“I think anybody that has the visibility that Sarah has is obviously going to have some divisiveness. . . I remember that a guy named Ronald Reagan used to be viewed by some as divisive. . . [Sarah Palin is] an incredible force in the American political arena [and] she’s keeping her options open. . . I think she’s doing great job. . . I think she’s motivating our base. I think she had a positive impact on the last election and I’m proud of her.”
Sorry, I’m going to have to bite my tongue on that one. Too many McCain worshipers around here. Oh what the hell, I’ll just keep it to this simple statement; he may have been a war hero, but he’s turned into a lying prick of a politician.
Reread what he said, and see it from McCain’s perspective. She does motivate the base. She did have a huge “positive” effect on the 2008 election, as far as McCain’s campaign ended up.
He may have decided to shove an unlubed hedgehog up our collective anuses, but from his craven perspective he spoke complete truth.
I might quibble slightly with the “turned into”— but I think the bulk of the McCain “worship,” at least from the center leftward, largely dried up here and elsewhere after it became glaringly apparent that he *was *just another lying (and intensely self-serving) prick of a politician after all.
McCain is just saying what he has to in order to avoid admitting a major mistake in judgment in the one critical decision he had to make as an applicant for the Presidency. If he said anything else, he’d thereby admit being unqualified for the job he lusted over for so long. It’s too much to expect him, or any normal human, to do that in public or even to himself.
The Twitter post is not about treason or the courts, neither of which she gives a shit about: it’s about creating an excuse to put the name of her new “book” in a Twitter post.
Well… I say ABC take a bullet for all of us and offer her the casting job for DWTS for say, the next 10 years or so… folks will be tired of her politics by then, right?
Actually, I think it’s more personal loyalty than party loyalty. Palin backed him in his re-election bid, generally against the wishes of the Tea Party. To him, that makes her a stand-up person, and he’s returning the favor.
It’s not clear at all that supporting Palin now is what the Republican party wants or needs.
A few comments. First of all I’m just barely old enough to remember the end of the Reagan era as a quasi-adult (turned 15 in 1988), and come from a liberal family and a liberal region, and much as I might like to take a “what? we’d say that Reagan was dumb? Why of course we would not engage in such vile slander!” attitude, that’s definitely a meme that was out there (all though of course we didn’t call them memes back then).
In particular, I remember the following joke:
Q: Why are Reagan’s brain surgeons Zen Buddhists
A: Contemplation of Nothingness
As for my opinion from 20 odd years later (and they HAVE been odd years), I certainly don’t think he was a dummy or a nitwit. I’d rank him WELL ahead of Palin. However, I do think there was one pernicious influence he had, which was that however intelligent he may or may not have been, he had such folksy charm that I feel like he was the first president where it didn’t seem to matter if he was intelligent or not. Reagan did a great job of playing the role of “I’ve just got some aw shucks homey wisdom, and I apply that to presidential situations, and gee it all comes out right… except of course when my advisers do scandalous and treasonous things, everyone knows I wasn’t involved because, well, gee shucks”. However effective that may or may not have been for him, I think it was a BIG step towards our current “everyone wants to vote for the guy they’d have a beer with” state, where it would be shocking and somehow improper for a president to actually be obviously brilliant and respond to off the cuff questions with clearly impromptu learned monologues on the issue.
Bill Clinton was (by all accounts) incredibly knowledgeable about the issues of the day, and probably more details-oriented-intellectually-prepared to be the leader of the free world than any other president of my lifetime, but he sure didn’t play that up as part of his public persona.
What that dumbass bitch is too fucking stupid to know is, the U.S. government has NO JURISDICTION over Wikileaks – they’re a foreign entity whose site is operated overseas.
The stupid just oozes out of every fucking pore of that woman.
The notion that she is in any way, shape or form comparable to Ronald Reagan is utterly ridiculous.
<winky