“Until at which point in time we feel like the news media is going to treat her with some level of respect and deference, I think it would be foolhardy to put her out into that kind of environment.” — McCain campaign manager Rick Davis explaining why Sarah Palin has not been made available to answer reporters’ questions.
Critical inquiry is what any presidential or vice presidential candidate should expect in a representative democracy. Respect and deference are due a queen. If Sarah Palin claims to be ready to be our next President of the United States of America, then she shouldn’t demand “respect and deference;” she should respect the American people and defer to their right to ask would-be leaders questions. If on the other hand Sarah Palin plans to be our new Queen of America, then we are not amused.
Sarah Palin says war is God’s will.
I don’t know if there is a God or not,
But I know that this is not my will.
I know that war is not my will.
Sarah Palin says she speaks for God.
But she only speaks for her own good.
Sarah Palin will bring us all to war.
Sarah Palin? Not In My Name.
You want to see what God’s will is?
Take a look then at what goes on in Palin’s war.
This is what Sarah Palin says God wills.
This is Sarah Palin’s God swill.
Let’s say you’re a twelve year old kid who’s been raped and impregnated by your uncle or your grandfather or your father. Should you have to bring the resulting fetus to term and become a 12-to-13-year-old mother? Or should you have the legal right to choose to abort the fetus, which at 9 weeks weighs a total of 2 grams?
Sarah Palin says tough luck, kiddo. So you’re 12 years old. So you’ve been raped. So you’re a victim of incest. You’ve got a 2 gram fetus inside you and Sarah Palin says if she were in charge you’d have to keep it.
Libby Casey: Suppose Senator John Doe puts forth a constitutional amendment that would outlaw abortion even in cases of rape or incest, and he asked you to attend the announcement and support him in that. Would you do it?
Sarah Palin: You’re, you’re asking if… in front of me were legislation that I would be asked to sign?
Libby Casey: No, if he was going to put forth a constitutional amendment, and he just wanted your support, you know, as a party member, as the leader of the state.
Sarah Palin: Um, I would. I would. And it’s no secret that I’m pro-life and I don’t hide that and nor am I ashamed of that but I am pro-life and yes, a, a proposal like that, I would stand by it.
Christopher Clark: Ms. Palin, if I may interject here, we know that you’re pro-life, but there are certain different shades of gray of pro-life. If a women were, say, uh, raped and got pregnant because of the rape, would that be an instance in which you would allow her to have an abortion?
Sarah Palin: Well, I don’t think it would be up to me individually as an individual, but…
Christopher Clark: Would it be against the law?
Sarah Palin: In the case of the life of the mother being in jeopardy, I think there, that is the acceptable exception and I think I’ve gone on record on that.
In the same debate, Sarah Palin reflected on abortion for her personally or for her family, and said it would be for her personally a “very private matter” in which “I would choose”:
Sarah Palin: Y’know, with my respect for the sanctity of life and my belief in the potential of life I know that this aspect of the abortion issue is very sensitive, and, you know, is a very private matter also. But personally, I would choose life.
Christopher Clark: Let me ask a question that was raised by a member of the audience on this issue. Let’s say your daughter was pregnant or your son was involved in a pregnancy. I mean, it was before marriage or anything like that. What would your reaction be, your reaction and your advice to him or her?
Sarah Palin: Um, again, I would choose life and certainly I’m quite confident that you’re going to be asking my opponents those same scenarios.
Christopher Clark: I will. But if your daughter had been raped, would that be something you would feel would be…
Sarah Palin: Again, I would choose life.
Did you get that? Sarah Palin would make choices for her or for her daughter, and they would be a “very private matter,” but she would take away the ability of every parent or child around the country to make choices in the matter. Above them, she would place her own Writ controlling every woman’s and every child’s body from the Oval Office in Washington, DC.
Lest you think Sarah Palin was just having a hypothetical lapse right there, consider her written response to the 2006 Eagle Forum Questionnaire:
Question: Complete the sentence by checking the applicable phrases (you can check more than one).
Abortion should be:
Banned throughout entire pregnancy.
Legal to save the life of the mother.
Legal in case of rape and incest.
Legal if the baby is handicapped.
Legal if the baby has a genetic defect.
Legal in the first trimester.
Legal in the second trimester.
Legal in the third trimester.
Other:__________________
Sarah Palin: I am pro-life. With the exception of a doctor’s determination that the mother’s life would end if the pregnancy continued. I believe that no matter what mistakes we make as a society, we cannot condone ending an innocent’s life.
Are you a 12 year old victim of rape and incest, a 7th grader who has been forcibly impregnated by her own relatives? Well, tough. If Sarah Palin’s in charge of the country, you won’t get to control what happens to your body. If Sarah Palin’s in charge of the country, Sarah Palin will control what happens to your body.
Did I mention that Sarah Palin is running to be in charge of the country?
The more American voters find out about Sarah Palin, the less comfortable they are with the idea that she could, in the case of an elderly McCain’s illness or death, become President of the United States in as little as five months from now.
The Militant Moderate writes: “I want to vote for McCain, but he is working hard to convince me otherwise. The nomination of Sarah Palin is only the latest, most egregious, example.”
The McCain campaign says that Sarah Palin is not ready to hold a press conference or to be interviewed by journalists. The mystery on the minds of voters is how Palin could possibly be ready to succeed John McCain as President of the United States if she can’t even answer a reporter’s questions.
If the McCain-Palin campaign won’t give the Press the chance to find out more about Sarah Palin directly, then it’s up to the Press, and to the rest of us, to find out what we can on our own. A good place to start is the sixty six page summary of Sarah Palin’s time as mayor of Wasilla, created by Democrats in 2006. The summary is written by Democrats, but the information is from state and local newspapers and the public record.
Read. Inform yourself.
Then call the McCain-Palin press office at 703-650-5550 and tell them you expect Sarah Palin to start answering reporters’ unscripted questions today. Call the Washington Post ombudsman at 202-334-7582 too, and get ask the D.C. paper to put the pressure on McCain as well.
Last month I wrote about Random House’s craven decision to revoke its publication of the historical romance The Jewel of Medina on the grounds that some unknown terrorist somewhere might bomb someone after reading it and getting hypothetically homicidally upset. The new Random House rule: If It Might Miff a Muslim, Muffle it. Oddly enough, Random House proudly carries a number of titles that harshly critique Christianity, and The Jewel of Medina doesn’t even try to act as a critique of Islam, but those are just tiny little facts hit by the wave of Random House’s peevish publishing panic.
Strangely enough, not one person at Beaufort Books or NPR has been killed by an Islamofascist. One clerk at Beaufort did get a hangnail after the announcement, though. Now more than ever, we must persevere. Cue the tinkly piano music of mourning.
“You ask me my feelings on an issue and I’ll give it to you straight up, because that’s the only way a voter knows where his employee stands. Elected officials are exactly that—employees.” — Sarah Palin, September 30 1992.
9 days since Sarah Palin was announced as VP pick. 0 press conferences with Sarah Palin answering reporters’ questions. 58 days left until the election.
Sarah Palin is still not ready.
Go ahead, steal that little web badge. I want you to. I want you to stick it up on your blog and remind everybody who visits that Sarah Palin is still not ready to answer the questions a Vice President should answer. Remind your visitors that, should John McCain kick the bucket, Sarah Palin is still not ready to answer the questions a President must answer.
To point this out in even larger style, steal a larger graphic:
Once you hyperlink to one of these graphics, it will automatically update on your web page every day that Sarah Palin refuses to stand before a room full of reporters and answer their questions.
Sarah Palin is running scared. Palin is terrified of reporters. She’s frightened by journalists. Sarah Palin lives in fear of appearing in public at an occasion that isn’t pre-scripted for her convenience.
Even the McCain campaign admits that Sarah Palin isn’t ready to talk to reporters yet.
Palin isn’t ready yet? It’s less than two months until Election Day! If Sarah Palin isn’t ready now, then she never will be.
If Sarah Palin isn’t ready to talk intelligently to reporters, then how will she ever speak intelligently with the leaders of foreign countries? That’s something that the Vice President has to do quite frequently.
And what if, as is quite likely, John McCain dies and leaves Sarah Palin President. How will Sarah Palin ever get ready for that?
For the McCain campaign to keep Sarah Palin hidden, running away from reporters who want to ask her important questions that the American people deserve to have answered is an insult. It’s an attempt to prevent American voters from finding out who Sarah Palin really is - without the mask of a script to make her look pretty and sound prepared.
If the McCain campaign is keeping Sarah shielded in this way, they must know something about her that they want to stay hidden. Maybe it’s that Sarah Palin has little knowledge or understanding of national and international issues. Maybe it’s that Sarah Palin can’t speak without being told what to say. Maybe it’s something else.
Whatever the reason for the McCain campaign to keep Sarah Palin protected from unscripted questions, we cannot sit and wait passively for the Republicans to tell the tales that want to be told. It’s time to wake up the Press, and shake the McCain campaign into letting us see who the real Sarah Palin is.
Action #1: Call the Press to action. Start with your own community’s newspaper, and express your displeasure that reporters are being given no access to Palin. Communicate your expectation that the Press will pressure the McCain campaign to provide unfiltered access for reporters to Palin - or stop reporting on Palin’s scripted publicity events.
Continue with the newspaper in our nation’s capitol, and call Deborah Howell, the Washington Post’s obmudsman, at 202-334-7582.
Action #2: Call the press office of the McCain campaign itself, at 703-650-5550, and tell the staff there that for Palin to be shielded from free questioning by journalists is an unacceptable insult to voters.
Last Sunday, I was in the audience with my audio recorder rolling as I heard Ohio State University Associate Registrar Jack Miner explain why he could no longer call himself a member of the Republican Party. This is what he said:
Most of you know me because of Ohio State, but a lot of you also know me because I’ve been a lifelong Republican. I’ve been pretty active over the years for the Republican Party, enough said. In this election, my family, my community and the nation can’t afford four more years of the same thing.
So this is the year that I know I’m heading out of the party and I’m supporting Obama. That’s become even more clear the past couple of days where I’m almost embarrassed to say I that used to be a Republican based on the ticket they’ve put together. So if you think about not just a heartbeat, but — not a strong heartbeat away from the presidency, we can’t afford to have someone who’s not strong in foreign relations, who’s not strong with domestic policy, and really has no experience. We can’t afford the Republicans.
Good Saturday morning reading comes from the band Portugal. The Man. One of the band’s members, John Baldwin Gourley, grew up in Wasilla, Alaska, also the home town of Sarah Palin.
The story boils down to a remembrance of moose hunting as a boy - a classic Alaskan experience with a twist. The moose lived to see another day. As the father told his son, they wouldn’t shoot and kill the moose “because we don’t need it.”
That idea is proposed as a core Alaskan ethic - take what you really need, but not more.
Sarah Palin’s ethic, shooting moose to show off for the cameras and hunting wolves from helicopters, chanting drill baby drill at the Republican National Convention, doesn’t fit with that ethic.
“We don’t need drilling in some of our most beautiful and untouched land,” says Gourley.
“We don’t need aerial hunting,” says Gourley.
“We don’t need book burners and censors,” says Gourley.
Thanks for showing us another view of life in Wasilla than the one offered by Sarah Palin, Mr. Gourley.
If like me you’ve been wondering where the Sarah Palin press conferences are, now we have our answer: the Sarah Palin press conferences are nowhere. The Sarah Palin press conferences are not happening. Journalistic interviews with Sarah Palin are not happening either. They will not be happening for the foreseeable future, either.
A few days ago, I placed the following video online, so that people could see the bizarre ideas being promoted by Sarah Palin’s church in Wasilla. This is the church at which Palin gave a speech on June 8th this year, proclaiming that the fighting and killing of American soldiers in Iraq is a part of God’s will, and a fossil fuel pipeline in Alaska is too.
In response to the video a supporter of Sarah Palin wrote,
“Fuck you heathen, I bet you can see Hell creeping up on your life already, can’t you?”
Every time I see journalists refer to people like this as “values voters”, I feel the urge to vomit.
Senator Sam Brownback gave an exceptional example of the incoherence that results from the mixing of religion and politics. Giving a speech to warm up the crowd for John McCain, Brownback tried to reconcile the belief that God has given America a destiny with the political assertion that the fate of America depends upon who we elect as President this year. Brownback said,
“I believe in American exceptionalism, that this is a special land and that to whom much is given much is required. We are blessed to be a blessing, but for America to fulfill its God-given destiny, we need leaders to help take us there…. John McCain is one of those leaders.”
So, on the one hand, Senator Brownback claims that America is a special nation that has been chosen by the Christian God to lead the world. He says this destiny is “God-given”. That’s past tense, which means the deal is already sealed. The destiny of world leadership has been given to us already.
Well, if that’s really true, and not just a lot of pretty meaningless God-talk babble, then we don’t need to do anything. It’s destiny, and destiny cannot be changed. If destiny can be changed, after all, it’s not destiny, but mere possibility. So, Sam Brownback is asserting, through the power of his religious faith, that the success of the United States of America is all wrapped up. It’s for sure, and nothing can stop us.
That’s in accordance with the religious belief of American exceptionalism that Sam Brownback claims to believe in, but it seems that as he was writing his speech, it occurred to Brownback that his religious pronouncement was giving Republicans permission to sit at home and do nothing - not even vote. You see, if God had guaranteed American leadership of the world as destiny, then it would mean that it wouldn’t matter if John McCain were elected or not. Whomever the titular President of the United States would be, God would be the real one in charge of the USA. So, why bother campaigning for John McCain?
That’s where Sam Brownback’s 180 degree turn begins, with the nonsense phrase “We are blessed to be a blessing,” which doesn’t mean anything except to express Senator Brownback’s feeling that he really has no idea what he’s talking about.
Then, Senator Brownback gives the internally inconsistent declaration that if we are to fulfill our God-given destiny, we need leaders to take us there, and that John McCain is one of those leaders. The clear implication is that if we do not choose John McCain as our President, America will not achieve its destiny. So, says Brownback, vote McCain!
That’s nonsense, of course. First of all, Senator Brownback never explained how he could tell that it was John McCain, and not Barack Obama, who would lead America toward the destiny already given to us by God. Did God come down out of the heavens and tell Senator Brownback? Did the angels send a memo to Senator Brownback’s office, or maybe, did Senator Brownback just make it all up and just pretend that he knows what the destiny of America is?
That’s the trouble with destiny. You can’t really know if something is destiny before it happens, because, well, there’s still a chance that it won’t happen. Even after something happens, you don’t really know if it was destiny for it to happen, or if there could have been another outcome. You don’t know, because you haven’t had the chance to try out that alternate reality, and you never will get the chance.
But, in spite of all the reasons he can’t possibly really know what America’s destiny is, Senator Brownback says that there is a destiny for America, and that it’s for America to be successful, and that God has made it a sure thing as a gift to us all.
So why was it that religious Americans need to elect John McCain again? Oh, yeah. It was because God has given us a destiny, but the destiny won’t ever take place unless we ourselves work to make it happen. It’s a tricky kind of destiny, see, kind of like a matching funds donation drive from God.
Only, where are God’s matching funds in this deal? According to Sam Brownback, God has told him that America has been given the gift of a destiny of successful world leadership, only it won’t take place unless we do the work ourselves.
Well, that’s not really a gift, is it? I mean, if I tell my nephew that I’m giving him the gift of a wooden sword, but he won’t get it unless he goes out into the forest and finds a big branch, and then carves the sword, then I haven’t really given my nephew the sword, have I? No. All I’ve done is tell my nephew what to do. I’ve just been a big talker. Talk, talk, talk.
So, according to the second half of Sam Brownback’s statement, God is a lazy, good-for-nothing spirit who won’t actually follow through on his promises. So, why bother paying attention to what God wants? Really? What’s God going to do about it if we ignore him? Will he doom us to Hell? Well, if God’s doom is like his destiny, then it’s all just a bunch of empty promises he’ll eventually forget about.
Neither version of Sam Brownback’s idea of God’s destiny makes sense. It’s ridiculous to claim that it doesn’t matter what Americans do, because God has America’s future all pre-arranged. It is equally ridiculous to assert that God is a great divine being who claims to direct the course of American history, but then lets the American people actually make the choices.
The sensible alternative that Senator Brownback never seems to have considered is that there is no God, and no destiny, and that the future course of history is not at all predetermined, but is created by our actions in the present. It’s a model of reality that gets rid of all the outrageous logical contradictions of Sam Brownback’s beliefs.
Unfortunately, the no-God model is not popular with voters. Apparently, the American people get rather nervous when they’re told that the future of their nation depends upon their choices today. They’d rather have a destiny that doesn’t make sense than a responsibility that does.
What’s most salient in the liberal zeitgeist? To get an idea, take a look at these, our top five selling bumper stickers from September 1 to September 5, 2008:
This week, opposition to Sarah Palin and John McCain tops support for Barack Obama. And some Alaskan governor-type politicians apparently still need to learn their lesson: never mess with a librarian.
Our newest book set:
2008 Reasons to Elect a Progressive President, Volume 1:
Reasons 1-1034 on Community, Economy, Education, the Environment and Freedom
2008 Reasons to Elect a Progressive President, Volume 2:
Reasons 1035-2008 on History, War and Peace, Democrats, Republicans, and Values
The 
Palin isn’t ready yet? It’s less than two months until Election Day! If Sarah Palin isn’t ready now, then she never will be.
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