As readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi. No one, save for Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, comes close to his ability to hone in on the very essence of a political issue and then lacerate the guilty parties with the flick knife of his prose. What an amazing writer. It’s all A game with Taibbi, but he’s especially on point when he writes about Sarah Palin. Sample some of the goods from his most recent column at True/Slant:
Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming?
BWAHAHAHA. Fox News accidentally shows a copy of the Palin parody “Going Rouge” while discussing said Right Wing Idiot. Baby Jesus is laughing too!
AlterNet picked up this pretty spot-on paragraph from WhiskeyFire. Damn hilarious.
The most unbelievable thing about Going Rogue, by the author-function “Sarah Palin,” is that it’s supposed to be self-serving. The problem a self-serving narrative about Sarah Palin confronts is that it’s about Sarah Palin, whose entire life, it appears, consists of worse and worse attempts to create self-serving narratives explaining away bigger and bigger fuck-ups. Going Rogue’s burden is that it must claim to be the definitive, encyclopedic explanation, the final excuse, for a long history of failure begat by failure; it’s an epic of failure, if you will, and if the goal here is some kind of ultimate vindication, well, it is monumentally unsuccessful. Going Rogue is, at bottom, the story of every one of Sarah Palin’s projects ending in grotesque catastrophe; it is only self-serving in the sense that these catastrophes either prove benign or turn out to be some other schlub’s fault. If everything I knew about Sarah Palin came from this book (and basically it does), I would say her life has been like a play in which a deus-ex-machina descends at the end of every act to bestow peace and harmony, except the deus forgot to put on pants and everyone’s just standing around going “uhhhh…” and then the lights go out and the scene changes.
It’s my favorite review yet!
As mentioned earlier on Dangerous Minds, OR Books will soon be releasing as a possible antidote to Palin’s own Going Rogue, “Going Rouge: An American Nightmare.”
Sarah Palin has many faces: hockey mom, fundamentalist Christian, sex symbol, Republican ideologue, fashion icon, ?
Spotted today in NY Mag, an update on the certainly-fascinating David Morrill:
What would you suggest as a fair price for a Sarah Palin?
This brings back memories of National Lampoon’s Bored Of The Rings!
Editors from the progressive magazine The Nation are pulling together a book to be released the same day as Sarah Palin?
I’m an admitted sucker for the “Hitler responds” meme culled from Downfall. Jump on this one while it’s still fresh. Hitler’s not gonna be blurbing Rogue, that’s for sure!
Max Blumenthal, writer for The Nation and The New York Times, and senior writer for The Daily Beast, is out making the promotional rounds for his provocatively-titled bestseller, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party.
In it, Blumenthal hacks through what The New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg calls the “dank forests of American Christianism.” Yesterday, he sat down with—and withstood—Joe Scarborough (see above), who grills Blumenthal on everything from birthers to death panels.
Blumenthal was also a recent guest of Terry Gross. You can listen to the interview here. In it, Blumenthal calls out such lesser known, behind-the-curtain players as the late RJ Rushdoony and his “financial angel” Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., who, after emerging, “saved,” from a mental institution, declared, “my goal is the total integration of biblical law into everyday lives.”
Beyond his work as a writer, though, Blumenthal’s produced a number of videos—including the “banned from YouTube” vid, Feel The Hate. You can watch that here, but you should also check out In The Land Of Queen Esther (below), where Blumenthal explores the possible Sarah Palin connection to the biblically-inspired Queen, and how Alaska’s crown-like shape might betray its ultimate purpose: serving as an end-of-days, post-rapture refuge for everyone in the lower 48.
Bonus: Max Blumethal’s Gun Show Nation!
The Nation excerpts Max Blumenthal’s new book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party. (Blumenthal is the journalist that uncovered the video of Sarah Palin being anointed by Kenyan “witch hunters.”)
The jacket copy makes it sound like a pure winner. Might have to order this one:
Republican Gomorrah is a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal and sordidmess from the dark heart of the forces that now have a leash on the party. It shows how those forces are the ones that establishment Republicans-like John McCain-have to bow to if they have any hope of running for President. It shows that Sarah Palin was the logical choice of a party in the control of theocrats. But more that just an expose, Republican Gomorrah shows that many of the movement’s leading figures have more in common than just the power they command within conservative ranks. Their personal lives have been stained by crisis and scandal: depression, mental illness, extra-marital affairs, struggles with homosexual urges, heavy medication, addiction to pornography, serial domestic abuse, and even murder. Inspired by the work of psychologists Erich Fromm, who asserted that the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture of personal crisis has defined the radical right, transforming the nature of the Republican Party for the next generation and setting the stage for the future of American politics.
The Nation’s excerpt focuses on the damage done to developing minds by batshit insane Republican home-school programs, focusing on school shooter (and Crowley/OTO enthusiast) Matthew Murray.
A few miles down the road from Colorado Springs [a home to James Dobson’s Focus on the Family], in the quiet bedroom community of Eldredge, a deeply disturbed young man named Matthew Murray followed the unfolding debacle at New Life Church [once under the stewardship of Pastor Ted Haggard] with an interest that bordered on obsession. Murray, a sallow-faced, bespectacled 24-year-old, had been indelibly scarred by a lifetime of psychological abuse at the hands of his charismatic Pentecostal parents. Murray’s mind became crowded with thoughts of death, destruction, and the killings he would soon carry out in the name of avenging what he called his “nightmare of Christianity”...
Murray lurched to the polar opposite edge of his parents’ fanatical faith, replacing their Bible as his inspiration with the writings of Aleister Crowley, a flamboyant, self-proclaimed Satanist. The fin de si?ɬ
Like a bad case of Republican herpes, Sarah Palin is the gift that keeps on giving…
Hopefully Sarah Palin realizes she’s been invited to Hong Kong almost certainly as a practical joke.
CLSA, the Asia-focused broker who invited Mrs. Palin as keynote speaker for an Asian investment conference, is well known for their cheeky takes on investment research.
In the past, they’ve polled Asian fortune tellers for index targets, hired anime cartoonists to draw Japanese research, and generally love to push the boundaries between entertainment and analysis. They are a real research firm, it’s just that they love to sprinkle in some hilarity every now and then as a smart marketing gimmick.
Sarah Palin is this year’s big laugh for them. Her invitation as keynote speaker in Hong Kong is so ridiculous that its absurdity can’t be accidental.
...and the predictable loony results.
Kenneth Thomas writes:
Hey Dangerous Minds - after frustrating discussions with family members about why health care reform is needed, I decided to make a 3-minute video describing how no reform equals a bad future for me and millions. Well, I posted the video to Sarah Palin’s FaceBook page, to try and show people the views of one, simple, hard-workin’ American and what I got was an anti-gay comment, skewed views on Christianity, and lots and lots of paranoid-driven misinformation. It’s a great example of how disinformation spreads like a virus that can’t be controlled after a while.
HURRAY, BRAVO and THANK YOU, Roger Ebert for saying this so beautifully! REPUBLICANS ARE ASSHOLES!
The notion of “universal health care” does not mean “socialized medicine.” It means just what it seems to mean. America is the only developed nation on earth that does not provide it. Why does it inspire such virulent opposition? Who is behind it? It is opposed mostly from the far right, whose enthusiasm seems to be encouraged by financial support from some (not all) insurance companies. Those companies have priced American insurance out of the reach of millions.
One result has been that our national life expectancy ranks 42nd among all developed nations. We spend more on medical care that any other nation, and get less than 41 of them. These figures are pretty clear.
I don’t pretend to know if this information is available to the angry people who have shouted down their representatives at town hall meetings. I think I do know where their anger is fed. The drumbeat of far-right commentators fuels it. Their agenda is not health care, but opposition to the Obama administration. It takes the form of demonizing Obama. It uses the tactic of the Big Lie to defame him him. An example of this is the fiction, “he wants to kill your grandmother.” Another is the outrageous statement that he is a racist who hates white people. A person capable of saying that is clearly unhinged and in the grip of unconditional hatred.
“Death Panels.” A most excellent term by Roger Ebert
What happens when a journalist runs afoul of shrill Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly and his marauding army of right wing viewers? Rick Perlstein found out when Newsweek published his think piece on Sarah Palin’s future in the Republican Party. Even before O’Reilly’s show ended that night, Rick’s inbox filled up with hateful and ignorant emails. Rick’s original piece is here and his post-Factor essay on the results is here. Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
I loathe Sarah Palin probably about as much as Peggy Noonan does. The mere sight of her renders me apoplectic. The sound of her voice makes my flesh crawl. Even reading something that she said makes me want to throw up. I can’t stand her. But that doesn’t mean I want to see the last of her. I’m not masochistic, although I’m hoping she runs for President in 2012 and that she wins the nomination.
Why? Because it’s the fastest way to end the Republican party as a national political force, as The Daily Beast’s Michelle Goldberg writes:
Ever since she pranced into the limelight last summer, Sarah Palin has been making liberals like me crazy. She embodies almost everything loathsome about the modern Republican Party?
