The Palin Fix
by Mark Ames


The fix was in. There's no other way to explain the disconnect between
Sarah Palin's performance in last night's debate--which made me cringe
so much that my forehead started to cramp--and the post-debate analysis,
in which everyone in punditland agreed on the happy Hollywood ending:
Sarah Palin has redeemed herself. Seeing pundits all agree about this
was terrifying.

What I saw in the debate wasn't the hyper-confident, polished,
prom-queen bully from the GOP convention, but a woman desperately
in need of beta-blockers: a nervous, wobbly-voiced contestant in an
County Fair amateur show trying her darndest not to forget her
lines. I was sure that her performance had McCain kicking his dog and
calling his wife unprintable names, and that Palin would be announcing her
withdrawal from the race "for personal reasons" by breakfast time.

You expect Fox News to spin Palin as positively as possible: as soon as
the debate ended, Brit Hume grimly announced, "She seemed perfectly
comfortable, she seemed to get more confident as the debate went on, and
she certainly does not seem to have committed any of the gaffes or
deer-in-the-headlight moments for which she's been criticized in recent
interviews."

Switching to CNN, the blame-America-first network, Campbell Brown,
hero-for-a-day among the HuffPo crowd for throwing a hissy fit over
Palin, returned to tamed form, repeating Hume's mantra almost
word for word: "I think the big picture is there were no major gaffes
here, so I don't see it--and I'm not going to be the judge here, the
polls will show it--that this isn't going to be a big game-changer." It
was a frightening, pod-people moment, as if her executive producer were
standing behind the camera holding Brown's contract in one hand and a
pistol-shaped lighter in the other. The Laura Bush lookalike not only
lined up behind Palin, but she even adopted Palin's distinctive Okie
diction: "You know, she seemed to do very well with the plain-spoken
language, and he [Biden]--when he started talking about amendments or
whatever--kind of lost people a little bit."

David Gergen, the embodiment of pundit centrism, hopped aboard
the Palin-Is-Redeemed Express, although his face had a kind of pained,
Stalin show-trial look as he spoke: "Give credit to Sarah Palin. It was
the Sarah Palin of the early part of the campaign. She was spirited, she
came out strong."

Most depressing of all, Rachel Maddow, the only meat-eating progressive
out there, gummed the Alaska governor in one of the most
hilarious displays of self-censorship I've witnessed: "I think that
Sarah Palin certainly did participate in the debate, and did stand along
Joe Biden, and she did stay true to character," Maddow said. "In terms
of substance, she did meet expectations in not being able to keep up
with the specifics."

There's only one explanation why TV pundits were reading the same
lines: the fix was in from the start. The redemption narrative was
already built in. America needed this redemption, if only to take the
edge off of the massive bummer that is 2008. This is the year that
America became a Loser Nation: the economy doomed, the empire in
full retreat and--until last night's orgy of delusion--the hope of Main
Street and Joe Sixpack turned out to be a total zero facing off
against a lightweight like Katie Couric.

Americans are masochistic about a lot of things--they don't mind getting
yanked around, fleeced, repressed, lied to, or murdered--but one thing
they won't tolerate is a loser. If you stink of failure, you're
history--and it's not a nice thing at all, since most of us fail at
something. But that's just the way Americans are. For most of us,
Palin's Couric interview wasn't funny but rather a manifestation of
what losers we've become--just as Yeltsin's drunken antics weren't funny
to Russians suffering during their horrible decline.

Tina Fey's Palin impersonations on Saturday Night Live were painful to many Americans in ways that Blue Staters can't fathom. After the debate, Chris Wallace
gleefully announced, ""It may be harder for Tina Fey to mock her on Saturday Night Live,
although Lord knows they'll try.""

Like most fixed events, this one started with a decoy: the alleged bias
of moderator Gwen Ifill, the bland-o-matic PBS anchor, who the right-wing
claimed was an Obama mole, secretly plotting to open up a can of elitist
whoop-ass on poor Sarah Palin. Ifill reacted the way all bullied kids
respond to a callout for a fight: she showed up in a wheelchair, saved
by her broken ankle. Palin, in one of her rare moments of prom-queen
confidence, cheerfully told Ifill that she wasn't going to answer her
questions if she didn't feel like it, a classic case of the popular girl
humiliating the school nerd, to the delight of the entire student body.

This is what even Palin's critics fail to understand about her appeal:
it isn't that she's "one of them"--the Joe Sixpacks and the Dodge
Durango-driving Bloodsport Moms. Palin looks nothing like Middle
Americans--she's too physically perfect, too confident, too healthy,
with a perfect pearly smile. The reason she's so popular is because
Palin is the adult incarnation of the top Heather.

Those who have seen Heathers and
remember honestly their own high school experience know everyone wants
to be friends with the popular bully. It's ingrained in our
culture--middle Americans are drawn to bullies like John McCain and
Sarah Palin on a level so primitive that it's almost impossible to
counteract.

This has been substantiated by a recent study that suggests bullies are
considered "cool" and popular by all (including school staff) but the
directly bullied kids.

Not that bullying ever stops--research published last year in the
Journal of Management Studies showed that American workers are
bullied up to 50 percent more than their Scandinavian counterparts. And
yet, in a classic example of Americans' penchant for optimistic delusion
in the face of misery, "only one in 10 (nine per cent) of Americans were
aware that the behaviour they experienced constituted bullying, leading
the researchers to conclude that bullying behavior is ingrained in the
culture of the U.S. workplace."

This physical chasm between the popular bully Palin and her fans was
made plain when CNN assembled an Ohio focus group to watch the debate: a
cross-section of Americans herded into some grim provincial library and
given "reaction dials" to show real-time reactions.

As the camera panned over the twenty or so participants, you could
almost see the artery plaque, pre-diabetes and chronic back pain. They
were a cheerless bunch who looked like a casting call for a Todd Solondz film. They
desperately tried to please CNN team leader Soledad O'Brien--who, like
Palin, is beautiful, slender and healthy--and who told some civics-class
lies that they all pretended to believe--like "negative campaigning
doesn't go over well with these folks," or something like that.

The CNN reaction dials revealed nothing during the debate. The only
interesting moment came when Joe Biden solemnly talked about what a
tragedy it would be if Obama were to get killed--and the reaction dials
suddenly flat-lined to zero, indicating that Middle America has no
strong feelings about whether a dead Obama is a good or bad thing.

Fox's focus group was the most clearly rigged jury that this country has
seen since the Civil Rights Act was passed, but that's what you'd expect
from a corn-fed creep like Frank Luntz, the Fox correspondent/Republican
pollster who assembled the "focus group," made up of people he claimed
were "undecided voters" split evenly between Bush and Kerry supporters
in 2004 and split evenly about Sarah Palin. "Let me ask you now: how
many of you thought Sarah Palin won the debate? Raise your hands." They
all raised their hands glumly, and Luntz turned back to the camera:
"Almost all of them raised their hands." Then he asked the audience why,
and some creep in the back, who observed, "She was Main Street America."
Luntz replayed their favorite moment, when Palin said that when it came
to future financial crises, "Never again!" The planted creep in the back
raised his hand and shouted, "I felt like it was a 9/11 moment."

You might be tempted to ignore or dismiss Fox, but remember, Fox rates
from two to three times more popular than its nearest network rival.
Ignoring Fox for being evil or dumb will do about as much good as
ignoring the Christian right at the end of the last century. Like the
cocky SWAT cop in the original version of Dawn of the Dead,
ignoring and mocking the zombies just because they're stupid misses the
point--stupidity is their greatest weapon. The SWAT cop ignored the
zombies right up until one of them bit half of his leg off--and by then,
it was too late.



This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081020/ames


by Mark Ames


The fix was in. There's no other way to explain the disconnect between
Sarah Palin's performance in last night's debate--which made me cringe
so much that my forehead started to cramp--and the post-debate analysis,
in which everyone in punditland agreed on the happy Hollywood ending:
Sarah Palin has redeemed herself. Seeing pundits all agree about this
was terrifying.

What I saw in the debate wasn't the hyper-confident, polished,
prom-queen bully from the GOP convention, but a woman desperately
in need of beta-blockers: a nervous, wobbly-voiced contestant in an
County Fair amateur show trying her darndest not to forget her
lines. I was sure that her performance had McCain kicking his dog and
calling his wife unprintable names, and that Palin would be announcing her
withdrawal from the race "for personal reasons" by breakfast time.

You expect Fox News to spin Palin as positively as possible: as soon as
the debate ended, Brit Hume grimly announced, "She seemed perfectly
comfortable, she seemed to get more confident as the debate went on, and
she certainly does not seem to have committed any of the gaffes or
deer-in-the-headlight moments for which she's been criticized in recent
interviews."

Switching to CNN, the blame-America-first network, Campbell Brown,
hero-for-a-day among the HuffPo crowd for throwing a hissy fit over
Palin, returned to tamed form, repeating Hume's mantra almost
word for word: "I think the big picture is there were no major gaffes
here, so I don't see it--and I'm not going to be the judge here, the
polls will show it--that this isn't going to be a big game-changer." It
was a frightening, pod-people moment, as if her executive producer were
standing behind the camera holding Brown's contract in one hand and a
pistol-shaped lighter in the other. The Laura Bush lookalike not only
lined up behind Palin, but she even adopted Palin's distinctive Okie
diction: "You know, she seemed to do very well with the plain-spoken
language, and he [Biden]--when he started talking about amendments or
whatever--kind of lost people a little bit."

David Gergen, the embodiment of pundit centrism, hopped aboard
the Palin-Is-Redeemed Express, although his face had a kind of pained,
Stalin show-trial look as he spoke: "Give credit to Sarah Palin. It was
the Sarah Palin of the early part of the campaign. She was spirited, she
came out strong."

Most depressing of all, Rachel Maddow, the only meat-eating progressive
out there, gummed the Alaska governor in one of the most
hilarious displays of self-censorship I've witnessed: "I think that
Sarah Palin certainly did participate in the debate, and did stand along
Joe Biden, and she did stay true to character," Maddow said. "In terms
of substance, she did meet expectations in not being able to keep up
with the specifics."

There's only one explanation why TV pundits were reading the same
lines: the fix was in from the start. The redemption narrative was
already built in. America needed this redemption, if only to take the
edge off of the massive bummer that is 2008. This is the year that
America became a Loser Nation: the economy doomed, the empire in
full retreat and--until last night's orgy of delusion--the hope of Main
Street and Joe Sixpack turned out to be a total zero facing off
against a lightweight like Katie Couric.

Americans are masochistic about a lot of things--they don't mind getting
yanked around, fleeced, repressed, lied to, or murdered--but one thing
they won't tolerate is a loser. If you stink of failure, you're
history--and it's not a nice thing at all, since most of us fail at
something. But that's just the way Americans are. For most of us,
Palin's Couric interview wasn't funny but rather a manifestation of
what losers we've become--just as Yeltsin's drunken antics weren't funny
to Russians suffering during their horrible decline.

Tina Fey's Palin impersonations on Saturday Night Live were painful to many Americans in ways that Blue Staters can't fathom. After the debate, Chris Wallace
gleefully announced, ""It may be harder for Tina Fey to mock her on Saturday Night Live,
although Lord knows they'll try.""

Like most fixed events, this one started with a decoy: the alleged bias
of moderator Gwen Ifill, the bland-o-matic PBS anchor, who the right-wing
claimed was an Obama mole, secretly plotting to open up a can of elitist
whoop-ass on poor Sarah Palin. Ifill reacted the way all bullied kids
respond to a callout for a fight: she showed up in a wheelchair, saved
by her broken ankle. Palin, in one of her rare moments of prom-queen
confidence, cheerfully told Ifill that she wasn't going to answer her
questions if she didn't feel like it, a classic case of the popular girl
humiliating the school nerd, to the delight of the entire student body.

This is what even Palin's critics fail to understand about her appeal:
it isn't that she's "one of them"--the Joe Sixpacks and the Dodge
Durango-driving Bloodsport Moms. Palin looks nothing like Middle
Americans--she's too physically perfect, too confident, too healthy,
with a perfect pearly smile. The reason she's so popular is because
Palin is the adult incarnation of the top Heather.

Those who have seen Heathers and
remember honestly their own high school experience know everyone wants
to be friends with the popular bully. It's ingrained in our
culture--middle Americans are drawn to bullies like John McCain and
Sarah Palin on a level so primitive that it's almost impossible to
counteract.

This has been substantiated by a recent study that suggests bullies are
considered "cool" and popular by all (including school staff) but the
directly bullied kids.

Not that bullying ever stops--research published last year in the
Journal of Management Studies showed that American workers are
bullied up to 50 percent more than their Scandinavian counterparts. And
yet, in a classic example of Americans' penchant for optimistic delusion
in the face of misery, "only one in 10 (nine per cent) of Americans were
aware that the behaviour they experienced constituted bullying, leading
the researchers to conclude that bullying behavior is ingrained in the
culture of the U.S. workplace."

This physical chasm between the popular bully Palin and her fans was
made plain when CNN assembled an Ohio focus group to watch the debate: a
cross-section of Americans herded into some grim provincial library and
given "reaction dials" to show real-time reactions.

As the camera panned over the twenty or so participants, you could
almost see the artery plaque, pre-diabetes and chronic back pain. They
were a cheerless bunch who looked like a casting call for a Todd Solondz film. They
desperately tried to please CNN team leader Soledad O'Brien--who, like
Palin, is beautiful, slender and healthy--and who told some civics-class
lies that they all pretended to believe--like "negative campaigning
doesn't go over well with these folks," or something like that.

The CNN reaction dials revealed nothing during the debate. The only
interesting moment came when Joe Biden solemnly talked about what a
tragedy it would be if Obama were to get killed--and the reaction dials
suddenly flat-lined to zero, indicating that Middle America has no
strong feelings about whether a dead Obama is a good or bad thing.

Fox's focus group was the most clearly rigged jury that this country has
seen since the Civil Rights Act was passed, but that's what you'd expect
from a corn-fed creep like Frank Luntz, the Fox correspondent/Republican
pollster who assembled the "focus group," made up of people he claimed
were "undecided voters" split evenly between Bush and Kerry supporters
in 2004 and split evenly about Sarah Palin. "Let me ask you now: how
many of you thought Sarah Palin won the debate? Raise your hands." They
all raised their hands glumly, and Luntz turned back to the camera:
"Almost all of them raised their hands." Then he asked the audience why,
and some creep in the back, who observed, "She was Main Street America."
Luntz replayed their favorite moment, when Palin said that when it came
to future financial crises, "Never again!" The planted creep in the back
raised his hand and shouted, "I felt like it was a 9/11 moment."

You might be tempted to ignore or dismiss Fox, but remember, Fox rates
from two to three times more popular than its nearest network rival.
Ignoring Fox for being evil or dumb will do about as much good as
ignoring the Christian right at the end of the last century. Like the
cocky SWAT cop in the original version of Dawn of the Dead,
ignoring and mocking the zombies just because they're stupid misses the
point--stupidity is their greatest weapon. The SWAT cop ignored the
zombies right up until one of them bit half of his leg off--and by then,
it was too late.



This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081020/ames

palin smoked biden.

what debate was the OP watching?

you obviously have some sort of disorder in perception.

the pic is Obama, not me.

duh!! and I see you took it down now, check this Mc Greedy one I have now.

Woody, Palin is a parrot. She had no command of issues like Biden, just recited talking points.