Lynn Vincent, the woman who is writing a book called Going Rogue “by” Sarah Palin, sure can pick her co-writers. She’s written books before with a general who kills “demons” for God and a guy who finds interracial dating “revolting.” As Charles Johnson — whose ongoing reformation from Muslim-hating wacko to right-wing apostate continues to puzzle and delight us — points out, Palin’s ghostwriter’s previous work includes Donkey Cons, a thoughtful investigative look at the Democratic Party’s criminality that blows the lid off that “killer and traitor Aaron Burr.” Vincent’s co-writer on Donkey Cons was Robert Stacy McCain, a former Washington Times editor who writes things like this:
“[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.”
That was from a private email McCain once wrote that a recipient posted online, so in his defense, McCain (no relation to Palin’s running mate) wouldn’t write something like that in public. In public, he says things like slaves and whites in the Old South had “cordial and affectionate relations,” and is a member of the League of the South, which wants to secede from the Union (again!), and writes for a web site called VDare, which proudly publishes the work of “rational and civil… white nationalists” who “unashamedly work for their people.”
While playing down Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke’s claim, issued during the week, that Obama and his team had helped the country to avoid depression, cable continued to cover a candidate whose dangerous rhetoric continues to ramp up death threats against the president.
On November 16, 2009, The Christian Science Monitor reported an escalation of threats against the president’s life:
There’s a new slogan making its way onto car bumpers and across the Internet. It reads simply: “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8”
A nice sentiment? Maybe not. The psalm reads: “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”
Presidential criticism through witty slogans is nothing new. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, and hats with “1/20/09” commemorated President Bush’s last day in office.
But the verse immediately following the psalm referenced is a bit more ominous: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”
By the beginning of winter, it was obvious that the media had become a sort of white power government in exile ready to pounce upon any of the young black president’s missteps. Not only predictable outlets like Fox News, which Obama’s advisor David Axelrod, on Sunday, October 18, 2009, defined as less a news organization than an arm of the Republican Party, but from “progressive” outlets like Pacifica, which had begun to view gay marriage as the civil rights issue of this period, thereby accepting the post-race thinking that racism was no longer an issue in American life and when blacks suggested that it was, they were playing “the race card,” or making excuses which was the line promoted by entertainment sideshows like CNN’s Black in America, or Saving Our Children. So powerful was the media that the titular head of the Republican Party was not a politician but a talk show host with a history of drug abuse and making outlandish and racially tinged remarks about the president.
It’s appropriate that the party of family values, which reached it’s height of power with the election of a man who contributed to the conception of a child while unmarried, and whose 2008 vice-presidential candidate was part of a family immersed in a tangle of social pathologies, be headed by a talk show host who, in the past, has had a drug problem. During this period it was revealed that Ayn Rand the Goddess of right-wing American politics was a crank addict. Lordy be!
None of this seems to matter to media financed by multinationals that curb any discussion of the hypocrisy of those who perform on behalf of its message. David Brock says that his homosexuality didn’t matter to the Republican homophobes as long as he used his brilliance to promote their talking points.
While Obama is the nation’s first rainbow president, put in high office by a coalition of white, black, Latino, Asian, and Native-American men and women, the opposition is no longer a political one but a sort of multinational-owned electronic government-in-exile which dictates the actions of the conservative and right-wing politicians, who cower before it. First they challenged the stimulus bill, the aim of which was to keep public servants like the police, firemen and teachers on the job.
(On October 30, 2009, it was announced that the stimulus had created and maintained more that six hundred and forty thousand jobs, 110,000 in California alone. On August 10, 2009, Paul Krugman, who had been media-appointed prime minster of a government-in-exile headed by Rush Limbaugh, wrote in The New York Times, “So it seems that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression after all. What saved us? The answer, basically, is Big Government.”)
When Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of the Morning Joe challenged a wonkish recital by Sen. Jack Reid about the bill and were rebuffed; they brought in a back-up commentator, Jack Welch, the former owner of General Electric to provide an open-ended rebuttal to Reid. I needn’t remind anyone that MSNBC is owned by General Electric. (As of this writing, they’re trying to sell it.) Welch is the industry captain who noticed while visiting India that labor there was cheaper than United States labor.
First there was chatter about Obama’s bad beginning. Neo-con David Frum said that it was “disastrous.” Over at CNN Wolf Blitzer was even suggesting that the Obama administration might be over before it began. Paul Krugman was brought on to trash Obama’s economic policies. (This is the Clinton supporter who said in February 2008 that Obama’s followers were members of a venomous cult of personality.) The cover of Newsweek had a photo of Krugman above the caption, “Obama is wrong.” By October of 2009, Krugman was defending Obama’s economic policies from the judgments of George Will and Peggy Noonan who became famous by coining the phrase “a thousand points of light.” Pat Buchanan who migrates from panel to panel on MSNBC to deliver comments that are proven wrong said that if Obama were nominated the Republican Party would rip him to pieces. When the market displayed a slump during the early days of the administration, he said that the market was sending Obama a message. Watching this hand-wringing over the Obama administration which was marked as doomed even before it had begun, one was reminded that not only did media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, who donated $25,000 to right-wing sock puppet Ward Connerley’s anti-affirmative action drive, own the media but finance the think tanks from which the media draw some of their commentators and so, the morning after the stimulus bill passed, representatives from The Wall Street Journal and the right-wing Cato Institute spent three hours trashing the stimulus package while rehearsed right-wing callers accused Obama of promoting socialism.