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Thursday, September 25, 2008
I’m sorry — Sarah Palin is a bad joke
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In her interview with Katie Couric to be aired tonight on CBS, Sarah Palin complains that she should not have been mocked for claiming that Alaska’s proximity to Russia gives her insight into foreign policy.
So Couric gently asks Palin to explain again how proximity enhances her foreign policy credentials. Here’s the exchange, verbatim:
PALIN: “It certainly does, because our next-door neighbors are foreign countries there in the state that I am the executive of….”
COURIC: “Have you ever been involved in negotiations, for example, with the Russians?”
PALIN: “We have trade missions back and forth. We do. It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska, it’s just right over the border. It’s from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right there next to our state.” (TRANSCRIPT CORRECTED AS OF 4:46)
And so they are.
Palin is living, breathing proof that John McCain lies when he claims to put this country first over politics. She makes Dan Quayle look like Albert Einstein with a better haircut.
Here’s the clip. Go horrify yourself. Seeing it is worse than reading it.
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The superpowers of John McCain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Leaders of the House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans alike, have announced they’ve reached a basic deal on the Wall Street bailout package and will present it to the president this afternoon.
“We are very confident that we can act expeditiously,” said Sen. Chris Dodd, Democratic chair of the Senate Banking Committee.
“I now expect that we will indeed have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate, be signed by the president,” said Sen. Bob Bennett, a Utah Republican.
“There really isn’t much of a deadlock to break,” according to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
So I guess I gotta ‘fess up:
That John McCain must be a real magic man. He leaves the campaign trail and shows up in Washington today and — voila!! — barely an hour later, a deal emerges, just like that.
I mean, Big John is so good he didn’t even have to go to the meeting. Just the mere rumor that he might be in town was apparently enough to heal divisions, erase disagreements and get all of Congress to start singing Kumbayah in perfect unison and right on pitch, like a regular Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
In fact, with superpowers like that the guy ought to be on “Heroes.”
Now … about that debate?
UPDATE: Seriously, doesn’t this make McCain look utterly foolish? Just this morning he was in New York, insisting there was a logjam in Washington. “”It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the administration’s proposal to meet the crisis,” he said. “I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time.”
Meanwhile, at the White House, Press Secretary Dana Perino was telling reporters that things seemed to be progressing well, that negotiators were making good progress.
Well, that’s not what McCain is saying, someone pointed out.
Perino shrugged.
“Maybe he has information that I don’t have that makes him think the deal is almost dead,” she said.
It’s fascinating — McCain’s fellow Republicans in the White House and Congress didn’t even try to give him any cover on this.
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It’s not all THEIR fault, you know….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So this is how the Reagan Era ends, not with a bang but with the whimpering and whining of Wall Street executives begging for a bailout from an American public they long treated like unsophisticated rubes.
In less sobering times, there might be some entertainment value in that scene. But not now. To make matters worse, we have no real choice but to give them the help they seek, although with a lot more strings than they claim are possible. It’s either that, or risk letting the whole country go down the tubes.
With this bailout, we mark not just the end of an era but the demise of the ideology that created it. Events have made it crushingly obvious that greed is a poor foundation on which to build a nation and a culture. It turns out that enforcing the rules is actually a good idea, and that debts both personal and public really do come due eventually, just like daddy said they would.
In that kind of environment, it’s no wonder that John McCain has beat a retreat from the campaign trail, declining to debate. The Republican talking points make no sense anymore; the Republican worldview lies exposed and empty.
But if we’re going to be honest, we need to acknowledge that the excesses of corporate America that are now so roundly ridiculed — the grotesque bonuses, the heedless risktaking, the disdain for rules — existed because the cultural values of this country allowed them to exist and in fact helped to create them.
Most of what’s been going on with Wall Street comes as no surprise. In recent years, it was almost as if we Americans took a perverse pride in the fact that we could pay our CEOs half a billion dollars to fail, as if that bloated excess was itself proof of our great prosperity and strength. We acted as if we were one of those tribes out of mythology that celebrated its prosperity by boasting how fat its kings and princes were.
And they weren’t the only ones getting fat. Go to Realtytrac.com and plug in your ZIP code. You’ll see a map showing hundreds of houses under foreclosure or facing auction in your area. Then start poking around into other neighborhoods — rich, poor, middle-class. The problem may be more concentrated in poorer areas, but it is significant almost everywhere, crossing class lines, racial lines, state lines and political lines.
As those maps demonstrate, Americans of every description succumbed to the temptation of living beyond their means, of accepting more risk than they could really handle. Much as we might like to toss tomatoes at Wall Street, they are merely the high-end exemplars of a mindset that became endemic in our culture.
How did we come to this? On the political side of the equation, it happened because the modern Republican Party sold its soul. A quarter century ago, the fiscally conservative, tight-fisted GOP, a party that championed a balanced budget amendment, suddenly convinced itself that deficits no longer mattered.
The reasoning behind that change of heart was obvious. When the much-beloved Reagan tax cuts inevitably produced massive Reagan deficits, conservatives faced a choice. They could abandon the tax cuts that had brought them great political success and power, or they could abandon their opposition to deficits. They chose to embrace deficits.
But that in turn created a bigger problem. If deficits don’t matter, then the rationale for small government disappears. If deficits don’t matter, we can cut merrily cut taxes year after year while also doubling defense spending and creating expensive new social programs. If deficits don’t matter, it’s all carrots, no stick.
In a culture that seldom worried about tomorrow, personal debt built up. Corporate debt built up. The national debt soared, and we financed our lifestyles by sending IOUs to places such as China and Japan and Saudi Arabia, IOUs that our children and grandchildren will have to redeem.
So while the most egregious mistakes of the era can indeed be traced to Wall Street and Washington, the rest of us shouldn’t feign innocence. We all grabbed a share of the pie.
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