Last Call

Here's my problem with the Twilight saga:  Two high school kids fall in love. There are two, equally unbelievable, fantastical conditions to the story that require you to suspend all reasonable belief:

1)  The guy is a vampire.

2)  Neither one of them is even remotely interested in sex.

Dealing with one I can handle.  Dealing with both at the same time is just stupid.

Standard-Bearer. Also.

Frank Rich's column on the Tao of Also is another must read today:

Even by the standard of politicians, this is a woman with an outsized ego. Combine that with her performance skills and an insatiable hunger for the limelight, and you can see why she will not stay in Wasilla now that she’s seen 30 Rock. The question journalists repeatedly asked last week — What are Palin’s plans for 2012? — is a red herring. Palin has no obligation to answer it. She is the pit bull in the china shop of American politics, and she can do what she wants, on her own timeline, all the while raking in the big bucks she couldn’t as a sitting governor. No one, least of all her own political party, can control her.

The fact-checking siege of “Going Rogue” — by the media, Democrats and aggrieved McCain campaign operatives alike — is another fruitless sideshow. Palin’s political appeal has never had anything to do with facts — or coherent policy positions. The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause. As Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, has correctly observed, “She represents less a philosophical strain on the right than an affect and a demographic.”

That demographic is white and non-urban: Just look at the stops and the faces on her carefully calibrated book tour. The affect is emotional — the angry air of grievance that emerged first at her campaign rallies in 2008, with their shrieked threats to Obama, and that has since resurfaced in the Hitler-fixated “tea party” movement (which she endorses in her book). It’s a politics of victimization and sloganeering with no policy solutions required beyond the conservative mantra of No Taxes. Its standard-bearer can make stuff up with impunity: “Thanks, but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere”; Obama’s “palling around with terrorists”; health care “death panels.”

After the Palin-McCain ticket lost, conservative pundits admonished her to start studying the issues. If “Going Rogue” and its promotional interviews are any indication, she has ignored their entreaties during her months at liberty. Last week, Greta Van Susteren chastised Oprah for not asking Palin “one policy question,” but when Barbara Walters did ask some, Palin either recycled Dick Cheney verbatim (Obama is “dithering”) or ran aground. Her argument for why “Jewish settlements” should be expanded on the West Bank was that “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” It was unclear what she was talking about — unless it was the “rapture” theology that requires the mass return of Jews to settle the Holy Land as a precondition for the return of Christ.

And I'll say it again: Sarah Palin represents The Stupid that Zandar is Versus.  It's all know-nothing slogans, sound bites, and reducing everything to either Good or Evil.  She is the lazy man's Dubya.  Policy doesn't matter to the woman because everything Obama does is bad, and everything she does is good.

That's her worldview.  It is shared by millions of Americans because that's been beaten into them by the Pretty Hate Machine.  She is the one-eyed Moose in the kingdom of the blind, stupid, deaf and angry.

The people angry with Obama's America know the GOP don't have anything better, Bush proved that.  They dream and hope that Sarah does.  So she can sell them all the cloudstuff and pixie dust in the world and they eat it up.  As I said yesterday, her creation and rise was inevitable based solely on the perfect idiocy of our current political process.  It has produced the Perfect Idiot as a result.

All hail.  In a reductio ad absurdum world, we have distilled everything down to Sarah Palin.

Praying For Rain

The Obama Derangement Syndrome has gotten to the point where the Bible is being used for dog-whistle politics as Rabbi Brad Hirschfield notes over at Beliefnet:

Any time the citizens of a state, particularly a democracy, invoke their faith to pray for the demise of those they oppose politically, we should be concerned. When the call for such prayers becomes one of the most popular Google searches in the country, we should shake, especially those of us who believe in God, prayer and the Bible. Psalm 109, verse 8, went viral this morning in just that way.

Among the world's top Google searches today are phrases that contain the words "Psalms 109 8", and "Psalm 109 8 prayer for Obama". For those of you who may not know that particular verse, it reads "May his days be few, may another take over his position." And before anyone excuses this toxic use of scripture as nothing more than the wish that President Obama not be re-elected to a second term of office, the next verse in the psalm reads, "May his children be orphans and his wife a widow".

In fact, the entire chapter is about the prayed for death of an evil person. Not to mention that anyone who knows enough Bible to have thought about this verse in particular, surely knows the entire chapter and appreciates its message. Pretty scary stuff.

(More after the jump...)

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Byron York's op-ed this morning in the Moonie Times is a fabulous example of GOP mendacity, as he coyly asks:

Why was it so hard for Dems even to start health care debate?

The extraordinary thing about the dramatic events surrounding the health care bill in the Senate is that there was any drama at all. Lawmakers were simply voting to begin debate on the Democratic version of health care reform. Just begin debate -- not end it, and not move on to a final vote.

If Democrats, with a 60-vote majority in the Senate, had not been able to begin debate on the top Democratic policy priority in a generation -- well, that would have been a devastating turn of events, both for the party and for President Obama. And yet just starting debate proved difficult, and only on the last day did the 60th Democratic vote fall in place in favor of beginning the process.

I asked a high-ranking Republican Senate source whether it was really that hard to get the Democratic votes together. Could it have been a media-fed story, with reporters looking to inject some unwarranted drama into the proceedings? No, I was told. "It really was that hard for them to get to 60 just to proceed," the source said. "Very telling."

Byron, not that I'd tell you how to do your job (which apparently is being a smarmy Village tool) but let's be honest: right now we have a Senate that consists of 59 actual Senators, Joe F'ckin Lieberman, and 40 worthless appendages who don't want debate on anything. The Republican caucus has abdicated its responsibility to the American people and has decided it will filibuster every piece of legislation at every point in order to block the Democrats. It is that hard for the Democrats to get 60 votes to start debate because 40 percent of the Senate does not want to ever start debate on anything other than their own agenda, and hasn't now for three years.

When there are automatically 40 no votes out of 100, everything will be this hard to pass. Period. That's the point.

Byron's a knucklehead, but this is stupid even for him. America wants a real opposition party, not the international laughingstock the GOP is now.