Excellent post.

That was a thorough take down. Concise, direct, to the point.

Thanks . . .

Isn't it interesting that the right so consistently goes after groups that try to actually make life better for the poor? That's what ACORN is all about. But, apparently, we just can't have that sort of thing happen in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

They also have a thing with environmentalists, which is even more bizarre. We ALL live here, for goddess sake!! Sheeesh.

That's the epitome of shooting oneself in the foot -- fighting to stop environmentalists who try to reduce or eliminate pollution.

Weird that the right thinks it should DEFEND pollution. It's got to be one of the most bizarre "constituencies" in all of American politics.

Sarah Palin is an empty chair.

She is not qualified to be a vice-principal in a middle school.

She will break up the good-ol'-boy networks as she did in Alaska.

They have no ethics but she does.

Then Baracky can go play with ACORN in Chicago (if it hasn't been dismantled.)

Adding to Steve Fox's very thorough takedown:

ACORN's employees committed fraud against ACORN. No one else. And ACORN turned them in to the authorities. Those few employees tried to get ACORN to pay them for non-existent work. They try to rip off ACORN.

Now, think this through. If you register Mickey Mouse, it can't become "voter fraud" because Mickey Mouse will never show up to vote. If one of those ACORN employees signs up Kobe Bryant in, say, Wisconsin, Kobe aint voting in Wisconsin. No one shows up to the voting booth. No voter fraud. If they sign up Abe Lincoln, honest Abe isn't gonna show up to vote. No voter fraud occurs.

Now, voter SUPPRESSION is a different story. It's a tried and true tactic of the GOP. They ESPECIALLY like to keep blacks from voting, knowing that they typically get only 5% or so from that segment of our population. They tried many tactics across the country, like telling them that the vote has been postponed to the following day. The GOP has been caught red-handed doing all sorts of corrupt and despicable things in order to suppress the vote.

Voter fraud, OTOH, is extremely rare. For obvious reasons. It just about never, ever happens.

You need to find another faux outrage to hang your tin-foil hat on.

Speaking off-the-cuff and from the heart as she always does.

Unlike Baracky who sleeps with his teleprompter.

What do you think of Hannity doing this?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/08/sean-hannity-caught-selec_n_228060.html

;>)

Palin and Hannity. An excellent pair. Both hopelessly uninformed, ill-informed, malformed true believers, without a clue, without any conception of reality, evidence, or facts.

Two things:

For the love all all good things, please get off the telepromter blather. All politicians use them and a wide-angle camera shot of Palin giving her guittin' speech showed that she was using one that day too. Believe it or not, that garbled mess was on a teleprompter.

Secondly, since you brought up the Hannity interview. Let's review what Palin said that day. Hannity asked about the State budget in light of the dropping oil prices. Palin's response?

She would be making huge cuts (billions) from the budget, but it was a good thing. She said, "If the government has money---they just spend it, so cutting the budget by HUGE amounts would be good for the state and good for the families of Alaska?

I kid you not, people, that's what she said.

Then, a few weeks later she quits and claims she is quitting because the State has spend 2 million that could be spent on schools, troopers, fish research, roads, etc.

Interesting. Considering that she was almost giddy about having to slash the budget which would impact schools, troopers, fish research, roads..and families. These cuts would be much greater than anything the State spent on ethics investigations. But,in Palin's view, the budget cuts would be a good thing for the State. HUH?

She made not have used a teleprompter that day, but you think that she was making any sense?

Thanks for this piece.

Doesn't it feel good to say that the Empress has no clothes.

If you have all convinced yourselves that SP is cooked and of no consequence - her political career over - then move on to some other profound subject such as how mankind will change the temperature of the planet.

Good post.

As others have mentioned, her complaint is bogus anyway. Virtually no extra money was spent on her defense by the government. Those were government employees who would have been paid regardless. They get paid whether they're defending her from scandal or not. As in, they're on salary.

As for those cuts. It's basically social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. The John Galters of this world love that. They hate the very idea that government would bother to try to help people in need. It ticks them off. They'd much rather every one be free to be rapacious, bigoted polluters, if that's what they want. That's "liberty" to them. No checks on bad behavior that hurts all of us. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. The middle loses ground, too.

If a person isn't rich, and they're a Palin fanboy, they're a fool. Cuz her policy ideas would hurt everyone BUT the rich.

Old Joe, as long as Sarah Palin has true believers, she'll never be out of the public eye, even if she gets trounced in the 2012 primaries.

She got a taste of the national big time. Look how fast she dumped Alaska.

From the Times of London, by Andrew Sullivan:

Writing about Sarah Palin always presents a quandary. Does one operate under the usual assumption that this is a rational figure, a serious politician, a rising Republican star . . . or do you acknowledge the copious evidence that she cannot tell the truth, has delusions of grandeur, has no policy record to speak of and quit her job as Alaska governor halfway through her first term because she is, in her own explanation, “not a quitter”? I think that you have to proceed under the assumption that this is a joke of a candidate and a symptom of a political party in the middle of a mental breakdown.

Mind you, I love the idea of Sarah Palin: a brassy, no-nonsense enemy of bloated government and corruption. That was probably John McCain’s rough idea of who she was in the five minutes his staff vetted her, and on the one occasion he’d met her, before offering her a chance to be leader of the free world. The idea of Sarah Palin, though, is sadly not the reality of Sarah Palin.

The reality of Sarah Palin is that politics is a means to her higher goal: celebrity. Every action she takes is designed to make sense . . . if you believe that government is really a version of a reality show. The remote, David Lynch-style location, the family often in trouble with the law, the pregnant teenage daughter and her impossibly handsome redneck boyfriend, the boyfriend’s angry sister, an ornery Alaskan trooper, a few moose and mysterious pregnancies . . . and, well, the mini-series never ends. The best guess I’ve heard of the real reason for her abrupt departure is: “I’m a celebrity . . . get me out of here!”

...

[T]rying to makes sense of Sarah Palin is a fool’s errand. I spent a lot of time last year trying to figure out how her bizarre pregnancy story could make any sense at all — it doesn’t — and came up with nothing but a suspicion that large parts of it were made up. If you present the facts to Palin spokespeople, they seem offended and regard you as some liberal hater. But the facts reveal she lies all the time about almost everything and so is probably improvising about her reasons for resigning.

I’ve now compiled 32 incontrovertibly untrue statements of fact that she has uttered in the public record and never retracted. They are not the usual political lies — spinning or shading the truth; they are demonstrably, empirically untrue in the public record. Some are trivial: Palin said on television that she asked her daughters to vote on whether she should accept the vice-presidency offer; but that story contradicts details given by Palin herself, who said she accepted the offer on the spot.

Others are more serious: Palin lied when she said the dismissal of Walt Monegan, her public safety commissioner, had nothing to do with his refusal to fire Mike Wooten (her former brother-in-law, who was at war with her family) from his job as a state trooper; in fact, the Branchflower report concluded she repeatedly abused her power when dealing with both men.

Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed to have said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” to the famous “bridge to nowhere”, an expensive, pork-barrel government project; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal project when running for governor. I could go on. But the truth is, she’s a reality-show star vaulted to national prominence by a Republican party now so devoid of talent and desperate for some kind of support that it gambled on the political equivalent of Susan Boyle. One who couldn’t even sing.

My own bet is that there is another scandal out there that would have forced her resignation if she hadn’t pre-empted it. Yet as plausible is the simple notion uttered by the only person in the melodrama who seems halfway sane: Levi Johnston, the teenage father of Palin’s grandson: “I think the big deal was the book. That was millions of dollars.” With a multi-million-dollar book deal, Palin can now become the darling of the right-wing media in America without the tedious duties of actually, you know, governing something. If the book contains scandals we have not yet learnt about, it could be explosively big in the mainstream; if it’s a hagiography, it could sell well with an adoring religious base.

And this helps explain the broader problem with American conservatism right now. It is less a movement than an industry. From Fox News to talk radio to conservative publishing houses, it has created an alternate and lucrative media reality that is worth a fortune to those able to exploit it. Alas, these alternative media thrive on paranoia, hatred of liberal elites and growing extremist rhetoric made worse by a hermetically sealed echo chamber of true believers. Anyone criticised by the left or even by the establishment right is a martyr in this world. In America, martyrdom sells. And Palin is a product worth lots of money.

She wants some of it; and she has no actual interest in governing America (even though she’d love the title of president). She referred to giving up her “title” as governor, not her “office”. In this, she is the ultimate Republican of this degenerate moment: all culture war, no policy; all identity politics, no engagement with practical answers to difficult public problems; and all hysterical opposition to Barack Obama, no actual alternatives offered.

Since even epic scandals heighten celebrity rather than diminish it, Palin’s future is secure. Her party’s? Getting bleaker by the day.

www.andrewsullivan.com