Matt Taibbi: Mad Dog Palin

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Mad Dog Palin

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted September 27, 2008.

The scariest thing about John McCain's running mate isn't how unqualified she is -- it's what her candidacy says about America.



I'm standing outside the XCEL ENERGY CENTER in St. Paul Minnesota Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party's nomination for vice president. If I hadn't quit my two-packs-a-day habit earlier this year, I'd be chain-smoking now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.

All around me, a million cops in their absurd post-9/11 space-combat get-ups stand guard as assholes in papier-mache puppet heads scramble around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joyously out the gates in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion Bowls and other "wild" drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the "unbelievable time" they will inevitably report to their pals back home. Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they're at a party.

The defining moment for me came shortly after Palin and her family stepped down from the stage to uproarious applause, looking happy enough to throw a whole library full of books into a sewer. In the crush to exit the stadium, a middle-aged woman wearing a cowboy hat, a red-white-and-blue shirt and an obvious eye job gushed to a male colleague they were both wearing badges identifying them as members of the Colorado delegation at the Xcel gates.

"She totally reminds me of my cousin!" the delegate screeched. "She's a real woman! The real thing!"

I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/election08/100551/mad_dog_palin_/

[chelsea0011]

1. There hasn't been any journalist willing to tell it like it is until Taibbi and that article.

[teach1st]

2. Excellent

Taibbi writes that watching Palin's speech to the Republican convention was "like watching Gidget address the Reichstag."

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. Matt Taibbi...

Is the HST for our times, only with more sobriety. Prediction: He will be huge.

Oh, and he signed up for our newsletter over at World News Trust. Amazing.

[Dinosaur13]

4. Sarah Palin is Britney Spears

She's telegenic, attractive, everywhere she goes she draws a huge crowd who just want to see her. And just like Britney, when she starts to flub it, a huge crowd shows up because they expect a train wreck and they want to be there for the crash.

When I told this to my girlfriend, she said "Yes, but I think Britney's a better mother."

[pipi_k]

5. Scathing article...

I think Taibbi wrote a particularly accurate portrait of the brainless voters who won't bother to scratch off the thin layer of gold leaf to see the cheap base metal that lies beneath.

And I agree with him...

it's not so much who, or what, Sarah Palin is, or isn't...

what's really scary is that someone of her ilk would be acceptable to millions of Americans as the person who would be one heartbeat from the Presidency.


:scared:

[OakCliffDem]

6. Kick

[ixion]

7. "Here's what Sarah Palin represents: ...

being a fat fucking pig who pins "Country First" buttons on his man titties and chants "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas."

I think that sums it up quite nicely.

[bluedeminredstate]

8. Absolutely the best article so far on this disastrous choice for VP

The whole piece is such an exquisite example of the outrage, the howling indignation every American should be feeling now that they have discovered how much contempt John McCain feels for them. The fact that he so recklessly and dangerously has placed this person in the potential position of unimaginable power shows that he has placed his ambition above the good of the country.
Unfortunately, only some of us realize how much John McCain hates Americans.

These are two of my favorite excerpts from the article:

"It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain's decision to cave in to his party's right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from a tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman -- reportedly his real preference -- by picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I'll rally the base. Here, I'll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy now?"

"In her speech, Palin presented herself as a raging baby-making furnace of middle-class ambition next to whom the yuppies of the Obama set -who never want anything all that badly except maybe a few afternoons with someone else's wife, or a few kind words in The New York Times Book Review -- seem like weak, self-doubting celibates, the kind of people who certainly cannot be trusted to believe in the right God or to defend a nation."

Joe Lieberman - ideologically promiscuous hack - ha! How can you not love Matt Taibi?

:rofl:

[silverweb]

9. Absolutely brutal.

And dead on target.

It's hard to pick the best part of this piece because every paragraph contains a uniquely expressed gem, but I especially liked the end, where Taibbi lays out the real difference between being a citizen and a consumer.

Democracy doesn't require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.

This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a Southern-Style Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing "I'm Lovin' It!" during the commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

Taibbi lays it all out, bare and stark as bleached bones.

If only the people who most need to understand what he's saying could or would actually read such a long article with so many big words in it.