Sunday Question for Conservatives

OK, a Palin question. My impression is that a lot of conservatives like Sarah Palin...but outside of a relatively small group of enthusiasts, most conservatives basically like her as a sidelines bomb-thrower, nothing more, and certainly not as a presidential candidate. Are you in that group? If so, what is it you like about her? Is it her willingness to hit hard? How she makes liberals react? Or do you respect her instincts (if not, perhaps, the depth of her knowledge) on policy? Something else?

(Yes, I'm using the term "bomb-thrower." No, I don't mean it literally. No, I don't think it's horrible for politicians to occasionally use rhetoric that has violent imagery, although I don't particularly like it when they go too that well too often.)

Palin's Constitution

Regardless of the importance of various small-bore controversies that get inflated by the need to fill cable net and talk show time during slow news months, it's still always a good thing for people to explain core Constitutional principles...or mistaken notions about them:

It's not surprising that Sarah Palin would come out in support of Dr. Laura Schlessinger's interpretation of the First Amendment as not guaranteeing freedom of speech, but rather freedom from criticism. Palin's expressed similar beliefs before, basically that the First Amendment only guarantees her and her political allies freedom of speech, while any criticism of her statements is an unconstitutional infringement on her right to say whatever she wants.

It goes without saying that this is painfully stupid...

That's Adam Serwer taking apart the Sage of Wasilla.  You are reading him, right?

Read Stuff, You Should

Got behind again, so I'm dumping lots of stuff here, as usual.  I don't really have a don't read...I'll agree with everyone that Maureen Dowd on Sunday wasn't at her best, but that's not much value added.  There was also a very weak NYT story and other coverage that you didn't need to read last week on the Dodd/Dorgan retirements (see for an explanation here and here), but again, if you didn't read it then, it's too late now, and vice versa (or something like that -- you know what I'm trying to say.  Sorry, but on to the good bits:

1. I haven't blogged about the Christmas bomber, but I have read lots of good items.  I'll start with two long but interesting pieces from political scientist Matthew Dickinson, who is expert in the presidency and bureaucracy.  I'm a huge fan of this sort of thing, from TPM: that's a good use of web-based journalism.  Here's Kevin Drum, reassessing what went wrong.  And you shouldn't miss this terrific piece by Robert Mackey.  Don't know if he's right or not, but it's a great story.

2.  No columnist is more fun to read than Michael Kinsley, still at the top of his game.

3.  No real need to the fancy furrin word, and I don't quite agree with everything he has to say here, but Julian Sanchez is well worth reading (part one, part two).  What I'll add is that you're rarely wrong if you bet on the candidate with the most resentment to capture the GOP presidential nomination.  Just think about the guy who captured that trophy three times.

4.  Again, not sure I agree completely, but Chris Bowers shows how to do a predictions piece.  He's right that the Tea Party crowd as such is going to be a minor footnote in history, not a major force.  On the other hand, people still talk about Ross Perot as if he was Very Important, so we may be stuck hearing about Tea Party types for a long time, regardless.

5.  I'll end with a couple of fun hit pieces: Chait on Tony Coelho, and Sullivan on the Sage of Wasilla.

Enjoy!

Malpractice

Marc Ambinder interviews Shushannah Walshe and Scott Conroy, who have a new Palin book coming out:

How thorough was her vetting, really? Could anyone have possibly given her a scrupulous enough vet? How much of a problem was it that the rest of the campaign had to struggle to figure out who she was along with the rest of us?

The vetting was clearly minimal at best. The McCain campaign's priority was secrecy, not thoroughness. Palin filled out a questionnaire, A.B. Culvahouse did a phone interview with her for a few hours, Steve Schmidt and Marc Salter spoke with her in person, and that was about it. Though they successfully pulled off the secret mission of plucking the sitting governor from Alaska unnoticed, the consequences of not thoroughly understanding their own candidate became clear almost immediately. It was major problem for the communications shop, since they were unable to handle media requests and answer questions about Palin quickly and correctly. They knew almost nothing about her at first and were given no head's up that she was a serious candidate for the VP slot.

This is the person who McCain picked to possibly become be president -- at the very least someone who, just by the announcement of her candidacy, immediately becomes a major voice within the Republican party -- and John McCain and his senior staff thought getting it right was less important than controlling the short-term spin surrounding the rollout.

There's something about the air up there that just induces a certain kind of craziness. Think of LBJ changing nominees because word leaked out about an appointment, or Nixon's obsessions with leaks that brought us the Plumbers and Watergate.

If there's one thing that I really think makes Barack Obama a likely candidate to be an excellent president, it's that (as far as we know) he seems relatively immune to that particular hazard of the job. As for McCain...well, whatever one thinks of the Sage of Wasilla, the procedure in which she was chosen sure makes McCain look terrible, doesn't it?

Palin Time (Not A Python Reference)

I'm pretty sure it says absolutely nothing good about me whatsoever that this news makes me just a little bit giddy. I do love a good Sarah Palin story, and November is going to be Palinerific. Palinsational. Palintastic.

Defending (Yikes!) Palin

All pols use ghostwriters for speeches and books. Not only is it no sin for Palin to have done so, but to the contrary, it's one of the few really professional things she's done in the last year plus that we've all been watching her.

She'll of course have to take responsibility for whatever she says or "writes." But there's nothing at all wrong with having someone else put the ideas into words -- and there's nothing at all wrong with purchasing her ideas, as long as she takes the trouble to understand them well enough to get through real interviews.

Dogs, Not Barking

Item 1. I did a previous Dogs, Not Barking item on the lack of visible scandals in the Obama administration, but there's actually another interesting thing (not) happening: a lack of scandals turning up from the Bush administration. Given what we know about the former president's hands-off management style, and the lack of interest in actually carrying out policy in many of the domestic agencies, I wouldn't have been surprised at all if the new team had found all kinds of screwy things had been going on. I don't know whether the Bush people were actually very well-behaved, or if the Obama people are under orders not to dump on the previous administration, but either way I find it interesting.

Item 2. Remember that shoe that lots of people thought would drop in Alaska soon after Palin announced her resignation? Never existed, apparently. We still don't quite know what she's thinking, unless we're willing to believe everything that Levi says, but I think enough time has passed that we can say she wasn't leaving one step ahead of the sheriff. Or the mounties. Or whatever they have up there.

Item 3. Where's the Biden test? About the closest thing we've seen was the saber-rattling from North Korea a while ago. Is that it? Nothing from China or Russia or Cuba that would qualify, as far as I can tell. A lot of people thought Biden was making a Kinsley gaffe, but perhaps the VP was just talking through his hat again.

Item 4. Continuing item: still no Fairness Doctrine! The bastards! Maybe that's the indoctrination that Obama's going to give the little kids in his school address. I have to admit I'm a little disappointed that I haven't seen much on this topic over the last couple of weeks, but I certainly could have missed it; keeping up with the crazy is a bit more than I'm up for.

Truth, Lies, and "Death Panels"

So now, the question gaining traction is: why "death panels"? Why this particular smear?

Keeping in mind that I think that most of what's happening out in the town hall meetings is a sideshow, it still is an interesting question, I think. Andrew Sabl speculates that it has to do with the particular context of the bills being developed; Mickey Kaus and Eugene Robinson (via the Dish) think that it's the result of Obama's mistaken emphasis on cost containment, instead of new benefits.

I'm with Robert Wright on this one. The opposition was going to make far-fetched claims, and which particular ones get made and then become part of the shouting matches on cable news, talk radio, and the town halls doesn't really have anything at all to do with what the proponents of the bill are saying, or what they put into the legislation.

The evolution of this particular claim is clear: it was propagated by the recent Republican Vice Presidential candidate, a woman who is also one of the handful of leading candidates for the Republican nomination for president in 2012. The news media is wired to treat things that such people say as news. Palin's crazy talk drowns out (at least to some extent) the crazy talk from the Becks and the Hannitys; that's how the system works. Normally, leading presidential candidates restrain themselves from talking out of their hats, but Palin either doesn't know better or believes its in her self-interest to act as if she doesn't know better. But rest assured: had she talked about communism or Hitler or, let's make up one, how Obamacare would require all doctors to recognize gay marriage, then that would have been the headline. My strong guess is that Palin (or Michelle Bachmann, who she apparently got it from) didn't poll or focus group this one; Palin and Bachmann just say crazy things because, well, because they say crazy things.

The story isn't why a particular smear was spread; the story is that Democrats treat their nutty Members of Congress as pariahs (yes, that's you, Cynthia McKinney) while (some, but some high-ranking) Republicans treat theirs as intellectual leaders. Meanwhile, the rest of us can enjoy the convoluted explanations Republican talking heads come up with to explain why it's perfectly appropriate for someone to say that something that's not in a bill is, in fact, in the bill (I saw someone -- Tony Blankley, maybe? -- arguing on TV this evening that since Obama once wondered out loud about whether heroic end-of-life efforts are always worthwhile, the only logical conclusion was that once a non-death-panel bill passed he would most assuredly stop treating anyone with something more serious than a cold. Or something like that).

Oh, and while I'm at it, I still think that Joe Biden should challenge Sarah Palin to a televised debate.