Monthly Archives: September 2008

‘He’s One Of Them – She’s One Of Us’

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Elections 2008, John McCain, Media, Sarah Palin

MSNBC’s Barack Brigade—Chris Matthews (said Obama sends a chill up his leg), Norah O’Donnell (like Campbell Brown, she too is not working with much) and wild man Keith Olbermann—attempts to speak over MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan whenever he opens his mouth. Fortunately, the man writes up a storm. In the process, Buchanan manages to say it all about the Palin factor and human nature:

“Why did the selection of Sarah Palin cause a suspension of all standards and a near riot among a media that have been so in the tank for Barack even ‘Saturday Night Live’ has satirized the infatuation?

Because she is one of us – and he is one of them.

Barack and Michelle are affirmative action, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard Law. She is public schools and Idaho State. Barack was a Saul Alinsky social worker who rustled up food stamps. Sarah Palin kills her own food.

Michelle has a $300,000-a-year sinecure doing PR for a Chicago hospital. Todd Palin is a union steelworker who augments his income working vacations on the North Slope. Sarah has always been proud to be an American. Michelle was never proud of America – until Barack started winning.

Barack has zero experience as an executive. Sarah ran her own fishing fleet, was mayor for six years and runs the largest state in the union. She belongs to a mainstream Christian church. Barack was, for 15 years, a parishioner at Trinity United and had his daughters baptized by Pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons are saturated in black power, anti-white racism and anti-Americanism.

Sarah is a rebel. Obama has been a go-along, get-along cog in the Daley Machine. She is Middle America. Barack, behind closed doors in San Francisco, mocked Middle Americans as folks left behind by the global economy who cling bitterly to their Bibles, bigotries and guns.

Barack has zero foreign policy experience. Palin runs a state that is home to anti-missile, missile and air defense bases facing the Far East, commands the Alaska National Guard and has a soldier-son heading for Iraq.

Barack, says the National Journal, has the most left-wing voting record in the Senate, besting Socialist Bernie Sanders. Palin’s stances read as though they were lifted from Reagan’s 1980 “no pale pastels” platform. And this is what this media firestorm is all about.”

[Snip]

Those who dare not speak honestly will omit the following: When you and I look at the Obamas we see accusing, blaming eyes. This, even though they are better off than we and have had opportunities we’ve not had because we’re the official “oppressors” and they’re the sanctioned “oppressed.”

Unrelated: Palin must muster a fresh speech; she keeps regurgitating her Convention address while campaigning. The lines sounded stale the first time she reused them.

Update II: Sliming Sarah (& On Feminism Vs. Individualism)

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections 2008, Gender, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, John McCain, Journalism, Sarah Palin, War

CNN’s Campbell Brown has been a woman possessed even since Palin appeared on the political scene. As I write, she is “investigating” how Sarah Palin’s Pentecostal faith and the practices of her church may impact her political outlook. (The segment was evidently aired earlier today. It didn’t cause Blitzer such apoplexy.)

By logical extension, does Brown—who is not working with much, if you know what I mean—wish to imply that hanging around a Black Liberation Church for 20 years—a church that states its members “are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization”—might poison a presidential candidate’s worldview?

At the time, she and her ilk denied that being a proud, long-time member of a separatist, white-hating “Black-Value-System” community had any bearing on Barack’s worldview.

Update I (September 10): INDIVIDUALISM VS. FEMINISM. our long-time, valued reader, young Alex (see his comments below), seems quite confused lately, inundating the blog with dogmatic comments asserting Sarah Palin’s feminist bona fides.

Sarah Palin is an individualist, not a feminist. Fulfilling one’s potential doesn’t make one a feminist. Sarah Palin is not a woman’s issues liberationist; but an individualist; a doer. She sees a problem in her community and she sets about solving it. She’s an individual doing her best, as she sees it, to improve herself and the community she lives in. That seems to be her calling. She is not doing this qua woman, but as an individual. Since when is fulfilling one’s potential always a manifestation of a feminist mindset when a woman is concerned?

I suspect that the conservative prattle about sexism, which Alex has correctly derided, has confused our friend. Alex is right about the stupidity of conservatives adopting feminism rather than articulating Palin’s achievements in the language of individualism.

Does the fact that I wish to fulfill my potential as a writer make me a feminist? No; I’m an individualist through and through.

As to the gender roles in the Palin household: In the early years of their marriage, the very manly first Dude supported his wife and their children. Sarah Palin then got involved with the school—an involvement that led to a career. As her career evolved, the family organization changed. Is this feminism at work? Hardly! These are individuals interacting and completing one another at different stages of their lives.

I’d like one day to retire my brilliant husband and see him cook for me and play guitar all day. Does that make me a feminist? Au Contraire; that’s the give and take between mature, loving individuals.

Update II (Sep. 11): The Silly Sex continues to sound off over Sarah Palin. This time a Salon.com feminist evinces what in our household is known as the “V” Factor. “V” stands not for victory, but for the inability of a woman to transcend her genitals. Quite common among distaff America. Here are the histrionics of a uterus named Rebecca Traister:

“Palin’s femininity is one that is recognizable to most women: She’s the kind of broad who speaks on behalf of other broads but appears not to like them very much. The kind of woman who, as Jessica Grose at Jezebel has eloquently noted, achieves her power by doing everything modern women believed they did not have to do: presenting herself as maternal and sexual, sucking up to men, evincing an absolute lack of native ambition, instead emphasizing her luck as the recipient of strong male support and approval. It works because these stances do not upset antiquated gender norms. So when the moment comes, when tolerance for and interest in female power have been forcibly expanded by Clinton, a woman more willing to throw elbows and defy gender expectations but who falls short of the goal, Palin is there, tapped as a supposedly perfect substitute by powerful men who appreciate her charms. …”

“The pro-woman rhetoric surrounding Sarah Palin’s nomination is a grotesque bastardization of everything feminism has stood for, and in my mind, more than any of the intergenerational pro- or anti-Hillary crap that people wrung their hands over during the primaries, Palin’s candidacy and the faux-feminism in which it has been wrapped are the first development that I fear will actually imperil feminism. Because if adopted as a narrative by this nation and its women, it could not only subvert but erase the meaning of what real progress for women means, what real gender bias consists of, what real discrimination looks like.”

Update II: Sliming Sarah (& On Feminism Vs. Individualism)

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections 2008, Gender, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, John McCain, Journalism, Sarah Palin, War

CNN’s Campbell Brown has been a woman possessed even since Palin appeared on the political scene. As I write, she is “investigating” how Sarah Palin’s Pentecostal faith and the practices of her church may impact her political outlook. (The segment was evidently aired earlier today. It didn’t cause Blitzer such apoplexy.)

By logical extension, does Brown—who is not working with much, if you know what I mean—wish to imply that hanging around a Black Liberation Church for 20 years—a church that states its members “are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization”—might poison a presidential candidate’s worldview?

At the time, she and her ilk denied that being a proud, long-time member of a separatist, white-hating “Black-Value-System” community had any bearing on Barack’s worldview.

Update I (September 10): INDIVIDUALISM VS. FEMINISM. our long-time, valued reader, young Alex (see his comments below), seems quite confused lately, inundating the blog with dogmatic comments asserting Sarah Palin’s feminist bona fides.

Sarah Palin is an individualist, not a feminist. Fulfilling one’s potential doesn’t make one a feminist. Sarah Palin is not a woman’s issues liberationist; but an individualist; a doer. She sees a problem in her community and she sets about solving it. She’s an individual doing her best, as she sees it, to improve herself and the community she lives in. That seems to be her calling. She is not doing this qua woman, but as an individual. Since when is fulfilling one’s potential always a manifestation of a feminist mindset when a woman is concerned?

I suspect that the conservative prattle about sexism, which Alex has correctly derided, has confused our friend. Alex is right about the stupidity of conservatives adopting feminism rather than articulating Palin’s achievements in the language of individualism.

Does the fact that I wish to fulfill my potential as a writer make me a feminist? No; I’m an individualist through and through.

As to the gender roles in the Palin household: In the early years of their marriage, the very manly first Dude supported his wife and their children. Sarah Palin then got involved with the school—an involvement that led to a career. As her career evolved, the family organization changed. Is this feminism at work? Hardly! These are individuals interacting and completing one another at different stages of their lives.

I’d like one day to retire my brilliant husband and see him cook for me and play guitar all day. Does that make me a feminist? Au Contraire; that’s the give and take between mature, loving individuals.

Update II (Sep. 11): The Silly Sex continues to sound off over Sarah Palin. This time a Salon.com feminist evinces what in our household is known as the “V” Factor. “V” stands not for victory, but for the inability of a woman to transcend her genitals. Quite common among distaff America. Here are the histrionics of a uterus named Rebecca Traister:

“Palin’s femininity is one that is recognizable to most women: She’s the kind of broad who speaks on behalf of other broads but appears not to like them very much. The kind of woman who, as Jessica Grose at Jezebel has eloquently noted, achieves her power by doing everything modern women believed they did not have to do: presenting herself as maternal and sexual, sucking up to men, evincing an absolute lack of native ambition, instead emphasizing her luck as the recipient of strong male support and approval. It works because these stances do not upset antiquated gender norms. So when the moment comes, when tolerance for and interest in female power have been forcibly expanded by Clinton, a woman more willing to throw elbows and defy gender expectations but who falls short of the goal, Palin is there, tapped as a supposedly perfect substitute by powerful men who appreciate her charms. …”

“The pro-woman rhetoric surrounding Sarah Palin’s nomination is a grotesque bastardization of everything feminism has stood for, and in my mind, more than any of the intergenerational pro- or anti-Hillary crap that people wrung their hands over during the primaries, Palin’s candidacy and the faux-feminism in which it has been wrapped are the first development that I fear will actually imperil feminism. Because if adopted as a narrative by this nation and its women, it could not only subvert but erase the meaning of what real progress for women means, what real gender bias consists of, what real discrimination looks like.”

‘Who Is Minding The Store, As We Party In St. Paul?’

Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

So asks Pat Buchanan in another thoughtful column, “Distant Drums At Sarah’s Party.” Here are excerpts:

“U.S. troops have crossed into Pakistan to attack Taliban and al-Qaida units in the privileged sanctuary of the tribal areas just across the border from Afghanistan. Have we just thrown a rock into the biggest hornet’s nest on earth?

How will the Pakistani government and people react to this U.S. incursion into their country to fight a war their own army has been reluctant to wage? How will the tribal peoples react? Will the weak new democratic regime, united only in its hatred of deposed President Musharraf, fall?

What is the future of this Islamic nation of 170 million, with its five-dozen nuclear weapons, that was once America’s great ally in South Asia, but is now seething with anti-Americanism?

In Afghanistan, the Taliban move closer to the capital Kabul as hardly a day goes by without U.S. armed forces being charged with the accidental killing of Afghan women and children. Is this even a winnable war, after seven years of fighting? And, if so, at what cost?

While the convention hears claims of victory in Iraq and an early return of U.S. troops, there are reports the Nouri al-Maliki regime, in collusion with Iran, wants the Americans out to settle accounts with the U.S.-sponsored Sunni militias and the Kurds over who rules in Baghdad and Kirkut.

Is the end of America’s long and costly war in Mesopotamia to be an Iraq incorporated into a Shia crescent led by Tehran?

Arnaud de Borchgrave reports that Israel, having supplied Mikheil Saakashvili’s army with weapons and training prior to his invasion of South Ossetia, had hoped to use Georgian airfields to fly strikes against Iran. The Russians are said to be furious and considering new military aid to Syria.

Now one reads of Dutch intelligence agents, who had infiltrated Iran’s nuclear program to sabotage it, being withdrawn, as the Dutch believe a U.S. strike on Iran may be imminent.

Vice President Cheney is in Tbilisi promising $1 billion in new aid, as Prime Minister Putin of Russia is asking why, if this aid is humanitarian, it is being brought into the Black Sea in U.S. warships.

In Moscow, President Medvedev and his foreign minister are talking of a Russian sphere of influence like the one the United States has demanded for two centuries with its Monroe Doctrine – a sphere from which all foreign military blocs and foreign troops are to be excluded.

This is a direct challenge to administration and neocon plans to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. John McCain may declare, “We are all Georgians now!” – but, are Americans, or Europeans, truly willing to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia to keep Josef Stalin’s birthplace under a regime led by an erratic hothead who launched what may be the dumbest war in history, which he lost within 24 hours?”