Bitches Get Stuff Done!

The headline is courtesy of Tina Fey, of course. For many people, though, Sarah Palin isn't the right kind of bitch. Our tribe's bitches, good. Your tribe's bitches, bad. And sometimes, our tribe's bitches are bad, if your name is Hillary Clinton. Too many rules!

Okay. I read the NYT article on Palin. We have a few observations!

Wait. Do I need to say, in every post about Palin, that I disagree with her about almost everything, and that I would never vote for her and McCain? In every post? Ooookay: I disagree with Palin about almost everything, and I would never vote for her and McCain. I would never vote for Obama, either. This is the major reason for my position. Here's some further background on the underlying issues.

Now back to the new national pastime, Life with Sarah! Is this Palin obsession helping Obama and Democrats generally? We don't think so! But we'll play. About this:

Ms. Palin entered the 2006 primary for governor as a formidable candidate.

In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile.

“I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy Ruedrich did,” Mr. Jenkins recalled. “And she said, ‘Yeah, what I did was wrong.’ ”

Mr. Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after.

Mr. Jenkins said a reporter from Fairbanks, reading from a Palin news release, demanded to know why he was “smearing” her. “Now I look at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ ” he said.

This anecdote and several others like it in the NYT piece fall into the general category of Salome outwitting Herod and getting what she wants:

To put the issue in other terms, and these are the exact terms you should apply to women in politics today: she beat him at his own game. Herod had set the terms of the contest, and Salome used them for her own ends. She fought on his terms, but she outwitted the man who had set the rules. She humiliated him -- and she got what she wanted.

For Herod -- for most men -- this is intolerable. It is inconceivable to Herod -- just as it is inconceivable to most men -- that the fault or the responsibility should be his. The fault and the responsibility must be Salome's. The fault and the responsibility must always be woman's. In any confrontation between a man and a woman in our culture, there is only one party to be punished: the woman. So it was with Salome, and so it is with Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.

Kill that woman. That is the motive, and that is the goal. To the extent women are successful, to the extent they threaten men's monopoly on power and control, they must be demeaned, diminished, treated with unending cruelty, and mocked. When all else fails, they must be eliminated. Kill that woman.

This explains much of the reaction to Palin. Besides hating on her just cuz she's a woman, I mean.

And about this tidbit:

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

If this is the worst that can be done by the surveillance state that threatens to destroy our lives...oooooooo, scary! "Stop blogging right now!" Nasty stuff. Of course, it's not the worst that has been and will be done, not by a long shot. But that's a story for another day, or another post. Or two.

All right, you want me to be more serious. Some of what's above is serious, sisters and brothers. You ask a lot for weekend blogging. Okay, okay.

After she became mayor of Wasilla in 1996, Palin "cleaned out the municipal closet" (not gonna touch that, we're being serious now), and fired "veteran officials to make way for her own team." Palin did the same thing after becoming governor:

As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, those with insider credentials were now on the outs. But a new pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.

Patronage in politics. I never! Palin's supporters say her long-time pals were qualified for their new jobs, her opponents say they weren't. Startling news!

Here's one simple test I apply to issues like this: how long is the person's death list? That is, how many deaths and how much destruction are these pals responsible for? Obama doesn't turn to people he's "known since grade school and members of [his] church" (at least, not his old church, since the old church was run by people who did unspeakably awful things like telling the truth about America). No, no, Obama is much, much more sophisticated than that. Obama turns to long-time friends of the Democratic and foreign policy establishment. Ministers of Death, as I sometimes call them. Their death lists are far, far longer than those cobbled together by Palin's pals. Therefore, Obama's team is much more "experienced" and "qualified." Much more death and destruction, in the past and very probably in the future. Obama wins!

As I've noted before, when you are dealing with a thoroughly corrupt authoritarian-corporatist system that engages in a neverending series of wars of criminal aggression, "experience" should properly be viewed as a major disqualification. Yet most people still cling to "experience" as to a life raft, so desperate are they for the reassurance they mistakenly feel "authority" provides. I will soon have much more on that specific topic.

Anyway, the NYT article. Those are all the observations I have. Some of the anecdotes are distasteful; some are worse than that. But there's nothing of great note, and there is certainly nothing uniquely awful. The article will change very few people's minds, one way or the other. If this is the worst to be found in Palin's record, the Republicans have very little to be concerned about.

Oh. I have a phone call. "Yes, this is Arthur Silber. Uh-huh. What? I see. Yes, I understand. Yes, yes, I understand, really, I do. Okay. Not a problem. Bye-bye."

"Stop blogging right now!"

She's going to be Empress of the Universe! Bet she'll get a lot of stuff done then.