Wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Sarah Palin was banished from all post debate interviews, not a good sign for the McCain-Palin campaign.   Joe Biden was all over the media, appearing on as many network and cable post debate discussions as he could reach.  He did not, however, appear on ABC News.  That network wanted both Palin and Biden, equal time stuff, you know. Unable to get Palin, ABC passed. Is the McCain campaign telling us something?

Huffington Post reports that Palin’s absence from all the spin rooms was a policy adopted by the McCain campaign. Is her departure from the ticket just a matter of time? Twenty-four hours before Thursday’s scheduled vice-presidential debate against Joe Biden could be the “drop dead” deadline.

Based on what we have seen in her previous non-scripted encounters, that debate would not be pretty. It could, in fact, be downright painful. 

Hockey Moms everywhere, unite!  One of your own is being exploited and humiliated for her beauty and spunk. Take a look at the exchange between Jack Cafferty and Wolf Blitzer on CNN, a network usually friendly to McCain.

Former AIPAC staffer Blitzer is taken aback by Cafferty’s anger at a Palin appearance on CBS News: “If Sarah Palin Being One Heartbeat Away ‘Doesn’t Scare The Hell Out Of You, It Should'”.   Blitzer tries to soften the blow with no success. You can almost see him wince at what he was hearing over his headpiece from his producer. 

Kathleen Parker, a columnist so conservative that she is now a regular op ed Chicago Tribune contributor, wants Palin off the ticket, NOW.  When conservative women with media platforms are against her, surely Sarah Palin must realize McCain will have to send her back to Juneau for more minor league experience.

Bill Clinton must not be watching the news.  Even after the ABC “Charley” interviews, and the disaster with Couric, ole Bill is still out there praising both Sarah and John, like some old TV critic whose taste for quality has been dulled after too long a time in the public spotlight.  Sarah, pay no attention to what Clinton says. You have a future in politics.  But this is not your time.

As for the debate itself, of course McCain showed up.  Was there ever any doubt?  This was Mississippi, a McCain red state where Haley Barbour is governor. Ole Miss had already spent $5 million to host this debate. The campus was alive with excitement. This was Mississippi’s chance to show the nation it was no longer the Ole Miss of its racist past.

If the debate had been in Chicago, Los Angeles or New York City, all hard core blue states?  Much easier for McCain to have kept his straight talking word: No bailout agreement, no debate. But five mil already spent in Mississippi?  This was a no-brainer for McCain.

Across the media spectrum, candidate advocates declared either McCain or Obama the winner.  Polls appear to favor Obama, if for no other reason than the fact that he gave every impression of knowing as much about foreign policy as the longer serving McCain. 

As for  body language, always a good topic for post debate analysis, Obama won big time.  McCain refused to look at Obama.  He gave off signs of anger and disdain for his opponent. One observor compared him to a “troll”. You remember, the grumpy fellow beneath the bridge.

McCain repeated, “Obama does not understand. . .” often enough to satisfy  his base. But Obama’s answers suggested he did understand both the complexity of foreign policy and the economic meltdown. McCain appeared angry at having to share the stage with this clearly inferior. . .Democrat?

McCain’s folksy style, emotive in a Reaganist manner, worked, but only if  you liked him going in.  For the undecided, his love for veterans, while heart-felt, seemed shallow in the light of  his vote against the Iraqi veterans’ GI bill. McCain has still not learned how to use his age as experience and not as, well, old age. He recalled his 35 years of knowing Henry Kissinger, reminding viewers he has been at this business for a looong time. 

Obama was excessive in his repeated expressions of agreement with McCain, a tactic meant to show his desire to work with those with whom he disagrees. McCain calls this “working across the aisle”, a phrase common in the senate, but with much less resonance among voters.  

Obama allowed himself to be bogged down in an exchange over what exactly is meant when a leader says he or she is willing to “sit down with” an opponent. Preconditions?  Of course.  But listeners tune out.

An Obama ad was released Saturday morning with a debate clip on the contrast between Obama’s concern for the middle class and McCain’s apparent lack of interest (“middle class” was not mentioned by McCain during the 90 minute debate). The ad was produced for showing in target states. It is one of the best ads Obama has produced. If you live in a hard core red or blue state, or outside the US, you will see it only on You Tube.  

Obama slipped in his oft-repeated reference to the Beach Boys song which McCain sang in 2007, turning “Barbara Ann” into Bomb Iran. McCain ignored Obama’s dig. He had earlier explained his use of the song was intended as a joke to a group of veterans. Good try, but it was not a reassuring explanation to Iranians nor to US allies around the world. 

Worth remembering that Barbara Ann was a 1965 pop hit for the Beach Boys when McCain was a young Navy fighter pilot. Two years later his plane was shot down over Viet Nam. McCain spent the next five years in a prisoner of war camp, labeled the Hanoi Hilton. “Barbara Ann” may have been one of the songs he played over in his mind during those difficult years. 

Obama worked hard in the debate to link McCain to George Bush.  The current White House occupant is fading fast from public attention, and is not someone a Republican needs hung around his neck. Check the ads for your local Republican candidate for Congress.  Notice any reference to either the Republican party or Bush?

Bush does continue as fodder for comic commentators like Jon Stewart. This clip, comparing the Bush call to invade Iraq in 2003 with a very similar 2008 marching order to confront the financial crisis is on target. It is also quite funny. 

Coming up:  Thursday night debate between the vice presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin or Joe Lieberman or Mitt Romney.  Stay tuned.

                                                                                            AP Photo by Stephan Savola

By James M. Wall

When Richard Cohen writes a column under the heading, “The Ugly New McCain”, he makes a dramatic shift away from his previous attitude toward John McCain, a man he has long admired for his “service to a cause greater than oneself”. Cohen is the highly respected Washington Post columnist who freely admits “I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible.” 

It was not McCain’s accessibility that made him so attractive to Cohen. Rather, as Cohen wrote, it was the effect McCain had on his audiences, particularly young people. “He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity”.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not. . . . .

Recalling an earlier encounter with the McCain he once admired, Cohen recalls what he describes as an “extraordinary” moment following the 2000 South Carolina primary. McCain confessed he had lied when he supported the flying of the Confederate flag. McCain admitted he actually abhorred the current use of  a symbol so offensive to African Americans. He admitted he broke his promise to always tell the truth.

Cohen writes: “Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.”

The turning point for Cohen, which he terms “the precise moment of McCain’s abasement”, came when McCain walked onto the set of the daytime television show, The View, no doubt expecting a pleasant chat with a panel of women, including the program’s creator, Barbara Walters.

One of the show’s co-hosts, Joy Behar, criticized two ads the McCain campaign was running in targeted states.  One ad “deliberately mischaracterized” Obama’s reference to putting lipstick on a pig, a line many politicians, including John McCain, have used to describe policies of their political opponents.  The other ad “asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergarteners”.  Cohen describes what happened next:

“We know that those two ads are untrue,” Behar said. “They are lies.”

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like “Home Cooking” or “We Will Not Be Undersold.” Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation “I approve this message” was just boilerplate. But he didn’t.

“Actually, they are not lies,” he said.

Actually, they are.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains — his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that’s all — but just as honorably. No more, though.

While McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin was to Cohen,  “a form of personal treason,” many members of the conservative “elite” media, and most Republicans, moderate and conservative, rushed to embrace Sarah Palin, the candidate Richard Cohen describes as “shockingly unprepared to become president”/

George Will and Bill Kristol, two columnists who pride themselves on their intellectual acumen, provide McCain with respectable cover for his choce of Palin. Kristol, the neo-conservative columnist added to the New York Times’ oped stable for “balance”, believes that McCain’s choice of Palin fits nicely, and perhaps successfully, into the current American political climate: 

McCain didn’t just pick a politician who could appeal to Wal-Mart Moms. He picked a Wal-Mart Mom. Indeed, he picked someone who, in 1999, as Wasilla mayor, presided over a wedding of two Wal-Mart associates at the local Wal-Mart. “It was so sweet,” said Palin, according to The Anchorage Daily News. “It was so Wasilla.”  A Wasilla Wal-Mart Mom a heartbeat away? I suspect most voters will say, No problem. And some — perhaps a decisive number — will say, It’s about time.

It is also “about time” for George Will, the dean of the political right media, who appeared on ABC’s This Week program and defended Palin’s performance during her encounter with ABC’s Charles Gibson. Will, who is usually the first to pounce at the first sign of flawed knowledge, criticized the professorial manner Gibson used in asking Sarah Palin if she supported “the Bush doctrine”. Palin had hedged her answer, clearly unaware of the Bush Doctrine. 

Gibson finally described the doctrine to her.  Will apologized for her fumbling responses by saying he could not have answered that question himself.  A remarkable comment for the well-read Will, which suggests that either he has suffered a severe loss of memory or else, like McCain, he is willing to evade the truth to defend Palin.

Will knows better. He may have meant his faux ignorance to be a funny bit of self-denigration, but Will does not do funny very well. He has written supportive columns on the doctrine, and he most certainly has read the discussion of the evolving versions of the Bush doctrine from 1.0 to 5.0 in Jaob Weinberg’s book, The Bush Tragedy (Random House © 2008) excerpts of which appeared in Newsweek.  Weinberg writes:

. . . it was [Vice President Dick] Cheney who first started calling it the “Bush Doctrine” in public. In a November 2001 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cheney offered this definition: “We will hold those who harbor terrorists, those who provide sanctuary to terrorists, responsible for their acts.”

When “Professor” Gibson asked Palin about the Bush doctrine, he was not asking a “gotcha” question. He was merely repeating a question he had asked presidential candidates in their debates earlier in 2008. Perhaps Charlie, as Governor Palin likes to call him, had also read the Weinberg book, which had just been published. McCain, by the way, told Gibson he agreed with the doctrine;

Palin will face Joe Biden in a nationally televised vice-;presidential debate in St. Louis, October 8.  Palin will have to have her Cliff Note cheat sheets updated to include things like the Bush doctrine in all five of its versions.  She is a smart politician and no doubt a quick learner. She will need to be. The questions in St. Louis will come from  Gwen Ifill, the Moderator and Managing Editor of the PBS program, Washington Week,

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                                                                   Photo source: Mudflats.wordpress.com

By James M. Wall

It was a rainy afternoon.  I turned on the television news to track the hurricanes. On the way to a news channel I found a movie, Kate and Leopold.  There, on my screen, smiling at me, was Meg Ryan, standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, ready to jump through a time portal that will transport her to 1876 where she will marry a 19th century duke. 

On her way back to the 19th century, Meg Ryan, who plays Kate McKay, a mild mannered, but successful 21st century New York business executive, turns and looks, wistfully, at her brother, Charley. He tells her she must jump back to the 19th century. Her destiny awaits. Kate smiles, and says: “I’ll always love you, Charley.” Then she jumps. 

I had heard that voice before!  Then it hits me: “That’s our Sarah!”. Could our Sarah have been at the Mat Su theater in Wasilla, Alaska, one cold January, 2002 night, watching Kate and Leopold and hearing Meg say, “I’ll always love you, Charley”? Or, maybe like me, in an idle moment, she found Kate McKay on her television screen.  

Could it be that she learned to say “Charley”, over and over again, with that special feeling of intimacy, certainty and warmth, sitting in the dark at the Mat Su in Wasilla?   It is certainly within the range of possibility that when she sat down for her ABC interview with Charles Gibson, Sarah Palin remembered Meg Ryan telling her brother Charley she would always love him. 

Could it be that each time she said, “Charley”, she said to herself, “I’ll always love you,” and then added, out loud, in a firm voice, “Charley”.  Is such a thing improbable?  Not at all.  Fairy tales happen in the movies. Sometimes they happen in national politics.

We have entered the Twilight Zone. Sarah Palin has jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and she has taken us with her.  One day Sarah Palin was in her first term as governor of Alaska. She had been mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. She was a “hockey mom”, belonged to the PTA,  and is the mother of five children. She can shoot and field dress a moose. She is attractive, smart, tough and ready for whatever comes next. 

Suddenly, her world spins into a different realm of reality. Reality is shaken. The matrix has shifted. She gets a call from John McCain, a glamorous war hero running for president of the United States. Are you ready to jump into a new world, Sarah, the war hero asks her? Yes, she said, and promptly jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge.

 In her ABC interview, Charley began:

GIBSON: Governor, let me start by asking you a question that I asked John McCain about you, and it is really the central question. Can you look the country in the eye and say “I have the experience and I have the ability to be not just vice president, but perhaps president of the United States of America?”

PALIN: I do, Charlie, and on January 20, when John McCain and I are sworn in, if we are so privileged to be elected to serve this country, will be ready. I’m ready.

 GIBSON: And you didn’t say to yourself, “Am I experienced enough? Am I ready? Do I know enough about international affairs? Do I — will I feel comfortable enough on the national stage to do this?”

 PALIN: I didn’t hesitate, no. 

It is easy to think of Sarah Palin as a character in a movie,  a successful corporate executive picked by a 19th century duke to be his bride. So far, the story line is developing just the way Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protege, planned it. “Forget the critics, John. We are number one at the box office for the second straight weekend. We got a blockbuster on our hands.” 

Schmidt, as the master mind behind McCain’s slash and burn campaign of rumors and outright lies, knows the American public responds to success stories with happy endings.  Sarah Palin is on her way to winning the next big thing. 

Bob Herbert of the New York Times, is not pleased:

While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson. . .  and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail.

How is it that this woman could have been selected to be the vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket? How is it that so much of the mainstream media has dropped all pretense of seriousness to hop aboard the bandwagon and go along for the giddy ride?

For those who haven’t noticed, we’re electing a president and vice president, not selecting a winner on “American Idol.”

Ms. Palin may be a perfectly competent and reasonably intelligent woman (however troubling her views on evolution and global warming may be), but she is not ready to be vice president.

Leonard Doyle, of AlterNet.com, went to Alaska to check on Sarah Palin’s environmental record. He found that her record was even more “toxic” to the environment than that of George Bush:

. . .The woman who could soon be a 72-year-old’s heartbeat away from the United States presidency has an environmental policy so toxic it would make the incumbent, George Bush, blush. Mr McCain has stressed he is concerned about global warming and has come out against drilling in the Arctic reserve. But, in recent weeks, he has wobbled on the issue. And environmentalists are describing Mrs Palin, who denies climate change is man-made, as “either grossly misinformed or intentionally misleading.”

The polls suggest that Palin is deep into the affection of the public. Let the critics carp. Throw her into the ring with Joe Biden. He will find that by the time they meet in the vice presidential debate she will be even stronger. She is gaining her footing, rapidly.  When “Charley” tried to draw her into a religious discussion, prompted by remarks she made in church,  she did not blink. She followed the Schmidt script and hit Charley with some solid Abraham Lincoln theology. 

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.” Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don’t know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said — first, he suggested never presume to know what God’s will is, and I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words. But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that’s a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God’s side.

Sarah Palin’s quick rise to power distresses Frank Rich. In his column, “The Palin-What’shisname Ticket”, Rich writes: 

It’s an urgent matter, because if we’ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election.

No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory,” whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.

The Times’ Maureen Dowd went to Alaska to see for herself.  She, too, is not enouraged:

An Arctic blast of action has swept into the 2008 race, making thinking passé. We don’t really need to hurt our brains studying the world; we just need the world to know we’re capable of bringing a world of hurt to the world if the world continues to be hell-bent on misbehaving.

Two weeks after being thrown onto a national ticket, and moments after being speed-briefed by McCain foreign-policy advisers, our new Napoleon in bunny boots (not the Pamela Anderson kind, but the knock-offs of the U.S. Army Extreme Cold Weather Vapor Barrier Boots) is ready to face down the Russkies and start a land war over Georgia, and, holy cow, what business is it of ours if Israel attacks Iran?

What business, indeed.  Karl Rove and Steve Schmidt are not afraid of the raging pundits. They have their candidate. They, and millions of Americans, believe they have God on their side.

by James M. Wall

I have no friends who are radical Christian fundamentalists. Like fundamentalists of all religious traditions, they are intolerant of non believers and dangerous to the public well being. They do not seek my friendship; they seek my submission.

On the other hand,  some of my best friends are non-radical Christian fundamentalists. They are my friends because they are tolerant, loving and supportive of folks like me who hold religious beliefs they believe fall short of the True Faith. 

I envy my non-radical Christian fundamentalist friends for their certitude and their spiritual serenity. I don’t envy radical Christian fundamentalists; I fear them. They use the certitude of their belief to enforce their intolerance. Like fundamentalists in all religions, they want to control others through force.  I don’t want them as friends and I do not want them to gain power over me, my family, nor my nation.

Does John McCain know, or even care, that some fundamentalist Christians, like fundamentalists in other religions, sometimes morph over to the Dark Side.  Could this be true of Sarah Palin? Could she be a radical Christian fundamentalist? 

Not a single voter passed judgment on a woman who could become president should a 72-year-old president with a history of cancer, fail to survive his first term in office. In his campaign for president in 2000, John McCain called Christian fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance”. Did he measure Sarah Palin by the same standard? 

Is Pat Buchanan, long time conservative Catholic activist, journalist, and TV talk show fixture, excited by Paln’s race?  He sure is, enough to draw this typically overwrought us-against-them contrast between Palin and the Obamas for Human Events magazine:

. . .she is one of us — and he is one of them.

Barack and Michelle are affirmative action, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard Law. She is public schools and Idaho State. Barack was a Saul Alinsky social worker who rustled up food stamps. Sarah Palin kills her own food.

Michelle has a $300,000-a-year sinecure doing PR for a Chicago hospital. Todd Palin is a union steelworker who augments his income working vacations on the North Slope. Sarah has always been proud to be an American. Michelle was never proud of America — until Barack started winning.

Barack has zero experience as an executive. Sarah ran her own fishing fleet, was mayor for six years and runs the largest state in the union.

Post convention polls indicate that a surprising number of women voters are agreeing enough with Buchanan to  turn to the McCain-Palin ticket. Christian fundamentalists, long excluded from seats of power are overjoyed.

Have Clinton loyalists turned into a giant American Idol television audience that embraces another glass ceiling breaker because Sarah Palin is a “hockey mom” who runs over the big boys? Surely not all of them, but anecdotal evidence spreads that Sarah Palin is the flavor of the next two months for many women who rejoice to see one of their own shaking the fist that has field dressed a moose. 

Love at first sight is dangerous for the sanctity of marriage; it has even more serious consequences in the sanctity of the voting booth.   Last minute decisions in national politics are risky, especially so for a political unknown.  John McCain did not vet Sarah Palin.  Vetting takes time; it takes deep background research. Since John McCain did not vet Saray, the rest of us must do our own vetting. 

There is no better place to start this process than to pay attention to an authority on religious fundamentalism, Professor Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His September 9, Salon essay, What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick: A theocrat is a theocrat, whether Muslim or Christian, draws upon Cole’s extensive knowledge of Radical Islam to make a disturbing correlation between Palin’s Christian Fundamentalism and Radical Islamic Fundamentalism.

John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the “transcendent challenge” of the 21st century, “radical Islamic extremism,” contrasting it with “stability, tolerance and democracy.” But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers.

On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God’s will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.

In an article published in Time magazine (September 2, 2008), Nathan Thornburg reports on the influence of religion in Palin’s career:  

“We like to call this the Bible Belt of Alaska,” says Cheryl Metiva, head of the local chamber of commerce. Churches proliferate in Wasilla today, and among the largest and most influential is the Wasilla Bible Church, where the Palins worship.

At the 11:15 a.m. Sunday service, hundreds sit in folding chairs, listening to a 20-minute sermon about the Book of Malachi and singing along to alt-rock praise songs. The only sign of culture warring in the whole production is an insert in the day’s program advertising an upcoming Focus on the Family conference on homosexuality in Anchorage called Love Won Out. The group promises to teach attendees how to “respond to misinformation in our culture” and help them “overcome” homosexuality.

Juan Cole recalls that as mayor Palin asked the Wasilla librarian about banning books from the library which some of her constituents said contained “inappropriate language”.  Palin later tried, unsuccessfully, to fire the mayor. Cole notes however, that:

Book banning is common to fundamentalisms around the world, and the mind-set Palin displayed did not differ from that of the Hamas minister of education in the Palestinian government who banned a book of Palestinian folk tales for its sexually explicit language. 

Theocrats are believers who want a government run by religious convictions.  Professor Cole reminds us that all theocrats, Christian, Muslim or Jewish, “confuse God’s will with their own mortal policies”. And they can be very specific:

Just as Muslim fundamentalists believe that God has given them the vast oil and gas resources in their regions, so Palin asks church workers in Alaska to pray for a $30 billion pipeline in the state because “God’s will has to get done.” Likewise, Palin maintained that her task as governor would be impeded “if the people of Alaska’s heart isn’t right with God.” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei of Iran expresses much the same sentiment when he says “the only way to attain prosperity and progress is to rely on Islam.”

Not only does Palin not believe global warming is “man-made,” she favors massive new drilling to spew more carbon into the atmosphere. Both as a fatalist who has surrendered to God’s inscrutable will and as a politician from an oil-rich region, she thereby echoes Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has been found to have exercised inappropriate influence in watering down a report in 2007 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Neither Christians nor Muslims necessarily share the beliefs detailed above. Many believers in both traditions uphold freedom of speech and the press. Indeed, in a recent poll, over 90 percent of Egyptians and Iranians said that they would build freedom of expression into any constitution they designed. Many believers find ways of reconciling the scientific theory of evolution with faith in God, not finding it necessary to believe that the world was created suddenly only 6,000 ago. Some medieval Muslim thinkers asserted that the world had existed from eternity, and others spoke of cycles of hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Mystical Muslim poets spoke of humankind traversing the stages of mineral, plant and animal. Modern Islamic fundamentalists have attempted to narrow this great, diverse tradition.

The classical Islamic legal tradition generally permitted, while frowning on, contraception and abortion, and complete opposition to them is mostly a feature of modern fundamentalist thinking. 

Some of my Christian fundamentalist friends agree with Sarah Palin on the teaching of ceationism in the public schools.  I am happy to discuss with them the pros and cons of equal time on controversial topics in schools.  But I would not want them to implement their views into public policy. The issue here is not religious beliefs but radical versions of those beliefs.

I agree with Juan Cole that:

The classical Islamic legal tradition generally permitted, while frowning on, contraception and abortion, and complete opposition to them is mostly a feature of modern fundamentalist thinking. Many believers in both Islam and Christianity would see it as hubris to tie God to specific government policies or to a particular political party.

If you have friends who say they are not worried that about a McCain-Palin ticket forcing religious choices onto the public (think Roe v. Wade), I suggest you hand these final paragraphs of professor Coles’ essay to them:

McCain once excoriated the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his ilk as “agents of intolerance.” That he took such a position gave his opposition to similar intolerance in Islam credibility. In light of his more recent disgraceful kowtowing to the Christian right, McCain’s animus against fundamentalist Muslims no longer looks consistent. It looks bigoted and invidious.

You can’t say you are waging a war on religious extremism if you are trying to put a religious extremist a heartbeat away from the presidency.

 

by James M. Wall                                                                                                Getty Photo

There is still time for Paris Hilton to send this email to John McCain:

“Hey, white haired dude, you wanted a female VP?  Why not me, or maybe some woman you could say would be ready on Day One?”

If McCain wanted to shock the voters, he could have asked Hillary Clinton. She would have turned him down and then he could have chosen a veteran Republican senator like Texas’ Kate Bailey Hutchison.  So why does he turn to an unknown Republican woman named Sarah Palin with less than two years as governor of Alaska  (which puts her in command of the state’s National Guard, our front line against Russia, remember?). Oh, and she served one term as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, 

No offense intended to Alaska. I lived there for a year courtesy of the United States Air Force, (I have even stopped for gas in Wasilla on the way up the Alaska highway to Fairbanks.) I have family members who live there and love the state.  

They report that their governor is popular two years into her term, partly because she “stands up” to powerful oil barons and is highly critical of her own state party’s reputation for corruption, for which senior Senator Ted Stevens, now on trial in a federal court, is a poster boy.

Of course, to get elected, Palin did rely on an endorsement from Stevens with an ad that has quickly disappeared from her website. Fortunately, Talking Points Memo saved a copy of the ad.  There are other states with female politicians who are well liked and have been at the job for much longer than Palin. So why Palin?

It had nothing to do with winning Alaska’s three electoral votes. It had nothing to do with experience or having someone ready to take over from Day One should the 72-year-old president with a history of cancer not survive his first term. The first important decision McCain made was a shock to the Republican establishment which was gearing up to slam Obama’s lack of experiene.

Ever the maverick, McCain plowed ahead with a decision designed to soften the ticket’s image with a new fresh face, freeing his campaign’s darker forces to conduct the usual Republican smear campaign.

For reasons related to the media’s fondness for a pretty face, Sarah Palin will be a household name a lot faster than any of the male options McCain might have picked from what is admittedly a weak Republican minor league system. 

    Gearing up the McCain Smear Machine

The real John McCain is not interested in that system. He got where he is today not through the party but by performing as a genial maverick. McCain has been smeared in the past by the Bush machine. Now, like an abused child he is ready to be the abusive parent. Sarah Palin arrives, truly out of nowhere, just in time to provide the genial maverick with a charming, and it must be said, attractive female partner with a record so brief she could have been a What’s My Line? contestant.  

Before Palin was chosen, Joe Klein wrote a prescient Newsweek column that traces the symbiosis between the most recent Republican attack dog consultants, Lee Atwater (who orchestrated Bush One’s smear machine against Michael Dukakis) and his protege, Karl Rove (dirt-master for Bush Two, first against McCain and then John Kerry). Karl Rove is not officially on the 2008 McCain team but as The Command TOC reminds us, he remains near at hand.

John McCain seems too nice a guy to fall into the Bush-Atwater-Rove tradition. He long has been a media favorite. He is usually described as an amiable fellow. But as Joe Klein notes, “sarcasm comes naturally to the fighter jock”

He disdains all those–his colleagues in the Senate, his political opponents–who aren’t as courageous as he thinks he is. But McCain has proved a selective maverick, surrounded by special interest lobbyists who shape his foreign and fiscal policies. In fact, I suspect that this year’s McCain is closer to the real thing than the noble 2000 version. This one is congenitally dark, the opposite of Reagan–not confident enough in the substance of his ideas, especially on domestic policy, to run a campaign that features them. Instead, his natural sarcasm has enabled him to perfect the Bush way of politics. . . 

Was it that sarcastic nature that convinced McCain that the governor of Alaska, in office less than two years, and former mayor of Wasilla, was his best option as vice president?  Of course not, which places her in the same role as Clarence Thomas when Bush One called him the best qualified African American candidate for a Supreme Court judge. So why pick this nice (and yes, attractive) 44 year old governor with a very slim resume, to fill the number two slot? 

The answer is easy.  She was what Karl Rove needed as a soft front behind which he could operate his smear machine against Barack Obama. The former mayor of a suburb of Anchorage, Alaska (population around 6,000), is already being spun by the Republicans: She is pro life, belongs to the NRA, hunts and fishes for real, not just for political photos, belongs to a nondenominational evangelical church, i.e., not one of those liberal mainline denominational churches.  

 She eats mooseburgers, and is the mother of five, the oldest of whom will soon be deployed to Iraq. In 1984 she was runner-up in the Miss Alaska contest. A nice hockey mom like this would certainly have no part in smearing a political opponent.  Would she?

              The Headless McCain Smear

“The Headless McCain Smear”, a column Glenn Greenwald wrote for Salon on January 21, 2008, makes a convincing case that the McCain smears in the Republican primary in 2000 were never actually traced to Bush Two, in spite of the reality that Karl Rove’s fingerprints were obvious to anyone paying attention.

A couple of weeks ago, I began noticing in passing that John-McCain-loving journalists loved to highlight in the most melodramatic terms possible the horrendous, ugly, vicious “smear campaign” which victimized McCain in South Carolina in 2000. Yet as they harped on how terrible, mean-spirited and even overtly racist it all was, none of them ever said who was responsible for any of it.

In their narrative, McCain was the sympathetic victim — that was always clear — but every time they described it, they would strain to use the passive voice, so as to avoid any mention of who the culprit of the “smear campaign” actually was (as in: “In 2000, McCain was the target of an ugly smear campaign in South Carolina suggesting he had an out-of-wedlock black daughter and that he suffered from mental problems due to his POW years, etc.”). . . .

The reason for this gaping omission — search high and low and see if you can find any reference to the perpetrators of the Smear — seems rather clear. McCain only had one opponent back then — the Honorable, Ethical George W. Bush, who restored adult honor and integrity to the White House. And his campaign was run by Karl Rove, perhaps the only national political figure who can compete with McCain when it comes to the media’s swooning affection. Honorable and decent men like that can’t possibly have been involved in something so wretched.

Greenwald points to several examples of “the headless smear”, including this one from the New York Times, which describes the smear but makes no reference to the culprit mean enough to spread such lies. A headless smear is like a virgin birth; it has no father. The most effective smear arrives from nowhere; it has no source. And without a known source, the media agrees to go along.  Notice how the Times handled the story of a smear that has no parent:

In the 2000 South Carolina primary, one of the most notorious smear campaigns in recent American politics peddled distortions and lies about him, among them that Mr. McCain’s current wife, Cindy, was a drug addict and that the couple’s daughter Bridget, adopted from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh, was a black child Mr. McCain had fathered out of wedlock. (January 17, 2008).

McCain needs a cover for what he plans to do to Obama, not on policy issues, but on Bill Ayers, Jerimiah Wright, and some false dark hints of Islamic connections.   McCain knows the best smear is the smear that floats headlessly among voters more interested in American Idol and Dancing with the Stars than they are in politics.  And while he knows nothing about the internet, he does know the headless smear is what protects the candidate from looking mean and dirty.

            Rove Is Ready to Frighten Your Aunt Susie

Rove’s involvement in this decision emerged several days before the announcement when a report surfaced that Rove had told Lieberman to withdraw his name from consideration, a request Lieberman refused. Rove knows his public and he felt Palin could be the key to the Hillary voters, wounded women whose passion for their candidate had, in their judgment, been disdained by the media.  

Rove was also able to assure McCain that conservative talk radio, Fox News, CNN, and The Obama Nation crowd will circulate this year’s version of  Swift Boats and Willie Horton.

Chicago conservative radio talk show host Milt Rosenberg has already weighed in with two hours of conversation with Stanley Kurtz of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, promoting the story that Obama and Bill Ayers have been close buddies for decades.

Not true, but Kurtz got two hours on a major midwestern radio station to peddle the tale. Ayers and Obama served on a board together some years back. Ayers’ radical past is well behind him, and he now makes a significant contribution to education in the city. But from behind the scenes, with help from media outlets like Chicago’s WGN, the campaign will continue to make Ayers a negative character witness against Obama. 

So can we connect the smear campaigns of the McCain Rovian forces to McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate?  Absolutely and here’s how:  McCain really wanted Joe Lieberman, his close buddy. But the convention would have rejected a pro-choice selection. Nor would Lieberman have provided cover to the genial McCain; softness is not his strong suit, slickness is.

So why Palin?  The answer is Obama’s selection of Joe Biden, a proven campaigner, and an experienced foreign policy hand. The Biden selection took the experience card “off the table”. Even worse for the Democrats, it put Biden in a bind in confronting the uninformed nice lady from Wasilla.

McCain picked a female governor with limited governmental experience but one who is attractive, very pro life, a zealot for drilling, does not worry about polar ice disappearing, and does not endorse protection for the polar bears in her state. McCain picked her not to appease the Greens, but to win those Hillary voters who were more passionate for Hillary for gender reasons than they were on abortion. (Not all of them realize, or care about, the impact of a third Bush term on the Supreme Court)

Sarah Palin softens the McCain image. It may look like a foolish choice to the Democrats, but it could be a winning choice for John McCain, the candidate who has turned his campaign over to the same dark forces that smeared him in 2000.

His Rovian forces are now free to play the fear-mongering Bill Ayers-Reverend Wright smear card against Obama. Get ready for all those emails from your Aunt Susie warning you about the danger of putting a radical Black Muslim in the White House. Tell her that is a lie, that Obama admires Islam, but that he is an African American Christian, as are his wife and children.  But, just you wait, she will tell you McCain and that nice hockey mom would never tell lies.