Kemstone's Journal

Right up until this past week, I’d been looking at Michele Bachmann’s candidacy for president as nothing more than an entertaining joke. The woman who famously suggested that the media look into members of Congress to determine if they’re pro- or anti-American, who says that climate science must be wrong because carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, who thought that the American Revolution began in New Hampshire, could never actually be president.

But then the Republican debate happened, and all at once the entire mainstream media began taking her seriously. I didn’t watch the debate, but I can easily imagine how a combination of low expectations, innate self-confidence, and contrast with the other boring candidates would have helped her stand out greatly to anyone watching. She is not your typical Republican, and nowadays that’s a huge advantage and one that the media was sure to take notice of.

And once the media takes your candidacy seriously, the rest of the country soon follows. Now Michele Bachmann will no longer be seen as Palin 2.0 but a serious contender for the Republican nomination and therefore the White House. Her history of crazy and/or false comments will be swept to the side, and anyone who brings such things up will be dismissed as a left-wing smear-merchant. “Forget her absurd crusade against the U.S. adopting an international currency—you should be focusing on what she’s saying now.” And as her poll numbers rise and the campaign cash continues to flow, she’ll surround herself with people skilled in the art of making even the most insane candidates sound reasonable.

Michele Bachmann is not insane (though she certainly often sounds that way), and she’s not Sarah Palin (i.e. she’s neither too dumb nor too lazy to run a serious presidential campaign). She is, however, a true believer—as Christian as they come. Read Matt Taibbi’s excellent piece on Bachmann to get a true sense of this. This is a woman who married her husband Marcus because she claims that she, a friend of hers, and Marcus all had a vision from God at the same time. She’s a fierce opponent of gay rights and is as pro-life as they come. These factors will ensure that she’ll have a significant portion of the social-conservative vote locked up from the very beginning, and her uniqueness as a candidate among a field of weak Republicans could easily push her over the top.

It all comes down to whether or not there are still enough sane, pragmatic Republicans left in the party to recognize that Mitt Romney—in spite of his complete lack of solid convictions about anything—is still their best bet to beat Obama in the general election. In 2008, conservatives held their noses and picked McCain because they thought in the end he stood the best chance of winning independents, so it’s not unlikely the same thing will happen again (in which case Bachmann is a shoe-in for VP). But Romney is so weak, so boring, so detested by the Republican base and such a blatant and transparent flip-flopper that his stench might be too much for Republican primary voters even with their noses held. Add to that the widespread (yet obviously false) perception that the reason Republicans lost in 2008 was that their candidate wasn’t right-wing enough, and Michele Bachmann at the top of the ticket doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.

Nothing I’ve written so far is the least bit controversial, but where I know most people will disagree with me is that I believe Michele Bachmann actually stands a very good chance of defeating Barack Obama in the general election. Why? Enthusiasm. Bachmann excites her base. Obama deflates his.

I won’t go into the standard litany of reasons as to why the progressive base is disenchanted and frustrated with Obama—it’s enough to merely restate that the central promise of his campaign was “not to the play the game better” but to “put an end to the game-playing” and in reality all he’s done for the past two and a half years is play the same old Washington games. Rather than stand up and use the power of the presidential bully-pulpit to forcefully articulate a vision for the country and make the (very easily made) arguments in favor of progressive policies, he’s tried to have it both ways on every issue and make compromise after unnecessary compromise with Republicans whom he must know are not negotiating in good faith.

He could secure re-election right now by simply refusing to play these games with the Republicans and proposing instead a massive jobs bill whereby the government will hire millions of Americans and put them to work re-building the nation’s infrastructure (which is in great need of re-building). The Republicans will scream and cry about more excessive spending, but since they’ve been screaming and crying about nothing else for the last two years their objections won’t have so much force. President Obama could make the case that this kind of spending is the best possible kind of spending for the economy, as it puts money directly into the hands of middle class Americans, giving them more purchasing power and thus getting the wheels of the economy rolling again. The American people, most of whom are not wed to a political ideology and who vote solely based on their own financial situation will see one party pushing a bill to create jobs and another party blocking it. Such a bill would undoubtedly fail in the Republican-controlled House, but the legislative failure would be a political victory, and voters would go to the polls next November determined to keep the guy who fights for them in the White House and kick out everyone standing in his way.

But sadly, Obama is operating according to a completely different political calculus. He believes that he’s got the liberal and progressive vote locked up, so all he has to do is drift far enough to the right to secure enough independents to push him over the top. As such, he believes he can compromise with Republicans to look as centrist and moderate as possible at the expense of the middle class. Instead of job creation, this is what we’ll get from Obama:

1- He’s already announced a draw-down of troops in Afghanistan, but one so small-scale and slow that even after three years we’ll still have twice as many troops over there as we did when he took office. That means more middle class kids remaining in harm’s way while billions of treasury dollars continue to be flushed down the toilet on an unwinnable war, forcing us to look elsewhere to cut the deficit.

2- There will be modest cuts to Medicare. Paul Ryan laid the groundwork for an all-out assault on the program that provides health care to seniors, and since Obama has never met a Republican plan that he didn’t want to meet half-way, we can be sure he’ll reach some “reasonable” compromise and weaken the program without completely destroying it (which he will call “strengthening” it).

3- The Social Security retirement age will be raised. In spite of the fact that over 80% of Americans don’t want their representatives to make any cuts to Social Security benefits whatsoever, it’s a foregone conclusion in Washington that cuts will be made and raising the retirement age is how to do it. The AARP has folded on this, and even members of the progressive caucus are saying they’re open to the idea. No one in Washington is going to fight on behalf of 80% of Americans on this issue, so average workers can look forward to a few extra years of work, courtesy of Obama’s political calculation.

4- There will be massive cuts to Medicaid. While many Democrats are at least willing to voice their opposition to this, because it’s politically dangerous to cut Medicare and Social Security too drastically, Medicaid will be the “sacrificial lamb”, as Jay Rockefeller put it. The money’s got to come from somewhere, so why not the program that provides health-care for people who can’t afford it? If you count children, Medicaid pays for the health-care of about 25% of Americans, so one out of every four of us can expect less help with our medical bills, thanks to Obama’s re-election strategy.

I could be wrong, but I see this as a disastrous strategy, one that is almost guaranteed to lose Obama the White House. But Obama believes that progressives have nowhere else to go, and if someone like Michele Bachmann is his opponent, he should easily cruise to victory.

But when an incumbent is running, most voters don’t even consider the opposition candidate and base their decision solely on whether or not they want to re-hire the guy they currently have. If they see that not only is the economy still struggling, that they’re still wrestling with their private insurance companies, their friends are still unemployed, and on top of that they’re now getting less help from the government with their medical bills and they’ll have to work a few extra years before retirement, they won’t care that they’ll be hiring Michele Bachmann—who would certainly be far worse for them—they’ll only be thinking of firing Obama.

I know it seems crazy. And I admit that I just can’t conceive of Michele Bachmann as President of the United States—I can’t picture her addressing the nation from the oval office no matter how hard I try—but then I think of all those conservatives in 2008 who found the idea of a black man in the White House equally inconceivable.

As Bachmann rises to become the nation’s top Republican the idea will gradually seem less and less absurd, and by the time she’s standing across from Barack Obama at the first presidential debate people who might consider her a joke now will have had plenty of time to grow used to the idea of her as president.

In his final act of self-destruction, President Obama will probably instruct his campaign not to attack Bachmann at all, not to call her out on her lies, her religious fundamentalism, or her nutty ideas, and to instead treat her respectfully and agree with her as much as possible. That’s the truly centrist thing to do, and Obama thinks it’ll help him win independents. He never really punched at McCain even when he chose Sarah Palin to run as his VP, and the Obama campaign’s failure to call her out on her idiocy lent her a large degree of legitimacy (temporary though it was). In the same respect, his campaign will legitimize Michele Bachmann.

In the end, most Americans vote on personality, and Bachmann’s is just more appealing. Unlike Obama, she is a fighter. She has strong convictions, and while every one of those convictions might be wrong, dangerous, or outright crazy, she is at least willing to fight for them. Obama is weak, he looks weak, he sounds weak, and he’s governed weakly throughout his whole first term. Bachmann looks and sounds strong, and voters like strength.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong about all of this, but unless we start taking Bachmann seriously we’ll continue laughing at and dismissing her right up until she’s sworn in as president and we’re left with mouths agape, wondering how the hell that happened.

So much has been said and written about the absurdness of the reaction of the right-wing media to the shootings in Arizona that it’s almost useless to add my voice to the choir. But because this is so important I’d feel remiss if I didn’t just briefly register my own strong agreement.

Whether it’s Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly or anyone else on a long list of right-wing pundits talking about the shooting, they’re all basically making the same two claims which they fail to notice are blatantly inconsistent with one another:

1- We can’t blame those who engage in violent political rhetoric for the shootings because the sole responsibility lies with the shooter and not his potential influences.

2- Anyone who claims that political rhetoric played a part in the shootings is grossly irresponsible because their finger-pointing might lead to violence.

Which is it, Sarah? Do words have consequences or don’t they? Bill—when is political speech just a free exercise of the First Amendment and when is it “flat-out reprehensible”?

Apparently you have zero responsibility when you call someone a “baby killer” dozens of times on national television and someone actually goes out and kills the person, but anyone who calls you out on that is terribly irresponsible because they’re fomenting violence? Apparently when anyone on the right talks about “second amendment remedies”, being “armed and dangerous”, or says that conservatives should, “not retreat, instead reload” those words couldn’t possibly have any real-world consequences, but if anyone suggests that they might, those words could have terrible consequences indeed.

I’m not saying Loughner was actually influenced by the rhetoric alluded to above (the best possible explanation so far is that he took his inspiration from the Sovereign Citizens movement), but to flat-out exclude the mere possibility that he was and immediately pounce on anyone making that suggestion is the epitome of intellectual dishonesty.

Of course these people had a game plan all along. They knew that it was only a matter of time before some right-wing nut actually took all these violent metaphors seriously and started shooting people. They had to think of their response ahead of time.

The proper, human response would be to say, “We don’t believe that our words played a part in this tragedy, but we have to acknowledge the possibility—however small—that they did. It makes us sick to think that our choice of rhetoric was in any way related to this, and while we don’t think it was we recognize that we just can’t be sure. And for that reason, we would like to offer our sincere and profound apologies to the victims and their families. We will do our best to avoid using language that might be misconstrued as a call to violence in the future, and call upon all of our colleagues to do the same.”

Instead, their response is twofold. First, claim complete and total innocence of any responsibility and fiercely express righteous indignation at anyone who suggests otherwise. Second, do everything you can to disavow the shooter and make your audience believe that he was actually a left-wing nut-job (which in this case they’re doing by grasping at whatever straws they can: he smoked pot, he read a book by Marx, etc.) and so if anyone influenced him to commit these violent acts it was radical leftists.

The right-wing media blames the left. The mainstream media blames both sides in a desperate effort to come across as neutral. Cenk Uygur does a great job of laying out the case that both the violent rhetoric and the violence itself comes almost exclusively from the right:

Your conservative, Fox News-watching friends and family members have already been imbued with the idea that political rhetoric is completely harmless unless it comes from the left. It should be incredibly easy to point out the blatant contradiction in this claim. Granted they can usually summon enough powers of cognitive dissonance to prevent your point from registering, but this one might be too obvious even for them. Either political rhetoric has consequences or it doesn’t. You can defend one of those positions, but not both.

I know this is ancient history already, but I’ve been meaning to comment on it for days and more important stuff got in the way. I promise this isn’t as unimportant as it will seem at first.

So all the way back at the beginning of last week, Sarah Palin sent out a tweet regarding the plans to build an Islamic mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero:

Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate

Totally ignoring the substance of what she was saying, the Twitterverse apparently responded with resounding laughter over the completely made-up word “refudiate”. Palin then responded with another tweet trying to mitigate the damage from the first:

Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real

Seeing as how “refute” makes no sense in that context, that didn’t really help. Finally she offered up this gem:

“Refudiate”, “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!

Immediately all of the focus shifted to the absurdity of Palin comparing herself to Shakespeare (not to mention the choice of “wee-wee’d up” as an example of a great new word). That is indeed hilarious, but it’s not the real issue. I’m going to give her a pass on the surface and condemn her on the substance.

For one thing, “Refudiate” is actually a great word. It even applies to what I’m doing in this blog post. It’s a combination of “refute” and “repudiate”—two things that often go together. So I will refute the idea behind Palin’s original tweet and repudiate her for saying it—thus refudiating her.

Here’s the thing: Why would a mosque a couple of blocks from Ground Zero “stab” any reasonable person “in the heart”? The tacit claim made in this statement is that the same people behind the 9/11 attacks are the people who want to build a mosque near Ground Zero—that all Muslims are guilty of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Refutation: Not true at all. Are all Christians guilty of every crime ever committed by Christians throughout history? I didn’t think so. Are all Tea Partiers guilty of racism because some of them hold racist signs? I didn’t think so. So how can you claim that all Muslims are guilty of what a small segment of radicalized, violent Muslims decided to do? If an entire group of people bears full responsibility for what a small segment of that group does, then the whole Tea Party is racist and all Christians have a lot of blood on their hands.

Repudiation: Shame on you, Sarah. You’re contributing to the already massive level of intolerance on the part of Americans towards Muslims. By equating the word “Muslim” with “Terrorist” you’re inviting further violence against Muslims, and possibly even an attack on the mosque they’re building near Ground Zero—which, incidentally, will be home to a perfectly mainstream, peaceful branch of Islam that would no doubt condemn the actions of the 9/11 terrorists, as would the vast majority of all Muslims around the world. What you said is divisive and ignorant and you owe all Muslims an apology.

But thanks for the great new word! Now whenever someone says something both factually and morally wrong, we can refute and repudiate them at the same time! Refudiation! Got to celebrate it!

I don’t feel like blogging at all today, but I’m going to bang out one quick post in order to stick to my resolve of blogging every day. I’ll just quickly repeat this blogger’s warning that the Christian Right is far from marginalized, and that it in fact stands ready to take control of the Republican Party and possibly even the country in 2012:

Every day in media markets across the nation, their media identify right wing views and apocalyptic warnings with “the true, uncompromised Christian worldview” for millions of voters. Conservative talk radio paranoia goes out on the same stations as sermons pleading with the audience to come to Christ. Listeners are told, year after year, that Christians are under siege and threaten with suppression, that liberals and the Democrats are socialists, that if they don’t support politically conservative positions disaster is imminent.

We’re clearly moving in this direction already. What most of us fail to understand is that the “Christian Right” is not some amorphous entity but actually a very concrete, organized political machine that could even be thought of as its own political party–a party within a party.

Three of the biggest names in the Republican Party–Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Mike Huckabee, are all far more closely aligned with the Christian Right than the establishment Republican Party. And given just how unpopular the establishment is right now (albeit rightly so) and how rapidly the view is taking hold that America is some kind of battlefield between good Christians and the evil, socialist government, it’s not extremely unlikely that one of these people will win the Republican nomination in 2012. And given how unpopular Obama is and how much support he loses every day especially from his own base, it’s not out-of-the-question that one of these people will become president.

I highly doubt Palin or Bachmann could win a general election, but Huckabee has enough surface charm to possibly pull it off. He’s a likable enough guy for most sane Americans to look past his evangelical views and vote for him without fully understanding what they’ll be getting.

If the Christian Right takes over the White House, we can expect a legislative agenda including a strong push to outlaw abortion in all cases including rape and incest, continued war with “Muslim countries”, intelligent design being required learning in schools, and possibly laws against purely religious crimes including adultery, homosexuality, or sacrificing sick or defective oxen to the Lord (Deuteronomy 17:1).

There is a lot to get discouraged about when it comes to the oil spill, but America’s pathetic response is probably the most discouraging thing of all. Peter Daou wrote an excellent piece last week on the Huffington Post about how the oil spill is the biggest opportunity we’ve had in a generation to push back against the green-bashers who enabled the oil companies to wreak their environmental havoc upon us but that nobody is going after them. If there was ever a time for the adherents of an ideology—environmentalism—to launch of a big fat fucking “We told you so” at the adherents of another ideology—green-bashing—now is the time. And since my blog is mostly a bunch of substance-free ranting anyway, I suppose this is as good a platform as any to do it.

Seriously you guys—we told you so. You said that offshore drilling was safe, that we needed to extract every drop of oil from the earth’s crust and that the potential environment damage was negligible. Look at the news. Who was right and who was wrong? Go ahead and defend your position now.

What can you say except that we need oil to fuel our cars and jet-planes and that renewable energy sources won’t do the job so oil drilling is necessary? Well, is it necessary? Or is it just that oil companies have so much influence over the government that we don’t spend what’s required to switch to alternative fuel sources and instead keep paying for fossil fuels? Sure, maybe we can’t currently supply enough energy to power our country on clean energy sources alone, but with enough research we might be able to, especially if we’re also willing to make some sacrifices regarding our energy use. If we devoted as much money and resources to developing new energy technologies and strategies for sustainability, I think we could pull it off. We put men on the moon, didn’t we? Whatever happened to Obama’s proposal for an “Apollo-style” program to switch America to clean energy?

Now I spend a lot of time bashing Obama—and I will again in just a moment—but I have to give credit when credit is due and he did come out this week and used the oil spill to justify the push for clean energy. I usually do like what the president says. It’s what he does that pisses me off. In front of the cameras he admits that there’s no safe way to drill for oil in extremely deep water, but behind closed doors he still lets oil companies start new drilling projects.

If this spill won’t be a wake-up call for America in terms of our feelings regarding energy and the environment, then I don’t think we ever will wake up. Clearly, while we had the technology to drill at those depths, we never had the technology to prevent a catastrophe if something went wrong. So we let them drill, and what did we get out of it? BP certainly got their fair share of profits, and when all is said and done they might very well still be standing just like Exxon after the Valdez spill. But what did the American people get? Obtaining some of our oil from domestic sources reduced the price of gasoline by a few cents at most. The average family probably saved a few bucks a year. So for a few bucks a year we’ve allowed entire ecosystems to be destroyed, livelihoods to be ruined, tourism-based economies to be crushed, and cities to be placed in jeopardy due to the loss of hurricane surge-protecting marshlands. I won’t even mention the horrific deaths of countless animals—as we already know the opposition can’t be moved by that.

We should be rubbing this in their faces, but instead we continue to let Rush Limbaugh dictate the terms of the debate. “It’s the environmentalists’ fault!” he cries. What’s it going to take to get these people to acknowledge that they’re wrong? Global warming could accelerate, the ice-caps could melt and the sea-levels could rise and flood New York City and the likes of Limbaugh and Beck would still be railing against Al Gore from their new studios further inland.

Every single republican who ever took the microphone and initiated a chant of “Drill, baby, drill” should have to shut up and hide away in shame right now. They should be too embarrassed to show their faces in public, let alone go on national TV and continue to defend offshore drilling. And yet Sarah Palin, the worst of the worst of the Drill-baby-drillers, goes on Facebook to say what she really meant was “Drill, baby, drill in safe onshore locations” in spite of all the clips of her explicitly saying offshore. She actually has the nerve to say to the “greenies”: “Now, do you get it?”

Well, fuck me. If only we’d listened to Sarah Palin. She warned us about drilling in the right locations, but we tree-hugging sissy-pants liberals just wouldn’t listen. BP wanted to drill safely on shore but we just wouldn’t have it and we forced them to drill so far from the coast that a catastrophe like this was bound to happen.

No, goddammit! Sarah Palin does not get to be the one saying “I told you so” here! This is one instance in which one side is clearly right and the other clearly wrong. They said offshore drilling was safe and that the reward would be well worth the relatively negligible risk. Well the risk was not negligible and the reward was hardly worth it. How about some kind of consensus in the media regarding what’s right before our eyes?

Luckily, what’s right before our eyes is so hard to ignore that offshore drilling supporters actually do feel like they have to walk back from it and insist “I never said drill, baby, drill.” But the media is still so obsessed with the appearance of objectivity that they continue to invite people on to talk about how important and necessary offshore drilling is for America.

And the president goes along with it. Now is the best opportunity we’ve ever had to simply say “Enough is enough” and make a clean break with oil. But even in spite of this tragedy, in spite of all the warnings of environmentalists having come to fruition, they are still regarded as some kind of nutty fringe that just doesn’t get it. And we keep on drilling.

They are the ones who don’t get it. There’s only so much damage we can do to the earth before it starts to purge us like a disease. We’re sucking sludge from the ground and spewing it all over the sea and into the sky. We don’t treat it like a catastrophe because it’s happening so slowly, but just look at the images of the oil gushing from that well and consider that it’s now guaranteed to keep gushing until August at the earliest. This crisis is just one small part of a much larger crisis, and the people who are out there shouting warnings from the rooftops continue to be derided as naïve and childish fools. If we do keep sucking and spewing until the planet is pushed past its tipping point and billions of us start to die off, the fact that they can then say “We told you so” will be no consolation.

I took a lot of heat last week [mostly in other forums] for writing a blog post called “In Defense of Rand Paul”. Right at the start I said it was more of an attack on the media than a defense of Rand Paul himself, who was growing less defensible by the minute. I also wrote that I might very well regret writing anything sympathetic towards the guy, and now that a few more news days have passed and I know more about him, I have to admit that I almost regret defending him. But for the most part I stick to what I originally wrote, which is that the media—particularly the small segment of it which could justifiably be called ‘liberal’—was being unfair to tacitly label him a quasi-racist wacko just because of his libertarian approach to the Civil Rights Act. But this morning I read this excellent piece on the Huffington Post by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos which focused on Rand Paul’s more objectionable positions regarding American interventionism and foreign policy. Whoever this Kelley Vlahos is, the mainstream media should take a lesson from her about the right way to criticize a candidate.

One of the reasons I was so quick to defend Rand Paul is because of his father Ron Paul, whom I came to respect during the 2008 Republican Party primary in which Ron Paul was the only candidate willing to come out and say that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a stupid idea that was costing the country more than it could afford. The Republican establishment was quick to label him a crazy wackaloon, and while some of his positions were a bit extreme I thought they were at least philosophically defensible. Ron Paul seemed to be the only guy on the republican side—indeed one of the only candidates from either party—who was actually saying what he genuinely believed with little or no regard to political popularity. So when I saw the liberal media attach the same wackaloon label to his son Rand Paul after what appeared to be an honest philosophical disagreement over the Civil Rights Act, my initial reaction was anger.

And if Rand Paul really were an honest politician as his father seems to be, my anger would still be justified. I get that it’s the media’s job to call attention to some of the more extreme and/or controversial views held by a political candidate, so I don’t begrudge Rachel Maddow for pressing him on that point. I just wish she’d gotten to other issues. I do, however, begrudge Keith Olbermann and a few other commentators who went about covering the story by mercilessly beating up on the guy just for having an unorthodox opinion. “Can you believe this guy?” was the tone. “Doesn’t he know anything about politics? You can’t have that opinion in Washington. What a buffoon!”

They were acting as though Rand Paul had been running on a platform of repealing the Civil Rights Act. As though his first act as a U.S. Senator would be to introduce legislation making it legal for private business owners to refuse to serve minorities. But this was never one of his campaign platforms, he never had any intention of going near the Civil Rights Act, and it only became a major issue because it’s the first question Rachel Maddow decided to ask him about and he foolishly spent 20 minutes trying to avoid giving her a straight answer.

And for the next several days all I heard about Rand Paul was his position on the Civil Rights Act, which I completely disagree with but which I also understand philosophically. If you accept the premises upon which libertarianism is based, then you have to accept the conclusion that business owners have a right to discriminate (particularly if you also accept the premise that businesses are akin to persons). I reject these premises so I reject the conclusion. The media barely even examined the premises and simply lambasted the guy for his conclusion. Although credit should definitely be given to Chris Hayes of The Nation, who brought on a real libertarian to have an honest discussion of the matter while guest-hosting for Rachel Maddow. That, I felt, was the proper way to deal with the issue—as opposed to Olbermann’s approach of bringing on Washington pundits to snicker and crack jokes.

But the real issue is that the Civil Rights Act isn’t even the issue at all. What does Rand Paul think about financial reform? He’s probably against it. Why don’t we talk about that? What does Rand Paul think of the oil spill? We were fortunate enough to see him asked about it and to hear that he believes BP is being treated unfairly—a position far more ridiculous and unprincipled than his stance on Civil Rights. But most importantly, what is his stance on American interventionism, the one position in which I was in 100% agreement with his father Ron Paul?

According to Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, it’s pretty unclear. We know that the Republican establishment opposed Rand Paul because they were afraid he would be critical of the wars like his father. But Rand Paul, who apparently made a political calculation to harness as much Tea Party momentum as possible for his campaign, hasn’t been willing to speak nearly as openly on this issue as he seems to be on others. It may very well be that deep in his libertarian heart of hearts he agrees with his father that the United States has no business spending trillions of dollars on foreign occupation, but that’s the kind of position that will get you thrown directly under the Tea Party Express bus.

The article, which I recommend anyone unfamiliar with Rand Paul to read, excellently presents all we know about Rand Paul’s feelings regarding American foreign policy. He does support the war in Afghanistan, he opposes closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, he supports Israel’s right-wing government and doesn’t think they should be pressed to make any concessions to Palestine. Most telling of all, however, is that while father Ron Paul likened the potential use of nuclear weapons against Iran to genocide, son Rand Paul thinks the nuclear option should remain on the table. Vlahos also calls attention to the fact that he personally courted Sarah Palin’s endorsement and enthusiastically welcomed her support.

This is how it should be done. After reading that article I now feel I know everything I need to know to make a conclusive judgment about Rand Paul, and that judgment is definitively negative. I was wrong to assume that like his father, Rand Paul was a man of principle.

I responded to a few commenters by saying that Rand Paul is not the enemy. His political philosophy may be dangerous and wrong, but at least he truly believes in it. The real enemy, I wrote, are the corporatist politicians who will say whatever they think the public wants to hear and then do whatever benefits them personally once they’re in power. The media should be going after the liars and hypocrites as opposed to demonizing candidates who merely have non-mainstream opinions.

But it now seems quite clear that Rand Paul is the enemy—another hypocrite willing to say whatever he believes is most likely to get him elected, and to refrain from saying anything he thinks would drive his poll numbers down. If he valued principle above power, he would be advocating the non-interventionist principles of the libertarian party in spite of their unpopularity among Tea Partiers, knowing that even if he lost he’d been fighting for what he believed in. If he valued principle above power, he would advocate closing Guantanamo and admit as his father did that dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran would be an act of genocide. If he valued principle above power, he would certainly not have sought and embraced the endorsement of Sarah Palin, the most transparently unprincipled player in American politics today.

So you won’t hear any more defense of Rand Paul coming from me, though I will continue to criticize the liberal media when I think they’re taking the wrong approach. Hopefully as the Rand Paul saga continues into November they’ll go about their criticism with a little less hyperbole and a little more attention to issues that really matter.

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

Forget all you learned about how the United States was the first country ever to be founded under no particular religion. According to right-wing political celebrities such as Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, the United States of America is indisputably a Christian nation. In recent speeches, both have declared that this is “God’s country” and that its founding documents are every bit as sacrosanct as Biblical Scripture. This is the kind of claim that drives me insane, as I just can’t grasp how so many people just accept it without question when the level of absurdity is literally astronomical.

Evangelicals and other fundamentalist Christians believe that the creator of the entire universe is a being much like themselves, which is already ridiculous. If they bothered to learn anything at all about science and cosmology, they’d know that human beings are one of billions of species who have ever walked the earth, that the earth itself is one of potentially trillions of planets orbiting the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, which is merely one of hundreds of billions of galaxies or more in the universe. Do they seriously believe that of the hundreds of billions of galaxies God created, our Milky-Way is His favorite one? That of the trillions of planets in this galaxy, Earth is His favorite? That of the billions of species that have come into being and passed into extinction throughout this time, human beings are His favorite? And of every nation that has ever existed throughout history, the United States of America is His favorite?

Please. This is obscenely irrational. If the history of the universe were condensed into one year, the amount of time humans have existed wouldn’t even amount to a full second. Recorded history is but the tiniest fraction of a second, and American history is merely a fraction of that fraction. If God really created untold trillions of worlds and waited billions upon billions of years so that one particular country in one of those worlds could come into being, then God is one strange character to say the least. And what interest does God have in America anyway? He waited billions of years for its formation so He could what? Help it win wars? Seriously, what does God want with us if we’re so important to Him?

The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

One thing’s for sure—He couldn’t possibly be a fan of the United States government. There’s nothing these right-wingers loathe more than the government. So apparently God loves America but hates the American government. So it must be the people he loves. But wait, I thought half the people were damned godless liberals. America is filled with atheists and homosexuals and all kinds of other abominations, so I guess He really just loves churchgoing conservatives. He doesn’t love the United States of America—He loves the Red States of America.

And apparently there’s something intrinsically better about American churchgoing Christians than churchgoing Christians from other countries. Perhaps because America is the country He personally founded by, according to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, guiding the hands of Thomas Jefferson as he wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Never mind that Jefferson didn’t write the Constitution—God obviously guided the hands of whomever it was that did.

After all, it certainly sounds divinely inspired:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
-Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, June-July 1776

No doubt about it—that’s some eloquent expression of passionate, righteous ideals for you. All men are created equal. What a brilliant concept. Definitely something for America to be proud of. And who knows? Maybe it did come from God. Just like the U.S. Constitution, a part of which reads:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
-Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the original United States Constitution

Wait a minute, what’s this “three fifths” business? If I’m reading this correctly, it would seem that when we calculate how many representatives each state should have in the federal government, “free Persons” are to count as 1 and “other Persons” (i.e. black people—slaves) are to count as 3/5. So all men are created equal…but black people are 2/5 less equal then white people. As for women…don’t even ask.

This perfect, divinely inspired document has since been amended to count minorities and women just as equally as everybody else, but you’d think if God was guiding the hands of those men who wrote it (themselves nearly as holy and sacred as the Apostles) He would have had them get it right the first time. Unless He really did mean for blacks to be counted as 3/5 of a person and those less holy men of subsequent generations went and fucked it all up by reconciling it with that “all men are created equal” idea that God wrote in that other document. Whether one contradicts the other is just another Great Mystery—like how some passages in Genesis 2 contradict some passages in Genesis 1. Or maybe what God really meant was “all white men are created equal to other white men, all black men are created equal to other black men, all Hispanic men are created equal to other Hispanic men” and so on. I suppose one could interpret it that way.

So it seems I’ve failed to defeat the claim. Just because there are trillions of trillions of planets in the universe doesn’t mean this can’t be God’s favorite. And just because the United States of America has only existed for less than the blink of a cosmic eye doesn’t mean it can’t be God’s favorite country—even though He hates its government and half the people in it. Just because the Constitution contradicts the ideals of the Declaration of Independence doesn’t mean they couldn’t have both been divinely inspired. And in the mind of an evangelical Christian, if something that feels good to believe even might be true, it’s safe to assume that it must be true.

Thomas Jefferson, a deist who believed that God merely set the universe in motion and didn’t interfere in human affairs, a scholar who actually published his own version of the New Testament with all of the miracles and supernatural claims removed, must have been divinely inspired by the God whom he believed did not divinely inspire people to write the founding documents for a country which he and the other [Holy] Founders intended to be a Christian Nation. So all of us liberals who insist on a firm wall between Church and State should just shut up and face the facts—unless you’re a Christian, you’re not fully American, because the two are and were designed to be intertwined.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1, 1802

In this post I’m going to outline my perception of what’s really going on at the highest echelons of power in the world today and how we are being controlled by giant corporations. I’ll admit right from the start that this is all speculation and that my assertions would have far more weight if I were to thoroughly research them and provide references, but my purpose as a blogger is merely to present ideas for others to consider. This is just my perception based on everything I’ve seen, heard, and read since becoming politically aware, and if it’s true I think we’d all do well to acknowledge it.

I’ll refer to the powers-that-be who control the corporations that control the U.S. and other world governments as the “power elite” though I won’t speculate much as to who these people are exactly and what their specific agenda might be if they have one. It may be the case that some organization like the Bilderberg group is really doing this with some master plan for global enslavement in mind, but but I haven’t seen enough evidence to convince me of such a conclusion. There is, however, a preponderance of evidence to suggest that political power today is concentrated in very few hands which have no concern for the collective well-being of humanity.

Their top priority seems to be the consolidation of power, but whether this is an end in itself or merely the means to some other goal is a question I’ll leave open. I’ll merely state how I believe they’ve managed to consolidate all this power and how they are continuing to do so.

1- Accumulate Wealth

Money is power, so the more money you have concentrated in one organization the more powerful that organization will be. The power elites seem to have gotten their hands in the big banks and worked hard to make those banks bigger and bigger to the point where the entire capitalist system became dependent on them. Once “too big too fail” they allowed themselves to crash and became even more powerful. For one thing, a few smaller competitors went under, thus increasing the influence of those left standing. But more insidiously, they crashed the entire economy, further squeezing money and therefore power from the hands of individuals. Now they’ve got hundreds of billions at their disposal and the average person can barely afford to spend anything on causes they believe in. Even if every last American citizen chipped in $5 to an effort to break up the big banks, the big banks could still out-spend them to prevent that from happening.

2- Control the Electoral Process

The democratic process has been around for too long to simply discard it altogether, so the power elites need to maintain the illusion that things are as they always were. As big as they are, a population united against them could topple them and the sudden abolishment of elections could very well lead to violent revolution. It’s much easier to let the people go on believing they still have a say in the direction their country goes.

So you simply put all your money into the candidates you know will do your bidding. Elections are little more than a popularity contest that allows the public to choose which brand appeals to them most. The Ron Pauls, Dennis Kucinitches, Mike Gravels and Ralph Naders of this world don’t stand a chance thanks to the corporate influence over the media, a point I’ll get to momentarily. Instead you get the Bill Clintons and Barack Obamas of this world who can pretend to be on the side of the people while actually catering to the power elite.

The 2008 election really felt for awhile like we were determining our country’s future, but it was all just a show. After eight years in which their puppet George W. Bush did everything the power elite could have asked for and more, the people were demanding a change of course. Bush had been too blatant about where his loyalties lied, and the people wouldn’t accept anyone who looked like they’d continue to funnel wealth and power from the middle and lower-classes to those at the very top of the economic ladder. So they offered us Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both novelties due to their race or gender. On the surface, both represented change, but underneath the veneer both candidates were exactly the same. Had the Hillary brand won out over the Obama brand, she would have been governing in the exact same way.

The McCain brand was clearly not strong enough on its own so they attached it to the Palin brand, which served another of their purposes I’ll get to shortly. Had the public chosen this brand things would be more or less the same, only the McCain/Palin administration would not have had to bother as much with appearances. Obama ran on a platform of change so he has to pretend to deliver on it. Thus we get an industry-friendly health care bill and an industry-friendly financial reform package, both of which look like change to the naked eye but which only perpetuate business as usual. Had McCain won they simply wouldn’t have had to put on that particular show. Elections do have consequences but mostly purely cosmetic ones.

3- Divide the People

The only real threat to the power elite is a population united against them, so they do all they can to divide us. It’s easy when every mainstream media outlet is owned by a handful of giant corporations which are themselves controlled by the power elite. They get to decide how the news is reported and which stories are told in the first place.

Of course you never see stories about power consolidation in the mainstream media. Fights over issues such as the deregulation of airwaves and net neutrality are barely mentioned, and when they are brought up they’re never explained sufficiently. If you’re lucky, at least both arguments are presented, but even though one side is being completely disingenuous they are never called out on it.

Much more visibly, however, we see the obsessive focus on culture war issues that most divide us. Abortion, gay marriage, immigrants, drugs, and so on…these are all easily comprehensible issues that people get fired up about. Recently, organizations controlled by the power elite such as Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity have hit a grand-slam with the whole Tea Party movement, which has been extraordinarily effective at dividing the people against each other.

The most obvious culprit in the media world is Fox News who blatantly promote the Tea Party and constantly level the most ridiculous charges against the president which serve both to misdirect the anger of their conservative audience and back progressives into a corner from which they have to defend the president against these baseless accusations. Most laughably, they’ve succeeded in getting nearly every conservative in America to believe that Barack Obama is a socialist when in fact he is the exact opposite. Obama is bought and paid for by the corporations and is doing absolutely nothing to diminish their power or increase state control over them. To continue deceiving his own base he has to make it appear as though he is reining them in, which allows Fox to continue attacking him for his “radical socialism”.

But Fox News isn’t the only network to blame. Every last one of them refuse to cover stories of corporate consolidation of power, and even the most progressive hosts on television don’t go near such issues. Even Rachel Maddow, whom I respect more than any other TV commentator, spends most of her time going after republicans while leaving the corporations more or less alone. Olbermann takes it one step further and spends most of his time making fun of conservatives and attacking the right-wing, and while the attacks may be warranted it doesn’t help us in the long run when what we really need to do is put our differences aside and come together against our common foe. MSNBC allows progressives to call politicians on their bullshit because there’s an audience for that and they’re relatively harmless as long as they don’t get to the heart of the matter. But liberals hosts are just as useful for polarizing the public as conservative hosts.

4- Provide No Alternative

The power elites can and will maintain their control as long as those of us who can see what’s going on can’t see a way out. The two-party system is entrenched so deeply within the system that almost everyone who votes feels forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. The democrats used to be the party that stood for the little guy, but now they serve their corporate masters just as much as the republicans only less openly. They still have to pay lip service to progressive ideals to get elected and keep the show going on.

What we’re seeing now is the political right-wing being constantly pushed further to the right thanks to Fox News and the groups that fund the Tea Party. This gives democrats plenty of breathing room to move away from the left and towards the center-right, to where the republicans used to be. A democrat today is like a republican of twenty years ago, while a republican today is like a dixiecrat of a hundred years ago, capitalizing on the xenophobia and the fear people have of “losing our country”.

In 2012 we’ll be presented with yet another choice of brands. Some far-right lunatic—the only republican capable of winning a primary anymore—or Barack Obama. Either way, the corporations win. Obama can continue to snuff his base and serve the corporate masters time and time again right up until the election because he knows progressives will have no viable alternative. We either get the corporate shill on right or the corporate shill slightly to the left of him (or her, if they actually decide to go with Palin).

5- Marginalize Dissent

The internet is the last bastion of hope we have at disseminating anti-corporate views without fear of being silenced. But net neutrality is already under attack and Obama is—surprise, surprise—already showing signs of caving in on this issue. Very soon corporations will have the power to un-level the playing field, making corporate-friendly sites far more accessible than those who oppose or allow their members to express opinions opposing them. How long before any anti-corporate blog post is censored and any anti-corporate YouTube video is removed? Freedom of expression may be breathing its last gasps.

So let’s keep fighting while we still can. I’m contributing the only way I know how—by presenting my point of view and hoping others will agree with it. I drop my pebble in the ocean of online discourse and hope the ripples spread as far as possible.

The only hope we have is to organize against the power elite and consolidate our own power to stand against that they’ve already accumulated. That means putting aside our personal and political differences for the time being and approaching online discourse from a standpoint of trying to accomplish something. Far too many people blog and comment purely to feed their own ego, and while I’ll admit there’s an element of that to my own endeavors in the blogosphere, my primary motivation is to contribute to humanity in whatever way I can.

And that means stopping these corporations before they become too big to stop. If a handful of like-minded elites manage to accumulate more than half the world’s wealth/power, the other half will be powerless to stop them. It may already be too late. Thanks to the narrative we get from the media we are more polarized than ever, pitted against each other over issues of complete triviality in comparison to the big issue. Fighting amongst ourselves is exactly what they want us to do, and they’re doing a great job getting us to do it.

But we can all recognize what’s happening if we look hard enough, and whether we’re conservative or liberal we can all agree that we don’t want to have the entire world run by a small group of wealthy elites who seem motivated purely by self-interest. I’ll write posts like this as often as I have to, and continue to try and expand my online presence to reach as many people as I can because I believe this is the most important issue of our time—perhaps of all time. I hope you agree.

I’m sick and tired of conservatives acting like their position on foreign policy is one of strength while Obama’s is one of weakness, when in fact it’s the exact opposite. They need to be called out for the despicable cowards that they are.

In my last piece, I wrote about the fundamental differences between liberalism and conservatism as attitudes towards the government’s role in society, and my analysis was very broad and not focused exclusively on the United States. I wanted to give conservatism fair treatment as my goal was to get both sides to recognize what common ground we might have. This week I’m going to focus on conservatives only in the United States and their attitudes on foreign policy, and I’m not going to be nearly as kind. My goal here is not to spark a dialog but merely to rant about something that’s been sticking in my craw since all those republicans started throwing a hissy-fit over Obama’s new nuclear policy last week.

For those of you who don’t know, Obama announced that Russia and the United States had both agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals by a third. Purely a diplomatic move, but enough for the republicans to jump all over it and claim that somehow only being able to destroy the world 66 times over instead of 100 makes us all less safe. But much more importantly, Obama declared that we would not use nuclear weapons to retaliate against a nation that attacks us if that nation does not itself have nuclear weapons and is in compliance with international treaties. So if Zimbabwe attacks us, we promise not to nuke them. As for the real threats—Iran and North Korea—we can still nuke them because they’re not in compliance with the treaties.

Of course the republicans are going to ignore those caveats and completely distort Obama’s position to the point of absurdity. Everyone from Newt Gingrich to Sarah Palin was saying that Obama was somehow stripping this nation completely bare of its defenses. “He said he won’t retaliate if another country attacks us! He’s basically inviting other countries to attack the United States and telling them we won’t do anything in response!”

Actually—no, that’s not what he said, you unbelievable dipshits. He said we won’t use nuclear weapons to attack a country that complies with international nuclear treaties. In other words, you give countries an incentive to comply with those treaties, thus reducing the threat of nuclear war. He didn’t say we wouldn’t retaliate at all. But just ignore that. Sean Hannity insists that’s what he said—and Hannity would never misrepresent the president’s position.

All of this is stuff you already know if you follow the news. Plenty of ink has been spilled over the disingenuousness of republicans on this issue. They’ve chosen to go with their old narrative of “democrats are weak on defense” so they’ll pounce on anything that smells the least bit like weakness, including not reserving the right to drop H-bombs all over Zimbabwe if we feel like it.

But I feel like something very obvious has been largely ignored in all the analysis of this issue, and it goes far beyond the nuclear news of last week. I really wish republicans would get called out on this more often, because it strikes right at the heart of the image they like to present and completely undermines their posture of strength in the face of the president’s weakness: these people are cowards.

Last week I wrote about the underlying principles between conservatism and liberalism, but I left out the underlying emotions behind those attitudes. In terms of economic policy, liberals are motivated by compassion and conservatives by selfishness. In terms of foreign policy, liberals are also motivated by compassion (let’s not drop bombs on innocent civilians unless we absolutely have to) but conservatives are motivated by fear.

Obviously, Gingrich and Palin are just playing political games and I doubt they’re seriously afraid that Zimbabwe is going to invade, but the people who take them seriously do have such fears. There are a lot of brown people walking around in turbans on the other side of the world and they all spend their entire day plotting and planning the best way to slaughter Americans. You never know when a loose nuke or some kind of biological weapon is going to find its way to the Palookaville Wal-Mart and kill all your neighbors. The only reason the Wal-Mart is still standing is because George W. Bush kept us safe for so long—fighting them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them here—but now Obama is doing everything he can to undo what Bush did. He is a secret Muslim, you know.

But even the conservatives who aren’t batshit crazy like that are still motivated by fear. Reasonable commentators like Bill O’Reilly have consistently supported things like water-boarding and other forms of torture, and there couldn’t possibly be a more cowardly position than that. Since the birth of our nation we’ve abided by certain principles and not torturing prisoners has been one of them. Liberals have remained true to this principle, saying first that torture doesn’t work but more importantly, even if it did work we’d rather maintain our honor and be slightly less safe than sinking to their level—going “to the dark side” as Dick Cheney so famously put it. Conservatives, on the other hand, have acted like frightened children. Please, torture them! Torture them all! He had a bomb in his underpants! He might know where more bombs are! How could you just read him his rights and give him a lawyer when there could be more underpants bombers on the way to the Wal-Mart as we speak?!!

It’s really pathetic, and they should be called out on it far more often than they are. Instead, we let them get away with acting as though they’re the strong ones, the ones who are willing to do ‘whatever it takes’ to protect America. Newsflash: that’s not strength. That’s the definition of cowardice—to be willing to do whatever it takes to stay safe.

It’s like a soldier who grabs a civilian to use as a human shield against the bullets flying at him, and when the civilian dies he says, “See? I had the strength to do whatever I had to do to save myself. If an innocent person had to die, so be it. I’m still here. See how strong I am? Where’s my medal?”

So now they’re twisting it around and saying that Obama’s new nuclear policy is a sign of weakness, as though dropping nuclear bombs on a country with a fraction of our military power is the bravest thing in the world. No, you fucking assholes, that’s the most cowardly thing you could possibly do.

The strongest, bravest thing to do would be to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether and have a level playing field. Now, if you attack us, we have to fight you through conventional means. And it’s not like our conventional army isn’t the strongest in the world by far anyway. Do we really need nuclear weapons to fight Iran or North Korea? It took us about a week to march into Baghdad—it wouldn’t take too long to get to Tehran or Pyongyang either—no nukes necessary.

But Obama didn’t even say we wouldn’t use nukes against Iran or North Korea—his declaration was specifically designed to exclude those very countries from the exemption from nuclear retaliation. So what are you still screaming about? Calm the fuck down already. If Kim Jong Il really scares the piss out of you so much, you can still drop a nuclear bomb on his head.

You’d think we could all just agree that we shouldn’t use nukes on a country with no nuclear weapons, but apparently not. The conservatives are too scared to even concede to that. They want to reserve the right to nuke anybody and everybody, as anything less would be weakness.

For the last time—your position is the weak one. You are the cowards. You are the ones who want to bring a bazooka to a fist-fight. And if that’s not cowardice, I don’t know what is.

There’s a lot of speculation going on as to the reason behind Sarah Palin’s resignation as governor of Alaska and what she intends to do in the future. Some say she’s positioning herself to make a run for president in 2012, while others believe she is getting out of politics for good. As someone who deeply loathes Sarah Palin and everything she stands for, I sincerely hope it’s the former.

From the time I was 11 to the time I went to college at 18, I grew up in a very rural, white-bread part of New Jersey, surrounded by more-or-less conservative kids and parents. I developed a strong hatred for “soccer moms”, whom I knew as either mothers of my friends or friends of my mother. Most of them fit into the archetype of the middle-aged, conservative, arrogant know-it-alls who love to hear themselves talk and believe that all their opinions are inherently right by virtue of the fact that they just know. These women used to piss me off enormously, and Sarah Palin fits that bill completely.

The self-described “hockey-mom” is exactly one of those kinds of people who think they know better than everyone else, and perceive the world as though everyone else is out to get them. They constantly see themselves as helpless victims and can’t stop dwelling on the trivial bullshit of each and every perceived sleight against them. Palin went after Letterman for making a bad joke, after blogger Shannyn Moore for reporting mere rumors of corruption, and has blasted the “liberal bias” of the mainstream media at every opportunity. She’s great at playing the victim, the political outsider who stands unafraid to take on the system and stand up to the “old boys’ club” by not operating under the “same old politics as usual”. If you don’t like it, you’re just a godless liberal elitist who can’t handle her maverickyness.

Of course, in actuality she’s just as much a ruthless game-player as the rest of them, if not moreso. She abused her office as governor at every opportunity, most famously in the famous “troopergate” scandal where she fired her head of law enforcement for refusing to fire her sister’s ex-husband. She played politics with the stimulus package, attempting to turn away funds that would go to education and social services for the sake of scoring some political points with the hardcore right-wing base. Worst of all in terms of her character, she’s used her children as props for political purposes, presenting her knocked-up teenage daughter as a poster-child for teen abstinence (as ironic as that is) and her baby with Down’s Syndrome as an example of why she made the right choice in not getting an abortion but that nobody else should even be allowed to make that choice. While focussing on her national ambitions she has virtually ignored the day-to-day business of running the state of Alaska, and her gross incompetence has resulted in such an overwhelming pile of bullshit that eventually she had no means of escape but to resign a year and a half before her term was over.

This week she wrote (or more likely had someone write for her) an op-ed for the Washington Post about why Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade plan is a bad idea. I read it with an open-mind, as I also think cap-and-trade is a stupid idea, but apparently not for the reasons she thinks so. There was almost no substance whatsoever in the article—just a bunch of railing against Obama’s excessive spending and how the only real answer to our energy and global warming problems is to drill more oil.

What worries me is that this may be indicative of the new direction she’s going with her career. She may actually be trading her power-ambition for her money-ambition. And she knows that she can make lots of money as a political pundit, which would allow her to spout her mouth whenever she wants without having to worry about that annoying little thing called accountability.

We’ve seen politicians take this road before, most notably in the case of Karl Rove. When he worked for the Bush administration, Rove was a legitimate target of criticism due to his hand in making actual policy. But as soon as he became a Fox News pundit it was as though he stepped above the fray and immunized himself against any attacks. Now he wasn’t responsible for anything, he was just stating his opinion, and if you didn’t like it all you could do was make a counter-point.

There’s no such thing as accountability for pundits. Just look at Bill Kristol, who’s gotten everything wrong from insisting that the Iraq war would be a huge success to believing that Sarah Palin would be the deciding factor that would win John McCain the presidency. As wrong as he’s been nearly all the time, he still gets invited to write columns and appear on the talk shows.

Should this be the route Sarah takes, we’ll have to deal with all of her ignorant bullshit for years and years, as whether you love her or hate her she certainly knows how to draw an audience, and ratings will follow wherever she goes. Because she won’t actually be running anything, the emptiness of her ideas won’t be as apparent as they were when those ideas were put to the test—and failed miserably—during her brief tenure as an actual elected official.

I really really want her to run for president in 2012 just to see her lose big. So far she hasn’t been explicitly rejected by the American people, and if she doesn’t run we won’t have the opportunity to hand her that rejection. If she doesn’t attempt to go for the glory, she won’t be able to not achieve it, and I won’t be able to laugh at her and experience that cathartic moment I’ve been dying for—the moment when she suddenly realizes that God actually hasn’t had her back this whole time, that’s she’s a complete fraud and almost everyone knows it, and that everything all those mean and nasty bloggers have been saying about her was completely true. She is deeply unqualified to be in any position of responsibility whatsoever, let alone the president of the United States. I really wanted to see her try, because I really wanted to see her fail, to see her holding back the tears at her concession speech before tucking her tail between her legs and crawling back to Alaska in shame.

So please, Sarah, don’t give up on your dream. Just keep on praying, hunting, suing people on groundless claims of slander, lying about your past, pumping out babies, race-baiting Obama, firing up crowds of gun-toting rednecks, and butchering the English language in every speech you give. Do it for hockey moms and soccer moms everywhere. Prove that arrogant know-it-all bitches can dupe millions of Americans into believing in them, but that ultimately they are all full of shit and that no matter how much lipstick you smother over a pig, it will always be a pig.