Living further-up to her Edward R. Morrow award for journalism, Ms. Couric applies critical thinking to reportage on the town hall bootjacks hoping to turn every policy debate into a referendum on their philosophically unrelated pet peeves.
"At a town meeting hosted by Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania resident stood up to say that the health care debate has "awakened the sleeping giant." Not exactly.
What's it's done, it seems, is stirred a hornets nest, and uncovered disturbing attitudes and emotions that have nothing to do with policy."
Some people wonder what's become of Katie Couric, ever since she effectively stopped any chance of Sarah Palin ever running for public office outside of Southeastern Kansas... or as long as those election 2008 interviews are archived on YouTube.
Navy seals rock better in some ways than in others. For example, they make GREAT charity calendars when the pentagon has to do fundraising and bake sales to fund the new paramilitary troops being institutionalized among the ranks of that teaming hotbed of savage social radicalism, ACORN.
"I do guerrilla warfare," Reed once boasted to a reporter, describing how he ambushed his enemies as a political operative. "I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag"
Google: Ralph Reed, Jack Abramoff, Sun Myung Moon, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, and see how much company they keep.
Today, much of the Republican Party is made up of southern segregation Democrats and their offspring, those who were disgusted by northern Democrats who signed onto the 1964 Civil Right Act. They and their children, and their children's children, have never gotten over it.
Neoconservatives, represented today by Kristol, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Pearl soon followed, because of their disgust for fellow Democrats involved with the anti-Vietnam War peace movement.
But the GOP sealed its fate, the one it's living today, when Ronald Reagan kissed the opulent ring of that corpulent gay-basher, Jerry Falwell, who ostensibly ran the Moral Majority on behalf of Ralph Reed, who's been laundering church tithing for decades via illegal operations with his College Republican cronies, Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist.
Rove sopped up the dregs of these religiBigot war-mongers from the Democratic Party in 2004, but they were nothing new to the GOP by then, just the ones who needed that kick in the pants from 9/11 scareMongering...
...and the wedgie he gave them over same-sex marriage. More war... More religion. Warligion is their brand, so the DNC was essentially drained of these characters by then.
What we see now is the mass-migration of those three waves of jihadi-bigots from Bush to Palin, in whom they've suddenly found his intellectual relative browsing the city library stacks for books to burn.
That movement and the moderates now being purged from the RNC is the primary political dynamic of our day. The Democrats have only had to sit quietly, eerily polite for the last four years, while 8 years of self-serving policy disasters destroy the RNC.
Ralph Reed, if he had it to do all over again, would do it all over again.
Conservative columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan pens the epilogue on the rise and fall of Sarah Palin, but I don't think Palin's done with us yet. Still, it's scathing stuff:
"She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence.
"In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying."
I don't think anybody has put it any better, except when Noonan put it even more succinctly, very early on, when she was caught on a live mike last year calling "political bullshit" on the Palin pick for VP.
Noonan also reads the beads of people who make excuses for the rise and fall of Sarah Palin, "some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths. To wit..."
I'm reminded of my sister's harangue. She's in education and says "kids today" are taught that everybody's a little prince or princess, everyone's a winner, except Noonan aims directly at OUR generation:
"Burris was appointed by disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to fill the Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama. His appointment was criticized from the moment it was announced and prompted calls for Burris to resign...
Burris is the Sarah Palin of the Democratic Party, defiant until the... until the... premature end.
His effective resignation just seals the impression of a loud mouth out of his league.
Really, the guy has the gall-filled balls of that woman, shrugging off his own parade of ethical violation... the violations of Blagojevich... as if it's just something someone made up just to get under his skin.
We're all special and have peculiar and wonderful talents, but where do some people get this sense of entitlement, the feeling that God intends SUCH great things for them... to the extent that their lies and deceit, even treachery seems to them like the will of God too?
Something uncomfortable about not having Dick Nixon to kick around anymore comes hauntingly to mind. You KNOW we haven't seen the last of the Palins yet.
Was talking to friends this week about the idea that Palin has transcended politics in the same way Paris Hilton somehow transcends celebrity, both of them becoming demigoddesses that no longer depend on auditioning for a role or campaigning for office.
Both have somehow wheedled their uniquely public persona into something beyond the roles they more ostensibly assume, living life as reality TV characters, albeit characters outside any particular reality TV program. They're multi-media reality stars, born for 24-hour cable, YouTube, txting, tweeting, and blogging.
Their whole lives have achieved a unique status, abiding like those who are famous just for being themselves... instead of any role they might play.
Michael Jackson had achieved it, but he didn't rest well knowing it. He seemed determined to bounce back as a pop star confined by production schedules... rather than inhabit the character of always-on notoriety he had become.
I think Palin recognized this, saw that the Alaska office was just dragging her down, when she could be out on the open road running the Sarah Palin Show... without a state ethics board in tow.
To what end... I don't know. She could just as easily become the political world's Kato Kaelin as she can be Paris Hilton, who has decided to sit back herself, now, to rewrite her place in the world, after notoriety was displaced by notorious.
After hearing her concession, Tom in the Richmond asks, "Did she just say that to hunker down and get the job done in the face of adversity is the quitters way out?"
"Really?"
In essence, she said it!
She's also saying it's okay to lie about "Every one - all 15 of the ethics complaints having been dismissed."
Speaking of ethics, maybe something bigger's coming up, and the Palin's are hunkering down or distancing themselves, maybe as money to fight it dries up, but I have to say, I might be more nervous not knowing what she's up to without an ethics committee looking after her from now on.
Tom in the Richmond also wonders, "if she's counting on the fact that people will forget this by the time she's running for president, because all she's shown right now is that when the going gets tough, she runs away.
"I wonder if it has anything to do with other GOP governors getting caught doing super hypocritical things. Is she just trying to stay out of the crosshairs?"
Aye!
My suspicion is; she's realized that the never-ending henpecking of the press, on every stupid thing she's come up with, will not subside, and that it's no way to prepare for higher office, especially when she can reasonably expect to lose reelection for governor in Alaska.
I think she's been properly advised by FOX Noose's Greta Van Stusteren to transcend political office, to operate from her own platform, where she can't be held ethically accountable while she remakes herself for 2012.
"When Kristol questioned the likelihood of a male like Mark Wallace using such a gossipy term as diva, (to describe Palin) this source said, Scheunemann wrote back that Mark Wallace knows something about divas because he’s married to a diva."
Good god, how ironic to read so far into such a sordid tale of sectarian gossip-mongering, and then to have a rumor mill like Bill Kristol cough up such a bizarre one.
What a bunch of divas they ALL are, and the preposterous macho posturing is just a laugh riot coming from one so prim, pursed and plainly effete at Ms. Kristol.
"Was Palin a fresh talent whose debut was mishandled by self-serving campaign insiders, or an eccentric diva who had no business on the national stage?" — Jonathan Martin for Politico Damn! If you have to ask...
But it gets even worse: Asked about these accusation, McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt struck back: "I'm sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign."
"After all, his management of Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away," Schmidt continued.
Putting his experience as a blogger to good use, Jonathan Martin is totally rolling with the snark.
The facts are these: If George Bush could pull it off, barging his way into office by way of the kind of judicial activism he swore he abhorred, having done it with a brain no better than Sarah Palin's, the American people COULD be just as susceptible to her under the right circumstances.
"There is ultimately no way to read McCain’s selection of Palin as reflecting anything other than an appalling egotism, heedlessness, and lack of judgment in a man whose courage, tenacity, and character they have extravagantly admired. — Todd Purdum, Vanity Fair
But I think we've changed and may be set for at least 80 years before the religious crazies will be again able to whip people up into a supersticious stupor over the NEXT Millennium, Rapture, Tribulation, and Armageddon.
We're a decade past that mythological due date, so the appeal of a Rapture-ready battle axe like Palin is limited to the 20% of people who need end-times Apocalypse-mongering to get them to the polls.
"What happened, was what the McCain campaign had not really taken the time to find out, that there was a whole sort of counter-story about her in Alaska that was a lot less rosy than the one they sold of a governor... so there were always a lot more problems with her than they knew." She'll do great in places like Indiana, Texas, and Alabama, but she'll need to reinvent herself on a scale that George Bush was able to do for himself, if she's going to pull off an electoral heist as blatantly as he did in 2000.
