The company she keeps

I know it seems just too easy to keep pointing out the foibles of Sarah Palin. It's sort of like shooting fish in a barrel, isn't it? But the reality is that Palin wants the White House so badly she can taste the white marble in her mouth already, the economy is still in the crapper, and Americans have short memories.

Oh, sure, there's the incontrovertible fact that no matter how much of a MILF you may be at 44, the relentless march toward decrepitude starts to pick up steam like a rollercoaster marching downhill after 45, and by 48 if you want to be a MILF you have to either a) be Susan Sarandon; or b) have a really, really good plastic surgeon -- someone better than the guy who turned Mike Piazza's face into the unrecognizable plasticene mask that we saw last night before the Mets christened Shitty Field with one of their patented "close but no cigar" one-run-game losses.

So it's in the spirit of tapping the American people on the shoulder and saying, "See?" that I point out Max Blumenthal at The Daily Beast reporting on Palin's Attorney General nominee:

While priming her political machine for a likely 2012 presidential primary run, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has fomented a scandal that threatens to further erode her reputation in the Last Frontier. In March, Palin nominated Wayne Anthony Ross for attorney general. Ross, a colorful far-right lawyer and longtime Palin ally who sports his initials, W.A.R., on his Hummer’s vanity plates, was once considered a shoo-in for confirmation. However, his nomination was thrown into grave peril when his opponents presented evidence that he called homosexuals “degenerates,” leveled invective against an African-American student offended by a statue of a Klansman, vowed to undermine the sovereignty of Native American tribes, and allegedly defended men who rape their wives. According to two sources close to the confirmation hearings, Palin may ask Ross to withdraw before his appointment comes to a vote.

According to Burton, who detailed the allegations for me, Ross allegedly declared during a speech before a 1991 gathering of the “father’s rights” group Dads Against Discrimination, “If a guy can’t rape his wife, who’s he gonna rape?”

Palin’s hopes for a swift confirmation process were dashed April 10 when Leah Burton, a veteran lobbyist on children’s issues and domestic violence, submitted a letter to the Alaska State Judiciary Committee claiming that Ross publicly defended spousal rape. According to Burton, who detailed the allegations for me, Ross allegedly declared during a speech before a 1991 gathering of the “father’s rights” group Dads Against Discrimination, “If a guy can’t rape his wife, who’s he gonna rape?” (In a subsequent letter, Ross denied the remark and claimed, “I don’t talk like that!”)

Burton said Ross’s statement was consistent with his overarching attitude toward women’s issues. She claimed that he once said during a debate on the Equal Rights Amendment, “If a woman would keep her mouth shut, there wouldn’t be an issue with domestic violence.” Burton also maintained she has been in touch with “a number” of domestic-violence victims who witnessed Ross make “horrible” statements, but are too intimidated to speak out. “Alaska is a very small state and it’s terrifying for these victims to come forward because they’re afraid of retribution,” Burton told me.

Since Burton’s testimony, her father, former Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Richard Burton, wrote a letter of his own demanding to Ross that he withdraw his nomination. “You sir, speak and act like the kind of bully I met many times when responding to domestic-violence calls, some of the most dangerous situations police officers are often in,” Burton wrote. Ross reacted with characteristic fury to the Burtons’ broadsides, barking to reporters that if “anybody said that to me, we'd have a little confrontation because that's a bunch of crap.” At the same time, a grassroots group raising support for Palin's presidential bid called Conservatives4Palin attacked Leah Burton as an anti-Christian "fringe nutcase."

Nice, huh?

It's hard to know what to go after first with Palin -- her family values hypocrisy, her inept and lackadaisical governance, her pathological lying, her corruption, her lust for the spotlight, her tantrums, her insane worldview. It seems like a waste of keystrokes, doesn't it? A pointless expenditure of effort spent poking fun at a buffoon. But as Dave Johnson points out (quote below), we can laugh all we want to, but these crazies, these people attending astroturf "tea parties" and thinking they're part of a grassroots movement, these people in terror that Obama will take their guns away even though he's made NO noises about doing so, the ones who think he's part of a secret Muslim cabal, not really a citizen; the ones demonstrating against high taxes even when Barack Obama has just signed the biggest middle-class tax cut in history and "Tax Freedom Day" arrives eight days EARLIER this year -- are deadly serious:

When Joe McCarthy was spreading his poison we dismissed him as a nutcase. We laughed at the John Birch Society's paranoia, when they called Eisenhower a communist, and they ended up getting Bolton appointed to the UN. We thought the "Impeach Earl Warren" campaign was a joke and now they have the Supreme Court majority. We laughed at Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's campaign and the religious right ended up staffing the administration with their followers. ... And now we mock them for being insane over Obama.

So I want to say, please take the right seriously. They may appear to be crazy - and they are - but this doesn't mean it isn't going to work. Let me explain.

In another life I was involved in direct mail. I learned a lot.

Direct mail lets you measure the effect of every smallest thing. You can change the color of the paper the letter is written on and then measure the effect this has -- and by the way, the color actually makes a measurable difference. Changing the price from $9.99 to $9.95 can have a significant effect on the number of people who choose to buy what you are selling.

So what I am getting at is that the most important lesson I learned was there is a reason that direct mail is worded the way it is, and looks the way it looks. That reason is that it works. "Buy now" is a call to action, and if you put "buy now" at the right place in your offer, people ... buy now. Every single word, the color, the font, the thickness of the ink, the headline, even the placement of periods and commas have all been tested and they are there because putting them there that way increases the number of people who make the decision to buy.

Repeat: they do it because it works.

What the right did in the Clinton years worked. They know how to do this stuff. That is why people across the country are reporting that a mass robo-call effort is underway to invite people to these tea parties. This is a funded strategic operation. They are reaching out to the general public with their message that Obama and "liberals" are to blame for the economy. They are setting the stage to own the issue when the economy gets worse.

Going out and talking to the general public with their message is effective, and that is what they are doing. Everything with them is about shaping public opinion. Everything is propaganda, saying whatever they need to say and refining what they say until it is having an effect, and then repeating and repeating that message. It's just standard marketing and advertising. And they get away with it because they are the only ones doing that. They have an entire TV channel dedicated to telling the public that conservatives and their ideology are good, and that everything that is bad in their lives is the fault of the liberals. They still have dozens - hundreds - of radio shows repeating that message 24 hours a day across the country. They still have hundreds of paid operatives writing op-eds, books, speaking to groups, appearing on their TV and radio shows, always always always repeating a coordinated strategic message.

So let's laugh at Sarah Palin, but let's also realize that the kind of hateful, bigoted, hypocrisy-riddled, holier-than-thou, mean-spirited, venal politics that this malevolent narcissist represents plays very well with the segment of the population that's screaming the most loudly right now. Anything can happen in two or four years.