ONE: Party Scooper?
Sarah Palin has managed to turn feigned anger into a pretty damned lucrative pseudo-career. Now on her second stint with Fox News and coming off a headlining appearance at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual “Road to Majority” shindig, Palin’s newest gambit is to imply that she might cut and run from the Republican Party. The GOP power structure would probably be relieved were this to happen, but only to a point. Palin’s enduring popularity with zero-information conservatives could be the catalyst for a significant number of traditionally reliable Republican voters bolting for weirder pastures.
Asked by a Twitter questioner whether she and rightwing radio loudmouth Mark Levin might “be willing to build a ‘Freedom Party’ if [the] GOP continues to ignore conservatives,” Palin got right down to some of that fancy pageant walkin’ that remains her only true aptitude:
“I love the name of that party — the ‘Freedom Party,’” Palin said. “And if the GOP continues to back away from the planks in our platform, from the principles that built this party of Lincoln and Reagan, then yeah, more and more of us are going to start saying, ‘You know, what’s wrong with being independent,’ kind of with that libertarian streak that much of us have.”
Yes, uh, much of them do. Putting aside the absurdity of her characterization of Republicans as the “party of Lincoln and Reagan” – which is like calling Chicago the “city of Studs Terkel and John Wayne Gacy” – I’m guessing she could no more name a plank in the party platform than she could name a newspaper back in 2008. Palin continued, in commendably fluent Palinese:
“In other words, we want government to back off and not infringe upon our rights. I think there will be a lot of us who start saying ‘GOP, if you abandon us, we have nowhere else to go except to become more independent and not enlisted in a one or the other private majority parties that rule in our nation, either a Democrat or a Republican.’ Remember these are private parties, and you know, no one forces us to be enlisted in either party.”
Darn right they don’t, Governor. I won’t get my hopes up that this is anything more than you pandering to your fans, but if your comments were at all sincere, I look forward to you and your acolytes fancy pageant walkin’ your splinter cell, and the GOP, straight to permanent electoral oblivion.
TWO: Through a Glass Snarkly
Barack Obama’s first term was barely underway when I experienced my first queasy twinges of disappointment. At first, it was nothing overt, nothing readily explicable; a strangely off-kilter statement here, an abrupt about-face there. Soon came the willful misrepresentations, blatant distortions, even bald-faced lies. Almost before I knew it, I found myself feeling more and more burned, betrayed, deceived. The sentiments gradually intensified over months and years, eventually becoming something resembling utter, exasperated disgust.
I’m not referring to the President’s policies and actions (even ones I oppose adamantly, such as Race to the Top, the escalation in Afghanistan, some woeful compromises on energy policy and the environment, and some pretty questionable appointments). I’m referring to the hypertensive squawking that now passes for “criticism” across a broad swath of the cyber-left, and what has devolved into a churlish and counterproductive reaction to this presidency.
The recurring clichés tell a lot of the story. He “lied” about closing Gitmo. He “lied” about ending George Bush’s wars. He “dragged his feet” on DADT and DOMA. He “rolled over” on even trying to implement a universal, single-payer health care system and then “shrugged” at the failure of the public option. He “bailed out” Wall Street and “ignored” Main Street. He “embraced” the use of drones and expanded it to new operational theaters. He “ramped up” persecution of altruistic medical marijuana operations and courageous whistleblowers alike. He brutally “suppressed” the Occupy movement. He “wasted” his “huge” majorities from 2009 to 2011 and got “nothing” accomplished. He eschewed using the “power” of the bully pulpit (while giving “nice” speeches). And now he is “revealed” to have taken the surveillance state to new heights of “intrusive” overreach and “Orwellian” excess.
Throughout the Bush years, I depended on a host of progressive pundits and bloggers to keep me informed, encouraged and emboldened. Some of the very same people now seem more interested in inciting a howling mob to stand in a perpetual downpour outside the gates of the citadel, declaring as one that this presidency and this President have been failures. For some, it seems as if Barack Obama was de-legitimized merely by winning office and actually having to govern.
At the heart of much of the “criticism” is a sense that the “critics” feel jilted somehow, that the duplicitous Barack Obama represented himself as FDR Redux, that he campaigned as a fire-breathing progressive, that he was supposed somehow to govern simply by asking himself what George Bush would have done on any issue and then immediately doing the diametrical opposite. I don’t doubt that some of this is genuine and heartfelt, but it’s still heavily underpinned by the fierce urgency of unreasonable expectations and an unhealthy ignorance of basic civics, not to mention an oddly selective critical faculty that takes nothing the government says at face value but will readily suspend skepticism over the latest inane Paulite bullshit, or worse.
Equally illuminating is the strident name-calling found at the larger nominally progressive discussion sites (one of which purports to exist in part to “elect more Democrats”). Expressing confidence in the Democratic Party and the President, or articulating any degree of comfort with the notion of incremental change and willingness to accept the frustrations of compromise and misstep is simply courting vituperation. The epithets this supposed heresy solicits, some dating all the way back to early 2009, have become more and more meaningless as they have become more and more venomous: DINO, DLCer, Third Wayer, Vichy Dem, sellout, apologist, propagandist, fanboi, Kool-Aid drinker, authoritarian, worshipper. It’s debate by tantrum.
Add to this an astonishing compulsion to play the victim. Rahm Emmanuel called me retarded! I’ve been hippie-punched! The Catfood Commission wants to kill my granny! Robert Gibbs dissed the Professional Left, and I’m a leftist so he obviously meant me! Obama said I’m all wee-weed up! Obama told me to eat my peas!
A lot of this is grandstanding, theatrical ego-tripping; start with, say, Tavis Smiley and Cornel West and you can draw a direct line right to the oh-so-aggrieved message board bloviators who insist in the face of any and all evidence to the contrary that Obama is worse than Bush, to a frenetic chorus of hurrahs. The new frontier of perpetual outrage is limitless; anyone can stake a claim.
And then there’s race. The last thing in the world I want to believe is that any sincere liberal would have a problem with the President’s skin color, but comments from some quarters about his supposed passivity and ineptitude don’t sound very different to me from accusations of shiftlessness. There’s a rank ugliness about some of this that’s hard to fathom if it’s anything other than racism.
These things aren’t universal, of course. There are still rational voices on the left side of the Internet, and I count myself very grateful to be aligned with some of them right here on this site. Those voices don’t shy away from honest criticism where honest criticism is due. As well, only a fool would believe that the Obama Administration hasn’t mishandled and misjudged the progressive cyber-community on more than one occasion. But the potential impact of the digital grassroots has been blunted mostly by the shocking willingness of so many to wallow in disinformation and histrionics. The promise of a synergy between elected power and a vigorous leftosphere leveraging technology for information sharing and activism is lost in a miasma of all-caps paranoia and misdirected anger. A community organizer can’t organize a community that refuses to be organized.
THREE: Mr. Pitiful
Governor Paul LePage is having a bad time of it recently, and that can only be good news for Maine.
Back in May, LePage got all stroppy after the legislature forced him to remove a TV outside his Statehouse office, which he was using to air “campaign-style” commercials touting his policies. His reaction to having his political propaganda videos yanked from the seat of government? Overblown, juvenile rhetoric:
“The minute we start stifling our speech, we might as well go home, roll up our sleeves and get our guns out.”
LePage also threatened to move his office to the Governor’s Mansion, which, so far, he hasn’t done. This came less than two weeks after Dawn Hill, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, refused to let him address a committee session:
“Are you saying that the governor of the state of Maine is not welcome to address the Appropriations Committee?” LePage asked.
“We hadn’t expected you, and what we had to accomplish was accomplished,” Hill said, adding that she would be open to speaking with LePage outside committee meetings. “It’s best to end it on a high note, and I think that’s where we were.”
“Outside this committee won’t happen unless I have a way to speak,” LePage responded. “I want to get on the record, and this committee is not allowing it. The people of the state of Maine are being played for patsies.”
A few short weeks later, LePage’s veto of the state budget was overridden by bipartisan supermajorities of both houses of the legislature, averting a government shutdown. The vote, and the tortuous process that preceded it, led LePage to quack:
“Democrats didn’t talk to me much. Neither did Republicans… The Republican Party is not a very strong party.”
LePage’s future plans are uncertain, but he recently hinted at forgoing another gubernatorial campaign to spend more time with his pouting, and even mused to reporters about a congressional run:
“I’m considering running for Mike Michaud’s seat if you want to know the truth because it can’t be any worse in Washington than it is here,” LePage said. “Everything’s on the table. Retirement, Social Security, running for Congress, maybe going back to Marden’s to stock shelves, who knows. I don’t take myself as seriously as all you do.”
But he certainly takes his invective seriously, as he demonstrated when speaking about Troy Jackson, a Democratic legislator who had fought LePage tooth and nail on the budget and urged Senate colleagues to override the veto:
LePage said Jackson “claims to be for the people, but he’s the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline…
“This man is a bad person,” LePage continued. “He doesn’t only have no brains. He has a black heart and so does the leadership upstairs.”
WMTW reporter Paul Merrill told him others might find the Vaseline remark offensive.
“Good,” LePage replied. “It ought to, because I’ve been taking it for two years.”
Fastest way to put a stop to that would be resigning right now, Governor. In a happy coincidence, Marden’s is currently hiring in Lincoln, Brewer and Scarborough.
FOUR: Signs of the Times?
Nearly forgotten in the reaction to the Supreme Court’s decisions on Prop 8 and DOMA was the surprising announcement that Exodus International, a high-profile “pray away the gay” organization, was closing up shop. Even more remarkably, Exodus International president Alan Chambers issued a lengthy, moving apology to the LGBT community, in which he noted his own “ongoing same-sex attractions” (Chambers is married, to a woman):
Please know that I am deeply sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly “on my side” who called you names like sodomite—or worse. I am sorry that I, knowing some of you so well, failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know. I am sorry that when I celebrated a person coming to Christ and surrendering their sexuality to Him that I callously celebrated the end of relationships that broke your heart. I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine.
Despite the damage you’ve done, Mr. Chambers, I applaud your change of heart and apparently sincere contrition. Now, if you could have a word with Marcus Bachmann…
In another sign that the Age of Ignorance might be giving way to a new vogue for rational thought, Kentucky’s Creation Museum appears to be floundering. Attendance has declined by nearly half since the operation opened in 2007. At least for now, that has helped put a spanner in the works for the museum’s highly touted spin-off project, the Ark Encounter, featured in this column in August 2011 shortly before construction was expected to begin. Despite continuous, heart-tugging appeals for assistance from individual donors, and Kentucky’s offer of massive public largesse, the Ark Encounter’s financing is still not in place:
Not enough private donations have come in to start construction, and building permits will not be ready until November, according to Ark Encounter co-founder and Senior Vice President Michael Zovath.
The project has $12.3 million in hand and $12.7 million more in committed donations; it needs $23 million more to start building the ark alone. Zovath does not know when that will happen.
Like Noah before the Flood, the builders are in a bit of a time crunch, since Kentucky tourism tax incentives for the project are set to expire in May 2014.
Sadly for Mr. Zovath and his business partners, the public just might be evolving away from them. Let it rain.
FIVE: Parting Shots
Last Monday marked the effective date of Colorado’s new gun control laws, and petulant firearms accessories manufacturer Magpul (first discussed here back in April) spent the Saturday beforehand giving away 1,500 high-capacity magazines at an event touchingly named “Farewell to Arms” at a park in the Denver suburb of Glendale.
We’ll probably never know whether any of the giveaway magazines – which, as of Monday, became illegal to obtain in the state – will be employed in a mass shooting. Magpaul certainly won’t concern itself with such things. The company still intends to make good on its promise to leave the state; seems there’s just no profit in magazines holding 14 bullets or less.
