Tag: Sarah Palin

During the first critical week after Sarah Palin’s RNC speech, the Obama campaign chose to virtually ignore her attacks and bring the debate back to issues.  That was a mistake. Instead of nipping Palinmania in the bud when he had the chance, Obama has allowed it to grow unchecked, so that now it is flowering like a big, stinking orchid.

Obama’s Kerryesque strategery has already hurt him big time.  Demographics suggest and polling confirms that the upper Great Lakes is back in play, while the fight in the Inner West, Appalachia, and on the southern Atlantic coast has gotten a lot tougher. Previously demoralized Goopers all of a sudden believe they can win again, and are raising gobs of cash to launch more lies & smears all over the swing state airways.  

Obama can no longer pretend the pink elephant in the room doesn’t exist, nor simply dismiss Sarah Palin as a minor threat to Democratic chances of gaining back the White House in November.  Indeed, his Palin problem has become so serious that if Obama can not destroy her before Election Day, she may very well do the same to him.

I know that word ‘destroy’ may sound harsh to some ears, but as former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington once said, “Politics ain’t beanbag.”  Politics is a bloodsport, and the higher the office, the bloodier the sport.*  The Thugs understand this implicitly.  The Dems need to as well, because if Obama and his surrogates don’t fight as hard and as tough as they can against Sarah Palin now, we will all still be fighting her and everything she represents for the next four years – at least.  

Note from GH–this probably applies less to the DocuDharma crowd, who don’t get so easily distracted by bright, shining distractions

These are serious times, and they call for a serious debate about where we need to take the nation.

–Barack Obama

Now, I admit to having a few guilty pleasures in life. Watching back episodes of “What Not To Wear”. Buying earrings at the Kohl’s in the 80% off clearance section. Getting that chai tea latte at Panera. Doing that powerwalk through Ikea and promising myself that someday, somehow my house really will be this organized.

Sarah Palin, over these last fun-filled days since the announcement that she would be Old Man McCain’s Vice President, has been one of these guilty pleasures. But like all guilty pleasures, it doesn’t take a whole lot of exposure to just get, well, a little tired of seeing it day in and day out.

Greetings, Docudharma denizens!  This morning I got an email from an old friend, and it definitely got my juices flowing.  I’ve received so many right wing hit job emails making fun of liberals, casting dispersions on Democrats and liberals, and generally boasting about the greatness of conservatism that the wasted electrons could light Las Vegas for a month.  Today, I have received the antidote.  I included it below in all its glory.  Feel free to copy, paste, spam, and repeat (editing as you see fit)!

Update:  edger, in comment below, pointed me toward the origin of this text, John Ridley at the Huffington Post.  I include the link here.

If a black Democratic presidential candidate was an affirmative action selection (akin to the legacy selection for McCain) at the Naval Academy and graduated 894 out of 899, Fox News and the conservative right would push this story as the basis for his disqualification for the nation’s highest office.  The rest of the media would then be forced to report on it, giving the story wide exposure.

  If a white Republican presidential candidate graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, he would be celebrated as an intellectual giant ready to lead the country in bold new directions.   But since we are talking Obama here, his education fits into the  “uppity” and presumptuous narrative.

  If you’re a Harvard and Princeton-educated black woman married for years before having her first child Fox labels you a “Baby Mama”.

  If you are a white woman who eloped and had a baby eight months later you are Sarah Palin

  If you have studied international affairs for several decades, you’re “inexperienced at foreign affairs”

  If you live in a state that is geographically near a foreign country, you have “foreign policy expertise”

  If you both write and present your own words, you just “give good speeches.” If you read someone else’s words from the teleprompter-a “superstar is born.”

  If you are Obama, your greatness must be measured by what you’ve done and its NEVER enough, NOT by any of the profound speeches you wrote yourself, or the repeated grillings you’ve taken in the press.

  If you are Palin, your greatness is measured by…just one speech, written by Bush II’s speechwriter, and no you will not be taking any questions from the press.

  If you attend two of the top ivy leagues schools in the country, you are surprisingly “articulate.” If it takes you several colleges to graduate and you deliver a speech with the phonetic “new-clear” on the teleprompter, you’re a poised and eloquent speaker.

  If your staff is so dumb they mix up Walter Reed Middle School for Walter Reed Medical Center in your convention’s big night, it’s because you wanted to focus on education & it would have been political to use the soldiers in that format.

  If Obama had done that, he would be eviscerated for not knowing the difference between the two, hating the troops/America & would be dangerously unqualified to be CinC.

  If your a a liberal mayor and you ask for government financing, your a “fan of big, tax and spend, corrupt government.”

  If your a conservative mayor and wind up on John McCain’s “worst pork” list in 2001, you are “”disgusted” that small towns like yours are dependent on earmarks,” even if your town had no earmarks before you became mayor.

  A white woman talking tough is an advocate of women’s rights, a black woman is angry and bitter. A white man talking tough is a straight shooter and a conservative, a black man is a angry gangsta rapper.

  If you’re a GOP’er you naturally wouldn’t see what the problem with any of this was, even if you slept for 20 years on a dictionary opened to the word ‘hypocrisy’.

  If you’re a Republican and you talk to America’s enemies, it’s diplomacy.

  If you’re a Democrat and you talk to America’s enemies, it’s appeasement.

  If you’re a Republican, you swear Jesus is a registered member of your party.

  If you’re a Democrat, you appreciate that Jesus was a community organizer.

  If you’re a Republican and you wind up on the cover of People magazine, it’s because you’re a “regular American.”

  If you’re a Democrat and you wind up on the cover of People magazine, it’s because you’re a “celebrity.”

  If you’re a black Democratic man who can fill a stadium with 80,000 people (or worse, a German atrium with 200,000), you’re a vapid celebrity. If you’re a white Republican woman who can get a room full of fire breathing evangelical right wingers to holler, you’re a star

  If you are a Democrat, the days are counted down since the last time you have been to Iraq.

  If you are a Republican, you have all the foreign policy experience you need because your state is close to Russia.

  If you’re a black woman, with advanced academic degrees, and you have children while married, you’re a “baby mama”

  If you’re a white woman who barely graduated from college, and you get knocked up and then get married after you’re pregnant, you’re a “SuperMom”

  If you are black and your daughter is pregnant, unmarried and has an uninvolved baby daddy, you are a statistic…but if you’re a white and your daughter’s baby’s daddy has an explicit MY Space page where in between 4 letter words, he exclaims he “don’t want no kids,” you get to run for Veep.

  If you’re a Black presidential candidate that has wide appeal and the ability to motivate over two million Americans to re-engage in the political process you’re an egomaniac with a messiah complex seeking the spotlight.

  However, if you’re a right wing conservative – you’re applauded for your “likeability” and called a “unifier for the Republican base”

  If you’re white, win a beauty contest, attended 5-6 colleges before finally graduating, join the PTA, are voted to be mayor by 1000 people, govern a sparsely populated state for a almost two years now, and randomly get chosen at the last minute to be VP…you’ve lived the American dream, “she’s every American”.

  But if you’re black, raised by a single mother, lived on food stamps, help the community, get into Harvard, become the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, build a great campaign organization from scratch, and are voted to be the presidential nominee by millions of people, you are just “uppity”.

  If you are a democratic candidate and people around you complain about the MSM vitriole toward you, you’re a whiner.

  If you are a republican candidate and you won’t answer the questions the MSM attempts to ask about your qualifications for the second highest office in the land, you’re being victimized.

  If you are a white republican mom with a special needs baby, you are suddenly the advocate of all special needs families in the US.

  If you are an Alaskan democrat mom with a special needs baby, you just saw state funding cut for programs like special-ed. You’re on your own.

  If you are a black democrat home-owner that was preyed upon by mortgage companies and your house is in foreclosure, you made bad choices and don’t deserve a house.

  If you an older white republican who can’t keep track of how many houses he has, then he deserves another one.

Connect the dots.

I won’t even use the term ‘man’ to describe this trash-talk. This is someone who describes his female opponent as a ‘piece of paper called change’…’wrapped around a piece of old fish’…that ‘stinks’. At this point, calling Palin ‘garbage’ would be a step up.

It’s that bad. And the worst of it is that so many in the media know exactly what’s happening and are scared to death of being branded as ‘racists’ for questioning the honesty and the integrity of this loathsome individual.

‘Stinks like a piece of old fish’. I was brought up to never make comments about fish and odor when women are being discussed, under any circumstances no matter what, for reasons that are so frigging obvious they don’t bear elaboration.

Many of the folks in the Obama camp, however, do not blink when the terms ‘b*tch’ and ‘wh*re’ are used in daily discourse, or in music, or in films.

Misogyny? What’s that? Throughout the long, bitter primary battles the Obama camp denied that their candidate ever attacked his primary opponent using gender. And now that a mother of five is kicking butt up and down the block out come the sexist slurs once again.

Times have changed. The good news is that nobody who heard Obama  follow the ‘Palin-Pig’ comparison with his “stinks like a piece of old fish” believes there is anything innocent at all about the candidate of change. It remains to be seen whether a media so inured to sexism will rise up to call the crud to account. An apology is, of course, impossible.

It won’t much matter. Few women, I suspect, find anything remotely inspiring or funny about comparing Sarah Palin to a `stinking piece of old fish wrapped in paper’

The Obama campaign will simply deny any derogatory attack ever took place and play the victim.

Female voters, I suspect, will be pitiless. Except those who don’t mind being  compared to ‘pigs’ and ‘stinking pieces of old fish’, of course.

From a stay-at-home mom.

I know, I know…my alias is “grannyhelen”, which I’ve used as a tribute to my own great-grandmother. I, myself, am a 40 year old stay-at-home mom of two in a small commuter city.

Wanna win my vote? It won’t be as easy as simply nominating a “hockey mom”, or even taking down the “maverick” image of John McCain. But women – and particularly mothers – may help decide this election, and it’s obvious that the McCain campaign picked Governor Palin to appeal to women like me. In order to put Barack Obama in the White House, Democrats must compete successfully for these votes.

Follow me over the fold for some talking point do’s and don’ts of this demographic.