Vanity Fair: IT CAME FROM WASILLA (McCain Staffers Trash Palin)

[kpete]

McCain Staffers Trash Palin

A blockbuster Vanity Fair piece by Todd Purdum quotes many senior members of John McCain's presidential campaign team trashing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R).

"They can't quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be."

Said one aide: "I think, as I've evaluated it, I think some of my worst fears... the after-election events have confirmed that her more negative aspects my have been there... I saw her as a raw talent. Raw, but a talent. I hoped she could become better."

It's today's must read article.
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2009/06/30/mccain_staffers_trash_palin.html

It Came from Wasilla

"Alaska's lipstick-wearing pit-bull is a "Little Shop of Horrors.""



Despite her disastrous performance in the 2008 election, Sarah Palin is still the sexiest brand in Republican politics, with a lucrative book contract for her story. But what Alaska’s charismatic governor wants the public to know about herself doesn’t always jibe with reality. As John McCain’s top campaign officials talk more candidly than ever before about the meltdown of his vice-presidential pick, the author tracks the signs—political and personal—that Palin was big trouble, and checks the forecast for her future.

read the rest:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/sarah-palin200908?printable=true¤tPage=all

[panader0]

1. It sounds like the title of a horror movie

I don't think much of McCain either.

[RufusTFirefly]

16. Uh, I'm pretty sure that was the intent. n/t

[devilgrrl]

2. Charismatic?

Get out of here! :argh:

[LiberalAndProud]

3. We pick the strangest people for celebrety in this country.

"Palin is a cipher by choice. When she chooses to reveal herself, what she reveals is not always the same thing as the truth. "

[madaboutharry]

4. A very good article.

Here it is in a nutshell: Sarah Palin is a narcissistic ego maniac with a thin skin and a long enemies list. She also possess that dangerous cocktail of shrewed character and mediocre intellect.

I guess that makes her the perfect republican.

[Raschel]

28. And she repaid McCain by trying to take over and talking about staff later.

Seems she turns on everyone.

[NJCher]

5. THANK YOU KPETE

This is what I've been waiting for!

Man, I love this kind of stuff.

:hug:

I have to do housework today. :-( This will be my reward for cleaning the bedroom.


Cher

[tammywammy]

6. Long article, but well worth the read.

:)

[XemaSab]

7. Good article

:thumbsup:

[WI_DEM]

8. from the article: Her own ambition is most sacred to Palin

The second thing McCain could have discovered about Palin is that no political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition. To be sure, Palin is “conservative,” whatever that means, but she can be all over the lot in the articulation of her platform. In a June interview with Sean Hannity, she sounded like a New Dealer when she proudly proclaimed that “a share of our oil-resource revenue goes back to the people who own the resources—imagine that.” In the next breath, sounding like a “starve the beast” conservative, she said she hoped the price of oil, the principal variable of state revenue, would not rise too much. “The fewer dollars that the state of Alaska government has, the fewer dollars we spend, and that’s good for our families and the private sector.” Palin has always been a party of one. She gained the mayoralty of Wasilla in 1996 by turning against the incumbent, John Stein, who had been one of her mentors when she was on the city council, and injecting sharply partisan issues such as gun rights and abortion into what had previously been a low-key local contest. She fired the police chief, eased out the museum director and the city planner, and fired and then rehired the librarian (who had opposed book censorship). Palin was entitled to make the dismissals, and she variously justified them on the grounds of budget difficulties or the need for a team that she could be sure would support her efforts. But the Frontiersman accused Palin of confusing her election with a “coronation.”

[Dappleganger]

33. Great post.

[Blackhatjack]

9. This was bound to happen... McCain people could never keep a lid on this

People who work in political campaigns put a lot more than time and money into getting their candidate elected. And in the Palin situation, there was so many disasterous decisions made by Palin and her people that the McCain people could never keep them under wraps permanently.

It must have been hard to watch Palin promote herself as the next Repub Nominee once it was apparent the race was lost.

[walkaway]

10. She reminds me of Richard Nixon if he had been....

really stupid and dressed like a hooker.

[eridani]

38. She isn't stupid at all

She's someone who is above average in intelligence, and yet is pig-ignorant and proud of it. That's worse, as unlike inborn mental dullness, it is a choice.

[KittyWampus]

41. I don't think she's above average in inteligence. That isn't the part of her brain or personality

that is the primary operator.

I think she's reptilian through-and-through. Purely native instinct for self-promotion. Clever.

That's my take :)

[sinkingfeeling]

11. Good reading!

[Marr]

12. That was an interesting article-- thanks. I'm no psychologist, but Palin strikes me

as a person who has absolutely no objective sense of direction or place. She's profoundly ignorant about the world around her, and so her only true north is herself.

[rocktivity]

13. A blockbuster? In what respect, Political Wire?

After she was picked, the campaign belatedly sent a dozen lawyers and researchers, led by a veteran Bush aide...to Alaska, in a desperate race against the national reporters descending on the state...

The difficulties began immediately, with the McCain team’s delivery of the bad news that the pregnancy of Palin’s daughter Bristol, which was already common knowledge in Alaska and had been revealed to the McCain team at the last minute, could not be kept secret until after the Republican convention....

...The second thing McCain could have discovered about Palin is that no political principle or personal relationship is more sacred than her own ambition.

Finding out about Bristol's pregnancy was when the McCain camp's association with Palin should have ENDED immediately. If it was common knowledge in Alaska, then McCain's vetters should have uncovered it in their sleep. If Palin's plan was to keep her mouth shut until after the GOP convention, the party leadership should have realized that her self-serving overambition was excessive even by THEIR standards. But I guess they were too blinded by the prospect of picking up disgruntled Hillary supporters to think it through completely.

:headbang:
rocktivity

[loudsue]

24. But competence at one's job is not a republican trait, to begin with.

Therefore, McCain's staff was merely showing their republicanism in picking her for the second slot on the ticket.

[KittyWampus]

42. McCain's campaign was given a directive by Fundie operators to take on Palin. The fact McCain

was so weak and befuddled that he couldn't stand up for himself or his campaign says volumes in itself. Or did McCain settle on Palin because he had a desperate need to wipe Obama off the front page?

And what does it say that Palin was vaulted to the national scene prematurely, as it were. Before she could be polished off and made more presentable to rational Americans? I'm not sure. Were they that desperate to make a splash with headlines?

[rocktivity]

43. Well, here's what I wrote on DU back then

(McCain)...shot his wad when he was given Palin...His strongest and most credible argument against Obama was that he was too young, too inexperienced, and had therefore earned a false, superficial celebrity. And who does he get for a running mate? Someone who is even younger, LESS experienced, and earned her celebrity within two weeks!

:rofl:
rocktivity

[me b zola]

14. This article brings back such fond memories

forward to the 60 second mark:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-f9NVyM47Y&feature=PlayList&p=99F4825947BE2903&index=1



:rofl:

[underpants]

15. Reading it now-the Charlie Gibson interview "went more or less fine"?

I think the writer missed the obvious there-she became a national joke in the first two minutes "In what respect Charlie?"

[redqueen]

22. Is that as much of a joke to the nation

as it is to more just liberals?

I think a good percentage of people probably don't see anything wrong with that question at all... maybe even a majority (sadly).

[Captain Hilts]

17. Well, they should not have let McCain get talkedinto the selection. He should have picked

Kay Baily Hutchinsen or Ollie Snowe.

[RufusTFirefly]

18. Anti-fascists: Please note the Malek connection

In Alaska, almost everyone I met wondered who was advising her in Washington—and in Washington, everyone wonders the same thing. There are one or two clues. On the eve of the Alfalfa dinner, in January, Palin was a guest in the home of Fred Malek, a veteran Republican fund-raiser and government official dating back to the days of the Nixon administration. Malek raised money for McCain’s campaign last year, and also agreed to play host to a fund-raising dinner for Republican governors in early May.

Fred Who?

Seems G.W. himself had long-standing business ties to the Carlyle Group, a firm bonded
financially with the Bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia. In 1990, he was granted a seat
on the board of Carlyle by former Nixon aide/bagman Fred Malek, a Carlyle advisor (Joe
Conason, "Notes on a Native Son," Harper's, February 2000, p. 49).

Fred Malek, mind you, was the CREEP deputy director who, prompted by Nixon's
trembling belief that "a Jewish cabal" in the Bureau of Labor Statistics was bent on his
destruction, made up a list of Jews in the bureau. Malek was made deputy director of
the Republican National Committee by George Bush, Sr., an old friend. It was Malek
who organized an "ethnic coalition" of Nazis in August 1988, the Heritage Groups
Council, that included the likes of Laszlo Pastor (a Hungarian-American, former fascist
Arrowcross death squad officer and junior diplomatic envoy to Berlin under Hitler), and
Father Florian Galdau (a priest, Vatican P-2 member and New York leader of the Iron
Guard, a latter day version of the old SS-run Romanian terror organization).

Once again, the Bush family distanced itself from scandal. The clan pled ignorance, even
though Bush, Sr. had cherry-picked Malek for the job. Supposedly, they had fooled
everyone, even the conservative National Jewish Coalition, which boasted In 1992 that
"Vice President Dan Quayle, HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, GOP Campaign Manager Fred
Malek and a large number of key Senators, Congressmen and candidates for office
addressed Jewish delegates and community leaders at a series of events hosted by the
NJC during the Republican convention in Houston last month." (NJC Bulletin, September
1992).

On February 2 1990, USA Today's Tom Squitieri wrote that "four key
Republican activists, ousted from George Bush's 1988 campaign amid
charges of anti-Semitic or pro-fascist links, are back working for the party."
These included Fred Malek and Phil Guarino, another pro-Nazi P2 lodger.
George W. Bush ran spin control for his father's 1988 presidential campaign,
and when the Nazi scandal broke ever-so-briefly in the media, GW protected
his father by urging the European fascists to resign from the Heritage Council
(Citizen's Law Web Site,
http://www.citizenslaw.net/bushdynasty_corrupt.htm).

http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/carlyle-bush-osb.html

[kpete]

19. Palin as god?

When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”

[Javaman]

20. I can't wait to her failin's rebuttal. It has class written all over it.

:rofl:

[Raschel]

29. If every comedian and writer ridiculed Palin at the same time she would go

beserk trying to answer every slight. You know she cannot let one go unaddressed. lol

[alsame]

21. Good article, thanks! Great description of McCain as having

'an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor'.

Interesting that those who know Palin wonder about Narcissism - a condition increasingly common in the GOP.

[Papa Boule]

23. You know what I learned from the article?

I learned that national politics is show business. Principle is just whatever magic words you can say that will bring votes and a win.

[myrna minx]

25. K&R n/t

[bullwinkle428]

26. Countdown to her tearful demands of an apology from the author of the article!

[No DUplicitous DUpe]

27. From NY Mag: The Most Unflattering Parts of Vanity Fair’s Sarah Palin Profile

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/06/the_ten_most_unflattering_thin.html

<snip>If you're a fan of Alaska governor Sarah Palin, there's not a lot for you to love in Todd Purdum's new 9,800-word Vanity Fair profile — starting with the monster-movie title "It Came From Wasilla" — which explores not just the failed presidential campaign, not just her tenure as Alaska's governor, but the entire essence of Palin. But if you are one of the many Americans who love to hate Palin (or simply hate her), this is basically Christmas morning.
<snip>
--------------------

Merry Christmas!

[noiretextatique]

30. "she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics"

:puke: i couldn't read anymore after that statement.

[Iris]

37. seriously. That's just biazarre

[DeschutesRiver]

31. Thanks for the links - going to read 'em now, didn't realize that much stuff was out there. nt

[malaise]

32. We knew all of this

Nice to hear it from the Repugs.


Love the Pix

[Dappleganger]

34. Boycott Vanity Fair!!

Boycott the newsstands and grocery stores who carry this anti-Merkan trash!


/waits for freepers to picket Food Lion/

[seafan]

35. What does it say, that a politician who is proud of her ignorance, is accepted and applauded?

What does it say about the overall mental health of our country? It's not a comforting thought.

.....

What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life?

Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency?

Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

It Came from Wasilla



With the help of a partisan Supreme Court, we've already tried 8 years of vengeful stupidity.

[maglatinavi]

36. palin

palin only makes serious women in politics cringe... no one woman wants to identify with this nut...

[david13]

39. All raw, no talent.

[Hutzpa]

40. And here they where trying their hardest to sell

us a BANGER!!

:evilgrin: