The juiciest bits from Joe McGinniss’s soon-to-be published Sarah Palin expose are starting to leak out. I totally hope this is all true. Via The Atlantic:
One-Night Stand with Basketball Player Glen Rice
Palin allegedly slept with future NBA star Rice when he was a University of Michigan student playing at the Great Alaska Shootout. The one-night stand supposedly happend in Palin’s sister Molly’s dorm room at the University of Alaska. Palin was a TV sports reporter at the time. And married. “I remember Sarah feeling pretty good that she’d been with a black basketball star,” a source told the National Enquirer, according to The Daily Mail. (The supermarket tabloid often limits its online content.)
The National Enquirer reports that Rice confirmed the affair to McGinniss. And The Washington Post’s Cindy Boren helpfully notes, “because keeping score is important, Michigan lost, 79-64, to Arizona in the semifinals. The Wolverines finished third, beating Alabama-Birmingham. Rice was named to the all-tournament team.”
Cocaine
McGinniss says Palin snorted coke off a 55-gallon oil drum while she and Todd were on a snowmobiling trip with their friends. He says Palin’s husband Todd was a frequent cocaine user.
I’m fascinated by the films of British documentarian Nick Broomfield. One of the pioneers of the “You get a documentary plus ME!” school in films like Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, Kurt and Courtney and Biggie & Tupac, the button-pushing Broomfield’s almost libelous directing techniques are both hilarious and riveting. I would never miss one of his films, which can be good sleazy fun (there is of course, another side of Broomfield’s work in socially-conscious films like Ghosts, Behind the Rent Strike and Battle for Haditha which I’m not addressing here).
One of Broomfield’s oft-used narrative tropes that I enjoy the most is when he knocks on the door of a subject’s home and when they aren’t there or refuse to talk to him, this is seen as evidence that they are hiding something. But he never comes right out and says that (libel laws being what they are) he usually just asks some form of this question pointedly right after we’ve seen a door slammed in his face or a security guard leading him away, “But what is ____ trying to hide?”
Nick Broomfield can be a gleefully immoral documentarian, which is why I was so tremendously pleased to find that the latest target of Broomfield’s patented style of hit and run filmmaking is none other than that snowbilly grifter herself, Sarah Palin! Broomfield’s Sarah Palin—You Betcha! is set to join Werner Herzog, Jessica Yu and Morgan Spurlock’s new films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
The film is supposed to examine Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, AK in detail and promises interviews with Palin’s parents, political associates and former brother-in-law. Broomfield told the Daily Mail:
“People are frightened to talk. Wasilla makes Twin Peaks look like a walk in the park. It’s a devout evangelical community – 76 churches with a population of only six thousand.”
And how many meth labs?
I’m just sorry that Broomfield wasn’t able to get El Duce on camera talking about Sarah Palin. (On a side note, about 20 years ago at a party for the Beastie Boys in Los Angeles, El Duce cheerfully told me that he had raped a friend of mine’s dog).
Below, in a clip released on YouTube, Nick Broomfield confronts Sarah Palin in public, in his signature Nick Broomfield style:
Sarah Palin would like to meet Margaret Thatcher when she’s in England next month. Palin told the Sunday Times:
“I am going to Sudan in July and hope to stop in England on the way. I am just hoping Mrs Thatcher is well enough to see me as I so admire her.”
Hey, not so fast there, snowbilly grifter! Palin’s plans for something to rub off on her (or at least a photo op that will drive Michele Bachmann green with envy) will be most likely be “thwarted” with the excuse that Baroness Thatcher is seldom seen in public anymore and in poor health, as Wintour and Watt report at The Guardian’s website:
It would appear that the reasons go deeper than Thatcher’s frail health. Her allies believe that Palin is a frivolous figure who is unworthy of an audience with the Iron Lady. This is what one ally tells me:
“Lady Thatcher will not be seeing Sarah Palin. That would be belittling for Margaret. Sarah Palin is nuts.”
It’s unclear why she thinks photos of bin Laden’s corpse will scare suicidal terrorists.
Who says she’s capable of thinking at all? Certainly I’ve seen no public evidence that Mrs. Palin is able to engage in critical thinking. But who cares about Sarah Palin anyway? I don’t and I’m bored with writing about her, but her tweet is one of the lamer, dumber examples of a Republican lemon-face trying oh so obviously and desperately to spin the killing of the most wanted terrorist in history against President Obama.
Sarah Palin: The incredible shrinking woman. I will admit that watching her flounder for attention now that the bloom is off and the public is starting to tune her out has been kinda fun to watch…
Irish comedy genius Graham Linehan, speaking certainly with MY full approval, tweeted the following to his 94,000+ Twitter followers:
#Nailed it.
Someone who follows him rejoined “Show us your tits first” and I think this is about where the level of discourse around the Republicans should be, which is to say, pointing at them and laughing.
But where was I? Oh yeah:
Jealous much, Republican’ts?
Of course they are—they can barely stand it—and it’s such a delightful farce to watch these craven shits lashing out like the angry losers they truly are. Even some die-hard Fox News viewers are (probably) starting to suspect what everyone else has known all along: THESE PEOPLE ARE SCURRILOUS FUCKS.
How many times does it take being exposed to the obviously insincere Eric Cantor, for instance, before even a complete idiot would intuit “This fuckin’ guy doesn’t believe a damned word he’s saying. He’s lying through his capped teeth.”
But anyway, back to the whole killing Osama bin Laden thing. The single stupidest, lowest IQ conservative conspiracy theory came from—ya don’t say—batshit crazy racist cat lady Pamela Geller, she of the brain-damaged Atlas Shrugs blog. (Read it if you dare, but as you do, consider the fact that this complete LUNATIC is a frequent commentator on Fox News! As if drivel like THIS IDIOCY has any merit or is in any way worthy of respect or discussion? Seriously Roger Ailes? Seriously??? Pamela Geller believes any damned thing she wants to believe, as long as it fits into her twisted prejudices and irrational foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of Obama, Democrats and Muslims. It would be pointless for me to give her insipid, dimwit conspiracy theories any space here since she’s so mean-spirited, repulsive and beneath contempt. I mean… yuck!).
Steve M., writing at my new favorite political bookmark, No More Mister Nice Blog had this to say about the myriad shameful, embarrassing ways the Republicans are comporting themselves. I think he makes a powerful case here for who America’s real enemies are:
Republicans are responding to this the way they respond to everything: by seeking to divide America and undermine Democrats and liberals. They do this for the same reason the scorpion stings the frog in the fable: it’s their nature. They will continue trying to divide America until we wake up and realize that they hate America—or at least they hate any America in which we don’t turn over all the power to them. They’ll undermine and weaken that pluralistic America until we finally recognize their disloyalty and marginalize the dividers.
We should have expected them to try to deny Barack Obama credit for the fact that bin Laden was located and killed on his watch, and to try to shift the credit to George W. Bush. We should have expected them to use the incident to reopen the debate about torture.
Obama took SIXTEEN HOURS to make up his mind about Bin Laden mission
Barack Obama kept military commanders hanging by declaring he would ‘sleep on it’ before taking 16 hours to give the go-ahead to raid Bin Laden’s compound….
Really? The mission was successful, and this is the straw they grasp at? A delay of less than a day?
Let me put that in context. It took 1,306 DAYS for George W. Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld for his sheer inability (or willful refusal) to cope with the chaos of Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, and for his stubborn insistence on a level of troop strength inadequate to quell the chaos and restore order—that’s 1,306 DAYS from the first reports of looting in Iraq (April 12, 2003) through the worst of the insurgency and to the day (November 8, 2006) Rumsfeld stepped down.
Maybe this scurrilous nonsense is coming from people at the far margins of the right. Or maybe it’s not—maybe it’s being injected into the debate by people close to the centers of mainstream Republican power, because they can’t bear to have a country that’s not divided, with powerful Democrats widely despised and mistrusted. In any event, the nonsense is being regurgitated at such sites as CNN contributor Erick Erickson’s RedState and the well-connected Pajamas Media. It’s part of the mainstream of Republican commentary. It’s a disgrace from a disgraceful party.
Americans tonight are united in celebration and gratitude. God bless all the brave men and women in our military and our intelligence services who contributed to carrying out the successful mission to bring Bin Laden to justice and who laid the groundwork over the years to make this victory possible. It’s a testament to the hard work and dedication of these brave Americans who relentlessly hunted down our enemy.
This is a victory for the American people, for the victims who were heartlessly murdered on September 11 and in Al Qaeda’s other numerous attacks, and for all the peace-loving people of the world.
May God bless our troops and our intelligence services, and God bless America!
They say that there is no such thing as bad press, but when your publicist is getting called out for how inept they are, it’s hardy something that can be reclassified as a media triumph is it? A shitty publicist only has one function and that is to make the individual or company that hired them look poorly. It’s what you might call “counter intuitive” to have a bungler handle your PR. The public questions your judgment for hiring them.
I mean, hey, if making you look like a fucking idiot is what you’re paying them for, then you win, I suppose… but get a load of the preposterously self-defeating tauntstweets that Sarah Palin’s “cyber messenger” prodigy, Rebecca Mansour, came up with. This is the best media strategy money can buy? [Note to Mrs. Palin, I’ll take over your Twitter feed and Facebook FOR FREE! Email me, let’s talk!]
You’ll get more with sugar, than you will with shit, as my mother used to say, but if all Mansour has on offer for the media is the same two-day old bread, what should be expected of them? People are getting really bored with Sarah Palin. I know I am. I can barely be bothered to read about her anymore, let alone write something snarky. She burned out way faster than I thought she would. Her shtick has just gotten too damned repetitive (and predictable) lately to be able to squeeze any humor out of it. Everything there is to be said about her has already been said a hundred million times.
I laughed to myself the other day when I saw longtime Republican pollster/spinmeister Frank Luntz on one of the cable news outlets—probably Fox News, but I can’t recall—giving some GOP talking points a dry run.
Not that he was exactly trying anything new, or innovating. In the context of the budget battle, Obama’s speech and the DOA “Ryan plan” etc., Luntz merely trotted out the by-now familiar threadbare Republican shuck and jive routine about how American families understand that you can’t live beyond your means and that the only remedy for that would be to tighten belts, stop living on credit cards and pay off debts. And the Ryan plan is going to achieve this in Washington by blah blah blah. I don’t even know why he bothered to finish his thought, he just should have said “blah, blah, blah” and everyone still would have understood what exactly he meant, anyway. Who cares? Who gives a shit? We’ve heard this all before, ten thousand times… Enough.
It’s too predictable. Too rote. Too by the numbers. Too old-fashioned. Shtick. The Republican orthodoxy is over-exposed. Transparently obvious. People are sick of hearing it, and when they are forced to listen to it over and over and over again ad infinitum on Fox News and elsewhere, what might have sounded like simple down home “common sense” when Ronald Reagan said it, just sounds like disingenuous bullshit in 2011. Bullshit being dished out, in most instances by mean-looking old white guys on the tee-vee talking about lowering the nation’s prospects, en masse, of living out old age with dignity, in favor of still more tax cuts for the top 1%. The problem with this simplistic focus group-tested “homespun” GOP messaging stuff is that no one buys it anymore except for the very least sophisticated characters amongst us, i.e. the real Republican base: The Dummies.
Republicans need some new material. Badly. With Donald Trump in the race it’s going to take a turn for the “even dumber.” It’s bad not just for them, but for everybody. (Everybody except Obama… and Donald Trump, of course, who is playing everyone, or thinks he is. He wins no matter what!)
A short item that ran on Wonkette, I think, sums up just how stupid the “Republican message” is getting to sound to… the rest of us, when the latest gloss on their talking points goes something like this… Quoting from Team Sarah:
The $60 billion that the Republicans wanted to cut from spending (simple cuts, not “reductions in rates”) was to the Federal Budget what 1/2 of a French Fry would be to a Big Mac Value Meal (medium size). That’s right, 1/2 of a fry. So why did the Dems manage to get the Republicans to cut that down to $38 billion? Do you realize what that amounts to in the same Value Meal? 1/4 of a French Fry. That’s the equivalent amount of calories in the Big Mac Value Meal that the $38 billion represents in terms of government spending. Think about that the next time you get a Value Meal (of any kind) at the fast food drive-thru.
I certainly shall!
Sarah Palin herself has always seemed “one fry short of a Happy Meal” to me—a whole fry, mind you, not half of one—but even accounting for the bottomless pit appetite for the regurgitation of ludicrously simplistic talking points on the right, this is a new, groan-worthy, anti-intellectual low. Even coming from her blinkered camp. Why wouldn’t someone conclude that the Teabaggers are idiots after reading the kinds of… uh… fucking idiocy they espouse?
I mean who can take a metaphor about a Value Meal seriously?
Below, pro-labor demonstrators nearly drown out Sarah Palin as she screeches nonsense addressing the Tea party faithful some dummies in Madison, WI, on April 15th. She tells them to fight for America, to take their country back and blah, blah, blah…
The mighty American Jesus blog brings us a new Sarah Palin viral video. Smug secular lefties will mock it. Conservatives will present it as an authentic example of a non-Caucasian’s enthusiasm for SP (and THAT it is!). This could be the start of a brand new bag for Mama Grizzly:
Today is Ash Wednesday- the beginning of the season of Lent. It is a time when we reflect on our own humanity and recognize our need for the Chosen One. To signify this, we use ashes and put the mark of the Chosen One on our foreheads. That mark, of course, is a large capital “P” for Palin! If your pastor/priest tries to draw a cross on you, just expose him as the socialist that he is and find a new church!
We try not to give in to stereotypes here, but if you thought that an African-American lady preacher would be the one to promote Sarah Palin as part of a Biblical prophecy- then kudos to you.
(The first part is a little slow, but things really get going around the 5 minute mark)
First of all, my point, in case anyone didn’t get it, was contained in the bold text (”...the genie is all the way out of the bottle for this type of violence, for them, too.”). I’m saying that the potential for a blowback against the folks propagating the majority of this hate talk is rather ripe. If you piss in the wind, don’t be surprised when it comes back to hit you in the face. Then poor Eric Fuller went and proved my point about 3 hours later, to his shame. His story is the very embodiment of my argument in the post. The guy should have been arrested, but it’s sad
I hardly see any evidence there of a “full-throated, hate-filled rant,” either, as I was accused of in the comments by “Metzger’s id,” someone who obviously did not read what I actually wrote. (Steve Doocey IS one of the stupidest people on television. He’s a fucking idiot and I will not back down from this position).
Commenter moflcky scores when he asks “Do you think it’s worse now than it was in the 60s/70s with SDS, the Weather Underground, the SLA, the Black Panthers, the Klan and the race riots?”
This is a very good point and worth thinking about. However, I think contrasting the difference of then vs today is best served by comparing *the media* that exists today vs. what we had at that time. With just three TV networks, I think the center could hold very easily back then. In the realm of “public opinion” it was much easier to achieve a broad general agreement 40-50 years ago and so there was, by and large, a very strong “centrist” majority. The GOP of Nixon’s era has very little to do with the GOP of today, they’ve moved far, far to the right of the positions they held in the 70s. And the Democrats of today are pretty much standing in the same place, ideologically speaking, as most of the Republicans were at that time. Nixon, it can be argued, was to the left of Bill Clinton, in many respects.
The political elites of both parties moved significantly to the right in the past 40 years, even if the general public did not. As the politicians shifted rightwards, the population, or some of the population, anyway, reacted by going in the other direction and eventually—sometime in the 90s—modern progressive politics is born (just as the Great Society and Roe vs. Wade saw an awakening of the religious right/Moral Majority as a political force in the late 70s).
You could say it was “the dialectic” or “zeitgeist” in motion or even just a “generation gap”—I refer you to Spiral Dynamics or the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe. I think both get it right. The generation up and coming looks at the Tea party and largely sees a bunch of ignorant, cranky old white people. As the younger citizens of the United States grow up, the folks who are attending these Tea party rallies will be dying off. And as they do, something else will happen that no one can anticipate at the present time. That’s just the way it works.
The Weather Underground didn’t get face time to argue their beliefs on MSNBC in 1970, although admittedly they might today, depending on the ratings potential. I don’t think they had ANY influence on the general public. The same cannot be said of the radical right Tea party-types and folks like Tony Perkins, Bryan Fisher, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and the rest of them.
There is a huge chasm between some misguided grad students who most people were appalled by, and few supported, and an obviously doomed Republican Senate candidate telling her supporters that if they don’t win at the ballot box, they’ll win with guns? This isn’t some group of hippies who appear to be freaks to 99% of the population talking, this is a lemon-faced church lady-type who faced off against the Senate Majority leader and raised a record amount of cash (most from from outside of her state).
William Ayers was brought up in the comments. I find bringing up Bill Ayers, specifically, in this context (and nearly all others) to be utterly meaningless and tiresome. How is he relevant in 2011 or is this situation comparable? Can someone please remind me?. I’ll say it again: the biggest difference between the Weather Underground in 1969 and the Tea party in 2011 is that the Weather Underground never had their own cable news outlet (The Weather Channel?) and 15% of the dumbest and least educated portion of the population did NOT follow or sympathize with their ideals.
Imagine the Democrats were running Bernardine Dohrn for the Senate? Wouldn’t THAT would be the flip-side of the GOP running Sharron Angle? WHO is the equivalent to Sharron Angle on the mainstream Left? (There is NO nuance in advocating “Second Amendment remedies! It’s not a statement open to that much wiggle room in the interpretation!)
Make no mistake about it, this is what MORE THAN HALF of the country is hearing when we have to listen to this Tea party bullshit: These folks want MINORITY RULE.
They will not get it, obviously, without violence.
Well, we know that Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Glenn Beck and their irresponsible, hateful rhetoric had nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the shooting in Tucson, because… well, they (and Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Michelle Malkin and the rest of the right-wing punditacracy clown parade) told us so. Right? Right??
But what of the people who were actually shot, but survived, or who were eyewitnesses to the tragedy? What do they think? Who do they blame for the sorry state of the toxic political climate that led a complete lunatic like Jared Loughner to seek to inflict his “Second Amendment remedies,” on them, as per the innocent, blameless Sharron Angle?
Well, can’t say it’s much of a shock to report that at least one of the shooting victims, Eric Fuller, a 63-year-old disabled veteran who had campaigned for Gabrielle Giffords in her reelection campaign last Fall, DOES blame Palin, Beck and Angle. Fuller, who was shot in the knee and wounded in the back, told Democracy Now that “It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target. Their wish for second amendment activism has been fulfilled.” In remarks Fuller prepared in advance for the interview, he added “Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled—senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic-fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even nine-year-old girls.”
In my book, Mr. Fuller’s opinion holds more water than Palin’s, Beck’s, Angle’s, Limbaugh’s and the whole of the Fox News staff’s (especially Steeve Doocey, who is a blithering idiot) combined. He took a bullet, two, in fact, so he’s got a right to his opinion. He earned it with his own blood. Suck on that, Sarah Palin!
What’s pathetically ridiculous about the entire argument from the right that the specific words of these specific people had no effect on this matter because Loughner is so very obviously batshit crazy is that this ISN’T the first incident like this in recent memory. It’s (at least) the second (if not the third: the name Richard Poplawski ring a bell?).
Why are so few people in the media talking about what happened when Glenn Beck decided to make the tiny Tides Foundation into a fearsome component of his “the progressive movement wants to destroy America with their evil Socialism” conspiracy theories last year? It HAS happened already that a mentally unbalanced person has decided to fight the vast-leftwing conspiracy that Beck and others subscribe to and propagate, with violence. Just seven months ago, a bank-robber out on parole, Byron Williams, en route to murder the staff at the Tides Foundation, opened fire on Oakland police with a 9mm handgun, a shotgun and a .308-caliber rifle with armor-piercing bullets. Williams told told authorities that he wanted to foment a revolution by “killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.” His mother told the San Francisco Chronicle that her son had been watching Fox News and was angered by “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.” Williams thought that the Tides Foundation was part of a conspiracy in which the BP oil spill was a deliberate act of sabotage masterminded by George Soros and progressives.
(Self-described “progressive hunter,” Williams told a reporter that Beck “blew [his] mind.” Who I am to disagree?)
Where will all of this end? Who knows, but what happens when the people who make a living riling up dumb-ass, poorly-educated white people to hate and fear people who are different than they are or who think differently than they do, face a blowback themselves? Sooner or later, a left-wing crazy probably is gonna come after one of them. It wouldn’t stretch the imagination of anyone to figure that somewhere out there in this vast nation of 300 million people, there is a foaming at the mouth far-left nutcase (or a “radical centrist” for that matter) who feels that what’s really destroying America is assholes like Beck, Palin and Sharron Angle and who thinks killing them is the answer to our nation’s problems.
I have a sickening, sinking feeling that this isn’t the end of this, for lack of a better term, “partisan violence,” but just the warm-up acts. There is something eerily Weimar Republic-esque about the sad state of present day America and it’s extremely disturbing to attempt to draw this type of behavior to its logical conclusions. Before anyone writes in to say that it’s only the right-wing who is using the violent talk, the “reload” nonsense and the brain-damaged conspiracy theories, I get that. I know that. What I’m trying to point out here is that I think the genie is all the way out of the bottle for this type of violence, for them, too.
Even if the right has always been the spiritual home to the racist and cryptofascist fringe, from the KKK to the John Birch Society to today’s Teabaggers, there are crazy people all across the political spectrum. The next time—and there is going to be a next time—it might be a former member of the American middle class who has lost his home or pension who comes gunning after a Republican. The next shooter might come from the ranks of the 99ers. The next cold blooded killer could be a radical environmentalist. The next political assassin might be someone whose child died because their insurance company didn’t pay for a new medical treatment or ...?
This toxic political climate in America today is a direct or indirect consequence of a small number of politicians and pundits on the far right calling those who they disagree with “evil.” Does anyone with half a brain, really dispute that? Then something awful happens, like what happened in Tucson. And then there is more blame. Then the momentum of the bad craziness builds in some lone-wolf lefty lunatic and this energy reemerges with someone on the right getting hurt. And then it will start again. Back and forth, back and forth.
When, not if, the next politician, government official or TV news pundit who is killed turns out to be someone on the conservative side, Palin, Beck, Angle, Limbaugh, Michael Savage and the idiots at Fox News will have no one to blame but themselves.
UPDATE: Mr. Fuller was arrested today for disorderly conduct after allegedly making a threat to Tucson Tea party spokesman Trent Humphries during a “town hall” TV show taping for ABC. According to sheriff’s deputies at the scene in Tucson, Fuller took a photo of Humphries and then said, “You’re dead.”
I didn’t think events would prove my point this quickly—and regret that they have—but there it is.
Take a moment to be utterly flabbergasted at how inappropriate and opportunistic Sarah Palin’s self-serving “blood libel” statement is regarding her supposed influence on the AZ shooter, Jared Loughner…
I know people are dumb, especially the vast majority of folks who call themselves Republicans, but they can’t be that dumb (or can they?) to think she’s doing anything more than “acting” statesmanlike or pretending to give a shit – especially when she’s such a bad fucking actor. The whole thing’s so amateurish. Her speech is just rambling nonsense. And they couldn’t even work out how to stop the teleprompter reflecting in her glasses. Whenever she even attempts empathy, she comes across like a glove puppet. An inarticulate glove puppet, at that.
She can’t even say “God bless America” as if she means it! Those three words are the cornerstone of her schtick!
