fpb | (no subject)

British media, including the supposedly conservative ones, are supporting Obama and (especially) hounding Sarah Palin, with a ferocity unknown even to their American counterparts, and looking more like the Daily Kos than anything, so to speak, human. This is appalling in itself, and may well end up being disastrous if by any chance McCain and Palin win. These creatures are planting poisonous ideas in the average British reader, which will take decades to weed away. And incidentally, it does nothing to disprove my view that at the roots of all serious modern political conflict in the West there is abortion; for the British media and establishment, including the so-called conservatives, are completely sold on the practice, and anti-abortion forces are marginalized to an extent unknown and hard to believe in Italy or America. This goes back a long time - Margaret Thatcher always voted in favour of abortion. Now, Sarah Palin, simply by being who she is, is a living rebuke to all the abortion-is-necessary crowd; and this explains the ferocious hatred and the avalanche of pathological lies with which this attractive, polite, competent female politician has been welcomed. Find me another explanation that makes sense! It also accounts for the complete silence that has been enforced on anything that might make Obama, the most pro-abortion candidate in history, look bad or even moderately dubious. It is not about race; if Judge Clarence Thomas were running for President, he would be treated like Palin has been. It is not even about party; if Condoleeza Rice had run and got the Republican nomination, you can bet your life that she would have had a much smoother ride than Palin. She, after all, has no children. You cannot underrate the power of repressed and concealed guilt feelings, crawling under the skin of all the career women who got rid of unwanted babies in order to please bosses and boyfriends, and indeed among all the men who were complicit in their crimes or even demanded them; when faced with a brilliantly successful career woman who not only had five children, but opted against aborting even the disabled one. (I don't suppose it helps that she is beautiful and looks ten years younger than her age. The sheer unfairness of the distribution of beauty is salt on any open wound, and the wound in question is painful enough in the first place.) Sarah Palin is a mirror who tells them the truth about themselves; and it is a truth that they cannot bear to see.

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You are talking as if I had not repeatedly criticized and attacked the Republican party, as if I had not pointed out their repulsive hypocrisy and their evident contempt for their own voters, as if I had not quarrelled with a number of REpublicans. You are so partisan that you cannot even begin to see beyond the party label, to realize that both McCAin and Palin have made their way as insurgents against the party establishment, that the party establishment hates both and has done everything in their power to destroy them, that they have destroyed the favoured establishment candidate (that sleazy deal-maker Mitt Romney, the man of a thousand faces) at the same time as they held at bay the creationist Huckabee (another person I am on record as criticizing severely). You are so scarily partisan and so scarily in thrall to media lies that you do not even seem capable of seeing the difference between a thoroughly pro-life ticket such as McCain-Palin - McCain having one of the strongest anti-abortion records in the Senate - and the most pro-abortion Senator in the whole Senate, a man who did not have any objection to the killing of babies born alive and who voted in favour of partial-birth abortion and against parental notification. Perhaps you did not even know that, so wholly in the grip of partisan passion you are. To you, a Republican, any Republican, will always and inevitably be wrong; a Democrat, any Democrat, will always and inevitably be right. And people complain when I curse and execrate the party spirit.

McCain would not have gotten the GOP nomination without the backing of the party elite. Period. They felt they needed to tack toward to the center from the beginning or they would not stand a chance in the general election. Palin was the acknowledgment that he had alienated too much of the party base (despite being, as you say, the most anti-abortion person in the Senate), especially among Evangelicals.

When Karl Rove goes on television and praises the hell out of Sarah Palin, when he had lambasted a Democratic candidate with a similar resume as being "too inexperienced," you know she and McCain have the backing of the party elite.

And for the record, I am a registered Independent, voted for Bush in 2000 and lambasted Kerry as a fool in 2004 (though I would vote for no one on account of coming home from Iraq to a different state than I left and not being registered in my new home--not that I would have voted for either one). In 2006 I voted for my state's Democratic Governor but our Republican Attorney General and Secretary of State.

Keep up with the ad hominem, though. It really casts you in a good light.

Bullshit. Have you even paid any attention? The Republican leadership pushed Romney like mad, and fought McCain every step of the way. They fought to have Romney as Veep when it became clear that McCain had won, even though the two men detest each other. The nomination of Palin was, among other things, a total defeat for the whole party leadership. And your use of Karl Rove as a kind of shorthand for Republican depravity is so typical of the dimmest kind of Dem talking point, it beggars belief.

I'll say it again: the McCain nomination was a strategic move by the GOP. If he had been capable of getting the nomination entirely on his own, without their blessing, he would have done so in 2000 when his "maverick" credentials were much less sullied by eight years of kowtowing to Bush and his appeal to the middle much stronger. In 2000, the party elite buried him, and they were more than capable of doing it again this year. But they looked at the polling, saw that McCain was the only hope for swaying the centrist 20% and went with him, with the full understanding that McCain was also, essentially, disposable. If he lost, he didn't hurt the chances of anyone else (like Romney) to take a shot at making the Dem winner a lame duck in 2012.

The Palin nomination was a cynical play for the evangelical vote, while also making a stab at the PUMAs in the Democratic Party who swore not to vote for Obama. She energized the base, which was otherwise looking like it might not show up at all for McCain (or, for that matter, GOP Congressional candidates, which is where the base is also badly needed for the GOP). Plus, she was a shock selection, generating much more conversation than Romney. I can't count the number of conversations that revolved around the notion that history would be made in the US no matter who won, and that's the kind of attention the GOP can't buy.

But seriously, who do you think makes up the party elite if not Bush, Cheney, and Rove? Who stands atop the party and pulls the strings, if not them? Where on Earth do you get your information, if not from the media whose bias you detest so much? Conservative online echo chambers?

From someone who believes that the police investigating one of their own amounts to immaculate proof, this is a really remarkable display of cynicism. Bordering, in fact, on conspiracy theory. Which always appeals to very naive people.

The ad hominems just keep rolling.

A political party is a conspiracy, by definition. Generally not an illegal one, but a conspiracy just the same.