An extensive but incomplete compendium of lies and obfuscations polluting the air of my state due to the dissembling nature of an Alaskan charlatan

or, Sarah Palin was here

by folkbum

I didn't watch the video linked from here--if I want to watch bad TV, there are 500-some channels on the satellite--so I understand that some gratuitous ad-libbed shots at unions and community organizers also escaped the funnel. But I'm sticking to the as-prepared speech, and since PolitiFact won't help a brother out and ID Palin's lies, I will.

She starts with puffery. "You look good," she says. Even her empty rhetoric is superficial! But now I'm being mean. Let's try it again.

Madison, these are the frontlines in the battle for the future of our country. This is where the line has been drawn in the sand. And I am proud to stand with you today in solidarity.

It takes a lot of nerve, first of all, for someone allied with those who have admitted that they are out to weaken and divide their enemies to claim to be all about solidarity. But it gets worse!

A pension is a promise that must be kept. Now, your Governor Scott Walker understands this. He understands that states must be solvent in order to keep their promises. And that’s what he’s trying to do. He’s not trying to hurt union members. Hey, folks, he’s trying to save your jobs and your pensions! But unfortunately some of your union bosses don’t understand this, and they don’t care if union members have to be laid off.

Problems abound:

• Wisconsin is solvent. Indeed, steps taken by this governor--to turn away federal investment, to cut taxes on those already paying historically low rates, to suck spendable income out of the economy through steep wage cuts or layoffs--have weakened Wisconsin, not strengthened it.
• Wisconsin's pensions are solvent. They are fully funded and among the best-run in the country. Where other states have raided pension funds or stolen payments to balance their books, Wisconsin has not. To suggest that any of the actions this governor has taken were to protect pensions is simply a lie.
• The "union bosses" offered concessions. WEAC and AFSCME bosses, among the biggest of the unions and bosses, acceded to every financial demand, knowing what kind of an impact it would have on their employees. Palin lies to say the unions don't understand what it means to make concessions.

You saw these violent rent-a-mobs trash your capital.

There were no "rented" anything. The Madison TAA and tens of thousands of other real people from here--not out-of-state agitators like Palin or Andrew "Go To Hell" Breitbart--have spent more than 60 days in peaceful and respectful protest. There was no trashing of the capitol (note the professional author misspelled it) and, in fact, the protestors who slept there organized clean-up crews to mitigate what challenge their presence presented to the (union) workers who keep the capitol clean day-in and day-out. Every "tea party" or other organized pro-Walker event in the period has been funded (Palin, unlike, say, Bradley Whitford or Jesse Jackson or Michael Moore, was paid) and promoted by non-Wisconsin entities. That's the real rent-a-goon squad.

Madison, you held your ground. Your governor did the right thing. And you won. Your beautiful state won. And you know what – people still have their jobs because of it!

Technically not a lie, because many public employees do have jobs still. But local governments and school districts are going to be laying off thousands of people in the next few months. That's income lost from our economy, which will ripple through housing, retail, entertainment, where jobs will also be lost.

After which, Palin transitions to Campaign 2012 mode, aiming not at the union thugs of occupied Madison, but at DC and Barack Obama. Doesn't mean there's still not issues. Consider the way she plays the victim:

The Tea Party Movement wouldn’t exist without Barack Obama. You see, Candidate Obama didn’t have a record while he was in office; but President Obama certainly has a record, and that’s why we’re here. And hey, media, it’s not inciting violence and it’s not hateful rhetoric to call someone out on their record, so that’s what we’re going to do.

A, Obama did have a record before 2009, and B, nice to see Palin finally acknowledge that a lot of what she used to do is inciteful. She goes on:

Candidate Obama promised to be fiscally responsible. He promised to cut the deficit; but President Obama tripled it! Candidate Obama promised that fiscal responsibility; but President Obama flushed a trillion dollars down the drain on a useless “stimulus” package and then he bragged about the jobs he “created” in congressional districts that don’t even exist! That’s right; on this, White House, you lie. The only thing that trillion-dollar travesty stimulated was a debt-crisis and a Tea Party!

• Obama did not triple the deficit. The FY 2009 deficit--the last under Bush--was $1.4 trillion. FY 2010 deficit, Obama's first, was $1.35 trillion.
• The stimulus was not a trillion dollars, and it was also not a failure. Every reputable economist--even conservative ones!--acknowledge that it kept the economy from sinking too far.
• Obama didn't "brag" about jobs in fake Congressional districts; grant recipients in states flubbed the paperwork, which was corrected by federal staff.
• The bulk of the debt crisis was created by unpaid-for tax cuts, unfunded wars, and a giant giveaway to big pharma known as Medicare Part D.

Then there's a painful stretch of speech peppered with phrases like "duck blind" and "cockamamie harebrained ideas." Then she has the gall, after praising Wisconsin's Republicans for ignoring the two-plus months of constant public pressure, to say this:

President Obama, you do not have our consent. You didn’t have it in November. And you certainly don’t have it now. You willfully ignored the will of the American people.

And what is Scott Walker doing? His ratings are lower than Obama's, his rebuke in the last election was stinging, his minions are being recalled left and right--well, just right--and his union-busting proposals are less popular than Paul Ryan's Medicare-busting plans.

And then Palin lists her lies in single lines, which makes it easy:

You ignored it when you rammed through Obamacare. [NOTE: After dozens of Congressional votes and nearly a year of public debate. Scott Walker wanted five days to bust the unions.]

You ignored it when you drove up the debt to $14.5 trillion. [NOTE: see above about tax cuts, wars, etc.]

You ignored it when you misrepresented your deficit spending. [NOTE: Wha?]

You ignored it when you proposed massive tax increases on the middle class and our job creators. [Obama lowered taxes on every American. He proposed raising taxes on incomes over $250,000, which is not middle class by any definition. And what does Palin think of Walker's willingness to slash pay of people earning 1/5 of that?]

You ignored is when you went to bat for government-funded abortions and yet you threw our brave men and women in uniform under the bus, Mr. Commander in Chief. [NOTE: None of Planned Parenthood's abortion services are paid for with tax dollars. Period.]

You ignored it when you got us into a third war for fuzzy and inconsistent reasons, a third war that we cannot afford. [NOTE: Where was Palin for wars #1 and #2?]

You ignore it when you apologize for America while you bow and kowtow to our enemies, and you snub our allies like Israel. [NOTE: So 2009. Ugh.]

And you ignore when you manipulate the U.S. oil supply. You cut off oil development here and then you hypocritically praise foreign countries for their drilling. [NOTE: Must be why the US oil industry keeps posting record profits.]

And when hardworking families are hit with $4 and $5 a gallon gas and your skyrocketing energy and food prices as you set out to fundamentally transform America, you ignore our concerns and you tell us we just better get used to it. [NOTE: Much of the rise in gas prices is due to speculation on the commodities market. Obama has refused to open the strategic petroleum reserve, but that's because there's no gas shortage--just a run-up in prices fueled by traders at places like Goldman Sachs.]

Palin ends with an explicit invocation of 2012. Which I will enjoy, because Republican overreach is certain to change Madison, and the House in DC. And maybe by then Palin will know what real Real America looks like: #WIUnion.

Can we all at least agree

by folkbum

that by now Sarah Palin has thoroughly made herself unelectable?

Sarah Palin -- The Anti-Jack Lalanne

By Keith R. Schmitz

In her on-going series of dumb and senseless attacks on all things Obama (race nor the race of course have nothing to do with it) Sarah Palin on the whiny Laura Ingram program went o the attack Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" initiative that encourages kids to get fit.

As usual, Palin is being stupid on so many levels, and Roland S. Martin provides them for you.

If you want an effort to reduce health care costs, this is a big way to do it. It is just too bad that in this country these kids will ultimately grow up to work for employers that are allowed to work people like dogs, giving them very little time to exercise. When people complain about obesity in this country, this is the one factor that gets overlooked.

What the First Lady is promoting makes sense in so many ways, and America's most prominent dim wit fails to recognize them. With so many people supporting the notion of her running for president it is no accident that this country is in a slow slide downward. Her circus life style and bizarre comments keep her in the spotlight, generating strange admiration for some and for others, provides a car wreck from which many of us cannot look away.

Why can't we just turn her off?

Theological Question

by folkbum

Can God create a permanent marker so indelible that not even He could wash its ink off His hands?

Talk From the Hand

by folkbum

To me, the saddest thing about Sarah Palin's having written some cheat-sheet notes on her hand (video of her checking those notes here) is not that she did it at all, but, rather, that in doing so she screwed up her own already oversimplified message:

(originally, AP, blow-up via HP)
Her hand reads, "Energy/ Budget Tax Cuts/ Lift American Spirits." She couldn't even remember, in the moment pre-speech with Bic in hand, that the important cuts are tax cuts, not budget cuts.

You'd think for $100,000, the tea-partiers could have gotten someone who has their message memorized.

Maybe She Could Be the Next GOP VP Nominee?

By Keith R. Schmitz

Ailes Is Analyzed by Freud

By Keith R. Schmitz

Pull up a front row seat. This is good.

Trouble in the House of Murdoch.

It appears that the monster created by father Rupert -- Fox News -- has become an embarrassment to his kids. And it's not just financial.

Here's the story:

The first shot—really a nuclear device—was fired today on The New York Times’ Web site by British public-relations executive Matthew Freud, Murdoch’s son-in-law. Freud’s on-the-record quote, for a front-page profile of the 69-year-old Ailes, who launched and runs News Corp.’s most profitable division, is stunning in its condemnation—a frontal attack on Ailes and an apparent attempt to force News Corp.’s founder to choose between blood and money, between his progeny and his most-prized executive.

“I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’ horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to,” Freud told the Times. A News Corp. spokesperson fired back: “Matthew Freud's opinions are his own and in no way reflect the views of Rupert Murdoch, who is proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News.”

Wonder how they are grooving on Fox's latest addition to their staff?

Unemployment situation improves

by folkbum

At least for one formerly out-of-work Alaskan.

Apples to Horse Apples

by folkbum

There's an ugly internet rumor going around that Sarah Palin's poll numbers are as good as Barack Obama's. It's not true. (Graphs below are as of 11/24; click on them to be magically transported to pollster for current data.)



(And for kicks, you can play with the graphs to remove the outlier Rassmussen, watch the two get farther apart.)

Deep Thought

by folkbum

Asking Sarah Palin for advice on how to be governor is like asking David Lee Roth for advice on how to lead a rock band.

Dare to Compare

By Keith R. Schmitz

It seems so unfair to pick on Sarah Palin since there is a lot less than meets the eye. But you still have supposedly serious people acting like she is a serious candidate, so when a dish is served it must be eaten.

That being said, as bad as she is when she stands alone put her up against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotmayor and the Sarah Barracuda absolutely wilts.

Margaret Wente with the Toronto Globe and Mail splashes water on the arguments of the anti-Sotomayor crowd by comparing the judge against their hero ex-Gov. Palin:

According to leading Republican pundits, Judge Sotomayor is a hot-tempered, dim-witted bigot whose judicial activism (read nutty identity politics) could play havoc with the Constitution. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, even called her a “Latina racist.” Amazingly, these are the same people who continue to insist that Sarah Palin is qualified to run for president of the United States. They insist she is the victim of a vicious smear job by the eastern media elites.

And for those who keep telling us that character counts and that there are 50 Rules:

Ms. Palin despises people who were educated in elite Ivy League universities. Judge Sotomayor, on the other hand, was smart enough to get into them. She put herself through school on scholarships, and graduated from Princeton with top honours. Ms. Palin, who finds homework disagreeable, has never doubted her own abilities for a minute. But Judge Sotomayor worries constantly that she's not good enough. “I am always looking over my shoulder, wondering if I measure up,” she has said.

As much as Palin and her undiscriminating (except sometimes when it comes to race) supporters whine about the people who have eyes and ears in the media and outside of the rad right, their real bane is George W. Bush.

In the past, the GOP became real masters at playing the game of presenting a mediocre candidate because at that time, they could sell the idea that government didn't matter so why should the people the offered up who managed it. At the same time, they could present critics as being detached from "real America" who could admire someone who was not an Ivy League snob. Note W did attend an Ivy League school or two.

Now things have changed. Most voters have noticed that when you have a proudly incompetent candidate, you have a government that can make your life complicated.

Nobody seems to care when things are running smoothly but when the economy runs into the ditch, people do point fingers.

Sarah Palin cannot play that card of the defiant incompetent except among the resentful and those who believe that the role of government is to strictly protect the unborn.

But she could play the element of surprise and find a way to improve and bone-up as they say. Maybe, just maybe, she could become a wise gringa. But when it comes to Sonia Sotomayor, Sarah has a long way to go.

Palin worship and the rare reverse-Godwin

by folkbum

Shorter Dad29: When Sarah Palin lied about the "bridge to nowhere," it was just like lying to the Nazis about hiding Jews in your house.

Aren't we all Sarah Falin' Pans at heart?

by folkbum

Palin gets out of the kitchen

by folkbum

I just don't know what to say about this.

Feminist Mistake

By Keith R. Schmitz

Sarah Palin's feminist rage at David Letterman could ring true if she hadn't supported charging rape victims for the cost of rape kits while she was Mayor of Walsilla, AK.

Unfortunately for her supporters, there aren't many voters out there who are into phony.

Reminders

by folkbum

A reminder that the Wispolitics Budget Blog is indespensable indispensable this time of year.

A reminder of just how close we came to disaster.

A reminder of the Really Big Show Saturday night. You'll be there, right?

A reminder that Mathias, Evers, and Abrahamson need your help now that the primary is over.

A reminder for reader Andy that he doesn't need to spend $3000 on appliances. (I got my first dishwasher for $10, if I remember correctly.)

A reminder to commenters here: I have never banned anyone only banned one person from this site. Ever. In six years. But if your comments have a very high profanity-and-insult-to-content ratio, you'll be gone. That is all. (This item updated.)

IOKIYAR, Part II

by folkbum

Will Southeast Wisconsin's conservative bloggers go after Sarah Palin with the same gusto they used to attack Charlene Hardin for her taxpayer-funded jaunts? Palin is a much bigger abuser:

Gov. Sarah Palin charged the state for her children to travel with her, including to events where they were not invited, and later amended expense reports to specify that they were on official business.

The charges included costs for hotel and commercial flights for three daughters to join Palin to watch their father in a snowmobile race, and a trip to New York, where the governor attended a five-hour conference and stayed with 17-year-old Bristol for five days and four nights in a luxury hotel.

In all, Palin has charged the state $21,012 for her three daughters' 64 one-way and 12 round-trip commercial flights since she took office in December 2006. In some other cases, she has charged the state for hotel rooms for the girls.

Alaska law does not specifically address expenses for a governor's children. The law allows for payment of expenses for anyone conducting official state business.

As governor, Palin justified having the state pay for the travel of her daughters -- Bristol, 17; Willow, 14; and Piper, 7 -- by noting on travel forms that the girls had been invited to attend or participate in events on the governor's schedule.

But some organizers of these events said they were surprised when the Palin children showed up uninvited, or said they agreed to a request by the governor to allow the children to attend.

I'm not defending Hardin--on the contrary, I have said repeatedly that if she abused her power as a member of the school board, she should suffer whatever legal penalties can be thrown at her. But Palin's case here is pretty clearly orders of magnitude higher. Dan Bice wrote breathlessly--and the conservative wags fair beslobbered themselves in response--about Hardin's alleged 5-minute appearance at a conference that cost $1200 for her to attend. Palin billed her constituents $700 a night for four nights to attend five hours of a conference in New York, plus airfare for herself and her daughter.

Where is the outrage? Or is this simply yet another case of It's OK If You're a Republican?

IOKIYAR

by folkbum

It has been barely a year since the conservative blog-o-tubes congested themselves with mockery for Democrat John Edwards's $400 haircut. It has only been a couple of months since a local righty went after Marge Krupp, Democratic candidate for Wisconsin's first congressional district (website; give), for her campaign expenses:

4-7-08, $20 for Crest White Strips? Seriously? You expect your campaign to help whiten your teeth?

1-4-2008, $537.95 for, get this, camera friendly glasses?

5-22-07, $261.00 for a campaign suit...

6-1-07, $261.00 for another campaign suit? Same suit? Same price? Different color?

It goes on and on...

I wish I were kidding--those were among the complaints this local conservative leveled at Krupp after seeing her spending reports. I can only imagine how that blogger will react when he learns his new favorite has her own issues:

The Republican National Committee appears to have spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.

According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.

The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.

The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.

As I said, I can imagine the reaction--and it will likely be indignation that anyone is bringing this up at all. How dare we go after Sarah Palin in this way? It's okay if she does it, after all. It's okay if you're a Republican!

Different, brief example: Same righty blogger as above complains (in comments here), "Jay, how do you lower taxes on people who don't pay them?" IOKIYAR: "Welcome to the People's Republic of Alaska, where every resident this year will get a $3,200 payout, thanks in no small measure to the efforts of Sarah Palin, the state's Republican governor. [. . .] No wonder she is popular with voters in a state whose residents pay no income or sales taxes."

You don't need a weatherman to know when Palin's blowing smoke

by bert

Pallin' around with terrorists? That's the best this pitbull with lipstick can do?

On the one hand I can see why McCain strategists and their servile pundits are playing up the Bill Ayers connection with Barack Obama. Palin carried that message yesterday. Ayers, who said in 2001 he opposes the "indiscriminate killing of human beings by either fanaticism or official policy", was nonetheless a member of the most notoriously militant anti-war radical group of the 1960s, the Weather Underground.


This group's use of bombs, which in one case killed a police officer, was wrong and contemptible.


Almost all anti-war activists and politicians of the time would also agree, which is why this splinter group earned the acrimony of just about everyone else at the time. Yet all that matters is the perceptions of voters today, and strategists think they can wound the Obama campaign with someone else's old splinter.


On the other hand, I don't see this working for a lot of people. Is our collective perception of the Vietnam Era -- what historians call our public memory --that mangled and highly selective? Did the 1960s gives us just one bad guy: the dirty hippies?


I am obviously not the base that this talking point is aiming to energize. And that's not because I was a hippie; like Obama I was still a little boy in the 1960s. I just don't get why he the wayward militants were the only domestic terrorists of the day.


Take Henry Kissinger, for example. While I don't admire Ayers, I am way more troubled by Sarah Palin's link with Kissinger, from whom she sought to learn about world affairs two weeks ago. Kissinger is a war criminal with blood on his hands shed during the Vietnam War period. Why Ayers bad, Kissinger not so much?


This is the period that also gave us National Guard soldiers at Kent State University in 1970. Chicago police officers who laid open the heads of young women in Chicago in 1968, and Milwaukee had those young guys waiting at the south end of the viaduct with two-by-fours and tire irons for the open housing marchers to arrive.



If I try to take it all in, some wistful sadness comes but not much selective outrage anymore. According to the New York Times, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley views the actions of a young Ayers 40 years ago "in the context of a polarized and turbulent era."

Sarah Palin and theMcCain campaign think a majority of voters aren't wise enough to do the same.

How Esenberg burnishes, distorts the truth

by folkbum

I have said before that I do not envy Rick Esenberg. I like him and have enjoyed every conversation we've ever had together. He is a smart guy--I wouldn't want to go up against him when death is on the line, let's say--and an honest conservative. However, he's also the guy the less honest or smart turn to when they need to legitimize their fetishes or polish their turds.

We saw it, for example, with the Gableman-Butler Wisconsin Supreme Court race. No doubt Esenberg agreed more in philosophy with the general lean of Mike Gableman, but Gableman proved to be at best a mediocre jurist and ran a campaign of outright lies and borderline racist attacks on Justice Louis Butler. As the lawyers on the Butler side of the blogosphere showed, repeatedly, Gableman's record and his seeming knowledge of Constitutional issues was wafer-thin against what proved to be Butler's complex and thoughtful record on a wide variety of cases. But law-prof Esenberg polished the Gableman turd week after week, day after day. It was painful to watch from here.

And we're seeing it now with Sarah Palin. In this morning's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Esenberg offers "How Palin reassures, challenges the right," an op-ed that bears little relationship to objective reality. The title of the piece suggests to me, if it is not a serious warning flag to everyone else--that the op-ed is directed at readers on the right and is not intended for moderate-to-left consumption. Even so, what Esenberg is telling his fellow conservatives needs a significant unpacking, and so I offer one here. It is long, but the payoff at the end is worth the reading, trust me--stick around.

He begins simply enough:

If Ronald Reagan was the Teflon candidate, Sarah Palin is the mirrored nominee. As a Democratic friend recently suggested, the Republicans could not have invented a better foil for Barack Obama.

I am not sure who his Democratic friend is, but this suggestion--as I read it and as I understand the definition of foil here--should not reassure anyone, let alone the right. Barack Obama has proved to be the calm, bold, and, dare I say it, presidential candidate in this race. His politics are moderate (as much center as left) and policy proposals are detailed and thoughtful. Obama's risen to the challenge of every situation life has offered him, and he's overcome those challenges with aplomb. If Palin here is his foil, that suggests she's hard-right, an inch-deep, likely to go-off half-cocked, and a relative failure at everything she tries.

As it turns out, that's a fairly accurate description of Palin--but that's not where Esenberg goes with all of this. Let's see some specifics:

Although a good deal of the enthusiasm generated by her nomination was lost in the wake of the financial meltdown and her unimpressive performance in an interview with Katie Couric, her strong showing in Thursday night’s vice presidential debate reinvigorates Palin as a factor in this election and in the future of the Republican party.

I suppose that by the Courickian standard, Palin's performance on Thursday was "strong." By, say, any other objective standard ever devised, her performance was not. Snap polls suggested a solid win from Joe Biden, and further polls have also shown that the debate pushed independents more toward the Democratic ticket than toward McCain-Palin. Neither Palin nor Biden was perfect in that debate, but Palin's performance was embarrassing. When she lacked a real answer on any topic, she pivoted to one of three things: discredited attacks on Obama's character and record; the word "maverick"; or her own supposed "record" on energy. Is the topic health care? Let's talk energy. Is the topic my greatest weakness? Did you know John McCain's a maverick? You want me to answer the questions? Screw you, buddy, I'm gonna talk straight to the 'merican people.

Let’s start with November’s election. For months, Obama has struggled against the criticism that a first-term senator who was, just a few years ago, an unknown and rather undistinguished state legislator is unqualified to be president. To now attack Palin as unqualified is to go after the bottom of the GOP ticket at the expense of the top of the Democratic slate. To draw attention to her lack of foreign policy experience is to underscore the same gap in Obama’s résumé. If she couldn’t guess what Charles Gibson meant (incorrectly, as it turns out) by the Bush doctrine, Obama did not understand that Russia holds a veto on the United Nations Security Council, making the latter a rather poor forum to address the invasion of Georgia.

There is little question that on paper, Obama's resumé is not as extensive as, say Biden's, or even Hillary Clinton's. (Although based on the propaganda launched from the right during the primaries, "experience" was also going to be a prime issue had Clinton won the nomination.) Comparing Obama's experience to Palin's might prove a wash (sure, she held executive office, but how many colleges did she have to transfer to to finally get that degree?), but more important, I think, is how they have applied that experience to their current positions as candidates. Obama has turned his brief career in elected office into the de facto leadership of his party; even four years ago, before he held federal office, he was so widely recognized by the party for his leadership potential that he was offered the keynote at the convention that nominated John Kerry. Four years ago, Sarah Palin was a small-town mayor that no one in Republican Party outside of Alaska had likely ever heard of. She was able to capitalize on Alaskans' distaste with Frank Murkowski--he appointed his daughter to replace him in the Senate!--and a divided opposition including a strong independent candidate to win the governor's race with a plurality, not a majority, of votes. And in the current race, Obama has risen to every standard expected of candidates for national office, while Palin has failed most of them. Even the supposed gaffe Esenberg notes--Obama's suggesting the UN Security Council engage the problem of a Russia-Georgia conflict--is not a gaffe; if it is, then John McCain is guilty of it too:

McCain, a Republican from Arizona, called directly on Russia to "cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from the sovereign Georgian territory." He said the United States should convene an emergency session with the U.N. Security Council "to call on Russia to reverse course" and gather the North Atlantic Council to review Georgia's security and measures NATO should take.

But back to Esenberg's polish of the Palin moose patty:

Is Palin just a tad outré? Can she be labeled a “backwoods hick” whose voice reminds us of Frances McDormand in “Fargo”? We certainly heard some of that in Thursday’s debate. “Oh, yeah,” she said with a smile and a shake of her head, “it’s so obvious I’m a Washington outsider. And someone just not used to the way you guys operate. Because here you voted for the war and now you oppose the war.” You betcha. But to dismiss her in this way recalls the suspicion that Obama is a bit of elitist who, notwithstanding his “Grapes of Wrath” rhetoric, looks down with a mixture of sympathy and disdain on those God- and gun-clinging unfortunates who undoubtedly live in subdivisions on wheels.

It's not that she has a grating voice that bothers me. It's that she's playing up the "backwards hick" when she is not, in fact, a backwards hick. We saw Palin at the convention deliver a (pre-scripted, mostly written for someone else) speech read from teleprompters. When she was doing that, she lacked the folksy, hicksy charm. Instead, she was dead serious and her delivery, while Fargo-y, was not peppered with youbetchas and donchanos. She only turned that on during the debate. You can compare the two here yourself.

     

I guess the question that I keep coming back to when I hear praise for her folksy speaking style, her "joesixpackhockeymom (wink) youbetchas," I can't help but wonder what the pundit world would think were Barack Obama to swap out his standard diction (Esenberg implies this is an element of Obama's "elitist" persona) to drop into something more like the Black English Vernacular and make references familiar to black popular culture. Oh, wait, I don't have to wonder--I can just go back to the harsh criticism Obama took when he let a little Jay-Z into his campaign last April. Some of the local righties even considered that the disqualifying moment of his campaign. When Obama turns on the "black," he gets hit hard. But when Palin turns on the "backwards hick," it is a sign she's not an elitist.

From there, Esenberg directs the rest of the piece to conservatives, though he still manages to mangle some facts:

Apart from the political dynamic, there is a substantive element to the Palin nomination as well with a significance that may well extend beyond November. Her selection sends two distinct messages: one that reassures the traditional Republican base and another that challenges it.

By selecting a staunch social conservative who has reduced both spending and taxes, John McCain signaled that he had no intention of abandoning the conservative movement and remaking the party. [. . .] The Palin nomination also challenged the complacency of a conservative movement that has had a difficult time moving beyond its successes. McCain may not want to remake the party, but he certainly intends to redirect it. Notwithstanding the fact that Palin initially supported an impossibly expensive bridge to connect Ketchikan to its airport, she did, in the end, kill it and directed that a more “fiscally responsible” alternative be found. Although she did not completely abandon Alaska’s requests for earmarked federal money, she substantially reduced them and warned her constituents that the state must push away from the federal trough. This reinforces McCain’s message of reform.

So much wrong in so few paragraphs! Palin may have cut some taxes, as mayor, but she raised others and raised spending by even more, leaving Wasilla, Alaska, in debt to the tune of $3000 per resident--that's not "fiscally responsible." The earmark for the "Bridge to Nowhere" was removed by Congress in 2005, long before Palin was sworn in. She won her race in part by promising to get that money and spend it for the bridge--and only when confronted with the reality that America generally would not tolerate such spending, she spent every single one of the potential bridge dollars on other projects, including on a road to the bridge that is not being built. That's not "fiscally responsible." Palin also pushed through a windfall profits tax on oil companies--something our own governor tried to do and which Rick Esenberg himself said "strikes me as political pandering." I am not sure how Esenberg can reconcile "political pandering" with "fiscally responsible."

But there is more. Palin is not, like Obama, an unreconstructed class warrior. But she, like McCain, takes seriously the obligation to ensure that the benefits of capitalism are widely enjoyed. The free market is the presumptive means to good ends, but not an end in itself. During Thursday’s debate, in response to a question about the financial crisis, she adopted a populist tone, “Darn right it was the predator lenders who tried to talk Americans into thinking that it was smart to buy a $300,000 house if we could only afford a $100,000 house.” While there is far more to the financial meltdown than this, her tone is a departure from doctrinaire laissez-faire economics.

This is my second-favorite paragraph in all of Esenberg's essay, because as I read through the various "live blogs" and reactions to the debate among local conservatives, to a one, almost, they recoiled in horror at this "populist" moment. Owen Robinson, for one, wrote, "Palin hitting corruption on Wall Street again. I hate that." I am not sure how Palin is supposed to be the link between social conservatives (the right-to-life crowd) and fiscal conservatives (the club for growth crowd) when she won't toe both lines.

Esenberg then talks class warfare for a moment, and delivers this:

Concern for those who are less fortunate is essential, but it is not measured by support for the compelled redistribution of income. Government cannot save you. It won’t pay your bills, and its job is not to take from Peter to pay Paul. But it can contribute to a set of circumstances in which Paul can help himself.

And that, my friends, was my favorite paragraph. Why? Because as much as Esenberg may well believe that government shouldn't pay your bills, Sarah Palin does. For what did she do with the results of the windfall profits tax on oil companies I noted earlier? This (my bold):

Alaska collected an estimated $6 billion from the new tax during the fiscal year that ended June 30, according to the Alaska Oil and Gas Association. That helped push the state's total oil revenue--from new and existing taxes, as well as royalties--to more than $10 billion, double the amount received last year. [. . .] Some of that new cash will end up in the wallets of Alaska's residents. Palin's administration last week gained legislative approval for a special $1,200 payment to every Alaskan to help cope with gas prices, which are among the highest in the country. That check will come on top of the annual dividend of about $2,000 that each resident could receive this year from an oil-wealth savings account.

Got that? Sarah Palin taxed oil companies and sent Alaskans a check to help pay their bills--exactly what Esenberg suggests Palin challenges conservatives not to do, not to engage in income redistribution or to tell Americans that their government will save you. She robbed Peter, paid Paul, and then bragged that Paul gave her an 80% approval rating.

There is little doubt that John McCain had an uphill battle against Barack Obama. The cards were all stacked against him and the current polls (Obama is over 50% in the pollster.com composite as I write this, 8.5 points above McCain, much worse for McCain than it was before Palin's debate with Biden) suggest that McCain has but the longest of shots to win. Palin may have re-invigorated the social conservative base that was tepid on McCain in the first place, I'll give you that. But whatever Palin may do for conservatives--and I submit to you that she does not do what Esenberg says she does--she clearly does not do for the American people. If this is the future of conservatism, conservatives will be in the minority for a long, long time.