America the Beautiful

Sure, this has been edited for effect. Sure, there are probably other people that could have been interviewed that wouldn’t make the Tea Party come off sounding so stupid. However, for this Glenn Beck-sponsored rally, I’ve got to believe this is pretty representative of the crowd. Why do I say that? Because, everything these flag-waving solid citizens are saying I’ve heard before. On the Glenn Beck show.

Move over, Drudge

It’s the obvious next step after reclaiming America’s honor. Glenn Beck has launched his very own Huffington Post. Apparently, he believes that there is a Tea Party subculture out there that can actually read. So he is doing what he does best: bending the news to have an Armageddon-Four-Horseman-of-the-Apocalypse-Doomsday flavor to it. So I guess his Million Minions March on Washington was not just a flash in the pan. It was a Blaze.

The God of Abraham, Jefferson and Franklin

Sarah Palin was on the attack last week. She is mad at all those wicked secularists and God haters who are trying to rewrite American history. And she’s right to be mad. They are clearly trying to rewrite history. But the big bad secularists are not nearly as guilty of trying to rewrite American history as the…uhm… Christians. Take, for instance, Sarah Palin. She would have us believe that all of our founding fathers were Christians with a profound respect for the Bible. Like, say, Thomas Jefferson who stayed up all night with scissors attempting to remove every one of Christ’s miracles from the gospels. He’s a role model, huh, Sarah? She also thinks that the U.S. Constitution promotes the God of the Bible and speaks of “unalienable rights” that where endowed by our Creator. Two problems with that 1) God/ Maker/Creator is never once mentioned in the Constitution, only the concept that religion should not be proscribed or curtailed by the State. 2) That unalienable rights bit is actually from the Declaration of Independence penned by the man who liked to slice the Resurrection out of the Good Book to make it more “reasonable”. Also, “In God we trust”is not our “national motto.” It’s not even part of our founding documents, unless you count the one dollar bill among them. It is just something that is indeed a part of our history, just like the banning prayer in schools. Unfortunately, for Ms. Palin, our country has always been much more of a mixed bag than she would like to admit. It is probably one of the reasons our churches are so full and those with a state religion like France, England and Germany are so empty. Finally, it is worth mentioning that Jesus came to “seek and save that which is lost”( atheists, secularists, and the like). The righteous and the religious have never been his cup of tea. You can look that up in your Bible (even the Jeffersonian version).

Post-Palin

I, for one, am sick and tired of populism in politics. Especially, in the politics of the right wing. So it very refreshing to see the face of GOP politics that has always rang true. The country club elite. Men named Biff with monogrammed Kleenex, a trust fund, a vocabulary like Bill Buckley and a Harvard degree. There! Much better. That’s the GOP I remembered.

Black ain’t beautiful

A great many people voted for Obama simply because he was black. All of the people responsible for the appointment of Michael Steele did it because he was black. He was born out of crass cynicism. The same naive cynicism that put a woman on the McCain ticket. And clearly, Caribou Barbie got more traction than Mr. Steele. Now these GOP cynics want him gone. Me too. I don’t like the idea of any black man in national leadership until they produce a birth certificate. After all, this Steele guy looks a little foreign to me.

And we thought Sarah Palin was dumb

Apparently, 37% of Americans can’t locate America on the map. Particularly  disappointing is the fact that the map our geographically-challenged citizens couldn’t find America on was a map of…well…America. Happily, even though the Department of Education is a little chagrined by this recent Gallup survey, one part of our government sees it as wonderful news:

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security sees the Gallup/Harris poll results as a blessing in disguise. According to Secretary Michael Chertoff, the nation would be better off if these numbers skewed even higher.

“Personally, I believe if fewer people in this world could spot America on a map, we’d have a much better chance of avoiding national tragedies like 9/11,” said Chertoff. “You can’t attack a country you can’t find.”

Every cloud has a silver lining. Clouds, you know, the puffy white things above your head.

Thanksgiving in Real America

Looking for something to be thankful for?  This one is a stretch.

Sarah Palin: the Book

Cinderella got a night on the town, a new wardrobe and a chance to hang out with movers and shakers. But then, at the untimely stroke of midnight, her life turned back into a pumpkin. Apparently, Sarah Palin’s fairy tale adventures come with a happier ending. $11 million dollars happier. Sarah has signed her big-buck-big-book deal. A book to nowhere. After all, do her diehard fans even read?

Eating its young

Interesting development. The liberal blogosphere which sullied Sarah Palin, her credentials, her motherhood and her intelligence, is now defending her honor. It’s amazing how winning an election can produce such magnamity. And losing? I’ll let Ellen Goodman describe it:

Have you ever seen a transformation this fast? In barely two months, the Barracuda became the Scapegoat. Think of it as evolution on steroids.

In September, Sarah Palin, the little-known governor of Alaska, was hailed as the great female hope of the Republican Party. Double the maverick, double the fun. John McCain called her “the most marvelous running mate in the history of this nation.” Pro-life conservatives were “ecstatic,” and she was a “hottie” to boot.

But after a handful of disastrous interviews, after polls showing she was a drag on the ticket, and after, of course, losing the election, McCain staffers began dropping little poison pellets all over the media. Sarah was a “diva.” She was a Wasilla hillbilly “looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.” She was a “wacko” who couldn’t tell the French president from a Canadian radio prankster.

Did they actually think that Gov. Palin would go quietly into that good Arctic night?

Decrypting Sarah

Sarah Palin has a syntax problem, a sentence problem and a problem talking before she knows what she is talking about. But a clever, young conservative has actually figured out how to decrypt her endless yammering:

I have concluded that the problem that so many people have in understand what Palin is saying is that we make the mistake of assuming that all of the words have some reason for being there. What we have to do instead is decrypt her message by filtering out all of the confusing chatter that keeps her statements encoded and difficult to follow. Let’s take the first sentence, and identify the essential elements in bold:

Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.

See? If you just cut out about 60% of what she says, it hangs together nicely.

Chill, baby, chill

Sarah Palin was beating that Bill Ayers drum again on CNN. Can we just give her an account at Neiman’s and send her on her way?

The patron saint of would-be assassins

The Secret Service is linking a spike in death threats against the President elect to the inflamatory rhetoric of Sarah Palin’s stump speeches. Gosh-golly, betcha didn’t know you were a murderous hate monger, huh Gov?

Meet the Jerk

Sarah Palin’s unnamed critic comes out of the closet. He is McCain campaign’s foreign policy advisor, Martin Eisenstadt. He shares more dirt on the shortcomings of the former GOP Veep candidate:

As you know, I was one of the foreign policy advisers on the McCain campaign who worked with Randy Scheunemann to help prep Sarah on her debate with Joe Biden. Did we outright give her a geography quiz when we started the prep? No, of course not. But yes, in the context of the prep, it slowly became apparent that her grasp of basic geo-political knowledge had major gaps. Could she have passed a multiple choice test about South Africa or NAFTA. Probably. But it was clear that she simply didn’t have the ease of knowledge that we come to expect from a major party political candidate. Other slights came up, too: Not knowing the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas. Or the difference between the Shiites and Suni. Or when it came to international terrorist organizations, knowing that the IRA was in Northern Ireland, and ETA in Spain.

A losing coalition

_

Running the numbers on the election, it appears that evangelicals supported the McCain-Palin ticket in greater numbers than they did Bush-Cheney  four years ago. Considering that McCain started the primary season with little support among Religious Right honchos like James Dobson and Pat Robertson, this was quite a feat. Considering he lost the election, this was no great accomplishment. The GOP tent is shrinking. Look at Proposition 8. It passed in the blue state that handed Obama the victory. That didn’t happen without those who voted for Obama also voting against gay marriage. This year, conservative values and voting for Obama was not mutually exclusive. The GOP has there work cut out for them.