Eliza Doolittle, Neocon
The McCain campaign’s efforts to claim that Sarah Palin’s "trip" to Ireland and her osmosis with Siberia qualify her to handle the vice presidential foreign policy portfolio have utterly failed. Here’s Lindsey Graham trying to put the best face on her inexperience.
"She can do fine in foreign policy because of the infrastructure we have around us. She’s smart, and she will learn over time," he said, adding that when it comes to selecting a vice president, "there is no perfect person. If we could have found someone who’s an expert in everything, we would have picked ’em, right?"
But they’re not giving up. Since the awkward revelation of Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy, Palin has been holed up in a hotel, cramming on foreign policy.
Which is why it will be so interesting to see what the McCain campaign does with the blank slate that is Sarah Palin, foreign policy expert. First out of the blocks, in fact, were Joe Lieberman and his AIPAC buddies, eliciting promises that Palin would expand the US relationship with Israel.
She spent Tuesday in her hotel suite meeting with campaign aides and working on her speech. She had private sessions with Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and members of the pro-Israel group AIPAC, said people familiar with her schedule. An AIPAC spokesman said Gov. Palin told its members she would "work to expand and deepen the strategic partnership between the U.S. and Israel."
That’s a pretty radical departure from the antisemitic rant she heard the other day in church:
An illustration of that gap came just two weeks ago, when Palin’s church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with deep hostility by many Jewish organizations: David Brickner, the executive director of Jews for Jesus.
Palin’s pastor, Larry Kroon, introduced Brickner on Aug. 17, according to a transcript of the sermon on the church’s website.
“He’s a leader of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism,” Kroon said.
Brickner then explained that Jesus and his disciples were themselves Jewish.
“The Jewish community, in particular, has a difficult time understanding this reality,” he said.
[snip]
Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God’s "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven’t embraced Christianity.
Moreover, Lieberman’s (and AIPAC’s) views are also a departure from Palin’s earlier hopes that McCain had a plan to end the war.
But I guess that’s the beauty of enlisting Eliza Doolittle to be your Vice Presidential candidate, huh? It allows you to fill that blank slate with the hard right neocon policies to match her hard right social policies.
Update: verb tense fixed per RH Green. Lindsey spelled properly per skdadl.
And I thought you were referring to this.
Yeah, I should have put a link to that.
Of course, this:
Ignores that both Obama and Kerry wrote their own speeches for last week (and Obama wrote his famous speech on race, too).
But, but, but, Howard Fineman told me this was a rare unscripted moment:
Did you mean to say that: “…Mc Cain HAS a plan…”?
I think I meant “had” but I certainly didn’t mean “have.” Thanks.
I agree with R H Green:
do you really think mcsame has a plan somewhere in all this ???
I get visions of Pig Killer from “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”
is mcsame so cynical and cunningly adept that he could have planned to trot out a totally unqualified and immoral veep candidate, and then play the victim when the press tears her ass to shreds
or is this just your every day repuglitard clusterfuck ???
either way, it doesn’t really matter
mcsame is tanking in the state polls
he shored up the repuglitard base, which means he has a lock on 30% of the vote, but he is losing the other 70% of the voters fast
anybody see where mcsame has a chance to turn this around ???
the debates sure ain’t gonna help him. he’s never really been tested in a race against an opponent like Barack Obama
I saw a comment or a post somewhere that offered the idea that mcsame energized the evangelicals because he knows he is gonna lose and he wants the numbers to look dignified
this could also be about the senate races
whatever it’s about, it backfired
Wile E Mcsame opened the ACME veep kit and went off the cliff
America isn’t laughing with john mcsame
we’re laughing AT him
Hold on; don’t bring me into this. My reference to a plan (@ 3)was to EW’s verb tense. That’s all.
Um, so does that make this flick “Mad Mac beyond the Palindrome”?
LOL… ;-))
‘Tis a bit much to see all the Victimhood kick in, however.
Putin and Osama bin Laden and anyone else fed up with the US must be laughing their heads off.
Uff.
Apparantly one need not write speeches, but there is this “infrastructure” to take care of any knowledge voids that might exist as well. Sort of like for the current president?
The Story for new daytime soap!
Joe falls in love with Sarah and leaves his wife for her because she is his soulmate too and like John, Joe likes the younger ladies.
Sarah Palin is more closely related to the Stepford Wives than Eriza Doolittle. You see she has this little USB port embedded in her chest and they just plug her in and program her to be VP!
don’t believe those crazy assed conspiracy theory wing nut tin foil wearing goofballs who believe any crazy theory
the USB port is in the side of her head
I can’t help but wonder if that “infrastructure” Graham spoke of entails someone to stand by to whisper factoids into a speaker’s ear, a kind of “speakaprompter”.
Now ythat I think about it, the ear whisperer is probably a special needs adaption for the reading impaired.
kinda new wave Cyrano DE Bergerac
Perhaps Lindsay Graham and those of his ilk, such as Holy Joe, could avail themselves of this “infrastructure” and get their coiffured heads out of their arses!
Lindsey Graham: sp. (You’ve been reading a lot of Lindsay Beyerstein, right?)
We’re having a little fun with this “infrastructure ” term, but comming from Mr JAG, it has horrific conotations when considered in the context of the surveilance, detention, and interrogation, & judicial process issues that have concerned us here. What hit me first upon reading this post’s reference to the term was The Vice Presidential search “infrastructure” that determined Dick Cheney was the ideal VP choice for the fledgling world leader neophyte.
It is 3-0 now, so I am beginning to accumulate trash to talk in bmaz’s general direction.
This is Christian narratives again. Israel is desperate to cultivate evangelicals as a group because they are willing to support Israel politically. But evangelicals as a group are the same people who support Jews for Jesus and Messianic Jews in general and give them aid and comfort. I don’t have a specific individual in mind who is prominent for supporting both.
Heh. You drew on a deep and old story for this one, EW. Maybe there’s another archetype speaking to you?
Galatea hadn’t even crossed my mind…
Some worrywarts like digby are afraid that resuscitating Babymamadrama, as one commenter called it, is going to save the day. No, it’s over.
Question: Do Bristol and daddy have Foreign Policy Experience now that they’ve met McCain on a tarmac?
You may be right, but at the same time it sure looks like an era of resentment, social grudges, and some genuine hostility about social institutions is leaking out like battery acid into the public sphere.
It doesn’t take all that much to poison things.
This woman alarms me; she seems familiar and if she’s like a few other ‘moms’ that I’m thinking of she has a boatload of grudges, she’ll fight to her last breath, and she’s not interested in walking through nuance. This Presidential election just took a very, very ugly turn. I hope the GOP gets buried in November; if even I can decipher subtle racism in her speech –and she’s married to a guy who’s part Yupik — then all bets are off. This could get really ugly.
Also in bmaz’s general direction: Feh. Once Dunn was in the ondeck circle I knew it was over. Continues to shake head at blowing important opportunity.
JTA: This was a sermon about their trip to Israel to convert people.
I think I am trying to say that Palin is perfectly capable of having a “stronger and deeper relationship with Israel” because of what Jeffrey Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan both noted today: no one calling themselves pro-Israel on the right has called this out yet. Even Abraham Foxman has been muted. So the Israeli government, noting that their primary relationship is with McCain, may not call it out. They may think that once Palin sees more of the world she will want to have a good relationship with them.
God’s “judgment of unbelief.”
It almost sounds like a real thing, doesn’t it!
Usually, bat shit crazy religious leaders refrain from attributing human endeavor to god’s wrath; they stick to ‘acts of god’ which is how they got the idea in the first place but hey, he’s got a cause – jews to convert to jesus – and gob bless him for that in the name of the father and of the …
Reminds of the good old days when the Gulf Coast was devastated by Katrina. Other Christian leaders explained, it was the gays settling down that brought that “judgment of unbelief.” Gustav? Not so much. Maybe God is taking a second look at the whole issue.
Now that “judgment of unbelief” includes man-made mayhem, what do you suppose we did as nation to deserve 9/11? Too many jews not for jesus? Sex before marriage? Birth control? Earmarks?
Yesss! Eliza Doolittle exactly.
But what happens when the Maverick’s maverick gets swelled head and decides to take off on her own (after all, all these folk are saying how they weren’t too jazzed to be at the Rethug convention but now, thanks to little old me, soccer Mom, they’re ecstatic) — how long before she ups and tells the Old Guy that she’s just fine without him, thank you very much.