Prometheus Unbound

In the below video interview with FOX News, McCain reveals that he met with Palin ONCE, on Thursday of this past week—and then offered her the VP job the next day, on Friday!

In other words, he barely knows her.

In total, McCain tells Fox News that his direct contact with Palin prior to this weekend has been (1) over breakfast at a Governor’s conference earlier in the year, (2) by phone ONE TIME, and (3) in a private meeting on the day before Friday, when he offered Palin the VP running mate job!

Three times.

That’s it.

Is that bizaare, or what?  

He then mischaracterizes Palin’s position on Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere” pork barrel federal project, claiming she opposed it.

This suggests that he doesn’t even have a nuanced understanding of her own position on the project—or worse, he knows what it is, and is lying about it.

In fact, Palin SUPPORTED the “bridge to nowhere” in her run for governor, and only reversed herself on the project AFTER she had become governor, and the project had become a national joke, and an embarrassment to Republicans.

In other words, one of the chief rationales for having her on the ticket (that she is a person who opposes federal spending consistently and on principle) proves FALSE, and his vetting of her proves to have been haphazard, last minute, and perfunctory, at best:  

Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, nicely sums up Sarah Palin’s troopergate scandal:

We rely on elected officials not to use the power of their office to pursue personal agendas or vendettas. It’s called an abuse of power. There is ample evidence that Palin used her power as governor to get her ex-brother-in-law fired. When his boss refused to fire him, she fired his boss. She first denied Monegan’s claims of pressure to fire Wooten and then had to amend her story when evidence proved otherwise. The available evidence now suggests that she 1) tried to have an ex-relative fired from his job for personal reasons, something that was clearly inappropriate, and perhaps illegal, though possibly understandable in human terms, 2) fired a state official for not himself acting inappropriately by firing the relative, 3) lied to the public about what happened and 4) continues to lie about what happened.

These are, to put it mildly, not the traits or temperament you want in someone who could hold the executive power of the federal government.

Here’s a link to Marshall’s full article: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/211769.php

And here’s a Youtube from Alaskan TV on the scandal. Did McCain even vet Palin at all?:

According to the Times of London (August 31, 2008), literary and cultural critic, and author of Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia, is impressed by McCain’s VP pick:

“We may be seeing the first woman president. As a Democrat, I am reeling,” said Camille Paglia, the cultural critic. “That was the best political speech I have ever seen delivered by an American woman politician. Palin is as tough as nails.”

I was far less impressed with Palin’s first national speech than Paglia was.

And though Paglia is a gifted cultural critic, when she makes predictions, her crystal ball is far from perfect. Earlier in the year, for example, she expressed, with a good deal of confidence, her belief that Romney had the presidency written all over him.

That, of course, didn’t quite work out.

But from a visual and stylistic vantage, Paglia’s initial impression—that Palin is a formidable politician—may prove accurate, but I think that (in this rare instance) substance is actually going to assert itself in the public consciousness as being more important than style.

And I think that Paglia’s opinion of Palin will steadily decline.

But I’ll certainly be interested to see what Paglia has to say about Palin as we go forward.

Here’s the link to the Times of London article that quotes Paglia: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4641030.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797093

The brazen insincerity of Cindy McCain’s response, the lack of adult seriousness, the wrecklessness, and the underlying contempt for the intelligence of voters that it represents, would be funny if this were a faux news clip from the ONION.

But it’s not.

It’s ABC News.

And it’s a serious question.

What knowledge or experience does Sarah Palin have with foreign affairs should your 72 year old husband be incapacitated or die while in office?:

And the plot thickens. Here’s Steve Doocy of FOX News shamelessly using the SAME cringe-inducing TALKING POINT. This would be funny if it wasn’t so serious:

The Washington’s Post’s Charles Krauthammer’s response to McCain’s Palin VP pick:

To gratuitously undercut the remarkably successful “Is he ready to lead” line of attack seems near suicidal.

Back in late October of 2006, during the Alaska governor’s race, in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News, Sarah Palin seems to have talked about the age of FOSSILS as an example of something that reasonable people might have different opinions about—and that might thus be talked about in the science classroom.

The Anchorage Daily News reported the following:

“It’s OK to let kids know that there are theories out there,” she [Palin] said in the interview. “They gain information just by being in a discussion.”

That was how she was brought up, she said. Her father was a public school science teacher.

“My dad did talk a lot about his theories of evolution,” she said. “He would show us fossils and say, ‘How old do you think these are?’ “

Asked for her personal views on evolution, Palin said, “I believe we have a creator.”

She would not say whether her belief also allowed her to accept the theory of evolution as fact.

“I’m not going to pretend I know how all this came to be,” she said. 

In her fossil example above, did Palin mean to imply that the ages that scientists generally attach to fossils are in dispute—and that we should teach different theories about the age of fossils in the public schools?

Does she think, for example, that it is reasonable to teach, in a public school science classroom, that there are theories out there that all the fossils we find in the earth were laid down by a single, great flood 10,000 years ago?

In other words, someone needs to ask Palin, not just whether she accepts the scientific consensus concerning evolution, but whether she accepts the scientific consensus concerning the age of the earth, and how fossils came to be deposited in the earth.

The question will tell us a great deal about her level of scientific literacy—and whether she would take sensible advice from scientific advisors (or even comprehend it).

The weak bench of Republican female politicians may prove to have been John McCain’s undoing.

At some point over the past week, McCain realized that there was not a single politically moderate female politician in the Republican party who also had substantial gravitas and foreign policy experience—AND who was acceptable to the James Dobson wing of his party.

Not a single one.

But the temptation to try to pick-off “Hillary voters” from Obama was too great—and McCain thus decided to choose from among the female options before him anyway.

The result?

Sarah Palin.

In other words, he ended up with a fundamentally unserious, far-right person, with zip foreign policy experience, apparently figuring that people wouldn’t notice that he is 72 years old and, if elected, had just put the country’s security at serious risk if he were to die in office.

Thus McCain may find himself dispatched into the political wilderness by the electorate for the sin of not putting the country’s best interest first.

An ironic, sad, and tragic fate for John McCain.

Suddenly, it’s Obama-Biden that looks like the mature, sober, grown-up ticket to ride.

For months McCain has been tauting his foreign policy sobriety and experience, parading around the Middle East with dour and seasoned daddy-figures like Joseph Lieberman and Lindsay Graham.

Obama responded by showing that he, too, is temperamentally serious. 

Obama set up a thoroughly grown-up and systematic vetting process for his VP selection, and landed upon a VP pick who will clearly help Obama think through every treacherous foreign and domestic policy thicket: Joe Biden.

From the vantage of keeping the country safe and sane over the next four years, Biden’s pick is nearly perfect, if not necessarily politically exciting.

It demonstrates Obama’s good judgment, fundamental reasonableness, and pragmatism, and recalls that famous quote of Emerson’s:

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and baffoons, but perceivers of the terrors of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

It seemed that both Obama and McCain were these kinds of American Emersonians, making it difficult to choose between them.

Then McCain chose Sarah Palin for VP.

Now the presidential race seems clarified, and not in McCain’s favor.

McCain, by picking Palin, gives one the impression that he is prepared, in the name of political expediency, to be wreckless with the country’s direction and security.

In other words, he now appears to be precisely the opposite of a sober Emersonian.

Thus Obama, by not selecting a woman for his own VP pick, appears to have left a bit of apparently low-lying fruit for McCain to be tempted with (“If I pick a woman now, the presidency will be mine!”).

Unfortunately, the Republican party’s pro-life female bench is so shallow, that he could not take from that fruit without selecting a fundamentally unserious person, and foreign policy lightweight, jeopardizing the country’s security.

He took it anyway.

And now McCain stands ready to be cast from the political Garden of Eden he once thought was rightfully his.

Under the headline “Choice Stuns State Politicians,” the Anchorage Daily News offers a disturbing report on the local Alaskan reaction to Sarah Palin’s recent elevation to the national stage as John McCain’s running mate. Below are the opening paragraphs of the article. (Note especially the astonishing quote from the Republican State Senate President Lyda Green, in which she states baldly, and in no uncertain terms, that Palin is not qualified to be a health crisis away from the presidency): 

John McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate stunned and divided Alaska political leaders on Friday. Supporters said she was a shrewd choice, but others argued Palin has no business being a heartbeat away from the presidency.

“I think it’s very easy to underestimate Sarah Palin,” said John Binkley, a former state legislator who lost to Palin in the 2006 Republican primary for governor.

Serving as small-town mayor of Wasilla was Palin’s main experience before running for governor. Binkley said he underestimated her guts and campaign skill.

“I think there will probably a tendency for the Democrats to do the same thing,” Binkley said. “They will assume that her lack of experience on the national stage will put her at a disadvantage, and I’m not certain that will matter.”

The reaction wasn’t so rosy elsewhere. State Senate President Lyda Green said she thought it was a joke when someone called her at 6 a.m. to give her the news.

“She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?” said Green, a Republican from Palin’s hometown of Wasilla. “Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?”

The article gets worse from there. It notes that John McCain does not even appear to have properly vetted Palin:

The early morning news of McCain’s pick sent jaws dropping throughout Alaska, with friends waking up friends with “Oh my God, have you heard?” phone calls.

State House Speaker John Harris, a Republican from Valdez, was astonished at the news. He didn’t want to get into the issue of her qualifications.

“She’s old enough,” Harris said. “She’s a U.S. citizen.”

Former House Speaker Gail Phillips, a Republican political leader who has clashed with Palin in the past, was shocked when she heard the news Friday morning with her husband, Walt.

“I said to Walt, ‘This can’t be happening, because his advance team didn’t come to Alaska to check her out,” Phillips said.

Phillips has been active in the Ted Stevens re-election steering committee and remains in close touch with Sen. Lisa Murkowski and other party leaders, and she said nobody had heard anything about McCain’s people doing research on his prospective running mate.

“We’re not a very big state. People I talk to would have heard something.”

The full, troubling article, can be read here: http://www.adn.com/news/politics/story/510249.html

John McCain’s VP pick may prove to be his presidential bid’s “fatal attraction,” for in this single decision, McCain does three things:

(1) perhaps ruinously damages his centrist brand, picking a far-right running mate;

(2) reminds people that he is OLD (because his running mate is grossly unqualified to take his place in the event that he dies in office, and this creates anxiety in the electorate about his age and health);

(3) makes people doubt McCain’s seriousness and ability to exercise sound, moderate judgement.

In short, Palin makes McCain appear immoderate in more ways than one.

If you’re an Obama fan, as I am, you can breath a sigh of relief. Obama might have been facing a moderate ticket with a pro-choice woman on it—which I think might have peeled away a lot of independent and centrist voters from Obama and to McCain.

This would have made Obama’s election much more difficult.

Instead, he’s now facing McCain-Palin—a ticket that makes Obama-Biden look like the safe, serious, centrist ticket for emotionally mature grown-ups.

Know hope.

Christopher Frilingos’s Spectacles of Empire: Monsters, Martyrs, and the Book of Revelation (University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) is a great academic text about the Book of Revelation, but it is also a fascinating uncovering of Roman cultural curiosities.

The author, for example, documents the importance of theatrical spectacle to imperial Rome, in which spectators gazed upon gladiator combats and the public display of monstrosities from other lands (such as exotic animals).

Spectacle thus functioned to (in the author’s words) “produce [sic] knowledge for all its participants” (p.35). He then shows how the Book of Revelation adopts the motifs of spectacle and monstrosity to Christian effect, setting the imperium of Rome up as the “Beast” that is at war with the “Lamb,” and in which saints and sinners function as spectators to this cosmic battle.

In reading this book, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Neitzsche’s reflections on Dionysian tragic theatre (in The Birth of Tragedy) and how he thought that tragic theatre enacted for the audience the duality of human existence (between the Apollonian and the Dionysian).

Especially interesting to me was the section on Roman ekphrasis (the art of detailed verbal description, usually of art) as part of the training of Roman rhetors. In other words, generating word-pictures for hearers functioned as an ancient technique in audience persuasion.

In short, Spectacles of Empire does a great job situating the Book of Revelation as both a cultural and rhetorical product of ancient Rome.

Here’s the link to the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Spectacles-Empire-Revelation-Divinations-Rereading/dp/0812238222/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220150222&sr=8-1

Answer: About 45,000.

Constructed in the 70s CE, the ancient elliptical amphitheatre was originally called the Amphitheatrum Flavium, and was the largest stadium in the Roman Empire.

The New Testament Book of Revelation, in its imagery and themes, was, in part, modeled on the grotesque spectacles of combat that took place in the Roman stadium, and in other stadiums like it throughout the empire.

See this quite extraordinary book at Amazon for more on the connection between the Book of Revelation and the Colosseum: http://www.amazon.com/Spectacles-Empire-Revelation-Divinations-Rereading/dp/0812238222/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220150222&sr=8-1

She’s a woman, like Hillary Clinton, but the comparison stops there.

Will moderate and liberal women drink McCain’s version of political near beer—Sarah Palin?

Will moderate and liberal women drink McCain’s version of political Diet Coke—Sarah Palin?

What was John McCain thinking?

Clearly, his advisors and pollsters told him, if he wanted a serious shot at being president, his VP pick had to excite:

• the Republican base (read fundamentalist Christians)
• and women who wanted Hillary for president

This meant that McCain was put in a “double-bind”—because these two constituencies, on many of the issues that matter to them, are mutually exclusive (anti-choice v. pro-choice, anti-gay rights v. pro-gay rights etc).

So he had to pick someone who was GENUINELY in one of the two camps, but who could maybe FAKE or pass for being someone in the other camp as well.

So he picked Sarah Palin—a real, live young earth creationist, anti-choice, Second Amendment, anti-environmentalist, anti-gay rural conservative.

And he decided to bank upon moderate and liberal women voters not noticing—and voting for the McCain-Palin ticket primarily because there is a woman on it!

In other words, if women voters aren’t paying close enough attention, and if a sufficient degree of obfuscating rhetorical pipe smoke can be cast into the air (think Fox News and talk radio), Senator McCain and his advisors hope confused women voters will carry him to victory.

How patronizing is that?

David Frum, after just one day of rather tepid “Palinmania,” questions McCain’s judgement:

The longer I think about it, the less well this selection sits with me. And I increasingly doubt that it will prove good politics. The Palin choice looks cynical. The wires are showing.

John McCain wanted a woman: good.

He wanted to keep conservatives and pro-lifers happy: naturally.

He wanted someone who looked young and dynamic: smart.

And he discovered that he could not reconcile all these imperatives with the stated goal of finding a running mate qualified to assume the duties of the presidency “on day one.”

Sarah Palin may well have concealed inner reservoirs of greatness. I hope so! But I’d guess that John McCain does not have a much better sense of who she is, what she believes, and the extent of her abilities than my enthusiastic friends over at the Corner. It’s a wild gamble, undertaken by our oldest ever first-time candidate for president in hopes of changing the board of this election campaign. Maybe it will work. But maybe (and at least as likely) it will reinforce a theme that I’d be pounding home if I were the Obama campaign: that it’s John McCain for all his white hair who represents the risky choice, while it is Barack Obama who offers cautious, steady, predictable governance.

Here’s I fear the worst harm that may be done by this selection. The McCain campaign’s slogan is “country first.” It’s a good slogan, and it aptly describes John McCain, one of the most self-sacrificing, gallant, and honorable men ever to seek the presidency.

But question: If it were your decision, and you were putting your country first, would you put an untested small-town mayor a heartbeat away from the presidency?

I think that most voters will come to a conclusion similar to Frum’s: McCain showed questionable judgment in selecting Sarah Palin for VP, and she is probably not ready to be anywhere near the presidency of the United States. 

Thus the pick will lead to less support for McCain on election day, not more.

Here’s the link to Frum’s diary on Palin: http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2VhOWE0N2VkOWI3MDdlODRlZWE4ODljMDc2NjliZDk=

According to Allison Mendell, an Alaskan attorney who has followed Sarah Palin’s career, McCain’s VP pick is not warm and cuddly with gays: 

“She spoke on radio programs all throughout the campaign saying, ‘I want a constitutional amendment, I think these things are only for a man and a woman.’ … I don’t think she’s ever said a friendly word about gay people, that they ought to have health benefits like other people do or anything along those lines.”

The attorney is quoted in Gay City News, and the full article on Palin can be read here: http://www.gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20098390&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=6

It appears that John McCain’s VP pick, Sarah Palin, is a young earth creationist.

Back in late October of 2006, during the governor’s race, the Anchorage Daily News reported the following:

“It’s OK to let kids know that there are theories out there,” she [Palin] said in the interview. “They gain information just by being in a discussion.”

That was how she was brought up, she said. Her father was a public school science teacher.

“My dad did talk a lot about his theories of evolution,” she said. “He would show us fossils and say, ‘How old do you think these are?’ “

Asked for her personal views on evolution, Palin said, “I believe we have a creator.”

She would not say whether her belief also allowed her to accept the theory of evolution as fact.

“I’m not going to pretend I know how all this came to be,” she said. 

In her fossil example above, did Palin mean to imply that the ages that scientists generally attach to fossils are in dispute—and that we should teach different theories about the age of fossils in the public schools?

In other words, are we on the verge of bringing a scientific illiterate into the second highest office in the land—someone who thinks that there is a scientific controversy surrounding the age of fossils, and that maybe evolution never happened?

In the 21st century?

This is getting scary.

Here’s the link to the original Anchorage Daily News article: http://dwb.adn.com/news/politics/elections/story/8347904p-8243554c.html