A Nasty Side of Politics, with Crib Notes

While watching Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Nation snarling speech Saturday night it occurred to me she was like a folksy version of Ann Coulter.  Nasty, snide, arrogant, above it all, and beyond any rules.  It was a juvenile  display of behavior, really. Does she represent the tea baggers?  I don’t know, but it’s fun to watch a right-wing movement that began with sour grapes at losing an election devolve into the very bowels of sourness in such a short time.  Here is an accurate description of it.

This was the Palin we saw at the 2008 Republican convention, the snarling pitbull in shimmery lipstick.  I know journalists aren’t supposed to use words like mean and dumb, but I can’t help it. Palin is one of the meanest people on the public stage today. She wallows in it. She loves it! Also? Possibly one of the dumbest. But mean works, and so does dumb. And so do lies, and there were many mean, dumb lies in her speech.

Yes, there were many.  Palin, the Tea Party Queen, now makes her living lying on demand for pay.  I don’t know what she did as governor, but now, she is all about spreading lies for a paycheck. She’s a paid operative to spread misinformation where ever she can, as long as it’s to put down half of America — the Democrats and progressives, even the left-leaning Republicans.

One odd moment of many:  after criticizing Obama for using a teleprompter, as she read her speech from her notes on the podium, and then did a Q&A, all apparently pre-determined questions.  In this photo on the right, Oliver Willis caught Palin reading off of her hand! (He also points out that she made fun of President Obama during her speech for his use of a teleprompter.)

What hypocrisy!  They should at last bury the teleprompter criticism once and for all, after this.

But what I noticed most of all during her speech was it’s snide, snotty, 3rd grade behavior aspect. She sounded like a bully daring us to disagree with her, threatening to punch us if we did.   She did not make any good solid points that I’m aware of, but she did criticize, call names, use ad hominems,  straw man arguments, and other funny devices to lower her entire speech into the gutter.  The Tea Bagger crowd lapped it up and begged for more.

It was nasty Attitude Porn. She has become her own mythology, the Pitbull with Lipstick.  This is from Salon’s Joan Walsh.

“. . . .  How rich that she read her talk in a sing-song voice as she ripped Barack Obama for using a Teleprompter. Once she left the speech for the Q&A, she really went off-message, as well as nearly off-English.  (Even though it looked like, at one point, she was reading answers off of her hand.) ”They’re not knowin what are we gonna do if we don’t have Tea Party support” was one of my favorite head-scratchers, a great echo of “when Putin rears his head.”

But it was also in her brief Q&A that she made one comment she might regret, if anyone in the Republican Party ever held her accountable. She told the crowd her husband Todd — according to recently released emails, the non-elected former governor of Alaska — is “much too independent” to be a Republican, because he’s even “more conservative” than she is. What a great way to revisit the controversy over Todd’s membership in the secessionist Alaska Independent Party! Remember how Palin dogged poor McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt, trying to get him to denounce Salon’s reporting on the Palins and AIP? She tried to get Schmidt to lie and say her husband checked the AIP box on voter forms mistakenly, and he refused. Now she’s bragging her husband isn’t a Republican because he’s so “independent.”

She lied about rejecting stimulus money for Alaska (apparently she rejected a small home-weatherization project, which as it is sounds kind of mean for the governor of Alaska.) She lied about Obama’s position on terrorism and the Christmas Day would-be bomber. She mixed up Alaska and America at least once. It was hilarious to hear her denounce political “talk, talk, talk” and also brag about the job she did as governor, when in fact she quit that job to talk, talk, talk, for money, at wine shows and for-profit tea parties and of course for Fox News.

I have to say, I’ve been assuming Palin probably won’t run for president, and that she quit her job as Alaska governor to cash in on her fame. I now feel pretty certain she’s trying to do both. She’s certainly looking like a grifter, and cashing in at the for-profit Tea Party Nation event, and taking questions from the increasingly despised Phillips, may hurt her politically. But it’s now pretty clear to me that in all her narcissism, she thinks she can get rich and run for president at the same time. And who am I to say she can’t, given the delusions of her right-wing supporters?

Read more here.