by Blue Stockings | Ken Layne at Wonkette noticed patrician right-wing princess Peggy Noonan's post arguing that McCain won the debate also spent several paragraphs arguing that Sarah Palin is as dumb as a brick. (He doesn't disagree with the part about Palin.) Noonan may be right wing, but she's also "an east coast" elitist. So hilarious that Republicans and Republican shills accuse liberals of elitism.....
Now we get to the main course, which is a snarling and funny attack on Sarah Palin. The beloved Noonan trope about how any dipshit nobody can become Ronald Reagan, as long as they’re simple enough and believe urban legends, makes its regular appearance in what is otherwise a calmly considered “No thanks” to the idiot Palin mobs, and the idiot Palin herself....
Perhaps Peggy thinks she can steer the weak-minded mouth breathers with this shiny bit of Reagan Glimmer, this phantom Gipper....But there is joy in intellectual honesty or whatever, right? And it’s not like you’re going to run into these people at Bloomie’s …. So tell us, what do you really think of Sarah Palin?
She doesn’t think aloud. She just … says things.
Her supporters accuse her critics of snobbery: Maybe she’s not a big “egghead” but she has brilliant instincts and inner toughness. But what instincts? “I’m Joe Six-Pack”? She does not speak seriously but attempts to excite sensation — “palling around with terrorists.” If the Ayers case is a serious issue, treat it seriously. She is not as thoughtful or persuasive as Joe the Plumber, who in an extended cable interview Thursday made a better case for the Republican ticket than the Republican ticket has made. In the past two weeks she has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn’t, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine. She could reinspire and reinspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn’t seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts.
That’s a little more long-winded than your first assessment of the Palin pick — “It’s bullshit” — but we pay you (or Murdoch does, anyway) to be long-winded.... Luckily, you have very few readers. Just us elitists, checking our portfolios, perusing the opera reviews in the Weekend Journal, a knowing smile when our Peggy references something from our more elegant past. We remember, too. And we all hate white trash. (Wonkette)
Princess Sparkle Pony has had it with the triumphal jeering of the stupidheads who attend Palin rallies.
What I keep getting from these rallies is We are the stupid and we're better than you. God, it's all so galling. "She's reg'lar folk." WhatEVER. I mean, I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and I'm not proud to be ignorant because I'm not ignorant. I worked really hard, studied hard, had shit jobs for over a decade... and that makes me... what? An East Coast Liberal Elitist? I'm middle class, just like they are. Sarah Palin says these are the "real Americans." All the rest of us are, what, holograms? Not Americans? Get an education and talk in complete sentences with words longer than two syllables and you're un-American? Move to the city and you're un-American?* Fuck these morons!...
I'm so glad these people are losing.
Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog wonders if he'll be able to cope with a new reality if, in fact, they really do:
Stupidity I understand. Proud, pugnacious ignorance I understand. I understand people who think Barack Obama is a crypto-Muslim Antichrist whose mission is to replace the current U.S. government with a socialist dictatorship. People like that have been the leading citizens of my country for as long as I can remember.
What I'm having trouble understanding is that America might have evolved into a country in which this sort of stupidity and ignorance doesn't prevail, in which John McCain's robocalls and scare ads don't work, in which the likes of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber can't fool 50% plus one of the people all of the time.
Maybe it's just a temporary condition -- maybe there's just a huge chunk of voters in the middle who are like the ones in that now-famous focus group of Reagan Democrats and independents who watched a brutally negative ad about Obama and believed it, but didn't care because they simply despise Bush and the GOP right now. Maybe in six months we'll be back in the country I remember, the one that fell for "Kerry looks French!" and "Ha ha ha, Dukakis in a tank!"
But if not, then what's going on is brand new, and I don't think I'm equipped to understand it.
Roy Edroso is disturbed by kinky wingnut fantasies about Sarah Palin and wants you to be as well. Thanks, Roy Edroso, my brain needed bleaching anyway.
It really has been a weird week. Bush's disembodied head appeared at the DC Chamber of Commerce
where it tried to reassure the nation about the vortex of the economy. Most people couldn't pay attention, though. They were appalled that a disembodied head was speaking in some horrible, garbled, barely human voice-like sound. "Why the f*** is it still talking?" a man in the audience was heard to scream. "It's just a head. Are we living in a nightmare?" (The Rude Pundit)
Scott at World-O-Crap muses over Jonah Goldberg's "latest parrot droppings at the L.A. Times.
He really does just come right out and say that the Republican party is a courtly gentleman of the old school, and will not stoop to striking women, cripples, or Negroes, no matter how badly their behavior may cry out for the chastening sting of the horsewhip.
McCain has done nothing to fuel racism.
True. The old racism was ecologically and politically unsustainable. And McCain and Palin’s cleaner-burning “code words” are just the first of many new alternative fuels for racism we can look forward to in the 21st century....
f Obama were a white Democratic nominee named Barry O’Malley, the GOP would be going after him twice as hard.
See?! We’re losing because we’re NICE!!
So nice.
See also the Halloween special edition of Zombie McCain. Meanwhile, Jesus' General has "[t]he latest ad from Passionately Credulous Bigots for McCain."
At Jesus' General, MJS wants to know whether it would be all right not to support the troops from slightly less patriotic parts of the country.
[I]s such blind support really that prudent of a policy in these times of patriotic parsing? Should a white man who says "negra" be forced to support a soldier from an inner city, an inner city where children routinely play hoops better than he ever did on his best day evuh?
Let's say you really want to Support the Troops, and you follow that up with actually learning about our troops, and you find out that some of our troops are brown and some are black (I like to think of the currently low enlistment rates for African Americans as "violence default swaps"). A lot of these people of pigment are not from Real America, and even if they get their asses shot off it's difficult to care about them as much, or to even feel like pretending to care as much. When Supporting the Troops means having to think about what that support means, well, you've lost a lot of people who depend on getting their oxygen by breathing through their mouths. Once we lose them it's over: once we find them it is also over. That is their singular beauty.
Kathy G. at G Spot wonders whether today's wingnuts are getting wingnuttier. Here's an excerpt from her piece:
Furthermore, the wingnut conspiracy theories about Obama -- that he's a secret Muslim; a terrorist; a Maoist or Stalinist; that he murdered members of his former church; that Bill Ayers ghostwrote Obama's memoirs; or that Obama was, contrary to his birth certificate and all other available evidence, born in Kenya -- are as wild and perfervid as any I've ever heard about any presidential candidate. And let us not forget that some of those ludicrous rumors, such as Maoist/Stalin one, and the Ayers-as-ghostwriter one, have been propagated by allegedly "serious" conservative outlets like the National Review Online.
After eight years of top dog status, they're getting busted back down to the ranks and may even be sliding into irrelevance. No wonder they're hysterical. David Michael Green has more on this at The Smirking Chimp:
There are few things you'd less rather be right now than a conservative/regressive, and that is why. It's like the old Firesign Theater bit: Everything You Know Is Wrong....
And, what's worse, everybody knows it except you. America is turning decisively away from its tragic thirty-year experiment with Reaganism-Bushism, and for very good reason. Regressives have ruled the country more or less unabated (Democrats, the supposed carriers of the liberal torch, were during these last three decades either frightened, centrist or irrelevent - and usually all three at once). Moreover, during the last years especially - the Cringe Decade - the right was particularly forceful, particularly unfettered, particularly successful at having its way, and particularly arrogant in the self-righteous belief in its authority on all things.
Finally, at Shakesville, Petulant posts the video of a bug-eyed Michele Bachman (R-MN) explaining to "an extremely patient Chris Matthews" how it is now the media's job to sort Congress into pro- and anti-American. Hellooooooo, Senator Joe! And I don't mean Lieberman or Biden; nor yet Joe Sixpack or Joe the Plumber. (Funny how guys name Joe have been a hallmark of this election cycle).
Big props to our beloved Tweety for not screaming like a girl and running away from the scary lady. Bachmann:
I would say, what I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look -- I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think the people would love to see an expose like that. (C&L)
Dave Neiwart at Crooks and Liars says:
Chris Matthews just gave Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Outer Wingnuttia, all the rope she wanted yesterday on Hardball, and boy did she make a handy little noose with it.
First Matthews tried to get Bachmann to tell his audience, per Sarah Palin's homage to "pro-American places," what parts of America are anti-American. She danced around the question and kept harking on the talking points programmed into her playback....
Even Pat Buchanan was shaking his head, grimly acknowledging that he doubted that any member of Congress could be called anti-American....
There's already a site up urging members of Congress to Censure Bachmann for these remarks. Go lend your voice. UPDATE: Or you can comment on her Facebook Wall. ActBlue candidate Elwyn Tinklenberg is running against Bachmann in a close race. Your support could make the difference.
Neiwart has a handy transcript.
RECENT BUCK NAKED POLITICS & IDLYE POSTINGS:
Obama Questions Justice Dept.'s Objectivity in Going After ACORN Again
Racist Attacks Emerge from GOP; Teh Nutroots Sez: "Let the Base be the Base"
Fall-out for "The Axis of Diesel" from Falling Oil Prices---and for the Rest of the World
Secessionist-Friendly Sarah Palin Visits the Pro-America Part of America
David Frum Takes on Rachel Maddow; Has His Arse Handed to Him
A Klassy Salute to Sarah from Her Supporters
McCain Petitions for Forgiveness from Letterman; Letterman Challenges McCain's Public Statements
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