of-touch, etc.

suzy, what Hoos said. To jump right to "stupid/stubborn white people" . . . well, you don't actually know any of the people I'm talking about, so you're making an awful lot of assumptions here.

Well, you have your anecdotal sample group and I have mine, which is definitely over-entitled white people who crow about how useless 'book smarts' are and demand 'English only' while butchering every sentence they have cause to scrawl, or utter. They've had several moments of serious contemplation from me; you just don't like the conclusion I drew.

and that many of those who are the public faces of the political system and the mainstream media seem to be entirely out of touch/uninterested in the situation in much of the country. and that the only obvious effects of the government in their lives are.. sending people off to fight and die in wars, using a bunch of taxpayer money to bail out wall street. so you can't trust the government to do anything right, really. so perhaps from that POV there may as well be less government and lower taxes b/c what little there is, is doing nothing for you?

No, my anecdotal sample group's features don't overlap yours, apparently. xp

Having nothing of substance to say is a major plus to a certain segment of Republican voters. It's how they manage to dismiss Democratic candidates as intellectuals, eggheads, out-of-touch, etc.

but this is the history of American politics, isn't it? At the risk of creating false equivalences, what did Walter Mondale, Dukakis, and Gore have to offer as "substance"? Certain candidates, I've become convinced, are set up to lose major races because the political parties stand to gain much by preserving the status quo.

But then neither of us is projecting the characteristics of our sample group onto yours, suzy. xxxp

Certain candidates, I've become convinced, are set up to lose major races because the political parties stand to gain much by preserving the status quo.

i'd def say certain are not set up to win because factions within the party want their candidate to run and win, 4 years later. for instance did the clintonistas go all-out to help kerry win? not so sure.

“How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for you?”

hey, at least she used one of my lines.

http://www.wfmu.org/flashplayer.php?version=2&show=29347&archive=49937

Dave Emory's got a nice paranoid podcast above, from 2008, all about Palin's anti-American tendencies.

Good Lord, Dave Emory is still out there?!

That Limbaugh thing in the Wallace interview is fucking retarded.

^satire

You betcha

At 31 minutes into that above podcast he lays out how Ronald Reagan staffed his administration with former nazis.

http://www.newpatriotjournal.com/PostImages/974e37c9-607c-4c24-8f6e-d72f6add6fd5.jpeg

At the risk of creating false equivalences, what did Walter Mondale, Dukakis, and Gore have to offer as "substance"?

Gore certainly had a little and that little was more than his opponent.

LOL at Trojan horse of socialism.

the trojan horse with apparently no space to actually hide anything inside lol

There's a copy of "Das Kapital" and Mao's Little Red Book in there iirc.

I was gonna comment on that photo but I've been in the bread line all morning long and now I'm just too cold and tired to think of anything to say.

And a Che t-shirt. xp