BS: Frank Rich on Palin

Subject: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Bill H //\\
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 03:25 PM

Since all the Palin threads are getting quite long I just wanted people to home in on a particular OpEd piece in todays NY Times which, I hope, you can find http://nytimes.com .

Check out the front page piece (which continues at length into the paper) about her hiring and firing of people once she was elected---BUT--more important click on TODAY'S PAPER and then the OP-ED tab.

The FRANK RICH article is right on the mark---too long for my to synopsize here other than to say she has her pegged perfectly and Obama had best start running agains McCain and just ignore a VP candidate. As Rich says "...that will take care of itself".

The MAUREEN DOWD Op Ed article is also right on-=--one of her not tongue in cheek but deadly serious piece which can describe Palin in only one way---SCARY. To think this has a chance of bringing her poison out of Alaska to the mainland and put the entire country at risk.

A commentator on a NYC radio station (not NPR) who does not care for Condi Rice made the point that "...disagree or agree with her she sure as hell is brighter and more competent and experienced as a choice for VP.

I can only, once again, paraphrase the great line from a Christine Lavin song "...what was he thinking" (McCain).

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Alice
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 03:40 PM

Thanks, Bill. (Hey, ummm... Alaska is on the mainland ;-)

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: katlaughing
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 04:01 PM

There are some choice bits in those, though in their entiety they are all excellent. Thanks, Bill. Here's some of those:

Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Ms. Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a "hater."

It is part of a pattern, Mr. Fagan said, in which Ms. Palin characterizes critics as "bad people who are anti-Alaska."

As Ms. Palin's star ascends, the McCain campaign, as often happens in national races, is controlling the words of those who know her well. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, has been asked not to speak to reporters, and aides sit in on interviews with old friends.

At a recent lunch gathering, an official with the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the governor's office. Dianne Woodruff, a city councilwoman, shook her head.

"I was thinking, I don't remember giving up my First Amendment rights," Ms. Woodruff said. "Just because you're not going gaga over Sarah doesn't mean you can't speak your mind."

and,

But the ultimate hypocrisy is that these woebegone, frightened opponents of change, sworn enemies of race-based college-admission initiatives, are now demanding their own affirmative action program for white folks applying to the electoral college. They want the bar for admission to the White House to be placed so low that legitimate scrutiny and criticism of Palin's qualifications, record and family values can all be placed off limits. Byron York of National Review, a rare conservative who acknowledges the double standard, captured it best: "If the Obamas had a 17-year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families."

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: DougR
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 04:43 PM

There you liberals go again! Cite an article written by a leftie like yourselves and expect that others with a different point of view won't challenge it because of the reputation of the writer.

I'm sure were I to search, I could find a article by Thomas Sowell or Charles Krauthammer or Michelle Malkin (conservative writers all)that refutes the articles by Rich and Dowd. Were I to do so, do you believe I would expect you to accept it merely because I posted it? I don't think so.

Or perhaps, BillH, you only exoected that your fellow liberals would read your post. Was that your intent?

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Bill H //\\
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 04:52 PM

Doug R: Your sarcasm exceeds your wit.   The article was posted for all to read so that, perhaps, some people might get other insights into The Pit Bull w/lipstick.

            Admittedly, the Rich and Dowd pieces are opinions. The News article is exactly that---an in-depth investigative newspiece.

             If you have some articles that refute this why not put them up on line---perhaps you might sway some people. Then again, perhaps not---all depends on those who read the objective news piece and then can compare it with your posts and OpEd pieces I linked to.

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: akenaton
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 04:53 PM

Come on Doug! they're not REAL lefties....I'm a real lefty, and I admire the woman's guts and her comittment to the right way as she sees it. I don't agree with anything she says, but she says it well and obviously believes it.

Please don't confuse Obama and the Democrats with "lefties".....Oh the shame!!!

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Bill H //\\
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 04:54 PM

Alice: Right I should have said "lower 48". Though given Palin and her thinking it seems to be totally devoid of being connected to this planet--so perhaps she really is not on the "mainland" Hell--she can see Russia and now that she has her first passport she is a foreign policy expedrt.


Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Donuel
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 04:55 PM

There you go again Doug,
...So I tell Doug, thanks but no thanks, if I want his opinion I will ask for it.

You know what the difference there is between a hockey coach and a statesman?

One starts bloody fights and the other ends them.


Creating a dangerous deficit, even it it involves shrink wrapped 100 billion dollars in cash dropped into a war zone, will only help conservative administrations since it is one dollar less a progressive administration can use.

So I say let the Republicans have the deficit, the total collapse and the ensuing civil war.

Like a bitter divorce, the wife spends all the money so the husband can't pay child support.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Stringsinger
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 04:57 PM

The Queen of Pork on the Bridge to Nowhere is a blip on the screen. It's another
weapon of mass distraction.

If she doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is, and everybody else does, what does that
say for her qualifications as a VP?

Biden knows what the Bush Doctrine is.

For those who say she is qualified I answer, "In what regard, Charlie?"

Meanwhile there's the petulant old man who wants to run for president.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 05:33 PM

I wish people would not confuse "refute" withe "reject" or "rebut".

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Amos
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 05:39 PM

They are a sham together and separately. They pretend on almost everything.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: DougR
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 06:43 PM

Funny, Stringsinger, I'm a Bush supporter and I didn't know what the Bush Doctrine is. Seems, after time for reflection, the Bush Doctrine is more than Charley Gibson reported. He was referring to the Bush Doctrine of 2004.

I would be interested in learning from you, however, what Obama's qualifications for being president. If it's based on his being a a "community organizer, however, that dog won't hunt. No executive experience there. State senator? Nope. A freshman U.S. Senator? Sorry.

DougR

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: pdq
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 06:54 PM

DougR, the term "Bush Doctrine" seems to be a term passed around between Bush haters and may not really have a set meaning. Somebody did a Google search and found at least seven or eight different meanings, maybe nine. I don't plan to do such a search because I don't care.

It's like tying to correct people about the Neo-conservative author Strauss. He was in most ways a Liberal but shared a strong feeling of US patriotism and a few other concepts with the Right. He was, by all accounts, a brilliant thinker. The current shortened term in common use is a swear word invented in the last eight years to throw at George W. Bush.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Bill H //\\
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 07:48 PM

I have stated earlier---in another place---that this may well have been a "gotcha" question since I doubt that GWB ever considered a "doctrine". Leave alone the meaning of the word. Do you think he knows what the Monroe Doctrine was?

After it was explained to pistol packin mama her response was---as all the others---boiler plate bordering on total incoherence of the topic. After all---here is a candidate who just got a passport, has not met any world leaders, has no experience in foreign policy (other than--as she says--being Russia's neighbor_ and says she will not blink when asked about thoughts on Russia, Georgia, etc;(which I suppose reads---blast 'em).

As to PDQ---I don't know the term you refer to. But, being a Bush supporter, one has to ask you a few questions--just the titles--all else is self-explanatory:

1) Economy
2) Loss of life of our young (and being maimed)
3) Stretching our Armed Forces to the limits that put us at risk at home
4) Constitunial abrogations
5) There are so many more---more than ever in the history of this nation

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Bill H //\\
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 07:49 PM

Don't criticize the typo---"constitutional" OK

BH

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: kendall
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 08:01 PM

Doug, I'll tell you one of O'Bama's qualifications...his IQ is off the charts. Surely you can see what that moron has done to this country in only 8 years? Gas went from $1.50 to over $5.00 a gallon largely due to Bush's illegal war and his deficit spending to pay for it.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: pdq
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 08:13 PM

"(Obama)...his IQ is off the charts"

People trying to sell the Democrat candidate have said the same thing about every one of their guys since (obviously, I mean after) Harry Truman. Adlai Stevenson was actually a real dolt and lazy too. Kennedy, Gore, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, Carter and Johnson all had IQs between 100 and 120. Less the George W. Bush's 125, but less than Clinton's 135. (Hillary is actually smarter at about 145 and George McGovern was brighter than most)

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: heric
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 09:56 PM

I did the search and here it is again. Gibson was flat out wrong for all his snottiness(and Palin was much closer to correct):

From Wikipedia:

"The Bush Doctrine is a *journalistic term* used to describe some foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush, enunciated in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Scholars identify *seven different 'Bush Doctrines,'* including the notion that states that harbor terrorists should be treated no differently than terrorists themselves; the willingness to use a 'coalition of the willing' if the United Nations does not address threats; the doctrine of preemptive war; and the president's second-term 'freedom agenda' as outlined in his second Inaugural Address."

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Amos
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 09:56 PM

PDQ:

Hell, anyone with an IQ over 130 would recognize his is quite high. Look at the intelligent things he says!! Every day!!!!!



A

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Amos
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 10:20 PM

THE BUsh doctrine, as the phrase has been widely used, is the pre-emptive war doctrine. It was battled in the press -- and NOT just the liberal press--extensively. Why pretend just because your heroine was stupid about that it was not a well-established term?

As to Obama's qualifications, DougR, I doub your are as dull as you are pretending to be. He''s an excellent executive, he has a long history of political consensus building, and he has a better vision of the nation as a whole than anyone else on the political scene.
He can think intelligently without knee-jerk reactions, speaks persuasively, and understands how to keep his eye on the important issues rather than go haring off after unimportant ones. Let me point out further that your erstwhile incumbent George has none of these qualifications.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: heric
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 10:30 PM

>THE BUsh doctrine, as the phrase has been widely used, is the pre-emptive war doctrine. It was battled in the press -- and NOT just the liberal press--extensively. Why pretend just because your heroine was stupid about that it was not a well-established term?<

I am speechless. It appears that words, always cheap in the public arena, mean nothing for the remainder of this election.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: pdq
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 10:43 PM

...from heric's post:

"...if the United Nations does not address threats; the doctrine of preemptive war..."

This a statement that we "reserve the right" to start a preemptive war if the United Nations (and one might assume NATO, also) chooses not to act on a real and present danger. There has been no such war in recent years as Iraq is based on numerous UN mandates and the Afghanistan conflict is a NATO action, not a US war.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 14 Sep 08 - 11:51 PM

"his IQ is off the charts"

A chart has TWO ends, the top and the bottom ones... or maybe it wasn't even plotted at all.... :-P


"no such war in recent years as Iraq is based on numerous UN mandates"

The world looks different Down Under - in Australia Little Fascist Johnny's such claims haven't been believed, and indeed there has been much political dissent about agreeing with this nonsense by other political parties (we DO actually have more than 2 sides of 'The One Party System') and private citizens, which eventually eroded Little Fascist Johnny out of office, and even his own seat... The critics seem to believe that no actual numbered 'motion to invade' was ever passed...

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Riginslinger
Date: 15 Sep 08 - 06:54 AM

"The Bush Doctrine" was the most requested search on the MSN web-site for a couple of days after the interview. That would indicate to me that very few people knew what it was. Looking it up, one finds that it could mean any number of things.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: kendall
Date: 15 Sep 08 - 07:45 PM

When I said his IQ is off the charts, I was not talking about anyone but O'Bama.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Riginslinger
Date: 15 Sep 08 - 07:48 PM

In which direction?

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: MAG
Date: 16 Sep 08 - 11:46 AM

The city of Portland Oregon, has 680,000 citizens -- would any mayor of Portland think on that basis he or she was qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?

And dare we question the woman's unmitigated gall to call herself a feminist in certain situations?

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Riginslinger
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 07:10 AM

Only if the mayor of Portland served as governor for a couple of years.

                      Does Palin call herself a feminist?

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Greg F.
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 09:40 AM

Good ol' Douggie-boy; he never changes- facts need not apply.


Geo. Dumbya's "qualifications" in 2000 were that he'd owned and run a baseball team into the ground & failed in the oil business.

You betcha.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Amos
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 09:53 AM

McCain and Palin both, are afraid to speak to journalists.

The Straight talk express has been field dressed by by the choice of Palin.

McCain's own guts appear to have been removed.

— Posted by GOP - Gutless Old Person.
3.September 16th,
2008
7:05 pm Only diehards can defend McCain at this point, He has expanded the goodwill (despite the Iraq war) that some independents like me had towards him. Obama, not my initial choice, has shown a far better judgement. I am truly appalled by McCain's judgement wrt Sarah Palin. Both she & McCain can spin all they want- but all they are doing now is being divisive and not respectful of my intelligence.

— Posted by lampyris
4.September 16th,
2008
7:12 pm "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee…that says, fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me…you can't get fooled again." (George W. Bush, 9/17/2002) Using the words that GWB was supposedly trying to say, if we get a McCain-Palin White House, "Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." What does that say about our society if we are "fooled" three times…..???

— Posted by MJH, Raleigh, NC
5.September 16th,
2008
7:12 pm Uh, David and Gail? Something I've been wondering about: I had heard that, under Palin, everyone in Alaska received about $1,200 a year from the largess of oil company tax increases. How bad a public servant does one have to be to rate only an 80 percent approval rating under those circumstances? Didn't the other 20 percent of Alaskans have anything they needed or wanted to do with the extra cash?

— Posted by CraigieBob
6.September 16th,
2008
7:13 pm McCain, Palin don't talk to reporters. . .remember the present administrations penchant for secrecy? Transparent government is best.

— Posted by brh
7.September 16th,
2008
7:17 pm Alaska is on a different planet, and Palin's experience from up there does not apply down here. They have a $5 billion surplus, and that doesn't count the tens of billions of dollars they've put aside in the "Alaska Permanent Fund" from oil revenues over the years.

Why a $5 billion surplus? Because the oil is on state land, and the state gets royalty payments for it. (There is no income tax or statewide sales tax. The oil companies pay almost all the costs of government — except the additional millions in federal earmarks.)

Palin recently sent out a check of about $1,200 to every Alaskan (children, too) to assist with energy costs. That's in addition to the approximately $2,000 check the state will write to every Alaskan (children, too) later this year. The State of Alaska pays people to live there — and doesn't charge taxes on ordinary people.

Do you think managing such an embarassingly big budget surplus is relevant experience for governing a country that is trillions in debt?

BTW — Palin's "maverick" act of raising taxes on oil companies undoubtedly had the effect of increasing energy costs to those of us in the Lower 48. Do you really think the oil companies didn't pass off Palin's oil tax increase to the rest of us?

No — Alaska is not in the real world, and Palin's experience there does not translate.

— Posted by former Alaskan
(All from comments in NYT)

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Amos
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 10:32 AM

"In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation's founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn't just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.

How is prudence acquired? Through experience. The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can't, what has worked and what hasn't.

Experienced leaders can certainly blunder if their minds have rigidified (see: Rumsfeld, Donald), but the records of leaders without long experience and prudence is not good. As George Will pointed out, the founders used the word "experience" 91 times in the Federalist Papers. Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she'd be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

The idea that "the people" will take on and destroy "the establishment" is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place. "

David Brooks, "Why Experience Matters", NYT

Subject: RE: The Palin archtype and why they need her
From: Donuel
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 10:46 AM

The conservative movement needs inferior people to do their bidding and do as they are told.


Every mispent trillion dollars or lost 500 billion is nearly doubled by interest over decades for that borrowed money.
IT used to be a stratedgy to leave the democrates with no money for their agendas except to pay down the debt.

Now it has gone beyond that has put the nation in peril of no global trust and in peril for the very existence of a prosperous USA for generations

Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society.

What do we have now?

Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrinkwrapped cash "misplaced" in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska's leading politicians are on the take—our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and pharisee that is Tom DeLay—or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war and bailing out a trillion dollars of Wall Street fraud.

But put conservatives like Palin in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities—priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. Conservative's leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job.

A treasonous unconstitutional job, but a professional criminal job none the less.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: DougR
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 06:08 PM

kendall:Need I remind you that those who spend taxpayer dollars are members of the congress. The Executive Branch cannot appropriate money. Who has been in control of the congress since 2006? The Democrats.

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Amos
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 06:16 PM

Actually, DOug R, neither your premise nor your conclusion are quite correct. The Democrats do not yet _control_ Congress, although the hash your lot have been making out of things will soon ensure they do. And the Executive has plenty of power to commit funds.



A

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Greg F.
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 06:45 PM

Doggie is WRONG ????

Shock! Horror!

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Genie
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 08:00 PM

Sarah Palin has, indeed, tried to evoke the memory of her Suffragist and Feminist forebears -- including Hillary Clinton -- in the attempt to make women voters, not just those on the far right, think she represents their interests and supports their causes. She did this very clearly during her RNC speech and in the interview with Charlie Gibson too.

Subject: Frank Rich: The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket
From: Genie
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 08:22 PM

NY Times: Frank Rich: The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket

==============================
September 14, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket
By FRANK RICH

... A week ago the question was: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The question today: What kind of president would Sarah Palin be?

It's an urgent matter, because if we've learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it's that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America's chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election.

No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for "victory," whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.

The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. ...

This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin's acceptance speech. Aligning herself with "a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri" who "followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency," she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity." Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, "run our factories" and "fight our wars" and are "always proud" of their country. As opposed to those lazy, shiftless, unproud Americans — she didn't have to name names — who are none of the above.

There were several creepy subtexts at work here. The first was the choice of Truman. Most 20th-century vice presidents and presidents in both parties hailed from small towns, but she just happened to alight on a Democrat who ascended to the presidency when an ailing president died in office. Just as striking was the unnamed writer she quoted. ... the now largely forgotten but once powerful right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler.

Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, misrepresented Pegler's too. He decreed America was "done for" after Truman won a full term in 1948. For his part, Truman regarded the columnist as a "guttersnipe," and with good reason. Pegler was a rabid Joe McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe ("geese," he called them) were all likely Communists.

Surely Palin knows no more about Pegler than she does about the Bush doctrine. But the people around her do, and they will be shaping a Palin presidency. That they would inject not just Pegler's words but spirit into their candidate's speech shows where they're coming from. ...

... [Even in the 21st C.] the vitriolic animus of right-wing populism preached by Pegler and McCarthy and revived by the 1990s culture wars remains the same. The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay "cosmopolitan" urbanites (as the sometime cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani has it) who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.

The racial component to this brand of politics was undisguised in St. Paul. Americans saw a virtually all-white audience yuk it up when Giuliani ridiculed Barack Obama's "only in America" success as an affirmative-action fairy tale — and when he and Palin mocked Obama's history as a community organizer in Chicago. Neither party has had so few black delegates (1.5 percent) in the 40 years since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies started keeping a record.

But ... the [dominant] emotion that defined the Palin rollout ... is fear — an abject fear of change. Fear of a demographical revolution that will put whites in the American minority by 2042. Fear of the technological revolution and globalization that have gutted those small towns and factories Palin apotheosized.

And ... fear of illegal immigrants who do the low-paying jobs that Americans don't want to do and of legal immigrants who do the high-paying jobs that poorly educated Americans are not qualified to do. No less revealing than Palin's convention invocation of Pegler was the pointed omission of any mention of immigration, once the hottest Republican issue, by either her or McCain. Saying the word would have cued an eruption of immigrant-bashing ugliness, Pegler-style, before a national television audience. That wouldn't play in the swing states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, where Obama already has a more than 2-to-1 lead among Hispanic voters. (Bush captured roughly 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.)

... The same Republicans who attack Democrats for being too P.C. about race now howl about sexism with ... abandon ... . The same gang that once fueled Internet rumors and media feeding frenzies over the Clintons' private lives now express pious outrage when the same fate befalls the Palins.

But the ultimate hypocrisy is that these woebegone, frightened opponents of change, sworn enemies of race-based college-admission initiatives, are now demanding their own affirmative action program for white folks applying to the electoral college. They want the bar for admission to the White House to be placed so low that legitimate scrutiny and criticism of Palin's qualifications, record and family values can all be placed off limits. Byron York of National Review, a rare conservative who acknowledges the double standard, captured it best: "If the Obamas had a 17-year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families."

The cunning of the Palin choice as a political strategy is that a candidate who embodies fear of change can be sold as a "maverick" simply because she looks the part. ... Palin is not only the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket, but she is young, vibrant and a Washington outsider with no explicit connection to Bush or the war in Iraq. That package looks like change even if what's inside is anything but.

How do you run against that flashy flimflam? You don't. Karl Rove for once gave the Democrats a real tip rather than a bum steer when he wrote last week that if Obama wants to win, "he needs to remember he's running against John McCain for president," not Palin for vice president. Obama should keep stepping up the blitz on McCain's flip-flops, confusion, ignorance and blurriness on major issues (from education to an exit date from Iraq), rather than her gaffes and résumé. If he focuses voters on the 2008 McCain, the Palin question will take care of itself.

Obama's one break last week was the McCain camp's indication that it's likely to minimize its candidate's solo appearances by joining him at the hip with Palin. There's a political price to be paid for this blatant admission that he needs her to draw crowds. McCain's conspicuous subservience to his younger running mate's hard-right ideology and his dependence on her electioneering energy raise the question of who has the power in this relationship and who is in charge. A strong and independent woman or the older ward who would be bobbing in a golf cart without her? The more voters see that McCain will be the figurehead for a Palin presidency, the more they are likely to demand stepped-up vetting of the rigidly scripted heir apparent.

But Obama's most important tactic is still the one he has the most trouble executing. He must convey a roll-up-your-sleeves Bobby Kennedy passion for the economic crises that are at the heart of the fears that Palin is trying to exploit. The Republican ticket offers no answers to those anxieties. Drilling isn't going to lower gas prices or speed energy independence. An increase in corporate tax breaks isn't going to end income inequality, provide health care or save American jobs in a Palin presidency any more than they did in a Bush presidency.

This election is still about the fierce urgency of change before it's too late. But in framing this debate, it isn't enough for Obama to keep presenting McCain as simply a third Bush term. Any invocation of the despised president — like Iraq — invites voters to stop listening. Meanwhile, before our eyes, McCain is turning over the keys to his administration to ideologues and a running mate to Bush's right.

As Republicans know best, fear does work. If Obama is to convey just what's at stake, he must slice through the campaign's lipstick jungle and show Americans the real perils that lie around the bend.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
                ==========================

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: GUEST,heric
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 09:00 PM

"Andrée McLeod, the activist who filed the FOIA request, said Wednesday evening that Palin should have known better than to conduct state business using an unsecured e-mail account.
"If this woman is so careless as to conduct state business on a private e-mail account that has been hacked into, what in the world is she going to do when she has access to information that is vital to our national security interests?" she asked.

McLeod's Anchorage attorney, Donald C. Mitchell, said Palin refused to comply with a public records request in June to divulge 1,100 e-mails sent to and from her personal accounts, citing executive privilege.

"There's a reason the governor should be using her own official e-mail channels, because of security and encryption," the attorney said. "She's running state business out of Yahoo?""

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Riginslinger
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 09:49 PM

"McCain and Palin both, are afraid to speak to journalists."


                   That's because the journalists that make it to the national forum are pre-programed to destroy creative thought, and they don't even know it. Of course, that's what they get paid for.
                   Did you see that buffoon Charles Gibson?

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Bill H //\\
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 10:08 PM

Assuming, of course, that someone like Palin is capable of creative thought that might encompass more than her personal vendettas.

As to Charlie Gibson--seemed to me like a damned good interviewer. Made her look like a lady ---albeit a fairly brainless one--other than her ability to BS and speak in generalities that signified---as Shakespeare once said---"....signifyiing nothing".

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Amos
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 10:41 PM

Palin? A creative thought?

She's a dittobox and a spear-carrier.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Amos
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 10:59 PM

Maureen's adventure in Palinlandia:

Carly Fiorina, the woman John McCain sent out to defend Sarah Palin and rip anyone who calls her a tabula rasa on foreign policy and the economy, admitted Tuesday that Palin was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.

That's pretty damning coming from Fiorina, who also was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.

Carly helpfully added that McCain (not to mention Obama and Biden) couldn't run a major corporation. He couldn't get his immigration bill passed either, but now he's promising to eliminate centuries of greed on Wall Street.

The Wall Street Journal reported that McCain was thinking about taking Palin to the U.N. General Assembly next week so she can shake hands with some heads of state. You can't contract foreign policy experience like a rhinovirus. To paraphrase the sniffly Adelaide in "Guys and Dolls," a poy-son could develop a cold war.

The latest news from Alaska is that the governor keeps a tanning bed in the Juneau mansion. As The Los Angeles Times pointed out, when Palin declared May 2007 Skin Cancer Awareness Month in Alaska, the press release explained that skin cancer was caused by "the sun and from tanning beds."

I sautéed myself in Sarahville last week.

I wandered through the Wal-Mart, which seemed almost as large as Wasilla, a town that is a soulless strip mall without sidewalks set beside a soulful mountain and lake.

Wal-Mart has all the doodads that Sarah must need in her career as a sportsman — Remingtons and "torture tested" riflescopes, game bags for caribou, machines that imitate rabbits and young deer and coyotes to draw your quarry in so you can shoot it, and machines to squish cows into beef jerky.

I talked to a Wal-Mart mom, Betty Necas, 39, wearing sweatpants and tattoos on her wrists.

She said she's never voted, and was a teenage mom "like Bristol." She likes Sarah because she's "down home" but said Obama "gives me the creeps. Nothing to do with the fact that he's black. He just seems snotty, and he looks weaselly."

Ten Obama supporters in Wasilla braved taunts and drizzle to stand on a corner between McDonald's and Pizza Hut. They complained that Sarah runs government like a vengeful fiefdom and held up signs. A guy with a bullhorn yelled out of a passing red car: "Go back to the city, you liberal Communists!"

At gatherings in The Last Frontier, pastors pray for reporters, drilling evokes cheers and Todd Palin is hailed as a guy who likes to burn fossil fuels.

I had many "Sarahs," as her favorite skinny white mocha is now called, at the Mocha Moose. "I've seen her at 4 a.m. with no makeup," said manager Karena Forster, "and she's just as beautiful."

I stopped by Sarah's old Pentecostal church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, and perused some books: "The Bait of Satan," "Deliverance from PMS," and "Kissed the Girls and Made them Cry: Why Women Lose When They Give In." (Author Lisa Bevere advises: "Run to the arms of your prince and enter your dream.")

In Anchorage Saturday, I went by a conference conducted by James Dobson's Focus on the Family and supported by Sarah's current church, the Wasilla Bible Church, about how to help gays and lesbians "journey out" of same-sex attraction.

(As The Times reported recently, in 1995, Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues she had seen "Daddy's Roommate" on the shelf of the library and did not approve. The Wasilla Assembly of God tried to ban "Pastor, I Am Gay" by Howard Bess, a liberal Christian preacher in nearby Palmer.)

Anne Heche's mother, Nancy, talked about her distress when her daughter told her she was involved with Ellen. Jeff Johnston told me he had "a struggle" with homosexuality "for a season," but is now "happily married with three boys." (Books for sale there included "Mommy, Why Are They Holding Hands?" and "You Don't Have to Be Gay.")

I covered a boisterous women against Palin rally in Anchorage, where women toted placards such as "Fess up about troopergate," "Keep your vows off my body," "Barbies for war!" "Sarah, please don't put me on your enemies list," and "McCain and Palin = McPain."

A local conservative radio personality, Eddie Burke, who had lambasted the organizers as "a bunch of socialist, baby-killing maggots," was on hand with a sign reading "Alaska is not Frisco."

"We are one Supreme Court justice away from overturning Roe v. Wade," he excitedly told me.

R. D. Levno, a retired school principal, flew in from Fairbanks. "She's a child, inexperienced and simplistic," she said of Sarah. "It's taking us back to junior high school. She's one of the popular girls, but one of the mean girls. She is seductive, but she is invented."...

NYT

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Donuel
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 11:24 PM

Moral dilemma

Sarah Palin's missing personal emails have reportedly been hacked.

I don't like the Bush administration of recording all phone and internet connections or peo[le at the passport office abusing their access to personal information, so I would be a hypocrite to look at Palin's emails.


But is it different since she is slated to be President one day?

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: CarolC
Date: 18 Sep 08 - 12:24 AM

That Eddie Burke guy also announced the cell phone numbers of the protest organizers on his radio show, and the organizers have since received death threats.

I find it interesting that people can say that Obama's supporters are hurting his chances for being elected because they question Palin's qualifications for the office she's seeking, while they remain silent about McCain/Palin supporters making death threats against Obama supporters.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: GUEST,heric
Date: 18 Sep 08 - 12:35 AM

It's different because she deliberately commingled her state e-mails with her personal e-mails with the stated intent to avoid subpoenae for disclosure. SHE initiated litigation based on the subject matter of those e-mails (scientific results of polar bear studies) and STILL thought she could hide them. Don't feel guilty, D.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: GUEST,heric
Date: 18 Sep 08 - 12:42 AM

(She created her own mess with bad faith (and amateurish) conduct.)

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: DougR
Date: 18 Sep 08 - 01:32 AM

Amos: The Democrats do not control the congress? Surely you jest. Methinks you are merely hallucinating. Who is the Speaker of the House? (Neoliberal Nancy Pelosi). Who is the Majority Leader in the Senate? (Neoliberal Harry Reid). The Republicans are in the minority in both the House and the Senate. If you don't believe me ...aw, what the hey.

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: CarolC
Date: 18 Sep 08 - 01:41 AM

On the subject of the hacked emails... there's not much to see (at least as far as is known at this time). After the password was posted, someone changed the password, and the hackers were only able to save two of the emails before that happened. After the password was changed, someone posted the new password, but a flood of people accessing the account shut it down for 24 hours, during which time the account was deleted. It's possible that someone was able to save more emails than just the two, but none of the accounts I read had any information about whether or not that was done.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Donuel
Date: 18 Sep 08 - 01:53 AM

Palin makes a poor National Security CHOICE



She was conducting the official government of Alaska, including her selection as a VP candidate on .....get ready for this.....
her free Yahoo email account.

It has just been hacked and diseminated on the web.

Will the Patriot Act be used to arrest the hackers as terrorists?
Next to the Bush national wire taps this will grow wings.




I don't know this Paul Burke.

2 Death threats against Obama was reported coming from Michigan where the child sex ads against Obama are televised.

Subject: RE: BS: Frank Rich on Palin
From: Genie
Date: 18 Sep 08 - 01:59 AM

Doug R, methinks thou dost not comprehend the way Congress worketh (or thou pretendest not to). : )
But that's really a topic for another thread.

Genie