She’s not a politician, exactly—she quit her job as governix of Alaska, and that whole second-in-line-for-the-presidency thing mercifully remained conjecture—yet all she talks about is politics. Normally that would make her a commentator, but her public statements are not really, um, up to the standards of the field. Palin’s pronouncements combine brevity and vagueness in a manner that suggests she’s not trying to convert us to her position so much as convert us to her. When she says that health care policy must strengthen American values, it’s not an argument so much as an answer. So far, Palin’s priority as a commentator seems to be to make her own position clear in relation to everybody else’s, albeit in the most infuriatingly abstract way possible. That agenda seems doubly odd, since we already know what she thinks before she says it: Sarah Palin agrees with the Republican Party. Still, she seems aligned with but not quite of the GOP, perhaps because the bulk of her rhetoric is not for anything; she’s just against President Obama. Consider her most recent piece in the National Review, in which she argues that the President’s recent support for expanded oil and gas drilling is just a trick. When one of her stated nemeses agrees with her, she refines her position in order to renew the dichotomy. In the past, we’ve criticized her for not having any ideas, but that isn’t really fair. In her present incarnation, Sarah Palin doesn’t need ideas, because the idea is herself. As David Carr suggests in today’s Times, Sarah Palin is a brand.
Author: Dan Brooks
Friday links! Reality gap edition
It’s Friday, which means we’ve come to the end of Week Two of the cessation of American liberty. I don’t want to jinx what has thus far been a remarkably low-key totalizing of government control, but I’m kind of disappointed. I guess I expected to be working in a salt mine by now, or at least be typing this with a brown-shirted ACORN volunteer reading over my shoulder. Where’s my unsupportable tax burden? Where’s my own personal bureaucrat to accompany me to the grocery store and make sure I don’t exercise my right to choose? It’s almost as if the dire predictions of half the country were based on an entirely different reality—one that threatened to come crashing into our dimension, but at the last moment got sick and decided to stay in the astral plane. This week’s link roundup is loosely dedicated to that alternate universe, where the federal government is still trying to put radios in our brains, the country longs for a second chance to vote for McCain-Palin, and all manner of useless celebrities influence our daily lives. Won’t you join me for a glimpse of the world that never was, population: half of us?
Feldblum “story” captures the transcendent genius of Fox News
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission appointee Chai Feldblum, who got her Gmail address without having to add any numbers or anything.
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last week, completely cut off from television, the internet, talk radio, newspapers, Twitter, coffee shop conversation and the mumblings of homeless people now, you’ve probably heard about Chai Feldblum. No? Obama’s controversial recess appointment to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission whose support for gay rights makes her a terrifying mystery to mainstream America? Ring a bell? Anything? That’s weird, because according to Fox News, the Obama Labor Pick’s Support For Gay Rights Worries Conservatives. Props to Ben “Yes, Folds—I Am Telling You an Anecdote That Rests On My Being Friends With Ben Folds” Fowlkes for the link. Just who these conservatives are or how Fox News became aware of the story that is their worry remains unclear, but that sort of vague sourcing is Fox’s modus operandi. It’s also the secret to the network’s genius fusion of editorial and news.
Combat! blog flies through air, is not useful
Combat! blog’s hazy Los Angeles vacation comes to an end today. I write you from gat 68A at LAX, which is pleasantly filled with Japanese people, one of whom is wearing a Knicks t-shirt and an enormous cowboy hat and is even now smiling at me in a nonthreatening manner. This modern world. An hour from now I will be suspended over the clouds, and two hours after that I will be vomiting in the garbage can at baggage claim. Yes, some of us come to claim things and some of us come to leave them behind. Today Combat! blog will make few claims and leave you nothing, the better to come blearily back to focused commentary tomorrow. In the meantime, consider the peculiar wondershow that can propel me at six hundred miles per hour 30,000 feet off the ground, yet somehow cannot create a single-file line. See you tomorrow.
Yes: Michael Steele’s RNC spends two grand at bondage club
You're welcome, Daily Show.
Since his earliest plans to resituate the Republican Party within “urban-suburban hip hop settings,” Michael Steele has been a gift to commenters. The chairman of the Republican National Committee has proven himself to have a tin ear for what the American people might want to hear, alienating independents and grassroots conservatives alike with a series of public statements that seem, well, stupid. But could Michael Steele be stupid like a fox? His clown reasoning has made him a punchline, but it’s also made him famous. I mean, who was the last Republican National Committee chairman? Can you name any of them? Steele has turned an obscure post as a party apparatchik into a bona fide public presence; he appears on Fox and Friends just as often as he appears on the Daily Show (pretty much a 1:1 ratio, come to think of it) and his book is selling like lukewarm hotcakes. Few would argue that Steele has made himself reckoned in national politics, but at least he’s made himself recognizable. If recent news reports are any indication, he’s also made himself rich.