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Patrick, Jim, and Fragano say I’m doing it wrong, and that the long comment I posted in the thread following Jim Macdonald’s entry Obeying the Law Is for Wimps should have been a separate front-page post.
I can go along with that, though I’ll keep my original format. The first part of my essay, about John McCain’s melanoma, began as a response to Kelly McCullough (#24). The second half, about Sarah Palin’s personality disorder, was a response to Paula Helm Murray (#2). Jim Macdonald’s entry, the background to all this, is about a story on the McClatchy News website—Palin fires back in ‘troopergate,’ calls official insubordinate—and the descriptive chronology of Troopergate posted in the story’s comment thread by a reader who goes by “DobermanTracker.”
Just read. It’ll all come clear.
Kelly McCullough (#24): “I’ve got a third option. McCain and his vetting team are so incompetent he didn’t know (or understand) she was under serious investigation.Kelly, I’ll take “Arrogance and Bad Vetting” for $600. Their vetting process seems to have only taken a few days, and to have been conducted from Washington and on Google. The centerpiece of it was a long questionnaire they went over with Palin in person.
I take their belief that Palin would self-report any problems as evidence that they didn’t know the woman. The same goes for expecting her to know what happened to Thomas Eagleton when he failed to report a lurking problem.
There are multiple reports from people in Alaska (big state, small community), and particularly people in the Alaskan government, who said they’d never been asked anything, and that they didn’t know anyone else who’d been asked either. In addition, one of the employees at the Wasilla newspaper (which is only partly available online) let drop that prior to Palin being named the Republican candidate for Vice President, no one had looked at the newspaper’s hardcopy archives in months
If you want to set yourself up for unpleasant surprises, that’s one way to do it.
For a different and grimmer take on McCain’s reasons for selecting Palin, check out Maggie Jochild’s John McCain: Dead Man Walking? at Group News Blog. She makes a good case for McCain having terminal cancer, an Après moi, le déluge attitude, and a deal with the Council for National Policy: the fundies give him their support, and he in turn accepts their hand-picked choice of his successor. A couple of quotes:
Last week, when I got the letter from Robert Greenwald talking about John McCain’s refusal to release his medical records to fair scrutiny, the fact that there are 1,000 pages of them (I create medical records for a living, 1,000 pages is EXTREME), and the news that he has had malignant melanoma, deep primaries with removal of lymph nodes, my immediate thought was “Then he’s dying.” If he were to be elected, he’d have an almost 2 out of 3 chance of having a recurrence if he doesn’t have one already. This is not the kind of cancer you count on escaping from. This is not Stage II, as it has been reported: Stage II by definition does not have lymph node involvement. By definition, it must be either Stage III or Stage IV.At the beginning of this next section, Jochild is quoting an article by Kathy Geier:
I posted a comment in their thread (as is only polite):“For years, releasing a candidate’s complete medical records has been standard practice for major party presidential candidates. The way the McCain has dealt with the medical records issue is highly unusual, to say the least. …[I]f the medical records really were unproblematic, they wouldn’t hesitate to release the whole enchilada to any reporter who asked, with no conditions and no strings attached.”If he is in fact a Dead Man Walking, then the choice of Sarah Palin as Vice President also becomes more than a Hail Mary pass intended to destroy any bounce from the wildly successful Democratic Convention. It becomes reckless in the extreme: Choosing an heir apparent who lies, engages in petty revenge, wants to know how to ban books, faithfully attends a church which believes dinosaurs were around 4000 years ago and Jews are punished by God for not believing in Jesus, has less foreign policy experience than a Delta flight attendant, doesn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is, and has less than two years experience governing a state with a population less than that of Wichita, Kansas or Raleigh, North Carolina.We know that the secret cabal, the Council for National Policy, who hopes to replace American democracy with religious rule (THEIR religion, not yours), are the people who investigated Sarah Palin and “chose” her for McCain as his VP. Since he accepted their decision, fundamentalist organizations have thrown themselves behind his campaign in a way they had not before. It raises the question of a deal: What would a dying man have to offer power brokers in order to have their backing for the U.S. Presidency?
…[I]f McCain were as chock-full of pride, integrity, and truth as he pretends to be, he would never have spoken to Bush again after the South Carolina primaries in 2000. What Bush did there was utterly dishonorable. Instead, McCain sulked for a while, then did a 180 and became the good little toe-the-line Bush supporter he never was before the 2000 race. It’s an easy guess that Bush promised to back him for the 2008 race. At this very moment, McCain’s organization is full of Bush’s old people.There’s always that temptation to refer to them as Bushpeople, but it would be unfair to the real ones.
(If I were really speculating, I’d say the reason the Republicans have had Joe Lieberman on a string all these years was because he was promised the Vice-Presidency under McCain.)I won’t claim I conveyed any great insights, beyond “McCain has turned into something you’d fish out of Dubya’s private office wastebasket.”Eight years of going down on his knees for Bush, Cheney, and their cronies must have irked the hell out of McCain. Whatever the truth of the matter, he’d put a lot of work into cultivating the appearance of integrity. Bush spent his reputation as recklessly as he spent Tony Blair’s, Colin Powell’s, and all the others. I can imagine McCain laboring to suppress his gag reflex while silently repeating his mantra to himself: “Shut up, go along with it, and you’ll get to be president.”
Then, after all those years of lip service, he discovered he wasn’t going to live long enough to collect his payoff. Such irony! Did he accept the news with resignation? Of course not. Are you kidding? McCain’s a senator, he’s the son and grandson of admirals, and he’s married to Arizona’s answer to Meadow Soprano. He never takes a fall if he can make someone else take it for him. (In this case, I think it was Joe Lieberman.)
So there it is: McCain thinks he’s got the presidency coming to him, and he’s damned well going to see that he gets it—no matter how much ruination it brings on the country he claims to love.
Paula Helm Murray (2): “Sounds like if they get elected, it will just be the same old same old. She sounds either dumber or more blindly self-centered than the Shrub. Or maybe both.My instant reaction to the Troopergate chronology was that we’re looking at a clinical personality disorder, located somewhere in the immediate vicinity of narcissism. If I’m right, Palin is basically out of control, and unlikely to improve.
Have you ever dealt with a full-blown narcissist? “Self-centered” is too mild a description. They’ve got a weirdly information-deprived worldview; they can’t process criticism, failure, or noncompliance; and they have a constant need for external validation of their grandiose self-images. It can lead them to do amazingly stupid things.
What I immediately noticed was that Palin hasn’t bothered to keep track of the stories she tells. It’s not that she can’t; she’s not that stupid. Rather, it hasn’t occurred to her to do so. She isn’t thinking about other people’s reactions. That isn’t bad judgement, or an absence of judgement. It’s a pathological lack of interest in the subject.
Here are my comments on the Troopergate chronology that “DobermanTracker” posted at McClatchy:
* First she would not tell us (Anchorage, Alaska) why she fired MoneganHe was in a high-profile position; he’d already had a middlin’-distinguished career; Palin appointed him in the first place; when she fired him, she offered him another state job; and there just doesn’t seem to be much evidence of general dissatisfaction with his work, or of preexisting disagreements between Palin and Monegan that didn’t involve Wooten. It was bizarre of Palin to not realize she’d be expected to explain that, or that there might be repercussions. I’d expect a candidate for county dogcatcher to know better than that.
* Then, finally, she said she wanted to take the department in a new direction.“Taking the department in a new direction” is not the same thing as “firing for cause.” It’s one of four unrelated issues Palin has cited as her reason for firing Monagan. She dropped the second one—that he was not adequately filling state trooper vacancies—after Monegan pointed out that the police academy was about to graduate its largest class ever. The third, that he wasn’t doing enough to fight alcohol abuse problems, is problematical in light of the fact that the state job she offered him at the time of his firing was Executive Director of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. The fourth, that he “did not turn out to be a team player on budgeting issues,” could mean anything. (Subsequent, equally meaningless accusations—viz., “egregious insubordination,” “obstructionist conduct”—are irrelevant to this discussion, since they were cooked up by the legal attack dogs the McCain organization sicced on the case.)
* Took forever (week at least) to get her to state what that direction was.
Oh, and Palin also said, early and often, that it had nothing to do with repeatedly pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law, which she never did, and didn’t know about either.
Now, the thing about (1.) taking the department in a new direction, (2.) attracting more recruits, (3.) focusing more on alcohol abuse, and (4.) being a team player on budget issues, is that whether or not Monegan mishandled them (evidence: still not in evidence), they shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise to him when he first heard about them; i.e., after he was fired.
Those are all policy and structure issues. Any one of them would have required Palin to do a fair amount of talking and memo-exchanging with Monagan before she could even tell they were a problem, much less a problem on whose solution she and Monegan were irreconcilably opposed.
When you’ve got a guy who by all-but-one accounts was doing a good job, only you want him to take things in a different direction, the first thing you do is talk to him about taking it in a different direction. Firing him comes a lot later, after flurries of memos plus maybe a few F2F tiffs, tizzies, and scenes. By the time it finally happens, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
Next point: what are the odds of anyone having four different large-scale administrative problems so serious that every one of them warrants firing him on zero notice, yet none of the problems are interrelated? It’s improbable, is what it is. Also, what are the odds that someone could be screwing up his job like that without pissing off an underling so badly that they’d be willing to talk about it to a friendly and understanding reporter? Should be news stories. Aren’t.
And one more bit about that “taking it in a new direction” thing. Palin replaced Monegan with Chuck Kopp, former police chief and acting city manager of Kenai. Whoops! Turns out Kopp had been suspended, investigated, and given a letter of reprimand by the City of Kenai for sexually harassing an underling. Kopp departed, clutching his $10,000 severance package. (Monegan got no severance.) Palin then appointed Joseph Masters, a former security director for a private petrochemical firm. Asked in an interview whether Gov. Palin had discussed her vision of the department with him before hiring him, Masters said “Gov. Palin didn’t give me any guidance or direction or mandates for the department.” It appears that Palin’s “new direction” is as unfindable as evidence of Monegan’s misdeeds.
Oh, who are we kidding? She didn’t fire him for cause. She ran out of patience one day with his continuing refusal to proceed illegally against her ex-brother-in-law, fired him, and only afterward realized that people would notice and have opinions about it. Even then, she didn’t realize that giving four or five different excuses would present a problem.
Every time I try to imagine Sarah Palin at work, what comes out of her mouth is Glory’s dialogue from Season Five of Buffy.
* Finally she said Monegan was not doing a good job of working on bootlegging in the villages and in recruiting new troopers—she forgot that 3 weeks prior to this announcement she had stated on TV news that he was doing a great job in both of these departments.“I did it in self-defense—and besides, I didn’t push him, he jumped. Furthermore, I can prove I was in another city when it happened.”
* She even stated she had offered him a job on the Alcohol Board (while firing him as commissioner) simply because he was doing such a good job in this area.
* Then, couple of days ago, she stated, he was not fired at all, that he quit.
If you stack up too many stories, you eventually reach a point where they all fall over.
* Now, she is stating he was fired and it was because of “egregious insubordination.”That’s one of the accusations cooked up by McCain’s people. If you don’t buttress it with details, all it means is “He didn’t do something I wanted.”
* She is asking the Personnel Board - 3 people appointed by Palin - to dismiss the ethics complaint which she filed against herself in order to get it before the Personnel Board - because some out-of-context e-mails sent to Monegan prior to his having been (fired/quit) “exonerate the Governor totally and completely, once and for all.”The story gets complicated. I highly recommend the Wikipedia entry, Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal: a first-rate piece of work that’s like a vision of what Wikipedia could be in a better world than this.
(Digression: an interesting subplot: If you read the whole entry, pay attention to how many of the charges and complaints made against Mike Wooten, the ex-brother-in-law, turned out to not amount to much; how few of them are based on testimony from people who aren’t close to Sarah Palin; and how much time passes between Wooten’s supposedly scary and threatening words and deeds, and the dates on which Sarah Palin and her sister Molly get around to mentioning them to anyone else. I’m not saying Mike Wooten is a suffering saint; I’m saying the case against him shrinks considerably when you examine it. Three under-reported facts: (1.) Part of the basis for Mike Wooten being made an Alaska State Trooper in 2000 was the fulsome character reference provided him by Sarah Palin. (2.) The Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) granted Molly McCann (Palin’s sister) at the time she filed for divorce was later quashed because McCann’s counsel was unable to produce any evidence of acts of physical or implied violence. In fact, McCann told police at the time of filing that Wooten had never physically abused her. Sarah Palin has since lied about the episode, saying the DVPO was lifted after Wooten’s supervisors intervened. Both Palin and the McCain campaign have subsequently cited the DVPO as evidence that Wooten was violent towards Molly McCann. (3.) At the McCann/Wooten divorce trial,
a representative for the Alaska State Trooper’s union testified that the union viewed the dozen complaints filed by McCann and her family against Wooten as “not job-related” and “harassment”. Judge Suddock repeatedly warned McCann and her family to stop “disparaging” Wooten’s reputation or risk the judge granting Wooten custody of the children. At a court hearing in October 2005, Judge Suddock said “disparaging will not be tolerated - it is a form of child abuse … relatives cannot disparage either. If occurs [sic] the parent needs to set boundaries for their relatives.”)(Another interesting subplot: Keep an eye on Todd Palin. The guy isn’t a state employee, but he accesses confidential files, sits in on personnel meetings, and generally works Sarah Palin’s will. Just yesterday he announced that he was also going to ignore his subpoena. If you think Executive Privilege is a shaky theory, try Executive Privilege by Marriage.)
Back to the main thread: The only reason Troopergate isn’t a bigger mess is that McCain sent a legal team to Alaska in order to obstruct justice. Once they were up and running, Palin’s words and deeds got a lot less random, ditto candid. Still, the uncontaminated pre-legal-team sample of her behavior is enough to establish that her emotional reactions are way off normal.
I’m going to bring up a touchy subject: the early reports suggesting that Trigg Palin is the son of Bristol rather than Sarah Palin. That was a nasty episode. Whose fault is that? Sarah Palin’s, first to last. She didn’t give birth to Trigg all alone in a cave. There have to have been multiple witnesses to the labor and birth. None of them could step forward without violating patient privacy. All Sarah Palin had to do was give a couple of them permission to say they’d been there, and that she was the mother.
But she didn’t do that. Why not? IMO, because it made her look like an injured party (she obviously enjoyed that, and got loads of mileage out of it), and drew attention away from the rest of her problems. The other consequence of leaving the story in play was that seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin got dragged through a cubic mile of mud, then paraded in front of the RNC on primetime television as a Moral Example. It’s fatuous to claim it was Bristol’s choice. Even grown men who have the law on their side would think twice before crossing Glorificus Palin; and Bristol is her resourceless minor child.
* She filed this complaint against herself because she felt the legislative committee investigation (10 Republicans and 4Democrates) is politically motivated even though the investigation was started before McCain selected her.Yup! All those people on her immediate staff, plus her husband, independently took it upon themselves to try to pressure the Alaska Public Safety Commissioner into firing Palin’s former brother-in-law from his job as a state trooper. That was amazingly brave of them, considering that one of the accusations McCain’s legal team has cooked up against Monegan is that he failed to get Palin’s explicit permission to petition the feds for additional funds for law enforcement.
* There is another ethics complaint filed against her for “demonizing” Trooper Wooten. A judge —in the child custody case—hard warned Palin’s family that their constant attacks on Wooten were becoming a form of child abuse.
* During all this, Monegan stated he was pressured to fire Wooten while Palin denied ANY pressure from ANYbody was put on him I.E SHE HAD NO KNOWLEDGE OF ANYONE CONTACTING MONEGAN ON THIS ISSUE
As of this August, months and months after Troopergate started, Palin finally got around to saying “Pressure could have been perceived to exist, although I have only now become aware of it.” So, which is it? Liar, or incapable of running her own staff, much less anything bigger?
* Palin repeats her campaign promises of “open and transparent” governing policy—-while Poll by TV station shows 87% no longer think she is open and transparent—so much for the supposed 80% approval rating!A person with a normal sense of potential consequences would be more prudent at every step of the way.
* Palin states, “Hold me responsible.” Regarding the legislative investigation, “Bring it on!”
* Legislature hires independent investigatorI believe this is the investigation the majority-Republican voted unanimously to undertake, long before Palin became McCain’s running mate.
* Palin suddenly has Atty General ( who, it ends up also pressured Monegan) start investigating and immediately finds phone call from her staffer Frank Bailey to Troopers - Bailey claims it was his idea and govenor had no input. He is put on PAID leave and remains that way today.And survives to this day with no worse blemish on his honor than being the recipient of Sarah Palin’s approval.
* Seems approximately 24 contacts were made with Monegan, from Todd Palin, Bailey, Attorney General, other staffers and PALIN HERSELF.Consider the implications. Sarah Palin had already fired Monegan on zero notice, denied him severance, publicly traduced him, and hired substandard replacements to fill his position. He had absolutely no reason to cover for her. On top of that, he’d had many years of administrative experience, and he’d been aware for some time before he was fired that Palin and her staff were pressuring him to take improper action in re Mike Wooten. Of course he’d be keeping a record of these contacts.
I take it as further strong evidence of a grandiose and unrealistic worldview, and an abnormal absence of basic human empathy, that Palin didn’t expect this story would come out.
* Despite having previously denied anyone contacted Monegan ( Todd did so in the Governor’s office !) Palin states these contacts did NOT constitute pressure on Monegan.If they weren’t intended as pressure, why were they made at all? If Palin and her staff are in the habit of taking completely ineffectual actions, she’s too incompetent a manager to hold important positions.
* Palin has done nothing but refuse to cooperate with legislative investigation and now states she will not submit to questioning, i.e. she is “totally and completely exonerated” by Monegan’s supposed “egregious insubordination.”Nope. First, even if she (or rather McCain’s legal team) has come up with decisive evidence in her favor, everyone still has to observe the normal legal procedures. Having the evidence may curtail those procedures, but the system still has to establish (to variable levels of precision) what happened, who did what to whom, and which rules (if any) were violated. (Note: this is a very rough description.) Palin’s evidence can then be examined in that context. She doesn’t get to declare that her evidence is so good that it doesn’t have to be looked at. That’s like saying you’ve been dealt such a killer Bridge hand that you should just be awarded maximum points without playing out the round.
Second, as I’ve already pointed out, “egregious insubordination” is close to meaningless if you don’t establish what that insubordination consisted of, the state of understanding between Palin and Monegan, and whether his actions were in fact egregious. This is not going to be established without going through normal or near-normal procedures, and Palin is going to have to be involved.
If she’s so incapable of taking responsibility for her actions that she can’t even answer for herself at a state-level inquiry, she’s not fit for high office. Leaders take responsibility. It’s part of the basic spec.
* While Palin makes public the selected e-mails to Monegan, she illegally witholds other e-mails (there is legal action to obtain them) which may show her direct and intentional participation in the pressuring of Monegan to fire Wooten.After all these successive instances of the story coming out, she still thinks the next part of the story won’t come out.
You can’t have it both ways. Either the woman is so stupid that Dan Quayle has to phone her long distance to tell her to come in out of the rain, or she’s wired wrong for assessing and predicting the consequences of her actions, and how others will react to them.
One more datum and I’ll quit for now. This is a parallel story, like Troopergate writ small:
Palin Fired Aide Who Dated Wife of Todd’s FriendLet’s get this straight. Todd Palin isn’t a government employee. He’s just the spouse. A buddy of his is being divorced by the buddy’s wife. A longtime aide of Sarah Palin’s was dating the soon-to-be-ex wife. I assume Todd Palin’s buddy felt bad about that. Result: the aide got fired.The Politico reported Friday that a longtime associate and former gubernatorial aide to Sarah Palin says he was asked to leave the governor’s office after the Palins discovered that he was dating the soon-to-be-ex wife of a close friend of Todd Palin.
This behavior wouldn’t pass muster in a junior high school student council.
John Bitney, who grew up in Wasilla with Palin, told the paper cum website:He’s been her political ally and full-time aide. He’s been her friend for thirty years. Now he’s out in the cold, and unemployed, because he dated the former main squeeze of a friend of Todd Palin? Yeah, I’ll bet he has no hard feelings.I wanted to stay with the governor and support the governor—we’re talking about someone who’s been a friend for 30 years—but I understood it, and I have no ax to grind over the whole thing.”
I think we should start keeping track of this kind of unnatural docility in people who’ve been screwed over by Sarah Palin. I think they’re afraid of her.
Today, the Wall Street Journal added more to the story, reporting that seven weeks after publicly praising Bitney, Palin fired him for what her spokeswoman now describes as “poor job performance.”That’s not just mean-spirited, vindictive, and mendacious; it’s stupid. Any organization is going to generate a few disgruntled ex-employees—it’s inevitable—but you have to try to keep their number as low as possible, because they can be dangerous to your operation. It’s especially important to avoid publicly humiliating them and/or rendering them unemployable, because it leaves them with nothing to lose, and a lot of time to think about it.
When you make a habit of arbitrarily praising your employees one month and firing them another, you also screw up relations with the rest of your staff, because there’s no way for them to feel secure. Some will leave. The others will spend more time and energy worrying about where they stand with you than they do on their actual jobs.
During that time, Palin had found out from Scott Richter, a friend of Todd Palin’s, that Richter’s wife, Debbie, was having a relationship with Bitney.And what does this have to do with the business of the State of Alaska? Absolutely nothing.
The Journal notes that Palin’s office seems to have had trouble keeping its story straight on the reason for Bitney’s departure.“He wanted to spend more time with his family” is the usual line.At the time, the governor’s office cited “personal reasons” for Mr. Bitney’s “amicable” departure, according to contemporaneous news reports.
Last week, Sharon Leighow, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, said “John Bitney was dismissed because of his poor job performance.” She declined to provide further details.Months into Troopergate, they still haven’t learned to keep their mouths shut.
If you go back to the original story on Politico, things get even weirder:
WASILLA, Alaska—While Sarah Palin’s supporters tout her personal warmth and openness, the newly minted Republican vice presidential nominee can be brusque to allies, advisers and employees who fall from her favor.When she first became Mayor of Wasilla, she fired so many employees that she had trouble getting information on how things had been run:Palin has unceremoniously ended relationships with an aide who was dating a family friend’s soon-to-be ex-wife, a campaign adviser whose mother-in-law fought Palin’s legislative agenda, a local political mentor who she felt represented the “old boys’ network,” a police chief who she said tried to intimidate her with “stern look[s]” and a state commissioner who refused to fire her sister’s ex-husband.
After upsetting the three-term incumbent Wasilla mayor in 1996, Palin quickly eliminated the position of one city department director and asked five others for a letter of resignation, a résumé and a letter explaining why they should be retained.One of Palin’s biggest and most expensive snafus as mayor was building a hockey rink on land to which the town didn’t fully hold title. If she thought she didn’t need the people who knew how things were run, she was wrong.Though five of the six department heads had supported her opponent, John Stein, Palin insisted the housecleaning was not politically motivated. Only two directors kept their jobs and one of them — city planner Duane Dvorak — left on his own eight months later.
“After all the excitement, I kind of felt like the ax could fall any time and just never felt like the situation warmed up,” said Dvorak, who had worked for Stein for more than two years and is now a planner for the far away Kodiak Island Borough.
Dvorak, who did not back either Stein or Palin, recounted being asked to brief the new mayor and her top aide on a wide variety of topics related to the city and state codes “that really didn’t have a whole lot to do with planning. But because they let everyone else go, they didn’t have anyone else to call on,” he said. “It’s one thing to take the city in a different direction and try to work with the staff that you have and maybe make a few key changes over time, but to just precipitously let people go and then restaff — it didn’t go over well.”
What kind of crazy do you have to be to start your term as mayor by firing almost everyone who could help you do your job?
See also Albert Bernstein’s The Smartest, Most Talented, All-Around Best Person in the Universe Test, a.k.a. The Narcissistic Vampire Checklist, and Joanna M. Ashmun’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder website.
I came on this post probably 5 minutes or so after Teresa posted it and it took me almost 20 minutes to get through the whole thing. And I couldn't stop reading it even when I realized how long it was taking.
Palin would have been a joke before Bush2, and is now being seriously considered for the presidency (if not because McCain dies, then because she'll run in 8 years). How did we get here?
Thanks for the great roundup of the issues. It will help me when I'm talking to McCain people who don't have much of a clue.
Palin certainly qualifies as a narcissist; she exhibits all the symptoms and tendencies.
I don't think there's any plot to put her in as VP because everyone knows McCain is dying, though. Rather, I just think McCain went with his "gut decision" and decided to vet her only after he announced she would be his VP. That, or he was so stupid as to think all the dirt in her past wouldn't be brought out to see.
Either way he displays incompetence to be the President.
Wait, whoa, what, who?
McCain is running for president, he may or may not have terminal cancer, and he isn't releasing his medical records?!
I know the West Wing was teevee and not real life, but can I possibly get a Toby Ziegler to go here?
Those people are going to be subpoenaed!
Or they damn well better be. Preferably before anyone votes. Doesn't matter if the running mate is Mahatma Gandhi (reincarnated, presumably); if he has a terminal illness he should not be running, and anyone in his party or his campaign who knew about it should be subject to investigation.
I tell you, if I hear the words "President McCain has been admitted to hospital with cancer" any time within the next four years, I had better hear soon afterwards of the dissolution of the Republican party and the arrest of its principal members. This goes beyond election-rigging.
I lived with a narcissist for five years, and, yes, the Palin stuff pretty much screams 'narcissist': a total inability to differentiate between personal and professional is a good danger sign. It's no surprise you're comparing her with Glory: Glory's behaviour was profoundly narcissistic too. (It's slightly harder to spot when the narcissist is smart, but only slightly.)
I think we should start keeping track of this kind of unnatural docility in people who’ve been screwed over by Sarah Palin. I think they’re afraid of her.
The unnatural docility of her screwees reminds me forcibly of Harry Whittington apologizing for being in Dick Cheney's line of fire.
In May, some guys from the Mayo Clinic checked out McCain. His urination has been normal since 2001 *and* he takes a multi-vitamin! So it's all gotta be okay, right?
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/05/23/mccain.health.records/
This behavior wouldn’t pass muster in a junior high school student council.
This is what gets me about Palin. From that New York Times story:
The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government.
It isn't just that she's a terrible administrator. It's part of the reason why she's a terrible administrator: I get the impression she stopped growing as a human being somewhere back in high school. The evidence suggests someone mentally stuck in her old clique, navigating her grown-up career just like she handled the eleventh grade.
Which explains why the BtVS metaphors seem so very, very appropriate.
I know this issue has been dropped and it's unpopular to bring it up, but I still don't believe Sarah Palin is the mother of Trigg. The "rushing back to Alaska to give birth" story isn't convincing; flight attendants on the plane say she didn't look pregnant. We still haven't seen any evidence of her having given birth to Trigg. All we've seen is one undated photo of SP looking pregnant. That's evidence? Obviously Bristol Palin isn't Trigg's mother either. My guess is that Trigg is a baby the family agreed to take in and claim as their own while covering up the pregnancy. It's an old story. Who's the mother? Probably a very young girl; hence the cover-up. Who's the father? My guess is: Track Palin.
I think the family originally planned to claim that Bristol was Trigg's mother. Bristol transferred to a high school in Anchorage even though she had a boyfriend in Wasilla, and the principal has said he didn't know why. Bristol foiled the plan by getting pregnant herself, whereupon Sarah had to step up and claim to be 7 months pregnant. No one knew about the pregnancy before then, and people who worked around her say she didn't look pregnant.
Why am I reading all this on a blog and not in the supposedly liberal media? Oh, that's right. It's because the people who have whined and complained about "Political Correctness" are now very concerned with how "lipstick on a pig" may hurt women's feelings. And because the media is only interested in a good show, not in any kind of actual dissemination of important information.
Thanks again, Making Light, for bringing something important to everyone's attention.
I'm also thinking Borderline Personality Disorder, especially for the characteristic of turning on people whom she'd previously praised so highly and publicly.
Really, she's something of a compulsive liar -- consider the different stories she's told about whether her children knew in advance she was accepting the VP nomination and whether they consented -- not to mention all the different accounts of whether McCain et al knew that Bristol was pregnant.
She is a piece of work that should be kept away from the Presidency -- especially the Executive Privilege model which has ever-less Constitutional safeguards to curb its absolute-ish power -- as far as possible.
Okay, now how do we get this essay into the New York Times and the Washington Post?
Well, Teresa could post this on Daily Kos and get a few hundred comments at the least ...
Kelly, I’ll take “Arrogance and Bad Vetting” for $600.
Too generous. I think whoever cut the deal with McCain for Palin knew there was lots of dirt on her, and wanted to get it out early. Once she's through it, it's old news when the stakes raise.
Mary: Teresa wants me to say that she really wants Making Light to stay away from hypotheses about the actual gynecological events. However interesting they may seem at the outset, they cannot end well, and must devolve into fractal re-examinations of inadequate data.
What we're discussing is the way the story was handled--a thing that's known and knowable.
Please don't feel squelched--this is a finickal policy for a difficult situation. (And I'm posting this comment from the passenger seat of a moving car.)
mary@8: The "rushing back to Alaska to give birth" story isn't convincing; flight attendants on the plane say she didn't look pregnant.
I think the last may be a case of misunderstanding; what the spokesman for the airline said was she showed no sign of "her condition", and people have been taking that as meaning, pregnant. But in context it appears he was talking about condition = being in labor.
And the whole "fly back to Alaska and endanger your child" thing finally made sense to me when it was revealed that her husband is a raving Alaska separatist. If you think the only important thing is being a citizen of *Alaska*, then being merely born a citizen of the United States isn't good enough, you have to be born in Alaska.
Yeah, I did say it was unpopular to bring it up.
Any hope of Lieberman writing a tell-all book?
I'm betting that McCain chose Palin on impulse, but the fact that he found her a plausible choice speaks badly about him. I believe the current administration is chaotic evil, and what they want-- even more than power and money-- is the freedom to act on a large scale without thinking and get away with it.
Even if McCain's cancer is at a deadly level, do you folks think he'd accept the fact thoroughly enough to be planning for his death? I don't have enough of a model of his personality to guess.
I don't give much credence to the cancer question any more than I do to the who's the real mother of Trigg.
I have this problem with flimsy evidence, and all of these questions are based on interpretation of scant circumstantial evidence by random people who's professional criteria in making these diagnoses is called into question by the fact that they would make a diagnosis based on such little evidence.
Really, it reminds me of the alleged psych profiles of G. W. Bush by people claiming that it was proof that he was a psychopath based on reading some recounting of his childhood.
You don't do that if you're a professional in the psychological profession. And you don't diagnose Palin as having not been someone's mother based on some photos and comments about a flight if you're a medical professional, because it's unprofessional to do so
While I resent the way that the past 8 years have made me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist, I recognize where these theories jump from nutbar into swift boat territory.
Very OT, but: in German, Donald Duck's nephews are called Tick, Trick and Track. So, ever since finding out about Trigg and Track Palin, I've been regretting that there isn't a Tick Palin to go with them... (a Dick Palin would do, too, in a pinch.)
Less OT: Entries like this are the reason why Making Light is one of my prime sources on American politics. Thank you.
In Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians (full text available), especially Chapter 5, he talks about "double-high authoritarians": social dominators who are also right-wing authoritarians. They're narcissists who are also big on hierarchical structures, deference to authority, and conventional standards.
That's Palin, and that's why she's dangerous, IMHO: it's not just the narcissism, it's the fact that she also taps into an ideology of authority. Because she's a woman, she can talk like she's constantly deferring to male authority -- but I think Christopher Hedges, who wrote that Common Dreams article , is being fooled. Her only use for male domination is to keep other women in their place -- I wouldn't expect anyone but her to be *really* calling the shots.
Without getting into McCain's health or possible deterioration of same: Almost everything I've read about Sarah Palin indicates that she would fit into one of those murder mysteries in which her [guilty] character is trying to throw the Great Detective off the scent, except both Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler would reject such a character as being too far-fetched.
This is not to imply Palin is guilty of murder or any other crime.
Good job, Teresa.
Re: Dead Man Walking. Isn't that post contradicted by this report (CNN/Mayo Clinic), which says that McCain's worst melanoma was Stage IIA?
NPR had the author of Angler, the new tell-all type book about Cheney on the other night on "Fresh Air."
Among the many other things discussed: Cheney not only nominated himself, he also (big surprise) did not have himself vetted to the same degree as all the other "candidates." [Also interesting, the fact that Cheney knew he was the nominee before looking at candidates, so the vetting only served as a way for him to "prove" other candidates were unacceptable.] In particular, no one checked his medical records. He assured everyone he was fine, and when they wanted an "independent analysis," Cheney's doctor called the independent doctor and assured the "independent" medical expert Cheney was healthy. According to Gellman (the author), when he interviewed the "independent medical expert," said expert said he'd never met or spoken to Checey, and had never seen Cheney's medical records.
I remember hearing (here at Making Light, I think) that the swelling in McCain's jaw was a good indication he was having major medical issues, and that his cancer was more serious than he was letting on. I suspect he's trying to use the Cheney playbook to duck the news on that.
While I am not wishing ill on McCain (at least, not in the form of physical harm or death) does anyone know what happens, election-wise, if before the election he dies or even if the illness just worsens enough that he is unable to run? Does that make Palin the presidential candidate with no running mate? And would that make the ticket more or less popular?
And, as another speculation:
While I prefer Obama, I have no doubt Hillary would also have made a spectacular, and spectacularly competent, president. In the event the worst happens, and McCain is elected and doesn't finish out his term, I have grave doubts of Palin's ability to do the same. And in that event does anyone doubt that 2/3 of the country will then cite that idiocy as "proof" that women can't/shouldn't be President, because they can't do the job? Listen to the complaints about Palin and narcisism. Setting aside her right-wing pit-bull positives, do not most of the "complaints" against her sound like the stereo-typical fear-mongering complaints to "prove" why females shouldn't serve: emotional decisions, changing of opinion every three weeks, inability to think logically, taking things personally, temper tantrums, etc. We all know these are all excuses, not reasons, and are not true besides. But if the first woman to serve displays these traits, what are critics going to say?
I think the reason so many people jumped on the Susan Slade scenario--
(Susan Slade was a 1961 movie with Connie Stevens as a teenage "good girl" who slips and has a shipboard romance/sex with a dashing young mountaineer who, a scene or two later, falls off a cliff and dies. Rather than admit their "good girl" has gotten knocked up, Susan Slade's parents move the family to Guatemala, informing all their family and friends that Susan's mother is having a late-life pregnancy. Hilarity does not ensue. Dead boyfriend, preggers teen, dying father, and a baby flambe'. Two-and-a-half hankies. Not available on DVD, surprisingly.)
--is that, bizarre and extreme as it was, the idea that Sarah Palin would fake a pregnancy made more sense that that she would endanger the health of an unborn child by taking a cross-country plane trip while in pre-labor.
People have had their children taken away by Child Protective Services for less.
We want our stories to make sense. Sarah Palin's cross-country plane trip doesn't make sense.
Two sarcastic asides:
(1) Name a major-party — hell, I'll even include third parties! — candidate for president and/or vice-president in the media age (roughly 1960 and on) who did/does not display substantial elements of narcissistic personality disorder. I can't, and I've tried. And the sad thing is that, thanks to a military tour as Deputy Chief of Protocol at Andrews AFB, I've actually met a fair number of them... and stand by that assessment.
(2) I do, however, have to take issue with one thing that the Fabulous Teresa said:
I take their belief that Palin would self-report any problems as evidence that they didn’t know the woman. The same goes for expecting her to know what happened to Thomas Eagleton when he failed to report a lurking problem.I simply can't agree with this assessment. For one thing, in 1972 there simply wasn't the same "access to medical records" meme that there is now. That, combined with the different attitude toward "hospitalization" for mental health issues at that time, means that McGovern's people should (and, in fact, were required by law to) have explicitly asked if there was any history of treatment for mental health issues... just like there is (and was) on the standard forms for security clearances.*
<sarcasm> Besides, if everyone involved has narcissistic personality disorder, shouldn't getting treatment be a plus? </sarcasm>
* N.B. I have far more experience with all of these issues in my family than I will explain in a public forum.
C.E. Petit @ 25: I think maybe (re: the Eagleton reference) Teresa is talking about the McCain campaign's apparent belief that Palin would know and understand the Eagleton story as political history, not in terms of the differences in having access to mental health records then and now . . . what's in question is the McCain campaign's faith that what now appears to be a relative unknown woman would tell them anything that might be hidden in her past. Which seems fairly valid: not exactly whether or not there might be an Eagleton-like surprise in Palin's past, but whether or not we believe that the McCain campaign looked at her closely enough even to try to find out about her at that level of detail.
Or am I the one who is misunderstanding both of you?
Bruce Arthur at #24: Sarah Palin's cross-country plane trip doesn't make sense.
This was over on MetaFilter:
Sarah Palin's Pregnancy Decision Map
And yes, there are plenty of other reasons to question her judgment, but Palin's status as "Mother of Five!" was the just about the first of her "qualifications" that they put forward for her.
And the story of her late-in-life pregnancy - as she herself tells it - just strikes me as, you know, batshit insane.
#25, C.E.Petit -- one of the articles that Teresa links to at the end includes discussion of the difference between being narcissistic and having NPD. For instance, Muhammad Ali's famous "I'm the Greatest!" boast may be narcissistic but it wasn't, at the time, groundless.
I expect the candidates for high office to have healthy, extra-large egos, but I also expect that they should have quantifiable reason for pride in their achievements and confidence in their decisions.
So, an amusing train of thought...
When Sarah Palin was poked in the side regarding the Bridge to Nowhere (mind you, there are hairs to split on that issue whereby she is not a liar) I thought to myself, "Well, this is the difference between somebody ready for National Politics and somebody who isn't." In that, she thought she could get away with lying. Then, maybe around this week or so I realized that she's exactly ready to fit with McCain's campaign.
Look them in the eye and lie to them.
Not to convince them, but because you don't care if you're lying, and maybe, just maybe, nobody else will either. It probably takes months of training to convince other politicians to "damn the torpedoes" but Palin was already all about it. Makes me wonder if torpedoes are outdated technology, or Palin should be scraping barnacles. Sadly, I won't know the answer to that question until November...
Let's talk about something other than Sarah Palin's gynecological history.
There are very good reasons for avoiding that subject, especially that a woman's mothering abilities are the least relevant thing I can think of about her qualities as a public servant.
That the Republicans spend their time dwelling on it just proves they're knuckle-draggers who think of women as mobile wombs. I'd rather not climb down in that mud pit with them.
Plus, it degrades our ability to point out that John McCain told this joke: "You know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno is the father."
I'm glad this ended up as a real post and not buried in the comments. Often I don't have the time to read through all the comments here.
I've known one or two national political leaders in my time (granted, not US leaders). While they've had large egos, which is necessary if you're going into politics, what's struck me about the ones I've known is that in their private lives they've been quite shy and reserved. Nothing that I've read or seen about either McCain or Palin has indicated any personal reserve (although Palin has been at pains to claim a reserve for McCain that I hadn't noticed before).
If he is in fact a Dead Man Walking, then the choice of Sarah Palin as Vice President also becomes more than a Hail Mary pass intended to destroy any bounce from the wildly successful Democratic Convention. It becomes reckless in the extreme
Actually, it makes me suspect that McCain secretly wants to throw the election to the Democrats. As it comes out that his health is so poor, and that Palin is so dreadfully underqualified to take over, fewer and fewer people will be willing to vote for him, and he must know it.
Side note: My sister, Melanie, worked in the Alaska State Governor's office until recently. At first she was afraid to speak out, for fear Palin would find a way to jeopardize her pension, but has since joined 'Women Against Palin.'
When I read the title to the first of the two links at the end, I thought it'd be a story or joke about an actual narcissistic vampire, the actual get-dusted-by-Buffy kind. Still seems to me that that might make a very funny story in the right hands.
Hear hear, John A Arkansawyer @ 30. It's become abundantly clear over the past weeks that Sarah Palin's major qualification for the Vice Presidency in the eyes of people who think she's qualified is, in fact, her motherhood (as a matter of fact, one of her early supporters explicitly said so on CBS News weeks before her nomination was announced). A strategy that fights a completely unqualified and scandal-plagued nominee on the only ground where she has any strength is a deeply unwise strategy, JMO.
Not to mention that there are an awful lot of mothers out there - pretty much all of them, in fact - who have personal experience of complete strangers who know little or nothing at all about us, our children, or our circumstances having detailed opinions about the job we're doing as mothers they're anxious to share, and we're not really very happy about it. That's not a vein of emotion a candidate trying to make his case with women really wants to tap into.
The funny thing is that motherhood didn't make her the huge celebrity she is today - what I believe really makes her attractive to her base and her principal is her pugnacity. Contempt for a system that doesn't do what she wants it to when run by the, you know, Rules and aggressive know-nothingism are pretty much what put George W. Bush into the White House twice.
That said, the mental image of John McCain on his knees suppressing his gag reflex may well have broken something in my psyche. Ew.
Petty-minded, vengeful, egotistic and not really all that savvy? Check. Former mayor? Check (pretty much). This refers not to Palin but to Vladimir Putin, as described in an article I'm currently reading in the October issue of Vanity Fair. Although he lacks the minor beauty queen glamor, this ex-KGB man and one-time vice mayor of St. Petersburg seems to be much the same kind of disaster for his would-be handlers and goldmine for his old cronies that Palin would likely become, given slightly more bureaucratic competence.
As for McCain, the latest Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon skewers him (and the lipsticked pig) quite thoroughly.
Laramie Sasseville @ 33 ...
Actually, it makes me suspect that McCain secretly wants to throw the election to the Democrats. As it comes out that his health is so poor, and that Palin is so dreadfully underqualified to take over, fewer and fewer people will be willing to vote for him, and he must know it.
What I see is a glass cliff scenario -- throw the completely fouled up, screwed up, guaranteed to make anybody look bad state-of-the-union to the Democrats; if they fail, you can say "Yeah, we knew they were going to", if they succeed, you say "Yup, we set things up so they'd succeed, and the Democrats are just taking advantage of all the hard work we'd already done".
Xeger @37, I think you're correct.
Oh dear, the emotional vampire site is sort of deeply alarming. Though it does explain why some of my family relations are so very difficult to deal with.
Is it just me, or is McCain releasing his records for a limited time to a limited set of people while not allowing any photos or other recording seem more suspicious than simply sitting on them? It's the difference between a kid refusing to let his Mom into his room at all (which may be privacy issues), and standing outside the room and popping the door open for a split second - "See, the floor is clean and the bed is made." The second is much more likely to mean there's something in the room he specifically doesn't want Mom to see.
Debbie Notkin, #11: "Okay, now how do we get this essay into the New York Times and the Washington Post?"
The traditional way is to buy an ad. If we took up a contribution we might be able to do it, but does Teresa want to deal with that much stress?
One group of Palin's supporters I haven't seen discussed is the NRA/ILA (the NRA's PAC).
That was a thing of beauty, Teresa! I feel enormously pleased to have had a tiny stake in generating it--I think I have some idea of how it feels to be a pebble at the beginning of an avalanche now.
Two points: first of all, I remember a thread -- hey, here it is -- called "The Mother Drive-By", in which it was roundly agreed that people randomly giving their two cents' worth on other people's (women's) parenting decisions is rude and offensive. I say, stick with that.
Second: Tavella@15:
And the whole "fly back to Alaska and endanger your child" thing finally made sense to me when it was revealed that her husband is a raving Alaska separatist. If you think the only important thing is being a citizen of *Alaska*, then being merely born a citizen of the United States isn't good enough, you have to be born in Alaska.
That highly-speculative idea (which I've seen around) assumes that the so-far-imaginary future Alaskan Republic would have a citizenship rule in which you have to be born in Alaska, no matter who your parents are, which seems like a stretch -- the USA rule isn't as restrictive, and the theoretical rule would eliminate Palin herself, who was born in Idaho.
Great post. And welcome back.
Just a couple of follow-ups:
26 I read Teresa's comment as "they were wrong to expect Palin to tell them everything that might be in the closet," and my response was intended to be that "but if McGovern's handlers had been doing their jobs (and following the law), Eagleton's mental health history wouldn't have been a surprise."
28 I'm not a mental health professional. I was, however, a commanding officer for nearly a decade, of units ranging from about 75 (aircrew members) to about 1200 (an aircraft maintenance squadron). I'd like to think I understand the distinctions among "self-confident," "narcissistic traits and arrogance," and "NPD." I've actually met and interacted with enough president/vice-president candidates as a protocol officer to put the ones we've actually gotten into the NPD category.
29, 33, 37 I have a slightly different take on this: I don't think Palin is about the Presidential race; she's about the Senate. By having a right-wing fundamentalist nutcase on the top ticket, the Heffalumps think they'll get more of the "base" to the polls... and thereby, hopefully, keep the Jackasses from achieving a filibuster-proof Senate. It's also about the Heffalumps' inability to think of politics as anything other than a game for the in crowd (which, at least at the national level isn't that much different from the Jackasses).
Peasant # 23 -
"..Setting aside her right-wing pit-bull positives, do not most of the "complaints" against her sound like the stereo-typical fear-mongering complaints to "prove" why females shouldn't serve: emotional decisions, changing of opinion every three weeks, inability to think logically, taking things personally, temper tantrums, etc. We all know these are all excuses, not reasons, and are not true besides. But if the first woman to serve displays these traits, what are critics going to say?.."
No,those are not "female traits," but the hallmark of the modern standard for GOP politicians. Or of people who abuse their life partners.
But yeah, that claim would certainly be made
DonBoy # 42 --
Remember, The U.S. Constitution made exceptions for the then-current generation who were not Born On These Shores
Sounds like Sarah Palin is eminently qualified to be the 43rd President of the United States.
Just not the 45th.
Faren @36: Beware of getting all your views from one source: Putin did not get to be a Colonel in the 1st Directorate of the KGB (not to mention picking up a degree in International Law along the way) by being wholely venal and incompetent, and I find it rather difficult to believe that someone as clueless as you suggest could run a great power for a decade and deliver 8-10% year-on-year GDP growth (after a decade of turmoil and implosion). Putin does indeed behave vindictively towards his opponents, but on the basis of his performance to date he seems to be the most competent Russian leader since Stalin.
Sarah Palin is no Vladimir Putin. I don't know what she is; Caligula, perhaps.
Max Blumenthal wrote an incisive article for The Nation on September 1, 2008, on how the Christian Right were the group that chose Palin to run with McCain as their payoff for supporting him. See it here.
As well, Limbaugh loves her and had been pushing her as a pick for months already.
This choice did NOT come from out of nowhere. Indeed, considering who chose her, she fits exactly their criteria.
This is their last chance to stage the theocratic coup they've been after for decades now.
Love, C.
Connie H.'s comment at #28 on Muhammed Ali's "I'm the greatest" boast reminds me of a story about Arnold Schoenberg. For those who don't know, Schoenberg was one of the foremost composers and music teachers of the last century; as an individual he was very bright and--when he wanted to be--very charming. He also had a gargantuan ego, a hair-trigger sensitivity to perceived slights, and a world-class capacity for carrying grudges. Put these together and you have the sort of person for whom most people may be divided into two types:
1) devoted cult followers, and
2) all those other people who are going "Dude, what is your problem?"
The story goes that some of Schoenberg's students had a graphologist analyze a sample of their teacher's handwriting. The graphologist's verdict: "At the very least, this man thinks he's the emperor of China." When the students gleefully reported this comment back to Schoenberg, he thought a moment then asked, "But did she say whether I was justified?"
As I posted on the other topic about this subject, Elizabeth George wrote a novel about a politician who behaves so much like Palin, and who has narcissist personality disorder, back in 1997, In the Presence of the Enemy. Unless you do everything she says and wants and never ever question, you are her enemy. Even if you are not, and she will do everything to destroy you, even in the face of all rational evidence otherwise, that you are neither guilty of being an enemy and that the truth is being told.
As soon as I looked into Palin even a little, I thought of this novel. This was a type I'd never encountered previously when I read the novel back then. But by now, alas, yes.
Love, C.
Just now the NPR program, Speaking of Faith broadcast a show about Palin and pentecostals and the variety of their churches.
The concluding sentence by one of the ministers, at the end of the program was a gentle chide, "We believers do not put the same value on rational thought that you do."
This is the answer to how the last 8 years happened.
This is what will be the operating principle if these people take the Oval Office. After what they've gotten away with for the last 8 years, they no longer even need to pretend to hide or disguise what they're up to.
Love, C.
Stephen Frug @34: When I read the title to the first of the two links at the end, I thought it'd be a story or joke about an actual narcissistic vampire, the actual get-dusted-by-Buffy kind. Still seems to me that that might make a very funny story in the right hands.
Not my hands, I'm afraid, but here's an O.Henry notion:
He* sets out to become a vampire, in order to become immortal. Having achieved this, however, he is left bereft... he can no longer see his reflection in the mirror.
* I tried writing he/she, but it was too awkward. Substitute 'she' as desired.
DonBoy@42 said: Two points: first of all, I remember a thread -- hey, here it is -- called "The Mother Drive-By", in which it was roundly agreed that people randomly giving their two cents' worth on other people's (women's) parenting decisions is rude and offensive. I say, stick with that.
Yes, I remember that thread. I commented on it myself, here and here.
I want to clear up a possible misunderstanding: when I posted my alternate theory regarding Trigg Palin's parentage, I didn't do it to slam Palin or her family. I am, in fact, rather sympathetic to the situation I described. Had my son gotten someone pregnant while I was still young enough to claim the child as my own I might have done the same thing. I'm pro-choice, but I wouldn't want my grandchild to be aborted.
I'm quite happy to drop the subject now; it's neither an argument for nor against Palin's qualifications. It's just a curiosity because of the downright weird handling of the situation by the McCain/Palin campaign. Sorry Patrick, Teresa.
I said at the time, and still say: Tom Eagleton is the only person to ever have run for President or Vice President who was certified to be sane.
Back when McCain let a small number of reporters take a brief look at his medical records, I figured there was something to hide.
That's the sort of thing one does in the sure, and certain, hope that things will be missed.
Esp. because it's much easier to leave things out, when you know the auditor can't establish a timeline for everything, nor detect lacunae.
Prima facie it's a sign of wanting to keep the complete picture from being told. It also lets him say, "I let reporters look at my records and the didn't find anything out of the ordinary".
Which makes further speculations not unreasonable; and extrapolations from known parallels not unfounded.
All he has to do to disprove them is actually release his records. He put the ball in play, so he can't really say it's unfair to want a real look at all the records. Better he had just said, "No. Those are private."
Debbie Notkin #11: Okay, now how do we get this essay into the New York Times and the Washington Post?
It might be more practical to see if Teresa can be featured as a guest blogger on Daily Kos, for example.
So Teresa is arguing that the republicans, having spent sixteen years scaring themselves that Hillary Clinton is a figure of primodial feminine evil, are now about to elect someone who actually is.
I suppose it makes as much sense as anything in American politics today.
One tiny omission in the McCain's medical record. The depth of his most recent melanoma makes it Stage IIb, which decreases survival to 75%. Another omission is the lack of mention of the Clark's level, which is usually more used for prognostication.
I am also concerned that misstatements reportedly made by McCain are more worrisome than simple senior moments. Sunni/Shiite, Iran/Iraq substitutions might be inattention, but thinking that Spain is in Latin America is a bit more of a concern. I wish that his medical records had included a report of an MRI of the brain* and the results of a mental status exam.
I wouldn't certify that a 72-year-old man could drive a truck safely without a short portable mental status exam. I would hope Dr. Eckerd didn't attest to Mr. McCain's medical health without evaluating his mental status.
*The lack of a brain MRI is surprising, since the brain is a site of predilection for spread of melanoma. However, I doubt that any 72 year old would have a stone cold normal MRI of the brain, so the results might have been withheld to avoid having to explain that fact.
pedantic peasant @23:
I must note that my immediate reaction to your description was "so, another GWB". I suspect this is common among liberal-minded folk.
(And, also responding to Andrew Brown @57: Palin joins Ann Coulter as possible evidence that the reason Republicans don't like women to be in charge is what happens when Republican women are in charge.)
Nancy Lebovitz @17:
I would suggest instead that McCain might have been in shock at the prognosis, and easily manipulated into accepting the evang-Hell-icals' hand-picked successor?
Craig R @ 45:
I was not saying they were female traits, I said they were the traits misogynists use to "explain" why women aren't suited to office.
Much like Xeger's "glass cliff" analogy at #37, I am commenting on the likelihood that if Palin does serve, and does a poor job, those who are against women serving in office -- and who therefore lump Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin together as all being equivalent to each other -- would use her as an example of what "all women" would do.
geekosaur @ 59 I assume you mean that Palin rates as equivalent to GWB?
If so, I agree. I am just predicting the likely consequence if the situation of her actually reaching the Oval Office arises.
As far as the GWB analogy goes, I thought of that as soon as Jim posted the previous "Wimps" thread, and I thought at the time that it served as an excellent object example to answer Teresa's inquiries in the "That's how it goes / Everybody knows thread. Would Palin be so boldfaced in her contempt to all and sundry over the investigation if it hadn't been for the various claims of immunity and executive privelege from the White House? As someone else said there, IANAL, and IANA-Alaskan, but even if Alaskan state law allows for some variation of privelege as has been claimed elsewhere, I'd argue it probably has not previously been done in such a cavalier manner, nor accompanied by the verbal equivalent of a poke in the eye, and that this attitude is the direct result of the past and continued claims of President Bush and his Band of Favorites.
This is kind of an illustration of that claim that any law that isn't or can't be enforced weakens the strength of the rule of law.
Whatever the cause, whatever the reason,
Palin scares me and I hope the news starts to cover this stuff as the date approaches.
And that raises another question:
Is it better for this stuff to come out early, before they have more time to fabricate cover, or bury it in people's minds,
Or for it to come out later, when the more stubborn voters have "known" who they're voting for for weeks, and "have already made up their minds and won't be misled by the facts"?
Pedantic Peasant @ 60: Is it better for this stuff to come out early [...] Or for it to come out later
Somehow I suspect that there will be no shortage of new/expanded reasons to not vote for McCain/Palin coming out over the coming weeks.
Charlie @47 - nah, Dubya's already a good mapping to Caligula; famous father, dynastic, etc.
Mooselini is my favorite so far.
Y'know, it occurred to me that the Bush camp may have made its promises to support McCain in '08 -- and I think that happened during the '04 campaign, because he didn't become such a big Bush cheerleader before then -- knowing about the melanoma issue, and taking a chance that it was a promise they wouldn't have to deliver on. But McCain lived, and everyone else fell by the wayside, so here we are.
C.E. Petit at 44 has a good point about the Senate, but I don't see that as negating her value to the fundies in the fourth-branch slot. Both/and seems the right assessment.
pedantic peasant, #23: Possibly more to the point -- what happens if McCain wins the election (whether by fair means or foul) and then dies, or becomes manifestly too ill to take office, before he can be sworn in? I would assume that there's some Constitutional mechanism to handle this situation, but IANACS.
DonBoy, #42: One presumes that people who are legally adult at the time the measure takes effect would be grandfathered in... or that Palin would make sure that she got a special exception.
pedantic peasant, #60: Yes, exactly. Just as no one will never convince me that the (mis)design of the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin wasn't a deliberate attempt to make it fail, so that then when the subject came up again, the argument could be made that "We tried putting a woman's image on a coin, and people just wouldn't use it."
(This is a shorter summary of something I posted on the other thread.)
The big question has to be why McCain chose Palin, why the vetting process didn't keep him from choosing her. My claim is that it was a terribly imprudent decision to choose her, given the ongoing ethics investigation and pregnant 17 year old daughter, because McCain and his handlers have to know that either or both of those could drag their campaign down, and could potentially even blow up in their faces and basically kill their campaign. It sounds like there are probably a lot of landmines lurking, waiting to be uncovered. Proper vetting should have caught some of them, right?
This is made harder, when you consider the number of people McCain had to choose from. He needed (say) a Republican evangelical woman, of at least Palin's qualifications. I suspect this is a reasonably large set[1]. It wasn't like Palin was the only woman he could have chosen.
The obvious guess here is that, as Teresa said, the vetting was incompetent. Alternatively, it may have been intentionally sabotaged, perhaps by people trying to help the Democrats, perhaps by Republicans who wanted to avoid the kind of shakeup in the party power structure that a McCain win might cause. Or (my favored guess), McCain may have done that loose cannon thing he's moderately famous for, and made a bad choice over the objections of his advisors. (If he's suffering from some age-related decline in mental function, this becomes more plausible.)
There are arguments about Palin's strengthening McCain's status with some of the base, but this is only a good reason for him to have chosen Palin if he couldn't have found other women who would do just as well.
[1] Contrast this with Clarence Thomas' nomination to the supreme court--Bush I nominated him to replace Thurgood Marshall, and it was pretty much required that the replacement be black. In that case, the Republicans simply had very few choices, because there weren't (aren't) many black Republicans. It's conceivable that they knew all about the sexual harassment complaints when they chose him, but simply had no better alternatives. That can't be the case here.
Lee #64:
But they tried again with Sacagawea dollar, which was rather better designed. (I always assumed they screwed up the SBA because they wanted vending machines to be able to keep the same maximum coin size, but having your dollar and quarter coins be indistinguishable except in good lighting is an obvious disaster, so maybe you're right.)
abatross: As I understand it the decagon design was meant to avoid that confusion, but the vending machine companies said they couldn't accept those.
The mint then rounded them and the vending machine companies didn't actually support the design.
Which meant they were just a heavy, confusing, coin and no one used them.
albatross: one of the interesting things I noticed when people started tallying the many experienced, highly-qualified Republican women was it turned out nearly all of them were pro-choice.
Dollar coins: when the Canadians introduced a dollar coin (because coin wore better than paper, it was more economical), they withdrew the paper bill from circulation. There was some grousing, but people quickly got used to it.
The coin had the queen on one side and a loon on the other; quickly nicknamed 'the loonie'.
When the $2 coin was introduced, with the queen on one side and a polar bear on the other, someone proposed 'the moonie' — the queen with a bear behind.*
*Yes, I have told this story before..
Lee @ 64
Yes, once the ticket is elected, they're the candidates, so if McCain/Palin gets the nod, and anything happens to McCain, Palin becomes the #1, even if it's before the inaugural. And, based on West Wing (because IANACS either) at that point as I understand it, Palin could nominate a VP, but Congress must approve (25th amend).
My question is what happens if the issue occurs between convention nomination and election?
-If it's before the election, can someone just be appointed to the ticket as VP, since then it can be claimed the election itself confirms their approval?
-Does the VP naturally assume the presidential spot on the ticket, or is it necessary to re-nominate? (I suspect this may be a party regulation, as with the primary dates issue this year.)
I am reminded of (I believe) Ashcroft losing for Senator of Missouri to the deceased Carnahan. Would people who like the McCain/Palin ticket be more or less likely to vote a Palin/TBA ot Palin/hurried-nominee ticket?
C.E. Petit @ 44:
Interesting analysis of the Palin phenomenon. I don't know if you are right about that as the primary philosophy behind the nomination or not, but it certainly is possible -- even probable -- that it figures somewhere in their calculations.
As has been said in other threads, it is frustrating in the extreme to hear about liberal media bias, while the media seemingly ignores important issues like McCain's health, and runs with asinine stories like the lipstick issue.
And how is it liberals and Democrats get touted as whiners, but comments like "No one likes us. It's all that liberal media bias." get swallowed and accepted without being perceived as whining?
Reading this post and its comments, I have to ask a question that I haven't heard elsewhere. How come anyone running for high office in the US isn't given a full FBI background check? Every 2nd lieutenant and ensign in the military has to be cleared for Secret information, why isn't at least that much checking required for the Commander-in-Chief?
Anyone believe Sarah Palin would pass that check?
That's an interesting question.
I suppose an obvious answer is that it might be a bad idea to give one Federal agency complete veto-power over who the American people could choose to be their President?
One wonders what J. Edgar Hoover would have had to say about George McGovern.
Debs ran for President from his prison cell, and all.
Terry Karney, #67: Which meant [that dollar coins] were just a heavy, confusing, coin and no one used them.
As Rob Rusick (#69) implicitly pointed out, if the paper $1 bills are not concomitantly withdrawn, there really is no incentive for vending machine companies etc. to make the transition. Any number of other countries have switched to coins for small-denomination bills - the government just has to be willing to deal with the grumbling and costs associated with the transition. The idea of putting women on coins was just collateral damage.
And Rob, I personally was in favour of 'doubloon,' but that never caught on either. But 'toonie' is pretty good too.
@Bruce
Requirements for an O1 or similar are fixed by statute. Requirements for President (and VP, Senator/Representative, etc) are fixed by the Constitution, so you'd need a Constitutional amendment to require that level of vetting.
And I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Imagine, for a moment, that J Edgar Hoover had held the legal power to reject any candidate for the Presidency. (OK, now stop screaming.) Hell, remember all the frothing right-wingers claiming that since Clinto
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