Re: Fun with Sarah
- From: Jack Linthicum <jacklinthicum@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 6 Sep 2008 08:01:54 -0700 (PDT)
On Sep 6, 10:23 am, hk <payer33...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Conservative Palinguage Guide Vols. 1 and 2
September 5th, 2008 | Posted in Talkback |
Vol. 1
If you’re a minority and you’re selected for a job over more qualified
candidates you’re a “token hire.”
If you’re a conservative and you’re selected for a job over more
qualified candidates you’re a “game changer.”
If you live in an Urban area and you get a girl pregnant you’re a “baby
daddy.”
If you’re the same in Alaska you’re a “teen father.” (Actually,
according to your own MySpace page you’re an F’n redneck that don’t want
any kids, but that’s too long a phrase for the evil liberal media to
take out of context and flog morning noon and night).
Black teen pregnancies? A “crisis” in black America.
White teen pregnancies? A “blessed event.”
If you grow up in Hawaii you’re “exotic.”
Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, you’re the quintessential
“American story.”
Similarly, if you name you kid Barack you’re “unpatriotic.”
Name your kid Track, you’re “colorful.”
If you’re a Democrat and you make a VP pick without fulling vetting the
individual you’re “reckless.”
A Republican who doesn’t fully vet is a “maverick.”
If you say that for the “first time in my adult lifetime I’m really
proud of my country” it makes you “unfit” to be First Lady.
If you are a registered member of a fringe political group that
advocates secession that makes you “First Dude.”
A DUI from twenty years ago is “old news.”
A speech given without proper citation from twenty years ago is
“relevant information.”
And, finally, if you’re a man and you decide to run for office despite
your wife’s reoccurrence of cancer you’re a “questionable spouse.”
If you’re a woman and you decide to run for office despite having five
kids including a newborn with Downs Syndrome… Well, we don’t know what
that is ‘cause THAT’S NOT A FAIR QUESTION TO ASK!
Vol. 2
If you get 18 million people to vote for you in a national presidential
primary, you’re a “phoney.”
Get 100,000+ people to vote you governor of the 47th most populous
state in the Union, you’re “well loved.”
SoyAA says: If you are biracial and born in a state not connected to the
lower 48, America needs darn near 2 years and 3 major speeches to “get
to know you.”
If you’re white and from a state not connected to the lower 48, America
needs 36 minutes and 38 seconds worth of an acceptance speech to know
you’re “one of us.”
If you give your wife a dap on stage, it’s actually a “terrorist fist jab.”
If your daughter licks her palm so that she can slick down your
youngest child’s hair on national TV it’s an “adorable moment.”
(Seriously, forget about abstinence only, teach these folks some
grooming skills).
DTD SAYS: If your pastor rails against inequality in the United States
of America, you’re an “extremist.”
If your pastor welcomes a sermon by a member of Jews for Jesus who
preaches that the killing of Jews by terrorists is a lesson to Jews that
they must convert to Christianity, you’re a “fundamentalist.”
If you’re a black man and you use a scholarship to get into college,
then work your way up to being the president of the Harvard Law Review,
you’re “uppity.”
If you’re a conservative and your parents pay your way to Hawaii
Pacific University . . . you only have four more schools to attend over
the next five years before you somehow manage to graduate (it might be
five more school over the next five years. No one has yet verified
whether or not Palin was actually ever registered at the University of
Hawaii at Hilo. But, you know how shady people are who ever attended
any kind of school in Hawaii).
SeanOcali says: If you’re 18, white, and get a 16 year old girl pregnant
“life happens.”
If you’re 18, black, and impregnate a 16 year old girl, you’re a
“registered sex offender.”
If you spend 18 months building a campaign around the theme of “Change,”
it’s just “empty rhetoric.”
If one week before your party’s national convention you SUDDENLY make
your candidacy about “Change,” that’s “red meat.”
And your last lesson for the day:
If you are a Democrat, an Independent, or even a moderate Republican, if
you’re female, male, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, bi-racial,
multi-ethnic, or GLBT, if you’re a Jew, Gentile, Muslim, agnostic or
atheist - “Yes, we can!”
If you’re a pitbull with lipstick from Alaska, “Yup, yup!”
The nuts are falling off the tree. The Republicans will try anything
to steer the elections away from the economy. Several types at the
Republican National Convention sneered at the idea that some people
were having problems keeping, getting, having jobs, samo samo with
houses and no question about health care---I mean what are emergency
ambulances for but to provide health care for the lower classes.
Why They Hate Her
Sarah Palin is a smart missile aimed at the heart of the left.
by Jeffrey Bell
09/15/2008, Volume 014, Issue 01
For months John McCain has apparently been hoping to use his selection
of a running mate to shake up the presidential race. By picking Alaska
governor Sarah Palin, McCain has accomplished that--and very likely a
lot more than that, more than he or anyone else could have imagined.
I'm not talking about the widely remarked fact that if Palin performs
well, and regardless of whether McCain wins or loses, she becomes a
future Republican presidential prospect. Given the end of the
remarkable 28-year run of the Bush family--present on six of the last
seven GOP national tickets, a record that could stand forever--and
McCain's own status as a pre-baby boomer, this was baked in the cake
no matter what younger Republican politician McCain chose to elevate.
But even apart from its political implications, the rollout of the
Sarah Palin vice presidential candidacy may be regarded decades from
now as a nationally shared Rorschach test of enormous cultural
significance.
From the instant of Palin's designation on Friday, August 29, theAmerican left went into a collective mass seizure from which it shows
no sign of emerging. The left blogosphere and elite media have, for
the moment, joined forces and become indistinguishable from each
other, and from the supermarket tabloids, in their desire to find and
use anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her
family. In sharp contrast to the yearlong restraint shown toward
truthful reports about John Edwards's affair, bizarre rumors have been
reported as news, and, according to McCain campaign director Steve
Schmidt, nationally known members of the elite media have besieged him
with preposterous demands.
The most striking thing in purely political terms about this hurricane
of elite rage is the built-in likelihood that it will backfire. It's
not simply that it is highly capable of generating sympathy for Palin
among puzzled undecided voters and of infuriating and motivating a
previously placid GOP base, neither of which is in the interest of the
Obama-Biden campaign. It also created an opening for Palin herself to
look calm, composed, competent, and funny in response.
In her acceptance speech last Wednesday night, anyone could see the
poise and skill that undoubtedly attracted McCain's attention months
ago, when few others were even aware that he was looking. But it was
precisely the venom of the left's assault that heightened the drama
and made it a riveting television event. Palin benefited from her
ability to project full awareness of the volume and relentlessness of
the attacks without showing a scintilla of resentment or self-pity.
This is a rare talent, one shared by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald
Reagan. For this quality to have even a chance to develop, there must
be something real to serve as an emotional backdrop: disproportionate,
crazy-seeming rage by one's political enemies. Roosevelt was on his
party's national ticket five times and Reagan sought the presidency
four times. Each became governor of what at the time was the nation's
most populous state. It took Roosevelt and Reagan decades of national
prominence and pitched ideological combat to achieve the gift of
enemies like these. Yet the American left awarded Sarah Palin this
gift seemingly within a microsecond of her appearance on the national
stage in Dayton, Ohio. Why?
The most important thing to know about the left today is that it is
centered on social issues. At root, it always has been, ever since the
movement took form and received its name in the revolutionary Paris of
the 1790s. In order to drive toward a vision of true human liberation,
all the institutions and moral codes we associate with civilization
had to be torn down. The institutions targeted in revolutionary France
included the monarchy and the nobility, but even higher on the enemies
list of the Jacobins and their allies were organized religion and the
family, institutions in which the moral values of traditional society
could be preserved and passed on outside the control of the leftist
vanguard.
Full human liberation always remained the ultimate vision of the left--
Marx, for one, was explicit on this point--but the left in its more
than 200-year history has been flexible and adaptable in the forms it
was willing to assume and the projects it was willing to undertake in
pursuit of its anti-institutional goals. For more than a hundred
years, the central project of the global left was socialism.
It's hard to credit today, but as recently as the 1940s most Western
political elites believed government ownership of business and
national planning were the keys to economic modernization. Even when
socialism's economic prestige was eroded by the West's capitalist boom
after World War II, socialism retained credibility as a means of
income redistribution.
It was the turbulent 1960s that proved a strategic turning point for
the left. The worldwide social and cultural upheavals that culminated
in 1968 were felt as a crisis of confidence by institutions in the
West. Some institutions (universities, for example) defected to the
rebels, while others saw their centuries-long influence on the
population greatly weaken or drain away virtually overnight.
In the short run, most political elites weathered the storm. A big
reason, the left gradually realized, was that socialist economics had
become an albatross. Increasingly, the democratic parties of the left
in Western countries downplayed socialism or even decoupled from it,
leaving them free to pursue the anti-institutional, relativistic moral
crusade that has been in the DNA of the left all along.
This newly revitalized social and cultural agenda made it possible for
the left to shrug off the collapse of European communism and the
Soviet Union nearly two decades ago. Even in countries like China
where the Communist party retained dictatorial power, socialist
economics became a thing of the past. Attempts to suppress religion
and limit the autonomy of the family did not.
For the post-1960s, post-socialist left, the single most important
breakthrough has been the alliance between modern feminism and the
sexual revolution. This was far from inevitable. Up until around 1960,
attempts at sexual liberation were resisted by most educated women. In
the wake of the success of Playboy and other mass-circulation
pornographic magazines in the 1950s, men were depicted as the
initiators and main beneficiaries of sexual liberation, women as
intolerant of promiscuity as well as potential victims of predatory
"liberated" men.
With the introduction of the Pill around 1960, things abruptly began
to change. Fears of overpopulation legitimated a contraceptive ethic
throughout middle-class society in North America, Europe, Japan, and
the Soviet bloc. China, which discouraged contraception and welcomed
population gains under Mao Zedong, flipped to the extreme of the One
Child policy in 1979, shortly after pro-capitalist reformers took
charge and fixed on strict population control as an integral and
unquestioned part of the package of Western-style development.
The fact that the Pill was taken only by women gave them a greater
feeling of control over their sexual activity and eroded their social
and psychological resistance to premarital sex. "No fault" divorce, a
term borrowed from the field of auto insurance, in reality amounted to
unilateral divorce and began to undermine the idea of marriage as a
binding mutual contract oriented toward the procreation and nurturing
of children. Contrary to nearly every prediction, the ubiquity of far
more reliable methods of contraception and the growing ideological
separation of sex from reproduction, coincided with a huge increase in
unwed pregnancies.
Though earlier versions of feminism tended to embrace children and
elevate motherhood, the more adversarial feminism that gained a mass
base in virtually every affluent democracy beginning in the 1970s
preached that children and childbearing were the central
instrumentality of men's subjugation of women. This more than anything
else in the menu of the post-socialist left raised toward cultural
consensus a vision in which the monogamous family was what prevented
humanity from achieving a Rousseau-like "natural" state of freedom
from all laws and all bonds of mutual obligation.
If this analysis is correct, the single most important narrative
holding the left together in today's politics and culture is the one
offered--often with little or no dissent--by adversarial feminism. The
premise of this narrative is that for women to achieve dignity and
self-fulfillment in modern society, they must distance themselves, not
necessarily from men or marriage or childbearing, but from the kind of
marriage in which a mother's temptation to be with and enjoy several
children becomes a synonym for holding women back and cheating them
out of professional success.
On August 29, in the immediate aftermath of the announcement by the
McCain campaign, all that was widely known of the governor of Alaska
was that she was married with five children, the last one of whom had
been carried to term with Down syndrome, and that she was pro-life. No
one knew that her oldest daughter was pregnant. No one knew much about
what she had done as governor or in her previous career. No one knew
how she had been drawn into politics, or that her sister had had a
reckless husband and a contentious divorce. Above all, with the
possible exception of John McCain, no one knew that Sarah Palin was
both a married mother of five and a brilliant political talent with a
chance not just to change the dynamics of the 2008 election but to
rise to the top level of American politics, whatever happens this
year.
The simple fact of her being a pro-life married mother of five with a
thriving political career was--before anything else about her was
known--enough for the left and its outliers to target her for
destruction. She could not be allowed to contradict symbolically one
of the central narratives of the left. How galling it will be to Sarah
Palin's many new enemies if she survives this assault and prevails. If
she does, her success may be an important moment in the struggle to
shape not just America's politics but its culture.
Jeffrey Bell, author of Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of
Equality (1992), is completing work on Social Conservatism: The
Movement That Polarized American Politics.
It has been fascinating to watch the right-wing press lap up the anti-
media nonsense put out by the McCain campaign's Steve Schmidt
regarding Sarah Palin. The latest is Jeffrey Bell, in the Weekly
Standard, who makes the media's attempt to find out just exactly who
Palin is part of a seamless, anti-clerical cloak that goes
all...the...way...back...to...the French Revolution:
Wow. What hogwash. The deviation from the actual truth of the matter--
pretty close to 100%, I'd say--is astonishing. If the Democratic
Convention is any gauge, liberals aren't very much interested in
social issues at all--but they are obsessed by the frightening
economic conditions we're facing right now. (Mr. Bell might consider
taking a gander at the front page of the paper today--6.1%
unemployment, the costly collapse of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac.) They
are concerned about making the tax code as progressive as it was
during the Clinton boom, and also about rebuilding the country's
infrastructure, finding new jobs in alternative energy industries and
making health insurance available to all Americans. You may feel
positive or negative about their solutions, but that's what liberals
care about.
The vast bulk of mainstream media reporting has been about Palin's
record as a public servant and her personal beliefs as a politician.
The tabloid media are treating her precisely as the tabloid media
treat everybody. Steve Schmidt has done a brilliant--fabulously
dishonest--job of setting up straw men, but it's a smokescreen to hide
the fact that McCain rushed into this choice and didn't vette her
properly. All these vast requests for personal information about
Palin's family have produced--what? No major news outlet has gone with
the various personal rumors that Schmidt is trying to promote. Only
Sally Quinn and a few others raised the question of whether Palin
should be home taking care of the children--although when the noted
feminist Rudy Giuliani made that a part of his speech, the cable
networks suddenly took it up, in their reliably Pavlovian fashion.
Maybe I'm getting old, maybe it's that I've seen this act so often
before, maybe it's that the people really are having a harder time
paying for things like health care, gasoline and college tuition, but
I'm finding the Republican attempts to derail the conversation from
the actual state of the country really depressing and disgraceful this
year. They practice Orwellian politics of the crudest sort. They are
trying to sell a big lie--that the election is about the social issues
of the 1960s, or Barack Obama's patriotism or his eloquence, or the
"angry left," when it's really about turning toward a more moderate
path after the ideological radicalism and malfeasance of the past
eight years.
.
- References:
- Fun with Sarah
- From: hk
- Fun with Sarah
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