Words of Advice from President Bartlet

What if Barack Obama turned to former President Jed Bartlet of the “West Wing” for some fatherly wisdom?

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet
- Maureen Dowd – The New York Times

Oh my god, my god (note, I used “god” in lower caps) is Aaron Sorkin! I love Aaron Sorkin. I LLLUUUUUUUUUV Aaron Sorkin. And I love President Bartlet. And oh my god, let righteous anger speak!

I loved that Biden said it would be patriotic for the wealthy to do their part at this time. Thank you, Biden, for having balls

Alaska Women Say She Be Failin’

A couple of hours after Gov. Sarah Palin returned to the Outside, as Alaskans call the Lower 48, her local critics swarmed an Anchorage intersection to correct the widespread impression that the whole of the Last Frontier endorses her candidacy.
…
“The whole thing grew out of frustration,” said Charla Sterne, one of the organizers, who like several people at the rally declined to say where they worked (several said they were state employees and feared retribution). – In Anchorage, an Anti-Palin Protest – Washington Post

I couldn’t resist including a sample of the signs:

• Bush In A Skirt
• Palin: She Be Failin’
• Jesus Was a Community Organizer
• Palin: Thanks But No Thanks
• Smearing Alaska’s Good Name One Scandal @ a Time
• Candidate To Nowhere
• Rape Kits Should Be Free
• Voted For Her Once: Never Again!
• Community Organizers are the Real Patriots
• Barbies for War
• I Shall Not Be Pandered To
• Give Palin Your Vote AND Your Draft Age Child
• Sarah Palin: So Far Right She’s Wrong
• Coat Hangers for McCain
• Sarah Palin, Undoing 150 Years of American Feminism
• Hockey Mama for Obama (on a hockey stick)

 

Alternate Reality

I’ve been very gloom and doom. Fretting over the election. Fretting about many things. Doesn’t help that I’m reading text after text on neo-Confucian ethics, including the memoirs of a Korean noblewoman whose husband, the crown prince, was sealed into a rice chest by his father, the king, and left to die: The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng, translated by JaHyun Kim Haboush. So, yes, I’ve been fretting about the moral/ethical failings of our world.

Then, I read this article.

The Year of the Cloned Candidates
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: September 13, 2008

We have been approaching this presidential race the wrong way. It’s not political science. It’s science fiction. Something is amiss in the space-time continuum.

The presidential candidates running now are not the same ones we started out with. It’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” all over again. We’re watching the clash of the pod people. – The New York Times

 

They're here already! You're next!

 

And I laughed. Lots. Gaffawing laughter.

Methinks I need to schedule in regular doses of the Daily Show with John Stewart.

If this were indeed a sci-fi horror flick, the kicker I’d like to add is this: the final scene takes us to a facility where the Republicans, unbeknownst to the American public, have been conducting secretly cloning experiments from stem cell lines. The final shot pans across glass pods of clones and zooms in slowly on the pod containing the protagonist’s clone. Mwahahahahahah.

 

Well-Intentioned But Manipulated

In “The Mirrored Ceiling,” the latest post in her New York Times blog Domestic Disturbances, Judith Warner articulates incisively the gross insult and danger that is Palin’s nomination.

Palin sounded, at times, like she was speaking a foreign language as she gave voice to the beautifully crafted words that had been prepared for her on Wednesday night.

But that wasn’t held against her. Thanks to the level of general esteem that greeted her ascent to the podium, it seems we’ve all got to celebrate the fact that America’s Hottest Governor (Princess of the Fur Rendezvous 1983, Miss Wasilla 1984) could speak at all.

Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?
…
One of the worst poisons of the American political climate right now, the thing that time and again in recent years has led us to disaster, is the need people feel for leaders they can “relate” to. … it brought us after all, two terms of George W. Bush. And it isn’t new; Americans have always needed to feel that their leaders were, on some level, people like them. …But never before George W. Bush did it quite reach the beer-drinking level of familiarity… There’s a fine line between likability and demagoguery. Both thrive upon manipulation and least-common-denominator politics.”

Some of the comments to this Blog post were especially worthwhile. In particular, I appreciated Elizabeth Fuller’s comments (#5 and #387 ), as did so many others who commented, and Bill’s comment #363. They were gems. I just hope that the populace is made up of such thoughtful people who do discern the dissimulation being waged by Steve Schmidt, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party who, in order to put themselves in the White House, would do everything but put the country first and in fact would soil and undermine the very values upon which this nation was founded. I hope they are able to see that Sarah Palin is none other than a lipstick wearing, Alaskan iteration of George W. Bush: just as ill-prepared because they are not curious about the world in which they live, they have not dedicated themselves to challenging themselves, their hubris allows them to believe they possess all the wherewithal that could possibly be necessary to be (V)POTUS, and they lack respect for the Constitution and would violate that foundational belief in the separation of church and state.

 

Shame on the Whole Lot of You

Steve Schmidt has transformed John McCain’s campaign into an elbows-out, risk-taking, disciplined machine. – An Adviser Puts His Stamp on McCain Campaign – The New York Times

Steve Schmidt stands for all that I find problematic about politics. His modus operandi is what most people purport to find repugnant about politicking. McCain used to criticize this type of “win at all costs, including stretching the truth so much that it bears little resemblance to itself” politicking. That McCain who was critical of dirty politics, I actually liked.

Must we resort to this to win? Are we that base? To stoop to such demeaning strategies and to devour such meat with frightening voracity that we make a pack of laughing hyenas appear civilized?

This criticism is not limited to Steve Schmidt and whichever likeminded Republicans.

Dems! Whatever happened to being the change you want, of wanting a more elevated, diginified political engagement?

Pretty Woman: Sarah Palin

Imagine my delight when the hokey chick flick came out on the campaign trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not premiering on Lifetime. – Vice in Go-Go Boots? – Maureen Dowd, NYTimes.com

I normally don’t go for Maureen Dowd. But this one did make me laugh. That said, I wonder at which point does critique become satire, then slur?

Yes, I still find insulting the choice of Palin as VP because she’s so grossly underqualified for that particular position. Perhaps she is a fine governor for Alaska. But 2nd in line to the POTUS? What was McCain thinking? What happened to the man who was once the Republican I Liked and Secretly Suspected Was a Democrat? (I just caught myself about to shoot off, “is he senile?” but realized how problematic that might be.)

That said, though we can critique her hypocrisy re: family values, if feminists want to argue for choice, we cannot go around criticizing her decision to be a Governor rather than the primary caretaker of her child, Down Syndrome or not.

I am a bit shocked by her hubris and audacity in thinking herself capable of being POTUS. I’d have respected her more if she’d declined.