They understand that if Barack Obama were to cure world hunger tomorrow, they would blame him for overpopulation.

They understand that if Barack Obama were to somehow bring about world peace, they would blame him for destroying the defense industry.

Also Back in October, Grayson told Congress that the Republicans health care plan is to:

A) not get sick, b) if you do get sick, c) die quickly.

Blogger and talking head Matt Taibi, in a humorous story, writes that Grayson once went “Werewolf” on him.

And back in September, Grayson successfully turned a legislative bill that was essentially (and unconstitutionally) intended for one one specific target, onto a much bigger, more successful range of targets –Defense Contractors who have committed any type of government fraud. (Little more seemed to be heard about the bill after that.)

Thus when a particularly well known person said the following of Grayson in Florida on Friday:

What can you say about Alan Grayson? Piper is with me tonight, so I won’t say anything about Alan Grayson that can’t be said around children.

Grayson, in turn, had a response. According to his campaign:

I look forward to an honest debate with [This person] on the issues, in the unlikely event that she ever learns anything about them.

So who is Grayson talking about? This person.

The person who said Rahm Emanuel should be fired for insensitively using the term “retarded” in a closed door policy session to describe a political strategy, but who then said it was okay when Rush Limbaugh (in defending Emanuel, and mocking Liberals) used it pejoratively as a noun, twice, publicly, to millions of listeners.

The person who once said she had foreign policy expertise because “Russia was close to Alaska” and she could see it from land in Alaska.

(Also See minute 1:14 here for one of the more incredible policy expertise claims ever made, and putting to rest fanciful delusions that Palin was “kidding” around.)

Grayson’s campaign email also noted how; “Palin knows all about politics in Central Florida, since from her porch she can see Winter Park” (in his Central Florida district),  also playing upon Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin.

Palin also infamously used written cliff notes on her hand last month. (What the notes on her “Alaskan Telemprompter” actually said.) Grayson also complimented Palin for having a large enough hand to fit Grayson’s full name on it.

***The End***

(Note, some may wonder why the “Big Brother” category tag was used for this post: Palin, despite constant chatter about freedom, is a chilling example of the type of rhetoric over reality — prompted by underlying and profound ignorances –that will take the U.S. — along with this guy, who of course constantly rails against Fascism while exhibiting nearly every one of its fundamental underlying traits — closer and closer to imperial, controlling government, where everyone is expected to be the same, and government acts “in our best interests” in secrecy. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart speaks of Abraham Lincoln getting “freedom boners” when the two of them finally, under the glare of the Statue of Liberty no less, get to meet.)

It’s easy to just scapegoat a group, and mix in a few wildly exaggerated and in most cases idiotic stereotypes that appeal to our deepest and most base emotions.  It’s the exact opposite of leadership. It’s cowardly, it’s insecure, it’s mean spirited. It’s ignorant.

At CPAC today, Tim Pawlenty went off an a really nasty rant about how liberals all sneer at conservatives for not having gone to Ivy League colleges and for not liking “brie and chablis.”

As this country moves further and further to the right, and– as we continue to have the opposite of our best and brightest, but the most gifted spinmeisters, seek to inform and lead our debate — misleading rhetoric continues to replace fact and understanding, America is beginning to slowly change. We are starting to enter the age of ignorance.

With all this information and misinformation abounding, in journals, magazines, books, universities, Internet sites galore, few can tell anymore what is spin and what is fact; with that which appeals to the lowest common denominator often rising to the top.  Like a shipwrecked crew in an ocean locked lifeboat, water all around yet dying from dehydration, our democracy — with information all around as misinformation continues to lead our national debates, is itself being threatened. From the inside.

For the record, Chablis is pretty lame. But we’re not liberals, so maybe we just don’t know — like 12 year school yard kid Pawlenty clearly does.  But this 12 year old prejudiced, ignorant, snob is a Governor of a state.

Maybe some Liberals can come off as a little elitist at times. Some, not understanding conservatives, sometimes do show disdain. It’s not helpful, and the disdain, with far more effective framing and messaging, is often shown right back.

But it’s idiotic, to bring brie and chablis into it. It’s not a metaphor. It’s a friggin’ cheese, and a crappy wine.  It’s the fallback for the weak, the lazy, the unthinking mind.  Exactly what Pawlenty seems to be insecure about being accused of, or, more likely, is trying to capitalize on, exploit, appeal to, foment,  in others.

Incidentally, Pawlenty graduated from one of the best law schools in the country.  He (theoretically) should know better. As should those putting up with this kind of lame reverse elitist snobbish contempt from the anti Chablis one time junior varsity Hockey Player.

One who, by the way, is considering a presidential run in 2008. No, not president of the local crass and lame divide and conquer stereotyping club; president of the United States.

A potential presidential candidate who — in addition to railing against any personal preferences for the easy targets of brie and chablis, picked an odd time to use a violence against Government metaphor:

Conservatives could learn a lot from Tiger Woods’ wife Elin, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said at the Conservative Political Action Conference today.

“She said, I’ve had enough,” Pawlenty said. “We should take a page out of her playbook and take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government.”

One day after one Andrew Joseph Stack, using an airplane as a missile, did just that.

Pawlenty, in this same CPAC speech, also rails against Liberals trying to take away freedoms, and how conservatives will “fight back.”

It’s not clear which freedoms he is talking about, since neither group has a full monopoly on taking away freedoms, but it seems conservatives have the clear if not lopsided edge here.

Yet clearly Pawlenty is not talking about the most basic freedoms of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, because once we “suspect you” of something, you have no more rights. Which defeats the ENTIRE purpose of having rights, in the first place. But that’s okay, just rail about protecting freedoms and at the same time rail against those laws and constitutional provisions that actually protect them, while blaming, of course, “Liberals” for everything once again. Classic rhetoric. The new fuel for America.

She’s a bit off on the numbers, too.

As noted here, by actual blogger Tbogg (not to be confused with “Tbow” who is Donkey Joel – Here might be the most ignorant and presumptuous media post ever — Achenbach’s “man“):

Megan McArdle – neither economist nor historian:

But the last two recessions were characterized by lingering unemployment–the infamous “jobless recovery” under Clinton and Bush.

Reality:

When Clinton was in the White House, the economy generated 17.6 million jobs during the corresponding period — from January 1993 to December 1998.

Bites:

The Unemployment Rate Was 4.2 Percent in 1999 — the Lowest Since 1969. The unemployment rate was 4.1 percent in December bringing the average unemployment rate for 1999 to 4.2 percent — the lowest since 1969. The unemployment rate has fallen for seven years in a row. It has remained below 5 percent for 30 months in a row. For women the unemployment rate was 4.1 percent — the lowest since 1953.

Obviously unemployment is not understood by those who should be unemployed.

A professor weights in on McArdle, on another occasion:

But the punchline for this story is that Megan McArdle in fact knows very little — not nothing, but not much either.

Which brings me back to my headline.  I don’t read McArdle much because I know she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and the glibness of her ignorance and the infantile quality of her ideology … piss me off.

Well, at least, for a person who claims to be an economics expert, McArdle knows her unemployment facts.

Talking head and blogger Sarah Palin spoke out on Fox News saying that Alito’s “Wilson moment” was OK, and that Justice Alito was just “calling him out.” She based her careful judgment on her longstanding and intimate knowledge of Supreme Court protocol. Oh, wait.

In other deep layer of Palin analysis, she went on to discuss health care “mandation.” What’s “mandation” you ask? According to Dictionary.com it means “No dictionary results.” Strange…

And finally, she described the entire state of the union from President Obama as being like “a lecture.” And we all know how she feels about lectures. Maybe that’s why she went through five different colleges.

Palin was also basing her support of Justice Alito’s “calling out” the President on the history of the law and the Supreme Court,  upon her intimate knowledge of Supreme Court cases.  Where it appeared she couldn’t name a single Supreme Court case.

Note, however, that after the aforelinked debacle, Palin crammed for a crash course, and got to pimp some misleading political spin at the same time, all while Fox’s  Carl Cameron did his magician like “Fair and Balanced” act, craftily veiling his two minute TV rehabilitation commercial for her even while,  rather emphatically, getting in Palin (and Fox’s) anti mainstream media message at the end.

The mainstream media is poor, as Cameron, and Palin, subtly, and not so subtly, imply.  But not because it is unfair to Palin;  but because of quite the opposite.  As an example, the ideologically fervent, and almost always incorrect, misleading, or simply rhetoric stuffed Palin is treated with kid gloves relative to the facts.  And the media has done a better job covering Palin than many other things, in fact, and it still has not covered Palin correctly.

Notice that at the same time Cameron also renovated this snafu on Palin’s part as well — where Palin apparently could not name a single source of news she routinely read. Now, according to her and her fair and balanced mouthpiece Cameron, easily explained by how ”annoyed” she was at that same media, even though in the video itself (just linked to), Palin expresses her “great appreciation for” that very same media.

If Palin was thus acting sycophantic here by telling the world her “great appreciation for the same media” she would later tell her rehabilitator Cameron that she was so annoyed at she would not answer critical questions, wouldn’t it have made far more sense to have simply name some sources (if she really dutifully reads them) and some Supreme Court cases (if she really knew any) rather than come off as looking extremely uninformed when that was already a chief concern to begin with? And then make her point about media annoyance?

You betcha.  Palin didn’t because she froze. And she froze because, as evidenced by her constant misleading rhetoric, it is unlikely that she really had read very much of substance, or knew much about the Supreme Court or its decisions at all.

But that’s nothing that spinmeisters Fox and Palin (and now back, naturally on the “Fair and Balanced” station, together again), couldn’t cobble back together, as the link of  Cameron and Palin above, aptly illustrates.  (Just not to active hard core Democrats perhaps, who sometimes don’t seem to want to grasp that just because they think something is purely empty, doesn’t mean everyone else is not being somewhat influenced by it on some level, or that being the most watched cable “news” source is not just coincidental with the movement of this country that past ten plus years. But then it’s not clear that Democrats see the movement of this country the past ten years, either. )

As noted in the Anchorage Daily News piece just linked to, also consider Palin’s suggestion from her recent book  that the media is “worthless as a source of factual information anymore.”

This is sometimes true. But mainly because they will publish wildly misleading and incredibly ill informed pieces like this one by Palin herself, and play to the same propaganda as a legitimate “side’ to a ‘factual debate” that Palin repeatedly, and erroneously, promotes herself.

The irony is unbounded.

]]> http://donkasauruspost.com/2010/01/28/worth-repeating-palins-expertise/feed/ 2 http://donkasauruspost.com/2010/01/18/what-democrats-repeatedly-miss/ http://donkasauruspost.com/2010/01/18/what-democrats-repeatedly-miss/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:04:04 +0000 admin http://donkasauruspost.com/?p=401 Paul Krugman is a Democrat, and a Liberal.  However questionable, the Atlantic ranks him as the most influential commentator in America. (Then again, it ranks Rush Limbaugh as number 2, and George “I know nothing about science” Will as number 3.)

Whatever one thinks of his politics (or his recent “debate” with Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald) Krugman has numerous accolades, and is an accomplished economist.  He has even won a Nobel prize. Often his opionions are characterized as “Liberal,” when what that really means is that he sensibly takes issue with the unofficial position of the Fox advocacy channel that masquerades under the clever guise of “Fox News.”

Whether Krugman is spot on much of the time, or often spouting knee jerk partisan positions, when it comes to Democrats and importance of framing and understanding what the national debate is imparting, he may follow the same mold as other Democrats. That is, the application of what seem to be intellectual, rationale (sometimes subjective, sometimes not) standards to the analysis of why things are the way that they are in American politics.

This is a huge, and typical, Donkey Party mistake. Krugman makes it here, yesterday:

Lately many people have been second-guessing the Obama administration’s political strategy….

The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments.

This is not the place to go into the conditions that the Obama Administration inherited when it took office, or the mistakes it has made, or the things that it has done, good and bad.  That has been debated elsewhere.

The Obama Administration’s troubles, politically, are a result of the fact that once again, the Right has controlled the debate, and done far more to define the Obama Administration, than Democrats have.

The analysis essentially starts, and stops, there.  Yet Democrats seem to live in a different world, and hold Obama to some standard of their own disappointment, rather than how Obama is being characterized to, and perceived by, the country.

The latter defines the administration. The former only defines it to a core of Democrats.  The former is not the country. Democrats often confuse it, for the country.

Yes, part of what Krugman suggests might be correct. The Obama administration has made political misjudgments. But to the extent relevant here, all of those  go to how the Obama Administration has framed and controlled (or failed to control) the debate, and thus, ultimately, the same issue. Here is a stunning example, rendered even more stunning by the response to it, from what is a mostly (but not all) Liberal site.

Full Disclosure:  We are not fans of Michael Moore.  Some on the left may likely get angry with that statement, and dismiss what we are trying to do (somewhat comically, since there are millions of blogs out here and few see this one).

But what is important to point out — and even more important to understand (aside from the fact that people can have different perspectives over the same set of facts) is that the fact that a website like this that actually supports a number of positions that the left happens to support, carries far more credibility, because it can not be simply dismissed by or attributed to irrelevant but typically common assertions of “well, that’s just the left talking,” and a presumption of bias and spin immediately read right in. Because, here, it is not, and there is none. Rather, we are looking at the issue objectively, and dispassionately, trying to share facts as reasonably as possible, and when our perspective intermingles (which is not often the case), we try to give the reason why, when it is relevant.

That is what gets people to listen, and to bridge divides. Not necessarily in changing positions or even “compromising” things that don’t need to be or even should not be compromised on, but in helping open up actual debate, improving the level of information,and making disinformation into a much bigger issue that it currently is.

Now back to that disinformation, and the intense media bias that continues to play into the framing of the right. Part of the reason the media does this is because — well, for reasons discussed in other posts, and on more serious, lengthy sites, this is what the media does. And part of the reason why is because Democrats allow them to do it, Democrats do not use the often misleading framing of the far right to define the far right, Democrats allow the far right to define Democrats, and Democrats often play into the framing of the far right. This makes it easier — no offense media — for the media to do the lousy job that they do. (Many reporters have privately acknowledged that the wish Democrats would sometimes just freakin’ make an effective case, so they could cover it without immediately being accused by the far right of bias simply by virtue of covering the facts — but this seems to be a notion that, when shared, many active Democrats online scoff at. Which is too bad.)

Briefly, with the Michael Moore example:  Here is the news headline, on its user account home page, that greeted millions of Americans today (emphasis added):

Michael Moore Defends Beliefs. Filmmaker reacts to suggestions he leave the country:  Why he won’t go

This is rather incredible in its presentation.  Moore had to “defend” rather than simply “express” his beliefs?  Then there is the absurd suggestion that Michael Moore leave the country.  Why is AOL even parroting this?   For quick headline appeal, most likely. But the effect is the same.

“Jim” is famous.  Jim doesn’t think the way we are doing things is the best way, so Jim complains about what he thinks is not the best way.  He might spin his facts, as many do, and exaggerate a bit, but he doesn’t even wildly mislead, as some very promiment commentators in America do. And we say “Jim should just leave the country.”  Because our country is not founded upon the notion of the right to disagree, but instead, the idea that those whose perspectives we don’t like (not those who continually, and repeatedly, wildly mislead — and even they have a right to be here) should just leave.

Ha ha. We were just kidding. Of course our country is founded upon the right to disagree — and in fact the necessity for it. But maybe a few other people take up our call for Jim to leave the country.  “Jim, just get the hell out.” It has a nice, real emotionally base, and very easily appealing (and pithy!) ring to it. It’s even fun to say.

It is absurd, of course.  But AOL in its news feed, to millions, decides to run a headline;  ”Jim responds to suggestions that he leave the country.” The idea, even if Jim’s response is wonderful, is now legitimized.

But AOL,here, does something much worse. AOL now actually gives credence not just to the idea that the suggestion is at least reasonable, but to the idea that Jim “should get the hell out” itself, by telling its readers and account holders “Why Jim Won’t Go” is reasonable.

This is sensationalism at its worse.  We may dislike Moore, but at the moment we dislike AOL “more.”  Maybe AOL should “get the hell out!”

Heck, that is appealing!!  And it is fine, we are not castigating those who make this very misguided (and darest we say, perhaps on some absrtract level, “unAmerican”? suggestion), BUT WE ARE CASTIGATING AOL FOR BLATANTLY LEGITIMIZING IT, AND PLAYING RIGHT INTO IT.

It’s shameless. It’s clueless. And it is extremely biased.  And it’s being manipulated by the far right.  But as we noted above, Democrats are not helping, either.