JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED COMMENTS TO A COLUMN BY MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Margaret Wente is back with her favorite cheap-trick “analysis” of a serious matter.

She gets one person who has written a book or is known for his/her views on a topic and treats the person’s unproved notions as authoritative research, here that person is Jonathan Haidt.

She did the same thing in Iraq some years ago, quoting the infamously one-sided scholar on the Mideast, Bernard Lewis.

She did it in Vancouver where she was supposed to be studying free-injection sites and sourced a single prejudiced “authority.”

Her method represents hack journalism at its most developed. It just happens to be one of the basic techniques of propaganda too.

It’s all very much like the notorious legal practice of expert witnesses: a single expert witness is brought into the courtroom and paid for his/her one-sided opinion in hopes of influencing the jury when indeed the reality is that hundreds of experts disagree and only their full range of views offers the state of the truth.

Her “authority” in this case just doesn’t begin to get it right, offering a specious notion dressed up as an idea.

The political Right’s success anywhere is not owing to a better understanding of human nature. That’s actually rather a sophism and an indirect way of saying what would read as foolishness were it phrased more clearly: the Right is right.

The Right’s success is owing to a couple of extremely basic factors.

The first is money and lots of it.

We always and everywhere observe the Right pandering to special interests for campaign funds.

Money doesn’t buy a seat in a legislature, at least not yet, but it gives politicians the wherewithal to market and advertise and travel and put on an impressive show (everything from stages and backdrops and music and big flags and the ease to ship them around quickly like a travelling rock band) and just saturate the airwaves with their pancaked faces, fluffed hair, and bleached teeth.

And then there are constant polls to test the effect of statements day by day, sophisticated polls that are very costly to run.

We know marketing and advertising work: tens of billions are spent every year just to sell this versus that soda pop or burger or deodorant, and the companies spending those vast fortunes know they are not squandering their money.

It is no different in politics.

Human beings are highly susceptible to suggestions, only the suggestions must be cleverly phrased and they must be tailored to the needs of the individuals or groups – the job of marketing. It is very costly to create and tailor these suggestions across millions of people.

Genuine issues have long receded into obscurity in elections. Rather we get costly advertising pitches designed to just suggest a position on a matter of public importance, and we get swirling dust about non-issues like patriotism, religious views, families, or flags.

And just whom do you think it is that has the best access to money?

Second, there is what we might call the stupidity factor. It is an established fact that conservative views tend to be correlated with lower intelligence. Like all correlations in statistics this one does not hold in every individual case, but it very much does hold on average.

It doesn’t take a great effort to sell stupid people: just look at the millions who bought books and tickets supporting that total air-head, Sarah Palin.

When you direct your appeal to this group, it doesn’t take much imagination or hard work to come up with the right words.

Witness Rob Ford’s (relative) success: he’s actually convinced that if he asks people in general, people who have no idea of costs or finances or urban planning, about wanting subways, that he has earned a mandate to build them. But it is an illusion, one built on asking a simplistic question of lots of people with no background in the subject being asked. It much resembles asking a very young child whether she wants to be a princess or he a magician or armored knight.

Were the same question put, as it should be: here are the choices and briefly here are the costs and taxes and difficulties associated with each, the results would be quite different.

It is actually part of the approach of genuinely stupid politicians – the Sarah Palins, the Rob Fords, the George Bushes – to elicit public responses with the least possible thought or detail or accountability. That makes their jobs so much easier. And as any good advertising person knows, selling a complex idea is very difficult.
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“Liberal$ have lost the trust of Canadians. The need to learn some lessons about telling the truth from the Conservatives.”

A 39.6% majority represents lost trust in the other side? After all, this is not just about the Liberal Party, it is about liberal views.

This reader brings up, inadvertently, a major factor in our politics: our democratic system is broken.

There can be no mandate to do anything involving great change, change which affects everyone, when more than 60% of voters don’t want you in office.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Well said, Jeffery Simpson.

I believe there is an important contemporary political phenomenon with conservatives few have carefully observed.

As you say, fiscal conservatism has been dead for decades.

Both Reagan and Bush were big, big – truly reckless – spenders.

Yet they always were reluctant to pay the bills for their spending, typically cutting taxes again and again.

Not paying your bills is a fundamental violation of traditional conservative views and ethics, the one part of conservative philosophy I have always regarded well.

So what is a contemporary conservative?

A politician who tries to buy votes with tax cuts. Long ago, conservatives would say that liberal politician tried to buy votes with big, new programs. The conservatives finally hit upon a counter strategy of buying votes with tax cuts.

Tax cuts had the additional advantages of crippling the government’s ability to grow and creating a temporary Keynesian stimulus to the economy.

It has been an effective cheap trick, especially in the United States where hatred of the “fed’rah” government is bred in the bone.

And again, as you say, the one area where there are never cuts, only increases, is in so-called defense (so-called because just ask yourself, when was the last time the United States launched a war to defend itself?). This part of conservatism has applied primarily to the United States, a nation that regards itself as democratic yet continually behaves as a rather arrogant world imperial power.

Indeed, many Americans through a long and complex process of indoctrination Mussolini would have admired – in everything from marching bands, pledges, football homecomings, flags on porches, speeches, songs, social pressures of every description, plus the presence of the military everywhere including recruiters in every campus and high school – almost regard the very meaning of their country as a grotesquely-enlarged cartoon eagle, with its talons out, ready to strike.

And for so many young Americans of humble origin and limited prospects, the military is the key to a paid education, their part of the cheap political slogan, the “American Dream.” Plus a sense of worth, unavailable in McJobs, in a place which so exalts uniforms.

The only way you keep that whole thing rolling forward is with more spending and, truly, more wars – completely against the attitudes of most of the Founding Fathers who were generally traditional conservatives and afraid of standing armies.

So mindless support of the military-industrial complex – thank you, President Eisenhower, the last right-thinking Republican – has become a fundamental part of American conservatism.

Only recently, with the intense influence of the United States in Alberta and thereby on Stephen Harper do we see a bit of this poisonous philosophy coming to Canada.

Of course, the great game American conservatives have devised has within it the seeds of its own destruction.

Much as the former Soviet Union always contained the seeds of its own destruction – immense inefficiencies and endless spending on the unproductive military and security establishment.

The United States is unquestionably stuck on a downward path towards losing its imperial status with vast economic and fiscal inefficiencies and unbelievable spending on a military which never creates anything but waste and destruction.

While the United States remains frozen, much like the proverbial deer in the headlights, countries like China, India, Brazil, and even Russia are making genuine progress as efficient competitors on a grand scale.
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“And this is why there’s a Tea Party movement spreading across North America. Less taxes, less government spending.”

Sorry, the Tea Party is nothing but more of the same old, same old.

There is nothing new in it, whatsoever.

There have been many versions of the same thing, including the “contract with America” of that pudgy old phony, Newt Gingrich.

Just look at the party’s hooking up with Sarah Palin, truly a pitifully ignorant person who understands nothing of economics or, indeed, much of anything else.

The Party is a vehicle – paid for by some wealthy people – to harness the discontent of so very many Americans who really do not understand what has happened to them.

And so many Americans are virtually trained to look for quick and easy answers, trained to respond to celebrities like Palin, and trained not to question the fundamental assumptions of their society.

America’s middle class is in an unavoidable spiral of decline. Real wages have fallen for many years. Its efforts to maintain its situation – through two people working per family and moving out to distant suburbs for cheap land – is about played out.

The world of suburban sprawl and two large cars is coming to an end with oil prices which are only going to go up long-term. And America’s lack of competitiveness in many fields only grows vis-à-vis up-and-coming states. So does its debt of every description. And so do the foolish expenses of its military-security complex.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Question her tactics?

What about her intelligence, to say nothing of her sanity?
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“i’m curious to know how many of the commentin’ folk actually watched palins video from start to finish …. i’m gonna guess ….not many”

And why would they, Ian of Chicago?

We have been exposed to Sarah Palin excessively over the last couple of years.

There is simply nothing she could say on any subject worth reading or hearing.

The woman is poorly educated and marginally retarded.

And her low effective intelligence is dangerously combined with an ambition she doesn’t even understand herself.

Why keep putting yourself forward when you’ve so miserably failed at everything you’ve ever tried?

Everything, that is, with the exception of making millions of dollars from those who have more money than they know what to do with, buying tickets to rubber-chicken dinners.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

There is nothing new in learning anything which confirms that Tom Flanagan is a nasty piece of work.

The man is pure, unadulterated American Right-Wing, a thrust-the-imperial-flag-into-the-chests-of-those-working-against-America’s-sacred-interests man, without a trace of decent traditional conservative.

He literally represents in Canada everything you find in that ugly mob which includes Dick “kill the turbanhead scum” Cheney, Tom “the money launderer” DeLay, Sarah “the idiot witth super-sized glands” Palin, Newt “I divorced my wife dying of cancer” Gingrich, and all the other charming Washington folks who work tirelessly for war and imperial interests. The influence and the money for promoting Right-Wing values come up alongside the same pipelines which carry Alberta’s crude and natural gas South.

I have never understood why the Globe gives him column-inches periodically, other than the well-know fact that he has been adviser to Harper, truly the most divisive politician in living memory and a man who already has succeeded in corroding away like spilled battery acid a great deal of Canada’s past wonderful international reputation.

Flanagan’s columns have never demonstrated anything beyond the academic quality or interest of just another second-rate social scientist. He is in academic terms a truly undistinguished thinker.

But there is nothing second rate or undistinguished about his visceral instincts for plotting against and trying to destroy traditional Canadian values. The man is an instinctive predator, a perfect hunting-mate for Harper.

I note the comment that Flanagan’s comment about killing Assange was made in the form of a joke, but then only rather sick people make such jokes or laugh at them.

Shouldn’t people who say such things be treated as terrorists, or at least as people having made a criminal threat?

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

What you are really asking here is: how stupid are American voters?

The very fact that Palin can enjoy a fair bit of popularity is rather an indictment of American democracy. The woman is plainly stupid. She’s proven it dozens of times.

Of course, money plays just a huge role in her promotion, as it does in all American politics now, America being in many ways pretty close to a plutocracy.

All Palin has done, since quitting her fairly humble job as governor of a state with about the population of Cleveland half-way through its term, is collect millions of dollars for cheerleading. Her words never go beyond clichés, slogans, and the odd ghost-written joke.

You might dismiss her as the comic relief on the political rubber-chicken circuit, but the phenomenon truly is more serious than that.

She is being pushed from behind the scenes into being a presidential candidate.

Had she an ounce of sense, she’d know she is completely unqualified for high office, but she is as ambitious and egotistical as she is stupid, a dangerous combination indeed.

For the powers that be – the big-money and establishment people behind her – her kind of candidate, gullible and easily manipulated while keeping the public stirred up with empty slogans and dumb rhetoric, is desirable.

Bush was her forerunner, a remarkably mediocre man who let the Cheneys and Rumsfelds actually run things without being elected.

It is a dangerous new development in an American society whose democratic credentials are badly worn.

The world’s only hope is that this woman is so overwhelmingly stupid she will not succeed beyond collecting millions from a minority of people who have more money than they know what to do with.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

A truly frightening prospect.

She would be a repeat of George Bush, perhaps worse, possessing even a lower-intelligence brain and a far bigger mouth.

Palin couldn’t even manage to finish her term in one of the least demanding executive jobs in America, governor of Alaska, a place with the total population of a middle-sized town.

But Americans have become such suckers for publicity and advertising and cheap (ghost-written) slogans, being inundated with these things, a good number of them believe this mediocrity is qualified for one of the world’s biggest jobs?

Her stunning ignorance on almost any subject that matters was on display for all to see during that farce of a campaign with John McCain.

Her intelligence and application are documented in her academic career: she took six years at five different institutions to get a BA in the soft and easy subject of communications. The last institution likely granted it partly as an act of mercy.

Her petty tyrant temperament also have been put on display numerous times. There was her abuse of authority in Alaska trying to get a police official fired whom she happened not to like. Then there was her pressuring a young man to marry her pathetic daughter, dragging him around like a trophy on display.

There is a whole list of her public statements which would be embarrassing to any thoughtful person.

Since leaving her job in mid-stream, she has done nothing but appear for high fees, mouthing the inanities of a front organization like the Tea Party. She is just one more shabby opportunist serving the interests of powers she does not even understand.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

EXPANDED VERSION OF POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I just want to know what else has Obama done since day one other than compromise?

All of his policies for two years have been compromises, some quite shabby ones in my view, notably his expanding the war in Afghanistan, his health-care monstrosity, and his surrender to Israel on his early demand for genuine peace efforts.

The truth is that this election is one more demonstration that Americans simply cannot govern themselves rationally. Indeed, it provides evidence that American democracy should be on the list of endangered species. It was a huge bought-and-paid-for operation, costing billions, leaving contributors privately glowing and chuckling about their success in getting what they wanted while leaving ordinary people thinking they have actually done something for themselves.

Much of the American electorate is gullible and poorly informed with no critical press left, and they respond to empty slogans and deluges of meaningless advertising. They respond to people like the leader of the silly Tea Party or Sarah Palin who are no more informed or helpful than Jimmy Swaggert or Rex Humbard would be.

The Republican who will become Speaker of the House actually cried in front of the cameras, a pathetic performance. His crying wasn’t about anything of substance or compassion, it was about his achieving personal success. Jimmy Swaggert puts on the same act when he’s passing the collection plate. This is how a great country governs itself?

The Supreme Court gave a decision on campaign funding that is genuinely dangerous, and this campaign shows just why. Ignorant rhetoric prevailed, and genuine public discontent was channeled into directions where it can not possibly shake the nation’s establishment.

I am disappointed in Obama, although I never expected huge changes, but I am even more disappointed in America falling for tired rhetoric and giving no clear thought to the future.

Sarah Palin, the Tea Party – it’s all been done before. They represent nothing but a series of big feel-good meeting by political evangelists moving their tent crusades across the countryside, themselves paid handsomely for their efforts, the whole effort generously paid for by interests whose objectives they do not even understand.

How many times in my lifetime have I heard the ridiculous pseudo-radical expression “We’re taking back the country!” rehashed? Well, in this election, it was the forces of wealth and militarism who took the country back from the threat of widespread popular discontent.

Of course, the taxes needed in America are now out of the question. Taxes are un-American, even when you are literally swimming in debt.

Never mind buckling down to hard work and sacrifice. Never mind recognizing the needs of the future. “You can have it all, and have it now because you are an American!” is the message embraced.

Stupid, surely, and on a grand scale.
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“The People of America are now back in control of their Congress, it is no longer controlled by special interest groups with hidden agendas.

It was funny watching the Dictator being humbled by the People. Obama will learn he has no power at all. It was a great day when FREEDOM came.

I wonder how the turn out was . I bet it was way over 90% of US voters!”

That is an unbelievably uninformed comment, but it does nicely demonstrate what the election represents: slogans with no content and complete lack of genuine information.

Actually not only was the turnout not high, it is a different pool of people to those who vote in presidential elections, as it always is for mid-terms.

The Dictator?

Well, using that term is pretty much a confession by the writer to an adolescent mentality or just plain paranoia.

By the way, the good old American people lost control of their Congress ages ago to the moneyed lot who pay the campaign bills.

One fact is certain, this was the most expensive election ever done.

Corporate and special interest money poured into this election as never before thanks to an idiotic, anti-democratic ruling by the Supreme Court about campaign funding.

The moron Tea Party itself was funded by the billionaire Koch brothers. It is anything but a grassroots movement.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN ARTICLE BY TOBY HARNDEN IN THE TELEGRAPH

There are two basic kinds of stupidity, Mr Harnden.

There is the original sense of the word, meaning a lack of intelligence.

There is no reason to suppose that the frequency distribution of IQs in America is much different to that anywhere else.

So, in that sense, yes, Americans are not stupid.

But the word has at least one other basic meaning, and that pertains to the holding of beliefs or views which appear to thoughtful people to have been devised by those who are stupid because their full implications are destructive.

America, having spent countless billions of dollars on two pointless wars and having caused the world financial crunch through a lack of any financial discipline in their laws, the last a reflection of the “I want it all and I want it now” attitude which dominates the society, is, very much, in this second sense characterized fairly as stupid.

Millions of lives disrupted all over the Western world because Americans insisted on buying their three-car garage homes with no down payments and with the legal ability to walk away from the mortgage when the price fell after purchase.

An entire generation of people in Iraq having their lives ruined with no jobs and even still many with no clean water or dependable electricity. A million dead, two or three million refugees, and countless cripples – all to no good purpose? Now that must be regarded as extremely stupid.

And how will America pay for a great deal of this destruction and havoc? Certainly not by reaching into its pockets for additional taxes.

My God, taxes are un-American. No, America will exploit its unique position as having the world’s main reserve currency. It will inflate and default on its obligations to billions of people, just as it did after the equally pointless war in Vietnam, and just as it did in the financial crisis.

Now a man of extremely mediocre intelligence was responsible for a great deal of this, and today we have a woman, not even of mediocre intelligence, barking at podiums, being paid millions, and being talked about as a candidate for the presidency.

That surely reflects a kind of profound stupidity.

I am disappointed in Obama, although I never expected huge changes, but I am even more disappointed in America falling for the same tired rhetoric and giving no clear thought to the future.

Sarah Palin, the Tea Party – it’s all been done before. Its nothing but a big feel-good meeting by political evangelists moving their tent crusades across the countryside.

Never mind, buckling down to hard work and sacrifice. Never mind recognizing the needs of the future. “You can have it all, and have it now!” is the message embraced.

Stupid, surely, and on a grand scale.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

My, those are inspiring examples.

Condi Rice? Compulsive Fifth Avenue shoe-buyer and mass-murderer?

Hillary Clinton? A woman who swallowed Bill’s crap for decades and lied for him in public, over and over?

And who now defends the indefensible, over and over, forgetting every decent spark she may have had forty years ago?

Oh, the list of outstanding American women in politics is breathtaking.

Sarah Palin, flop as governor of a tiny state and someone who took six years at five institutions to get a BA in a bird subject?

Elizabeth Dole whose biggest achievement in running for the Republican nomination seems to have been the way she stepped down from the platform at meetings, walking amongst the audience much like a salvation-tent preacher?

Oh, let’s not forget Madeleine Albright, that horrible windbag who defended America’s killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi children, over and over.

I do think, in view of the record, Madame Tussaud’s has a role here. Surely, this is a wax-works gallery of female political horrors America offers the world.

I’d love to see women take their rightful place in politics, as I’m sure they will, but America’s recent example is an inspiration to no one but those with a taste for the grotesque.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

The problem certainly is not the crib notes on Sarah Palin’s palm, although it makes a funny anecdote after her blubbering about teleprompters.

The problem is that Sarah Palin has absolutely nothing to say, with or without notes.

Almost every word that comes from her mouth is completely predictable. And all of it is as vacuous as the applause soundtrack from a 1950s television sitcom.

Organizations might just as well buy a DVD of her past appearances and play random selections.

Imagine giving this hare-brain a hundred thousand dollars to come and say nothing?

Ah, that’s America, land of opportunity.

And, of course, when dear Sarah bounces around and waves her hands like a Baptist preacher at a tent meeting, she sees nothing from the podium but real folks in the audience, not beltway insiders.

This, as she works tirelessly to become one of those very beltway insiders.

What a truly tiresome theme, a re-tread of Newt Gingrich and Lamar Alexander and Phil Gramm plus countless other past opportunists devoid of content.

How is it that America has an endless appetite for such regurgitated tripe?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHN IBBITSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

John Ibbitson,

You really do have it entirely wrong.

I’m surprised at how much so. Perhaps it’s your American-wannabe inner-self seeking expression?

There is nothing new, and certainly nothing genuinely anti-status quo, about the goofy Tea Party.

Good Lord, Sarah Palin – George Bush with a sex change – was there, and they were applauding that total airhead as she waved her arms around like a Baptist tent preacher.

And surely, you understand that there is nothing new about Palin except the color of her hair.

In fact, the Tea Party is the same tiresome bunch we’ve heard from dozens of times before in the U.S.

It’s a re-run of a re-run of a re-run there: back to political basics and origins.

It’s almost a hobby amongst the U.S. Right Wing, every once in while, we get a bunch of them with a new set of slogans.

This latest group of clowns reminds me of Lamar Alexander working desperately towards the Republican nomination in 2000, by going around in a red lumberjack shirt and offering the profound suggestion of a part-time government.

Likely it was a custom-made lumberjack shirt since good old Lamar is a multi-millionaire. Of course, in one sense, old Lamar was only talking about formalizing the de facto reality: America does have a part-time government if you count the time spent soliciting money.

Were you aware that one of their speakers at the convention also called for the re-establishment of literacy tests for voting? It’s the old code phrase for eliminating black votes.

Anti-status quo? Yes, if you count going backward a century as being anti-status quo.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY PAUL CELLUCCI IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The Tea Party is just one more in a long list of American right-wing political fads, just during my lifetime.

For some reason they always use words or names that are suggestive of revolution or revolt – words like manifesto.

I guess that serves to disguise the basically retrograde nature of their movement.

Of course, I recognize that America is an extremely conservative country.

A genuine liberal there is rather like a rose blooming on the desert.

But Americans are given to fads and impatience in all aspects of their lives – after all, that’s a good part of the reason for the financial crisis (‘I’ve got to have it all and have it now’).

The Tea Party, as with all of its predecessor fads and clubs and movements, will be forgotten in just a few years.

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Why on earth is the Globe publishing the comments of Paul Cellucci?

Cellucci surely qualifies as the most obnoxious, intefering-in-our-internal affairs ambassador of all time. A truly unpleasant man who loyally represented America’s first certified moron President’s interests.

As for Brown, he’s another empty shirt spouting synthetic slogans.

The Democrats’ candidate, Ms Coakley, proved a disaster.

In a six week campaign, Ms Coakley started by taking a week off around Christmas. Simply politically stupid.

She also did not use television to any extent. Again politically stupid.

And she made several blunders during that short time.

While I agree there is now impatience with Obama in America – after all, these are people ready to kill over a late pizza delivery – Obama would have had to be miracle worker to save her.

Sadly the voters had no third choice, because the empty shirt who won is no prize.

Here’s an example of Brown’s silly gibberish:

“I didn’t mind when President Obama came here and criticized me – that happens in campaigns. But when he criticized my truck, that’s where I draw the line.”

“I’m Scott Brown, I’m from Wrentham, I drive a truck, and I am nobody’s senator but yours. Thank you very much.”

Pure Sarah Palin. Pathetic pseudo-humility.

Oh, sure, “nobody’s Senator but yours.” Do Canadians realize that U.S. Senators spend on average two-thirds of their time soliciting money? That a big Senate race can cost $15 million for each candidate’s election? You don’t get that kind of money from “folks.”

Well, you do get pretty much the government you deserve.

Of course, the main trouble when America elects bad government is the rest of the world is made to suffer.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY REX MURPHY IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Connects?

She connects with a fair number of male couch beer-swillers who consider her a “hot babe.”

She connects with the gun nuts.

She connects with the trailer-park and fuzzy-dice set.

She connects with the lobotomy cases of the religious right.

She connects with all the xenophobes in America who have no use for “damned fureigners.”

God that’s a lot of people in America, and she is a very dangerous woman.

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Apart from Sarah Palin’s dozens of ridiculous errors and misstatements plus a demonstrated tendency towards abuse of power, two facts stand out like the great rocks of the Straits of Gibraltar for me.

One, Sarah took six years at five different colleges before she finally earned her BA in a bird subject like “communications.”

Two, the woman quit her elected job as governor of one of the least populated states in America, yet told us she was not a quitter.

The woman is simply a joke, but then so was Bush, and look what that moron gave the world.

America seems to have a boundless appetite for this kind of insipid daytime-talk show politics.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Newt Gingrich’s comments show how devoid of any content the American Right is.

Here is a woman who could not finish one term as governor of one of the smallest-population states in America, and yet she is spoken of in the same sentence with the presidency?

Palin’s real reason for quitting as governor may never be known, but the two most likely explanations are a scandal-prosecution suppressed by a secret promise to resign or her recognition she just could not handle the pressures of the job.

In either case, she is about as qualified to run for president as Bozo the Clown.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The latest word is that Palin resigned so abruptly owing to a new, yet-undisclosed scandal brewing.

It is said that an Alaskan building corporation called SBS was given the contract for building the arena in good old Wasilla, and in return it helped to build her rather impressive home.

A separate report indicates that the costly supplies were delivered from SBS while others actually built the home.

It is clear to anyone who has seem pictures of her home that it is beyond the means of this woman’s meager achievements and large family and the high costs of building in Alaska.

No one who is thinking clearly believes her bizarre act was a political strategy. It simply is not the way politics are done in the U.S.

Candidates running for nominations virtually always retain their existing offices until the last possible moment.

Palin likely reached a secret deal with a prosecutor behind the scenes. We may never learn the full truth.

But we know from other events that her ethical standards are extremely flexible. The case of her wildly spending two hundred thousand dollars of other peoples’ money during her campaign on designer clothes is the clearest example of many.

She was given an account for a modest topping up of her wardrobe, and promptly went on an insane buying spree buying stuff for her entire family.

McCain and establishment Republicans were outraged behind the scenes, but they managed to keep it reasonably quiet. She had to return the clothes and has no friends in that wealthy wing of the party.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“If I had to bet right now, I think we just saw the opening statement of the 2012 presidential race.”

Unbelievable, you quit your public post early, and that means you are running for president?

There must be something we do not know that has happened in her private or official life behind this.

It remains stunning that in such a powerful, rich country as the United States this woman would be taken seriously for even five minutes by any group larger than her immediate family.

Every time she opens her mouth a cliché falls out.

“It would be apathetic to just hunker down and go with the flow.”

Go with the flow? I think it’s called doing the job for which you were elected.

And her tiresome whimpering about “the real America.”

Haven’t we had enough of the “the real America,” from every huckster and professional rustic in the Republican Party for decades?

“A recent CNN poll had Ms. Palin running neck and neck with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.”

Good God, the late freak Michael Jackson’s name inserted into a poll in America would produce comparable results.

Besides, Mitt Romney is a stiff, cold, and unappealing man who spent twenty million dollars of his own money promoting himself and still failed.

“We are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction.”

Quoted from the lips of the very Douglas MacArthur who was ready to bomb China with nuclear weapons and whose drive to the border with China – despite many warnings – brought a million Chinese “volunteers” into the war.

Wasn’t eight years of the first certified moron president enough?

________________________________________

Phil Gramm and what his momma used to say about “getting’ down outta” the wagon to help push it?

Deadbeat Bush and his never having read the international section of the newspaper? Lamar Alexander and his rustic lumberjack campaign shirts (custom made)?

Nixon and his wife Pat’s “cloth Republican” coat? Privileged, spoiled flyboy McCain, son and grandson of admirals, and his regular guy look?

Dan Quayle and his “potatoe”?

Former Sen. Roman Hruska and his plea that members of the Supreme Court should reflect all qualities, including mediocrity?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

Could be, but I believe there is another explanation.

Alaska is a place heavily peopled with militia-types, backwoods throwbacks, and Aryan-nation types, much like Idaho.

Sarah Palin fits the profile of an ideal candidate there, utterly uninformed about the world at large yet ready to offer an opinion on any of it, being blithely unaware of how parochial her every sentence is. Such places very much want parochialism, male or female.

Her having Russia as “a neighbor,” with its assumption of knowing something about world affairs, pretty much sums up the situation.

Her equivalent as a male is more far common, places like Texas, Mississippi, or Oklahoma growing them almost like a toxic crop.