Saturday, November 21, 2009

Taibbi Versus Sister Sarah

From the comments section comes this brilliant Matt Taibbi piece on the zeitgeist of Sarah Palin (Moosegeist?).  Taibbi completely nails her book and the entire experience (emphasis mine):
Palin’s extraordinary ability to inspire major national controversies around these injustices done to her immediate person is going to guarantee her some kind of major role in American politics for the next dozen years. In this regard she is going to have a willing ally in her supposed keen enemy, the mainstream media, which likewise loves nothing more than a political narrative that has nothing to do with politics. It’ll be a virtually endless war over nonsense like this latest Newsweek cover, which hilariously is being seen as one or the other of a) a liberal media plot or b) a sexist assault on a prominent female politician by the male-dominated media world when in fact, as all of us in this dying print media business know, the magazine’s motive was grounded entirely in the nihilistic desperation to sell newsstand copies.
And Sarah Palin sells copies. She is the country’s first WWE politician — a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever. Her followers will not know that she is the perfect patsy for our system, designed as it is to channel popular anger in any direction but a useful one, and to keep the public tied up endlessly in pointless media melees over meaningless nonsense (melees of the sort that develop organically around Palin everywhere she goes). Like George W. Bush, even Palin herself doesn’t know this, another reason she’s such a perfect political tool.

With Going Rogue, the 2012 reality show has already begun. As brainless political theater, she can’t be topped. It’s just too bad for conservatives that she happens to be unsustainably divisive and, as Newsweek points out, a really good bet to permanently marginalize the Republican party by reducing it to a pissed-off, semi-coherent mob that repulses independent voters on a visceral level. To paraphrase John Doman’s Deputy Ops Rawls character from The Wire, she’s “brilliant — fuckin’ shame it’s gonna end our careers, but still.”
And he's right.  She's the perfect politician for 2010, quite literally a mindless Rorschach who picks meaningless fights as entertainment.
The policial process we have built since 1980 created her.  It was inevitable.  She is glorious chaos, she is the result of politics divided by zero, an unknown and destructive mess as the end.  For better or for worse she will destroy it all, she will reduce it to ashes.  It will be a clean slate.

What will come after?

2 comments:

  1. That is a perfect piece, I would only add that her success in the MSM is not likely to be matched with success on the ground (NY-23 for instance). Winning political campaigns means organizing, and even with legions of fans Sarah is not putting any of them to work doing useful things for a supposed political career.

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  2. That is a perfect piece, I would only add that her success in the MSM is not likely to be matched with success on the ground (NY-23 for instance). Winning political campaigns means organizing, and even with legions of fans Sarah is not putting any of them to work doing useful things for a supposed political career.

    ReplyDelete