I’m Feeling Another Sarah Palin Payday

One-time vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is joined by "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson during a tea party rally against the international nuclear agreement with Iran in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 9.

Purely as a distraction you understand, I’ve taken an interest in Sarah Palin’s defamation trial against The New York Times. A decision may come down today, and betting money says she’ll lose. But losing could likely mean yet another in a series of pop culture paydays for the ex-mayor, ex-governor, ex-vice presidential candidate and ex-Masked Singer.

If you haven’t followed this at all, the very short story is this: Palin is accusing the Times, its editorial department and its editor at the time, James Bennet, of sullying her reputation in 2017 when he referenced an ad her “team” ran in 2011. The ad, fairly typical of other rabble-rousing pro-Second Amendment fund raising appeals, used gunsight imagery — a collection of crosshairs — over 20 Democrat-held congressional districts. You know, “They’re in our sights.”

Truly clever stuff. But invariably effective in ginning up small dollar contributions from the right-wing base.

The issue is that one of the “targeted” districts belonged to Gabby Giffords, who not long after was seriously wounded by a lunatic in a Tucson rampage that killed six people, including a nine year-old girl. (After being shown the ad prior to the attack, Giffords herself said, “We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, and when people do that, they’ve got to realize there are consequences to that action’.”

Sarah Palin vs. Ernie Chambers – Ricochet

Six years later Bennet added in a reference to the ad as he edited an opinion piece in the wake of the baseball field shooting — by a Bernie Sanders supporter — that seriously wounded Republican congressman Steve Scalise. His intended point, he says, being to draw attention to how violent rhetoric and imagery can lead to truly violent actions by the unstable.

Palin wasn’t having it. She had been sullied! And by god and mama grizzlies she was going to take the Times to court.

The truly ludicrous part of Palin’s claim is that the editorial — which Bennet and the Times corrected within hours — had “damaged” her in some way. Which way, she couldn’t say exactly, as Times’ lawyers pointed out that her standing in her political community and by extension her finances didn’t diminish much at all in the aftermath.

Put in another, less polite manner; being accused of anything by a citadel of godless, anti-freedom, elitist-liberal intolerance like The New York Times is — as everyone knows — like a monsoon of gold from the hillbilly firmament. In other words, mam, “Exactly what damage have you suffered?”

True to form, court room observers have noted that Palin hasn’t lost her touch when it comes to self-parody. At one point she declared that this editorial was just another example of how the Times had “lied” about her. The only problem with that being was that no one, not even her, could come up with that other, um, you know, example. Said Palin when pressed in court, “I don’t have the specific references in front of me.”

Right. Well, we understand you’ve only been preparing for this trial for five years. But you get back to us when you’ve done some more research.

Then you factor in Palin being a very high profile-to-notorious public figure and how difficult it is to make a case abut defaming any famous personality.

So how a jury possibly rules in her favor will be a fascinating thing to see.

But the behavior of Mr. Bennet does expose the Times to a standard criticism of bias, certainly in the eyes of the usual right-wing echo chamber suspects. I mean, he did reach back six years for an example of a conservative politician using violent imagery. That leaves him open to accusations of fixed bias.

However, as Bennet — who was later driven out of the Times by the Times itself after running an incendiary opinion piece by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton demanding troops be sent in to subdue George Floyd protestors — explained in court, he was unable to find even one example of a liberal politician using similar violent imagery. In other words, its kind of a PalinWorld thing, that “targeted”, “get ’em in our gun sights” money raising pitch.

If Palin loses today or tomorrow I do hope someone keeps tabs on the speaking circuit/cheesy singing show/reality TV/FoxNews appearance/fund-raising haul that comes her way in the wake of being treated so cruelly and predictably by … a jury of New Yorkers.

I tell you, there’s gold in being a perpetual victim of elitist liberals.

The Race of Snakes for 2024 Has Already Begun

Very much true to form, 2020 is slithering back under its rock pretty much the same way it lived its 366 days in the sun. Which is to say covered in the ash and sewage of incompetence, grift and noxious self-interest. As we prepare to sing Auld Lang Syne by Zoom, the Trump administration is (again) blaming the state and local officials for the inept roll-out of vaccines … to fight a global pandemic. Meanwhile, never a crowd to let a crisis go unexploited for personal gain, big name Republicans are busting their first moves for 2024.

First among equals in naked self-service is of course The Donald himself. As of New Year’s Eve, the Lord of Low Information has scammed another $250 million from MAGA zealots, many of whom I’m guessing had to shave $20 off their welfare disability checks.

Looking at (known) debts in the $600 million range and facing the near certainty of criminal prosecution for bank and insurance fraud, His Grand Orange Incontinence is, I read, toying with the idea of charging the Red Hat Brigade to attend “Trump 2024” rallies, along with launching some kind of All-Donald-All-the-Time streaming TV service, which at say $5 month for even 10% of his 70 million Twitter followers adds up to $35 million a month, or a little over $400 million for the first year, little to none of which will be reflected on his federal income tax returns, of course.

There’s just too much easy fool’s gold to be picked up off the ground for Trump to ever say he’s not running again in 2024. Plus, even his putative opponents are falling over themselves to sustain his standing as the Anointed Redeemer of Aging White Deplorables. Pundit John Heilemann, (one of the few who emerges from 2020 with credibility intact), recently asked listeners to imagine a “hands up” question in the first Republican primary debates in 2023.

The question? “Do you believe the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from Donald Trump?”

Being Republicans trying to win votes out of a Republican base, all 30 of them on the stage, from Louie Gohmert and Don Jr. to Ted Cruz will of course raise their hand and attest that The Donald was robbed, thereby implying his rightful claim to the crown. (It will be an echo of that infamous moment in Iowa years ago when John McCain and every other Republican raised their hand when asked who took issue with the Theory of Evolution?)

Speaking of Cruz and the Republican affinity for grift, you have to love The Most Hated Man in the Senate taking a clue from Trump and making a Facebook appeal to MAGA Nation for money to help near billionaire Kelly Loeffler and China-trader/multi-millionaire David Perdue win their run-offs in Georgia. Except Ted did Donny one better. Where Trump had to peel off a percentage to the Republican Party, Ted … can keep it all. To himself. Without giving a nickel to his already richer-than-Croesus colleagues.

As the Brits so often say, “Brilliant!”

Post-Donald, the existential issue is early identification and a tactical plan to stop “competent Trump”, the not so mythical “conservative” who is not just smarter than Trump, (which is easy, hell even Louie Gohmert could jump that bar), but more disciplined. Cruz is one such animal. So is Tom Cotton from Arkansas.

But the horse breaking hardest from the gate here, 20 days before Joe Biden gets sworn in, is 40 year-old Josh Hawley of Missouri. As you may have read, he intends to carry the MAGA Warriors banner into the Senate chamber next week and refuse to certify the electoral college of Biden. This really won’t do anything but piss off every Republican who really doesn’t want his/her name on a forever vote to undermine an election that wasn’t even close. But as naked grifts go, it will create a mega-ton of publicity for Hawley and raise at least Cruz-size cash from perpetually raging Trumperoos.

As a candidate, Hawley is already on different track — or in a different lane — than Cruz and Cotton. His strategy is to aim everything at pissed-off rural/blue collar whites, promising them more free money. (He says he supports those $2000 checks, knowing Mitch McConnell will make sure he never has to actually vote on it.) All while reigniting their self-pitying grudges against mongrelizing immigrants, high-tech slicksters and sneering, anti-cop big city elites.

But unlike Trump, who can’t be bothered to read a cue card, much less a legal brief, Hawley, the former John Roberts law clerk, former half-term attorney general of Missouri, “educated” at Yale and Stanford, is all about utterly shameless, serpentine calculation. (Who can forget as a Senate candidate two years ago the fresh-faced Hawley appearing in TV ads underlining his support for the key elements of Obamacare while — at that very moment — leading the Republican court challenge to kill it?)

Hawley has chutzpah and strategy chops neither Cruz or Cotton have shown to date. Moreover, no major Republican donor is going to be confused or dissuaded by Hawley’s talk of moving significant cash downward toward “real Americans” in a “worker-focused approach”, as Hawley likes to say. GOP money men and women know a slick con job when they see one, and Hawley is the slickest on the scene at this moment.

You gotta hand it to Republicans, they have a deep, nearly fathomless well of these snakes.

The Biden years went by so fast … .

And What If Mitch Has Finally Had Enough of Donny?

Watching the shock wave rippling out after what should be Donald Trump’s fatal blunder, I keep wondering how close we are to Mitch McConnell at deciding at long last that Trump is no longer a useful idiot?

The fundamentals of McConnell’s support, (with McConnell being the most prominent face of establishment conservatism), remains what it has always been. Any intelligent, calculating conservative — in politics or business — can see clearly that America’s demographic trend lines are not moving in their favor. The USA will soon be a minority majority country with more and more citizens refusing to vote for, much less protect the oligarchic ambitions of rich white guys.

The great backstop to this inevitability therefore is stocking the U.S. court system with hundreds of conservative-to-right-wing judges who will reliably thwart liberal legislative goals designed to realign the country’s wildly out-of-whack economic balance.

And to date McConnell, in mitered-tight coordination with the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal club — Bill Barr, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh being among its most celebrated members — has done a superb job. With Donald Trump sucking up all the attention the media has to give, McConnell and Barr’s re-fitting of the country’s judicial system has gone on with very little notice and resistance.

In the wake of this week’s Trump meltdown(s) we’ve heard more about how Capitol Hill Republicans “loathe Trump”, and how if the vote could be taken in secret, without their names attached, 30 GOP senators would vote for impeachment. Allowing the usual 50% for hyperbole and bullshit, this rings true.

Trump has been a useful dunce. He’s inattentive to policy, bored by “intellectuals” and think tanks and, as we see with this self-inflicted Ukraine fiasco, all but entirely focused on his personal needs. In other words, up to this point, he’s been a nearly ideal fool, easily manipulated by characters like MCConnewll who truly understand the long-term demographic peril facing the Republican party and are skilled at manipulating the bureacraciesa most critical levers of power.

But now … McConnell has to be reassessing this relationship.

Trump appears to have blundered so badly, so flagrantly, and in a way so easily understood by the general public, that Moscow Mitch has — has — to be running separation scenarios. It’s simply due diligence.

Trump has always been expendable to McConnell (and Barr, et al) if they could do it without infuriating Trump’s base. (Please note that for once I’m not referring to them as slack-jawed racist goobers.) That’s still a tricky move. But with the control they already have over the court system, McConnell and Barr could effectively throw Trump under the bus simply by lifting the myriad obstructions they’ve planted.

By allowing subpoenas to take effect and permitting key witnesses to testify — given that impeachment is a clear “legislative purpose” — and letting the Democrats’ case proceed they could argue to Trump’s low-information voters that they resisted as best they could. “But those damned radical Democrats just built up too much of a head of insane steam and (illegally) railroaded the process!”

Better yet, they could maneuver in a replacement for Trump appealing enough to the base and far, far more appealing to traditional Republicans repulsed by Trump’s vulgarity and corruption.

And no, I don’t mean Mike Pence. Pence is what he appears to be, a vacant stooge. In that way he would be every bit as easy to manipulate as Trump. But he possesses not even a scintilla of charismatic attraction for “the base.”

Far better — McConnell’s dream — would be somehow replacing Trump with the scariest proposition of all, namely, “competent Trump”. A candidate every bit as reliably retrograde and autocratic as Trump, only vastly smarter and therefore capable of functioning — of doing McConnell’s will and protecting conservative power for another generation without a popular majority — in a manner that presents the public face of a thoughtful adult, not a scatter-brained teenager without impulse control.

And who might that be? Among all the names regularly churning among conservative deep thinkers (sic), Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton strikes me as Candidate #1. His style of corrupted intellect — in the vein of Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan and that ilk — could reliably sell and deliver everything McConnell and stegosaur Republicans believe they need to maintain power as places like Texas and Arizona and Florida tip blue.

Sci-fi scenario: Pence resigns for “health reasons” and is replaced by Cotton sometime in the spring.

Far be it for me to give Donald Trump any advice, but Donald, if you’re listening, I hope you’re not so stupid you believe Mitch McConnell has your back come hell, high water and catastrophic election defeat.

Frat House Group-think, from Oklahoma to the U.S. Senate

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterNot being a big “joiner” — no bowling league will have me and the Elks Lodge want too much in dues — two nearly simultaneous events this past week reaffirmed my long-held belief that the truly wise man follows his own path.

First, those Oklahoma frat boys. When I was in college, during the height of the anti-Vietnam counter culture, nothing was less cool than a fraternity. Country club prep houses for kids too self-absorbed and weirdly rule-bound to notice or care that the times were a-changin’. A duller crowd you couldn’t invent, even if a lot of flashy girls turned out for their parties.

Mainly though it was the tribal mindset, the appalling group-think required to gain entry to … what? A band of brothers who might some day rule hedge funds that could single-handedly crush a Third World nation? Or, more likely, the possibility of exchanging a secret handshake with an insurance agent selling you your first homeowner policy? The thrill didn’t register. Worse, the thought of acquiescing to the herd mentality that required you to run naked through a girls’ dorm with a propeller on your head while singing “Wild Thing” didn’t strike me as particularly, well, dignified.

Clearly, I was an outlier. Post counter-culture, the Greek culture has come roaring back, or ranting back as was the case with the astonishing numbskulls on video from Oklahoma, who at least have the excuse that they are a bunch of liquored-up kids. (Over dinner last night my wife and I agreed that short of John Wayne Gacy does anything reflect worse on your parenting skills than a kid leading a “no n—–s” singalong? Jesus!)

Human history is littered with examples of the extreme downside of tribalism, the need to belong to a group that you believe gives you more power than yourself alone, the feeling of affirmation, the certainty that if so many others who look like you are doing it must be okay. It’s no great consolation that the young are most susceptible to the allure of malignant group-identity.

So, second example, what can you say about 47 Republican Senators who … sign their names … to a letter to the Great Satan-hating Ayatollahs of Iran urging them, tribe-to-tribe, to resist a deal impeding their nuclear ambitions? These aren’t stupid kids, and as far as I can tell none of them were drunk at the time they signed on, although there’s no guarantee a few of that crowd aren’t on high-powered dementia medication.

The letter of course was the inspiration of newby Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a 37 year-old Harvard man with deep Tea Party roots and ambitions far beyond Razorback-holler. (Over the years, local bloggers, the Powerline lawyers, have regularly soiled themselves promoting young Mr. Cotton as a “true conservative”, i.e. tribal warrior). It goes without saying that as a dragon-breathed Constitutionalist (or whatever) Cotton’s master plan is far more about himself than saving the free world from a bad deal on nuclear tubing.

Cotton is following the well-marked path of other archer-than-arch conservatives like Michele Bachmann, Ted Cruz, the entire House class of 2010 and every foghorn on talk radio. Go big. Go loud. Go half-insane. The people who will send you money and push you forward as their next savior will be delighted far beyond reason. They will give you license to go forth and smite the infidel libtard tribes until not so much as a lame dog walks among their burning huts.

There’s no downside whatsoever for Cotton. But what can you say about … John McCain, a guy already stamped by history as have demonstrated some of the worst judgment of any top-level politician of his era? (Sarah Palin.) How does he explain, I mean truly explain, attaching his name to something so nakedly self-serving as Cotton’s letter?

The suspicion is that like the muddled-head frat kid egged on by the house’s alpha-party animal McCain piped up and added his voice to, you know, prove he too is worthy of the tribe.