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Sunday, November 15, 2009

A Little Truth to Peddle the Deception

The internets are abuzz today with David Brooks' talk show declaration this morning that Sarah Palin is a joke. Here's the quote:
She's a joke. I mean, I just can't take her seriously. We've got serious problems in the country. Barack Obama's trying to handle war. We've just a had guy elected Virginia governor who's probably the model for the future of the Republican Party, Bob McDonnell, pretty serious guy, pragmatic, calm, kind of boring. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination -- believe me, it'll never happen. Republican primary voters are just not going to elect a talk show host.

Let's be very clear about this. Brooks' declaration represents no turning of the tide from teabag crazytown, but in fact a crazytown double down. Although it is a stretch to attribute anything so substantial as "views" to La Palin, it is important to grasp that Sarah Palin and Bob McDonnell are actually both right-wing crackpots, neither are the least bit "serious" about solving our shared "serious problems" as a nation.

Palin and McDonnell differ less in political substance than in media style and strategy. To win office, McDonnell pretended to a pragmatism he neither believes in nor is likely to govern by while Palin, on the contrary, clowns it up for the cameras and for the rubes the better to get her Fox Noise or ClearChannel talk-show gig.

That these two ideologues are opportunistically deploying their different cynicisms to their different ends is scarcely worth noting (any more than it is really worth noting that somebody with a brain regards Sarah Palin as a bad joke). But I do think it merits our attention that the most deeply cynical performance on display here, by far, is coming from David Brooks himself, who knows all of this very well, and is smoothly spinning for the stealthy right wing liars over the overt whackjobs for no reason beyond the fact that he knows well which side of the lying loaf his own bread's buttered on.

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