Matthews v. Palin, round 2: ‘nothing going on mentally’
Chris Matthews renewed his Sarah Palin fusilade last night, saying she “has nothing going on mentally” and calling her “dangerous.” Watch, as Mark Halperin is equally tough on her, though he hasn’t gotten the same amount of ink for it:
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Matthews’ case against Palin is that because she knows so little about so much, she is an “empty vessel, ready to be filled with aneoconservative ideology she doesn’t even understand,” a la Dan Quayle or George W. Bush (the latter of whom proved that you don’t have to be bright to become president.) That’s not such a far fetched case, including according to Ron Paul, who says the neocons have already infiltrated the tea party movement, of which Palin is the undeclared but clear leader. (She’s also the leading figure, besides Rush Limbaugh, in the Republican Party, something the party may not like, but it’s reality.) More on Sarah’s 2012 prospects (shudder…) here.
Tea parties turn on Ron Paul: is this the beginning of the end?
Allahpundit asks: if Ron Paul isn’t safe from the tea party movement, who is? And it’s a good question. The tea party movement began as a sort of Libertarian/conservative uprising, focused on shrinking government, ending bailouts and cutting taxes. It definitely had an element of Obama Derangement Syndrome grafted onto it, but in theory at least, it also was anti George W. Bush. Clearly it has morphed into something else — a confederation of people who reject the results of the 2008 election, mainly Palinites (the angry mobs who shouted “kill him!” and “off with his head!” at Palin’s ‘08 rallies look an awful lot like those making up the tea rallies these days…) George W. Bush defenders, neoconservatives (who really don’t seem to fit in, but whose beef with Paul is that he opposes foreign adventurism, a la Iraq) plus the well-documented fringe of racists, nativists, birthers and just plain angry white people. Throw in Tom Tancredo leading the lobster-gobbling, pinky in the air Nashville conventioneers and you get a strange gobbledygook of race baiting and snobs who can afford to pay $800 to hear Sarah Palin say what you can hear her say for free on Fox News, and what you’re left with is a very strange brew. Read more
If you read this to Glenn Beck, his head will explode
Salon.com posts a brilliant history of the Pledge of Allegiance by Michael Lind, which explains why it’s so darned un-American:
Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s. Francis Bellamy was a progressive Baptist minister and a Christian socialist who composed the pledge for the 400-year Columbus anniversary in 1892 and published it in a youth magazine. His cousin Edward Bellamy, a socialist from Massachusetts (Glenn Beck, are you taking notes?), was the author of the 1888 bestselling utopian novel “Looking Backward: 2007-1887,” which described a collectivist America in 2007 in which everyone is drafted in an “industrial army” and dines in public kitchens. (Instead of an industrial army, the United States in 2007 had a reserve army of the unemployed and working poor, and instead of public kitchens we had Starbucks.)
The Bellamys, like many at the time, were inspired by the integral nationalist and statist ideals that were percolating in Europe. From the 1890s until the 1940s, American schoolchildren often accompanied recitation of the pledge with “the Bellamy salute,” a stiff-armed salute of the ancient Roman kind that was indistinguishable from the later fascist and Nazi salutes. Heil Amerika! It was Franklin Roosevelt who suggested replacing the salute with a hand over the heart.
In the course of the 20th century, support for the pledge migrated from the collectivist left to the reactionary right. The original Bellamy pledge read: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” In 1923 WASP nativists prevailed in having “my flag” replaced by “the flag of the United States of America,” to make sure that young Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, among others, knew they weren’t pledging allegiance to the old country. In 1954, Congress inserted the words “under God,” following an influential sermon by a Protestant pastor who argued that the model for the United States in the Cold War should be ancient Sparta.
Could anything be more foreign to America’s enlightened 18th-century liberal and republican traditions than this toxic compound of collectivism, nativism, Spartan militarism and theocracy?
Actually, no. Read more
Chris Matthews vs. the Neocons, round two
In case you missed it, tonight, Chris Matthews went on night two of his tirade against neocons who are all for war, but not for fighting. Watch:
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In case you missed it: Ron Reagan Jr. (and Chris Matthews) vs. neocon Frank Gaffney
Fresh off his black tie fete for our four times draft deferred, hawkish former vice president, Dick Cheney, and his former deputy, the still-convicted Scooter Libby, (in which Dick Cheney accused the Obama administration of “dithering” on Afghanistan,) Frank Gaffney tried to give as good as he got on “Hardball” yesterday, even telling the son of the president Gaffney purportedly idolizes that Ron Reagan Jr’s father “would be ashamed” of him. But in this clip, watch as Chris Matthews serves him up, and Ron Reagan proves that he really is the son and namesake of America’s John Wayne president:
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Of course, behind the above thumping is the very sobering fact that Mr. Gaffney was among a coterie of neoconservatives who served George W. Bush that pre-cooked meal that was the Iraq war, costing more than 4,000 American servicemen and women their lives, not to mention hundreds of allied troops and countless thousands of Iraqis. Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, essentially silenced the neocons, most of whom worked for his administration in some capacity, mostly nestled within the Department of Defense, because they couldn’t stop themselves pushing for him to go to war — and that would be thermonuclear war — with the Soviet Union. Read more
If Pol Pot had a daughter…
… she would probably be a lot like Liz Cheney … On another note, our bridge trolly friend has launched a brand new think tank to try and keep her father’s torture and war machine alive (and to push for a brand new war in Iran.) Her partners in the new venture? Bill Kristol, right wing 9/11 widow Deborah Burlingame and a bunch of leftover advisers from the failed candidacy of John McCain. But why would anyone listen to a woman whose only claim to foreign policy expertise is that she happened to be born to the world’s toughest talking draft dodger, a man who has been wrong about literally everything he has said or predicted since reaching the age of majority, and the only 9/11 family member Glenn Beck doesn’t hate?
Liz says she wants to go back to the thumb screws and drills to the head policies that “kept us safe” under Bush and Cheney. Well … not to be mean, but I seem to recall that 9 months into the Bush-Cheney bad dream, we got attacked by al-Qaida, after Dick failed to do his job as head of Dubya’s terrorism task force, and Condi and George spent time hiking the Crawford trail instead of perusing the memo entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The United States…” kept us safe, you say? I say “not so much …”
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