By Hanlon, on September 21st, 2008 at 11:44 PM
Sam Harris in Newsweek.
We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter’s microphone, saying things like, “I’m voting for Sarah because she’s a mom. She knows what it’s like to be a mom.” Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.
It took a lot of work to pick the best quote, his article is full of them, but that seemed the best.
By Hanlon, on September 21st, 2008 at 11:33 PM
First off, here’s the cartoon in question. Just so we’re all on the same page.
Let’s assume your reading comprehension ranks somewhere between 3rd grade and PhD from Cambridge. Chances are you should be able to piece together the intention of this cartoon: Palin speaks in incomprehensible gibberish and her claims of being our holy candidate aren’t legitimate, in the eyes of our cartoonist, delivered by poking fun at the tendecy of Pentecostals to “speak in tongues” aka “make random noises”.
Well hold tight, because the hypersensitive Christians have come around to claim that the cartoon is mocking God and religion itself. Crying that “The Washington Post would not think of printing a cartoon that mocked members of the Muslim or Jewish faiths,” and that “the cartoonist portrayed God as cranky, befuddled, a user of profanity and not omniscient,” they’re all up in arms in the way they mocked Muslims for being a few years ago.
I’m sure the WaPo will go on to apologize and say the message wasn’t that harsh (which it wasn’t), but you know what? Even if it was, tough titty. When someone is running for VP that is waiting for Jesus Christ to descend from the sky, they deserve to be mocked until they’re sent home crying. Someone who thinks the earth is 7,000 years old isn’t qualified to teach elementary science or history, let alone be 2nd in command at the White House. Period.
By Hanlon, on September 21st, 2008 at 10:32 PM
Ouch.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzc0re_3hQw
By Hanlon, on September 21st, 2008 at 10:29 PM
 Here’s a general rule of politics: if at any point the phrase “you have to blame both sides” or “we can’t be pointing fingers” appears, it means the person saying it is covering their own side. I’ve heard it a few times recently in reference to the economic crisis, and there’s a good reason for that. What we’re seeing now is a direct result of conservative philosophy.
Just as a complete and utter socialization and federalization of the marketplace would bring about disaster, so too does letting everything go “Social Darwinism” and scrapping any remnants of governmental involvement with the economy.
Take a moment to recall my continuing frustration at the fact that there is an upper limit to how liberal one can get in the national spotlight, but no limit to how conservative. That’s what we’ve seen in economic matters as well. There’s not a single credible voice out there saying that the government should just step in and take control of everything, but there’s no shortage of people saying the government needs to step out entirely.
Our current situation is what happens when people who think the free market will regulate itself are let to take charge. Does it work? Well, judge for yourself. Who is at fault? You can point your finger at a few politicians on both sides perhaps, but the prevailing philosophy that led this disaster is unabashedly conservative. We didn’t get here because Washington pushed for more federal control over the banks, quite the opposite.
McCain’s current flip-floppery illustrates the real nature of far-right free-marketism. It works when things are going well (after all, the Gramm-drafted legislation that catalyzed the collapse was in 1999 in the height of the Clinton-era economic boom). When the chips fall, though, the same people who said the government should keep their hands off of our money start asking for handouts. After all, it’s easy to tell Washington to decry handouts when you don’t need ‘em.
So when it comes time to point fingers, and yes fingers should be pointed, don’t buy into this crap that both sides are in the muck. Maybe the Democrats went along, but the attitude behind it all was wholly right-wing. Now that the shit’s hit the fan suddenly everyone’s in love with bailouts. If we want to avoid it next time, we need people in office that don’t buy into the philosophy that led us here.
By Hanlon, on September 21st, 2008 at 07:07 PM
 I’ve noticed that Obama has picked up the offense in the campaign lately, and specifically in one realm: calling his opponents out on lying. For a while now I’ve been harping about dishonesty, misrepresentation, and stretching the truth in campaigns, but it’s always been verboten for politicians to come right out and call the other side a liar.
This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. The word “lie” conjures up an image of malice, that someone completely invented a statement to slander someone and did so with a complete lack of respect for those who would hear it. When you lie, you appear desperate, and you appear to have contempt for the public because you believe they won’t be smart enough to catch you.
So we get euphemisms. Euphemisms for lying. Ironic since a euphemism itself is a way to shade or hide the truth in order to make it more palatable (as George Carlin so often said). We hear “dishonest” a lot of the time, same with “misleading” and “bending the truth”. The idea then is that, unlike a lie, the other guy took something and simply portrayed it in an unfair way. Still an accusation of willful inaccuracy, but a far softer one.
Sometimes it feels like McCain’s been exploiting this hesitancy. When you know the media and your opponent are going to avoid calling you a liar at all costs, you can lie and the response will be the same. Misrepresent a vote on a tax plan or make up a story about his history and both will be called “misleading”. The American people have become so desensitized to the idea of a politician “stretching the truth” or taking something “out of context” that they’ll hardly bat an eye.
Obama’s finally gotten sick of skirting around the issue, though, and is now stepping up, calling McCain’s lies lies. When Sarah Palin says she said no to the Bridge, she’s not bending the truth, she’s just lying. When McCain says Obama would raise taxes on middle class families, this is a lie. This isn’t spin, it’s not taking something out of context or mischaracterizing it. It’s a lie. A false statement based on nothing resembling the truth.
I wholly encourage Obama to continue this, not out of some Democratic anger, but because I’d like to see a campaign where one side isn’t simply pulling things out of their asses in order to slime the other. Go after him for “socialist” policies, argue with him on the war, hell you can say his ears are big if you want. Just stop it with making shit up.
By Hanlon, on September 21st, 2008 at 02:40 PM
 I’ve noticed for a while that the Anchorage Daily News is the most critical paper of Sarah Palin, which is an odd li’l thing. Then there was the gigantic anti-Palin demonstration with Alaskan women. Now we’ve got another development, the Alaskans are mad that Palin’s become “off-limits”.
The partisan spillover of the presidential campaign into the statehouse, political analysts here say, now threatens Palin’s most powerful political capital in Alaska: her commitment to transparency, her willingness to forge bipartisan alliances with Democrats to advance her legislative agenda, and her battle to upend the good ol’ boy network.
“Is this going to dilute her image as a maverick who will clean out the rascals from their perches of power, when she herself cannot tolerate questions into her behavior, investigations into the firing of a public safety commissioner?” said Gerald McBeath, political science professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
Palin, he said, is “still popular” in Alaska, “but she is not beloved. And there’s a difference between the two. She’s getting a lot more criticism at the state level as a result of her vice presidential candidacy.”
When your home state isn’t really big on you any more, that’s pretty telling. When the most vocal “for the love of all that is holy don’t elect this woman” constituency exists in the state where she’s still governor, maybe it’s the kinda thing people should pay attention to.
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