Things That Are Related

Sarah Palin’s Twitter praise for a Thomas Sowell column comparing the BP escrow fund to the political roots of the Holocaust, and this.

Have a nice weekend, everyone!

Blogs and Pieces

Enough about the “Snowmaggedon” already:

• At the Atlantic, Michael Kinsley makes a great point about the difference between condescension and simply, you know, believing you’re right. Marc Aminder, meanwhile, breaks down Sarah Palin’s paradigm, which is basically appearing as a victim of condescendsion. Imagine that.
• At ThinkProgress, Matt Yglesias throws some cold water on the popularity of the Tea Party movement and tears to pieces Marc Thiessen’s gross dissembling on torture. Thiessen’s angry response is laughable.
• Nate Silver, writing at FiveThirtyEight, proves a point that can’t be made often enough: Obama’s policies have, on the whole, been more popular that not. “[T]he votes taken by the Republican Congress have far more often been out of step with those of the median voter.”
• In New York politics, uncertainty abounds. Governor David Paterson will resign very soon, or he won’t. Hiram Monserrate, who probably slashed his girlfriend’s face with broken glass, may finally be expelled from the State Senate, or not.
• Hipster puppies!

“Words have power. For example, they can be used to tell a pretty enormous lie.”

Tiger Beatdown has a long, interesting, rather esoteric piece on Rahm Emanuel, Sarah Palin, and the use of the word “retarded,” to which I don’t have anything to add except that it would be nice if anything in politics measured up to this level of intellectual curiosity.

Incidentally, more temperate disagreement continues between a reader and I in the the comments of this post.

Rudy Giuliani and the Deep Unseriousness of the Right on National Security

With Sarah Palin on a national media blitz, the amount of false reality out there naturally increases by a huge amount. Palin lives in her own little impenetrable world; she’s the commensurate victim. Why anyone believes a word she says is beyond me.

(An aside: I don’t think Palin expects to be a credible conservative leader—she’d rather be a popular conservative celebrity. As Ana Marie Cox said on Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night, you don’t write a book taking revenge on staffers if you want to build a campaign in the future. Likewise, you don’t quit your only major elected office if you want to be seen as a qualified presidential candidate. So let’s agree, for now, that Palin’s lies are those of someone craving the spotlight as an ends, not a means.)

But this post isn’t about Sarah Palin’s false realities. It’s about Rudy Giuliani’s, and those of the right’s “experts” on national security, which I think are far more dangerous.

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Walking Straight Into the Echo Chamber, or Why Sarah Palin Gets Away With It

It’s too easy to anger the mind.

I was catching up on my growing pile of New Yorkers this weekend when I came across a book review by Elizabeth Kolbert that got me to thinking about Sarah Palin and her whole phony “death panels” meme, which she reiterated on Saturday on her Facebook page. (Screw the MSM!)

First thought: I can’t believe I just went to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page.

Second thought: Anger. People believe this?

The occasion for Palin’s screed, of course, was the House vote on the health care reform bill. “What’s in this bill?” she “wrote.” “The ‘death panel’ provision is in it.”

Needless to say, this is still not what end-of-life counseling means. It has never meant what Palin claims it means. “Death panels” is a nefarious phrase—willfully misleading, politically expedient, morally repugnant. It’s a retreat to the cowardice of empty polemic. In other words: vintage Palin.

But why do so many people believe her? Why does she continue to get away with it?

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