Which you clearly don’t. With all due condescention.
Why don’t you just come right out and call me a moron? Please go for it. Why hide behind euphemisms?
I mean after all, you all are the ones with Recreational Outrage that Sarah Palin hasn’t taken care of business when you don’t even know whether or not she has. Just because she hasn’t held a press conference over this ridiculous issue.
There is one side of this debate that is preposterous, and it’s not the side that Sam Stone and I are taking.
Interviews with Matt Lauer and 3 day junkets to Miami aren’t her “damn job”. She’s doing these things because she wants to be sure she remains on the national stage as long as possible, it doesn’t have jack shit to do with running Alaska.
Surprisingly enough, Oct 22 was when Politico broke the story. It’s also when a McCain spokeswoman said that “It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign.” Yet, weeks later, nobody knows what they are actually going to do with them.
I don’t think people are supposed to call other people morons in Great Debates. Actually, I don’t think people are supposed to try to bait other people into using personal insults, either.
If this issue is “ridiculous”, “fluff”, and “irrelevant”, then the RNC should have said so back when the story broke. That was the time to stake out the position that the clothing issue was trivial and that they weren’t going to take it seriously or give any information about it.
They didn’t do that. Instead, they anxiously assured the public that these $150K of clothes were simply lent for the campaign and would be auctioned off for charity afterwards. They seemed to think it was important to let the voters know their views and intentions in this regard.
And now the voters are asking for some follow-up, to which they are fully entitled. You don’t get to treat an issue seriously when it looks like it might potentially lose you some voters, and then just shrug it off as “trivial fluff” when the campaign ends. Not without getting called on it.
Because that would be appropriate only in the Pit, and we’re not there.
You may call yourself names, if you like, though. I certainly won’t object.
What? Sarah Palin was never the Vice President. She can certainly choose who gets to help her on the campaign trail. Sure, the McCain campaign probably assigned her someone (or two), but she had input–just as any other executive level candidate would have input. She may not have the boss, but she wasn’t a helpless innocent bystander, either. You seem to want to blame McCain, someone who probably had the least part of this. Look to the head of his campaign or an advisor–I doubt seriously that McCain was in any way involved in her wardrobe decisions. I hope not, anyway. That would point to some truly messed up priorities. Nobody pushed all these clothes onto her. No one forced to take them, or the silk boxers or the stuff for her kids. I don’t know which way it went down–if Palin was pushing for them or if she was saying to yes to it all, but either way, it shows bad judgement.
I doubt the aides came to her and said–let’s outfit your whole family down to the skivvies and spend insane amounts of money while doing it. I think they came to her and said, “let’s get you a few things to polish your image.” And then all hell broke loose. Who knew the sizes of her kids etc? If the aides didn’t ask her, they asked Todd or Bristol–either way, Sarah was not unaware of the magnitude of the shopping.
I’m not “pissed off” that she didn’t go “rogue enough”. Believe me, she went/is rogue enough. Her choices reflect poor decision making regardless if she were the one actually shopping or just on the receiving end. As was said upthread, her past behavior of thinking she’s entitled to charge her family’s hotel rooms to the state augurs a pattern of self interest.
You want this to go away because it doesn’t reflect well on your candidate or party. No matter who spent it and why, 150K is far too much money to minimize and dismiss, which is why some Republicans protested against it. Someone who would make this kind of stupid mistake does not belong holding the public trust.
Perhaps it would be better to admit she made some poor choices and this shouldn’t be the end of her political career. Certainly I don’t want to see her gone–she’s great value for money.
Well then how about this. You continue with the euphemisms and my babelfish will continue to translate them to a more direct and clear statement.
I think that’s a very disingenuous way to frame it. What’s going on here is that certain statements have been made, and you are assuming guilt until proven innocent. You are assuming that the correct actions have not been taken, and people in this thread are acting like Sarah Palin prioritizing a Governor’s conference over holding a press conference about her clothes is some sort of shameful subterfuge. It’s ridiculous.
Right, the problem here is that ‘weeks later’ is only one week after the campaign ended and Oct 22, was two weeks before the election. At this point you are willfully disregarding my point about giving Sarah Palin and the RNC a rational time frame.
I mean if you’re going to ignore rational reasons why it may not have occurred and thing that saying, “She’s been busy this week.”, is an apologia instead of a statement of fact then I’m going to have to conclude that you simply don’t actually want to look at this in any meaningful manner. This essentially is a pit thread masquerading as a GD thread.
Yeah your critical inability to understand how organizations work is making this very difficult but I’ll try and slog through, though I’m getting very bored of trying to explain elementary concepts.
McCain was the executive. He hired the people who were to be his business managers. So instead of hiring competent people like David Plouffe and David Axelrod, he hired others who were not quite so competent. Sarah Palin was then chosen as VP on a whim, on short notice and immediately thrust into a situation she wasn’t prepared for. So instead of focusing on the minute details of keeping track of day to day expenditures she was trying to bone up on foreign policy details so she could at least present the facade that she knew what she was talking about. Something she mostly failed to do outside of a small segment of loyalists. Like she said, she didn’t hire the stylist, and she didn’t hire the lighting designer. She let them do their jobs.
Bottom line is that no one in the Palin family was prepared for the national spotlight, so she outfitted her family so that they wouldn’t look like a bunch of Alaska hicks. This is what was expected of her. It is expected that candidates trot out their families on the campaign trail. I didn’t notice that she did it anymore than the Obamas or the McCains. This is a double standard.
Somehow I doubt Sarah Palin was spending days in department stores. So we each find something incredulous about this story. You find it incredible that aides bought the clothes, and I find it incredible that she had time to spend all her days doing the shopping you claim she was doing. Some of it would have had to have been done by aides.
Recreational outrage as I said. This is a woman who sold a private plane to save the state of Alaska millions, and who has then been lambasted for using the cheaper state owned prop driven plane. So I hope you’ll excuse me if I don’t take the concerns that near and dear to my heart.
How exactly does this reflect on Barack Obama?
She did make some poor choices, but they were based on being thrust into circumstances she wasn’t prepared for as opposed to some narrative of the wicked witch of the west that you are trying to paint.
How is this RO? I’m talking specifically about how your characterization of “main street american women” offends me. That you also seem to think that MSAM are so stupid they can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality is not helping your case.
Take this parody of a meta-debate to the Pit.
This nonsense is closed.
[ /Modding ]
At the request of the OP, this thread is being re-opened in the BBQ Pit.
The rationale was that there was good information in the thread that could be applied to the ongoing discussion. I suppose that is possible.
So, everyone is welcome to have at it again (until the Pit mods get tired of it).
[ /Modding ]
So, has the RNC gotten their clothes back yet?
I don’t think the RNC qualifies as a charity.
Well, not yet at least. 
But, either way, I think that th RNC is, to some extent, required to make sure that Palin doesn’t keep the clothes, due to campaign finance laws. I’d imagine that in most situations, putting it down in the books as the candidate having auctioned off the clothes for charity would pass muster, but there are, for better or worse, a bunch of eyes on this one. Basically, I think the RNC really wants to take possession of these clothes to prove that everyone followed campaign finance laws, and then auction them off for charity themselves (well, I’d imagine they’d prefer to keep them, as it’s their clothes, but someone promised the whole charity thing, and people are watching).
Or, there’s also the theory that Sarah Palin is pretty much being set up in the whole thing, and the RNC is more or less letting the story out that Palin hasn’t been forthcoming in returning the clothes. It certainly does seem that there are at least a few former McCain staffers that are eager to blame Palin for all manner of ills.
This is what Palin said happened:
When she was chosen to be the VP candidate, the RNC sent image consultants and stylists out to buy wardrobe for her and the family. This is known as ‘framing’ the candidate, by the way, and it’s a time-honored tradition. Palin claims that she didn’t even know about it, and that the stylists and wardrobe were already arriving before she even got to the Republican convention.
Palin claims that she asked for none of it, chose none of it, was never under the impression that it was hers to keep, and has none of it now.
As to what happened to it all: 1/3 of it was sent back immediately because it was the wrong size and/or inappropriate. This would be because the stylists probably had to guess at the sizes of everyone, so some of the stuff didn’t fit, or after it was tried it didn’t look right.
Another 1/3 of it never left the belly of the plane. The stuff was packed in, and Palin wore the stuff she liked and didn’t wear the rest. She has no idea where it is now, as she never saw it after initially trying it on and choosing not to wear it.
The other 1/3 traveled around in the hotel rooms with her. She says it was all returned at the end of the campaign.
The lawyer sent to go through her things? Never happened. She’s never been contacted by the RNC or anyone else other than the media over the clothes. The lawyer, if there is one, is probably just doing a routine verification that campaign finance laws were adhered to, and isn’t in Alaska.
That business about her sorting through things at home looking for clothes? A partial truth. In fact, what she was doing was going through a number of boxes that came back with her from the campaign. She was given things like campaign buttons, posters, T-shirts, whatever - detritus from the campaign that she or her kids might like to have as souvenirs of the biggest event in their lives. So it had to be sorted out and she had to go through it all to make sure there was nothing of value, including clothing, included with it. There wasn’t.
Palin doesn’t believe the $150,000 number. She says she can’t imagine that the clothes she had could be worth anything like that amount. That could be just her provincialism showing, or the number could be grossly inflated.
Now, you can call Palin a liar if you want, but she was quite specific on the details, and they are details that are easily checked or refuted if those ‘anonymous insiders’ were right. So it seems strange that she’d lie in that kind of detail. Usually, when a politician lies they do it by being vague and obtuse so you can’t catch them on the details.
Frankly, her story sounds like the truth to me. And since this story broke, several ranking McCain staffers who are actually willing to comment publicly have said the story is nonsense. So all we have are some ‘anonymous sources’ against everyone else. Given the track record of accusations against Palin, most of which have proven to be false, I would be highly skeptical of new ‘revelations’ if I were you.
Speaking of debunked stories - it turns out that the “Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent” story was a hoax. Carl Cameron at Fox didn’t vet his source properly. The story that Palin didn’t know the three countries in NAFTA is also a lie - several staffers for McCain who were at that meeting came forward and said it was a complete fabrication. It ddn’t even pass the smell test - as Governor, Palin has dealt with NAFTA issues with both Mexico and Canada numerous times.
All this stuff proves one thing - if you really, really hate someone, it’s easy to believe almost anything negative about them. Remember all the Republicans running around saying Hillary killed Vince Foster and Clinton was up to his eyeballs in crooked land deals? You guys sound just like them.
It doesn’t even have to be McCain staffers. The RNC is currently in complete disarray, and forces are lining up in various camps and factions. There are a LOT of Republicans who don’t want to see Sarah Palin lift her head out of Alaska ever again, and it’s entirely possible that there’s a campaign underway to discredit/diminish her now before she can build a loyal following outside the McCain campaign.
McCain’s volunteer base was always very thinly loyal. They came together out of necessity, but McCain was never liked much inside the Republican party, and neither is Palin. She’s actually been a thorn in the Republican party’s side for a long time - don’t forget that she ran against a fellow Republican and beat him. And that she worked against Republicans and with Democrats on the renegotiation of the oil royalties in Alaska. And that she was quite critical of Don Young and Ted Stevens, both powerful Republicans in Washington. Add to that the enemies she’s got simply for being a threat to win the nomination in 2012, and it’s not all surprising that there are a lot of Republican knives out, just looking for an opportunity to be stabbed into Sarah Palin’s back.
Have you got the cite for that? I’ve seen many quotes as to what Palin said about returning the clothes, but never anything that upon close reading means that she actually returned them at some point. Her use of tenses in discussing the issue has been very creative, so I’d like to see her say it straight up, and then have an acknowledgement from the RNC.
BTW, that was a pretty snazzy outfit she wore to the governors conference. That wasn’t part of the stash, was it?
Assuming it all checks out, great. For the life of me, I don’t know why it took her this long to explain something that simple.
I don’t agree with Palin, but I don’t hate her. It will be interesting to see if she is able to build a national presence from her time in the spotlight. Has she ever given a straightforward, simple answer to anything? That’s what I’ll be watching for.
I assume here that ‘story’ refers to the public reporting and not to Palin’s version.