It would have been a horror story if Sarah Palin had been elected vice president, but for now we can sit back and enjoy the ongoing soap opera aspects. There are two new stories today, including one of pre-marital sex. Levi Johnston was interviewed for The Tyra Show. The full interview, for those who really care to learn more about his sex life with Bristol Palin, will air on Monday.
Like any good soap opera, we have a whole crew of supporting characters. Today’s other major development was that Diana Palin, Todd Palin’s half sister, was arrested after breaking into a Wasilla home for the second time this week to steal money.
Somewhat related post for television fans:
What Not To Wear: Special Vice Presidential Candidate Edition
Gah. I live in a neighborhood where a lot of this sort of thing is par for the course, but no one ever talks about electing the neighbors president.
Hmmmm, I am finding nothing liberal or enlightened about this constant sheeplike attack on Sarah Palin by the left.
Obama’s famaily and chosen associates are not exactly beaver cleaver land and certainly not the Huxtables.
Palin is a self made woman, smart enough to become governor with no family connections to help her. The couric interview was a joke and my fellow liberals are an embarrasment the way they continue to go after this woman.
Keep it up and smart women, liberal and conservative all over this country will vote for her. You guys have no freaking clue the effect you have on the general electorate with this hateful and ignorant snipe.
Smart women will never support Sarah Palin as they will realize that she is unfit for national office.
We know that Sarah Palin doesn’t understand the First Amendment, but for most of the country mocking politicians is agreed to be protected speech. I shall continue to mock politicians–and that includes politicians of both parties and regardless of gender–despite your antipathy towards freedom of expression. It is rather sexist on your part to think that Palin should be treated any different from other politicians because she is a woman.
The Couric interview was a joke–it showed that Palin was unfit to be on a national ticket. It wasn’t only the Couric interview which showed this. Palin’s incompetence was seen repeatedly. When is she going to be brave enough to appear on a Sunday morning interview show?
This was posted more as a matter of popular culture than politics with no claims that this is included among the reasons why Palin is unfit for office. In contrast, right wing hacks (including the PUMAs) regularly exaggerated, distorted, and sometimes outright lied about people Obama has been associated with (even if the association was trivial) to try to make bogus political points. There’s hardly any comparison here.
Most Democrats don’t understand the 2nd Amendment, but supposedly smart people still vote for them.
Anyway, I honesly don’t see Palin being a national contender in 4 years, so this is just entertainment.
The Alaska story I would like the inside dirt on is the prosecutorial misconduct in the Stevens case. I find it very, very hard (just this side of impossible) to believe that that level of misconduct in the prosecution of a sitting US Senator could be accidental. Someone wanted him real bad. And that misconduct changed the composition of the Senate.
The Second Amendment as written is ambiguous. I support an individual right to bear arms, but reading the Second Amendment it is really questionable as to whether that was intended. Of course this doesn’t matter in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling.
While the Second Amendment is ambiguous, there is no question that Palin’s interpretation of the First Amendment to protect her from criticism by the press is the opposite of what was intended.
One would hope that Palin would not be a contender. I initially predicted she would not but she does have a dedicated group of supporters and considerable name recognition. In a divided field anything could happen. I wouldn’t put any money on Palin but it is possible she will be a contender in 2012. Her chances would also be improved if Obama remains popular and stronger candidates decide to wait another four years.
In the Alaska case we had both prosecutorial misconduct but also real misconduct by Stevens. I agree with sending a message that prosecutorial misconduct won’t be tolerated by dropping the charges, but Stevens still deserved to be removed from the Senate.
Ron, I have no love for “Bridge to Nowhere” Stevens. But I consider the presumption that a prosecutor took out a Senator through misconduct — and changed the political landscape of the US Senate in the process — to be far scarier than the graft that Stevens commited. The fact that Stevens won’t be going to prison is secondary (well, maybe not to him).
I really want to know who decided it was good clean sport to take out a sitting Senator through misconduct.
I believe in a Constitutional right to bear arms. I also believe in a government responsibility to keep grenade launchers and machine guns off the street. The language of the Second Amendment is arcane enough that it can be questioned whether anyone really understands it. The First Amendment, on the other hand, is extremely clear.
The idea that women, with one accord, are going to rise up and vote for Sarah Palin because people are ‘mean’ to her is more insulting to women than any insult to Sarah Palin. It’s like saying women are going to rise up and vote overwhelmingly Democratic from now on because conservatives are mean to Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi.
There was a great deal of gleeful misrepresentation surrounging Palin’s family during the election… both on the part of liberals wishing to score cheap points and on the part of the McCain campaign. When the campaign was over, many in the McCain campaign went out of their way to join in the smears on Palin after going out of their way to attempt to turn a good joke targetting John McCain’s policy positions and comparing them to Bush’s as some sort of nasty personal attack on Palin in attempt to score cheap points with women.
I wanting to keep corrupt, ignorant religious fanatics out of government is elitism, then I may be an elitist. I refuse to believe, however, that calling a corrupt and ignorant person corrupt and ignorant is sexist because the corrupt and ignorant person happens to be a woman.
I’m not sure there was very much misrepresentation. There were enough true stories about Palin to keep everyone busy. There were also a handful of stories every early after her pick which turned out to be inaccurate, but I think that was primarily due to attempts to report quickly, not intentional misrepresentation. With regards to the McCain vs. Palin disputes after the campaign, I think these were largely differences due to the different perspective of each camp.
Another form of misrepresentation was that many people believe that things said by Tina Fey impersonating her were actually from Palin. This was more accidental than intentional as people should be able to tell the difference between what is said on SNL and the real world. Even there, some Tina Fey comments were exaggerations for comedy value, but still had connection to things Palin actually said. In one case Fey even did repeat a Palin answer exactly as given by Palin in a real interview. The answer was so unintentionally funny on Palin’s part that it got laughs.
Ron, the whole “Was Sarah the mother of Trig” thing was pretty damn repulsive. I stopped reading Sullivan’s blog because of that.
Eclectic — there are large areas where the First Amendment is not all that clear. Commercial speech, for instance. BTW — there will be a new contentious case for that. The bill going through Congress right now to put tobacco under FDA regulation makes it an offense for tobacco companies or their representatives to state that tobacco is under FDA regulation.
Fritz,
You are right about the Trig thing. That was one story I had no interest in. I put stories about Trig’s birth in the same category as claims that Obama was not a natural born American citizen.
As for the First Amendment, there are ambiguity in some situation, but not in the manner that Palin confused it.
It was the Trig case that I was mostly referring to in referring to misrepresentation on the liberal side. There were lots of other silly stories spread by bloggers in the same vein and just as unreliable. There was a lot of stuff that was legitimately bad, but the fact that much of it was reported inaccurately when it first broke has convinced even many people who are not Bible-beating, gay-bashing, abortion-clinic bombing fans of Palin to believe that all of that information was completely false rather than sorting out the nuance between the real scandals and the exaggerated reports.
I really don’t consider the First Amendment that ambiguous. It gives citizens the right to speak their opinions freely without criminal persecution for their words.
There are questions of whether or not corporations are ‘citizens’ and spending money = ‘speech’. That is due to economic changes that have created situations the Founding Fathers were not equipped to predict. There are also questions of the issue of free speech in the workplace, between employer and employee, which were not even considered as something that would ever need to be ‘protected’ because Revolutionary American society did not ponder the concept of firing an employee for advocating a political opinion different from that of the employer.
None of these issues are the results of any ambiguity in the First Amendment, which is perfectly clear. They are the result of economic developments not foreseen by the framers.
Personally, I think much of the modern concept of ‘advertising’ would horrify the framers, who would have said that craftsmen should produce what the people need rather than spend their time convincing the people they need what craftsmen produce, but my view of capitalism is very different from that currently en vogue.