Terrifying insight into the Sarah Palin phenomenon

By Dan Brooks in conservatism, glenn beck, health care, health insurance reform, populism, Reactionary Populism, representative democracy, rumormongering, sarah palin, snake that operates sarah palin 2 Comments
The friendly snake that operates Sarah Palin, enjoying a rare moment of repose

The friendly snake that operates Sarah Palin, enjoying a rare moment of repose

Combat! blog’s vacation in sunny lazy California continues today, and I am too sunny to produce a long post about fat people/pants. Fortunately, the ever-vigilant Ben Fowlkes has sent me a terrifying video of interviews with Sarah Palin supporters. Surely it’s an example of uncharitable editing, but it still offers a chilling vision of an America that does not make its political decisions on the basis of political issues. The melange of talk radio catchphrases that passes for discourse among these people is simultaneously baffling and weirdly distinct; they all talk kind of the same, and what’s most unnerving is that Sarah Palin talks like that, too. She’s like some sort of rhetorical surrealist, who has tapped into a deep vein of subconscious connections that operates below logical reasoning. Understanding the people in this video is like trying to read a digital clock in a dream. Video after the jump.

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Going roguish: Sarah Palin as vague alternative to everything

By Dan Brooks in conservatism, conservative liars, counterculture, representative democracy, sarah palin, widespread dumbening 22 Comments
Completely natural

Completely natural

I know you guys are probably sick of Sarah Palin, particularly since our media-industrial complex—of which Combat! blog is now officially a part, with the addition of ads touting anti-health car propaganda and krav maga—has recently devoted itself to covering her full-time. But I remain fascinated by her, in part because it’s either that or the bafflingly long-legged story about the changes in mammogram recommendations, and in part because she is so aggressively stupid and yet so amazingly popular that she must be important. You know, like Uggs. The vague feeling that Sarah Palin signifies something, combined with the frustrating inability to articulate exactly what that something is, isn’t a phenomenon limited to her detractors. It also turns out to be a major impetus for her fans, who—at least until she announces for 2012 and the entire national cackles, half of us with sardonic glee—can’t be called “supporters” anymore. Palin is a politician now in the same sense that OJ Simpson is an athlete. She is an entity in the mediasphere, gossamer but still strangely endowed with the power to affect the material plane, and her fans don’t understand what Sarah Palin means any more than we do. Video evidence after the jump.

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