As described in an enlightening article by Joel Olson:

Arizona's economy was founded on the Five C's: copper, cotton, cattle, citrus, and climate (tourism). These C's were controlled by big mining and agricultural interests and real estate developers. Corruption was commonplace as they manipulated the political system for their benefit. A group of these capitalists, called the Phoenix 40, controlled state politics until the 1970s, when the political establishment opened up some. But even after their rule, the state capitol has always been a place to lie, bribe, and scam your way to what you want. If the names Don Bowles, Evan Mecham, AZ scam, Fife Symington, or the Keating 5 (which included Senator John McCain) mean anything to you, then you know that corruption is as plentiful as the parking here. And I haven't even mentioned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio or State Senator Russell Pearce, the tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum of racist nativism.

SB 1070 and Giffords's shooting, in other words, are but the latest of a storied history of corrupt cowboy capitalism.

Such tomfoolery is part of the class struggle in the Grand Canyon State. Three classes matter in Arizona: elites, the white middle class, and the working class. The elites come mainly from the agriculture/mining, tourism, and construction/real estate sectors (with an emerging tech sector). They are the masters of the corruption I described. But in a system of majority rule, elites need a junior partner to dominate. This is where the white middle class steps in.

The white middle class is the engine of suburban development here. The new housing developments, strip malls, and big box stores that pop up almost daily (until the recession, at least) are built for and fueled by this class. Many in this class run small businesses related to the main sectors of the economy, such as ranching, construction, landscaping, and pool maintenance. Many are retirees who used to manage businesses in other states. This small business atmosphere contributes to the libertarian, Barry Goldwater-style political culture of the state.

For years, this relationship has been mutually beneficial. While legal segregation never took deep root in this state (most of Arizona's explosive growth took place after Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954), unofficial practices have kept many neighborhoods and schools comfortably white for decades, and the best jobs have been traditionally denied to Chicanos and Natives. (With a Black population of just three percent, the racially "out" groups in this state have historically been Chicanos, Mexicans, and indigenous peoples.) Politicians have successfully tied these practices to the laissez-faire economic policies of the elites, giving whites the sense that their success is due strictly to their own work ethic rather than being facilitated by white privilege. As a result, many white middle and working class Arizonans identify with the success—and conservative politics—of the elites.

This collusion has created an anything-goes capitalism mixed with a suburban consciousness. Call my state the Wild West or suburban hell—they're both accurate to a large degree.

But the partnership has been fraying in the last two decades. Pressures to diversify corporations, universities, and governments have led elites to support various multicultural initiatives, which middle class whites resent. (Arizona voters in November voted to outlaw affirmative action by a wide margin.) The state's Latino population has outpaced white growth, and the state is now nearly one-third Latino. Areas that were once comfortably white now have Spanish-language business signs. More and more schoolchildren have brown faces—even in the good schools.

Please consider reading the article in its entirety, as Nelson places the current struggles over the anti-immigration bill, SB 1070, the collective bargaining rights of labor unions, the dismantling of essential public services, and the Tucson killings within the context of the unraveling of the conservative coalition between white elites and their brethren on the lower rungs of the class ladder. He provides what is the best argument to date, one grounded in class analysis, and therefore, class resistance (as opposed to the liberal alternative of speech regulation and suppression), for connecting the political activities of Palin and the Tea Party to Loughner:

Of course Loughner is probably crazy, but his mental health—and even his ideology—are not the point. What matters is that the conflict over this frayed class alliance—and all the political vitriol it has generated by Tea Partiers and others—pointed his illness toward Gabrielle Giffords.

It bears repeating: the conflict over this frayed class alliance. Giffords was part of the elite that implemented the conservative social and economic policies described by Nelson, even if she was not in complete agreement with them. She therefore became a target for the resentment of someone like Loughner, who was all too willing to misogynistically select her as opposed to numerous other male alternatives. Nelson highlights the prospect that, in addition to Tea Party and Minutemen threats and violence directed towards people of color, we may now be entering a period of fratricidal conflict among whites, one in which the combatants are identifiable by their class status. No one has been so provocative in this regard as Sarah Palin, and it may partially explain why so many elite conservatives, like Charles Krauthammer, for example, were alarmed by her selection as John McCain's vice presidential candidate in 2008. A sociological project that focused upon quantifying the subjects of her hostility in her public statements might generate some interesting results in this regard.

Nelson also implicitly repudiates the liberal strategy of treating the Tucson killings as merely the consequence of toxic political speech. In the remainder of his article, he identifies the interrelated struggles associated with workers' rights and immigrants' rights as the best hope for overcoming cowboy capitalism in Arizona, and the violence and repression associated with it. Both constitute political movements in which the Democrats, and many liberals, are noticeably absent. While protesting people like Palin, Limbaugh, Beck and others for what they say may feel good in the short term, it is insufficient, by itself, to generate the momentum necessary to escape the escalating violence related to the sub-proletarianization of America.

Labels: Arizona, Democrats, Racism, Sarah Palin, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Tucson Tragedy

UPDATE 1: Over at firedoglake, they are, as they often say about inopportune statements of political figures, walking it back. Today, Jane Hamsher is now saying this:

I don’t care if they find Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map in Jared Loughner’s bedroom. She didn’t cause him to do what he did. What she did do, undeniably and indisputably, was act irresponsibly in the midst of an extremely volatile situation. On the fifth straight day of violence and threats against members of Congress over the health care bill, when everyone from John Boehner on down was calling for the attacks to stop, Palin released her crosshairs map and tried to prove she was not a weenie by telling people to reload, not retreat.

David Dayen has also accommodated himself to the new liberal line as well:

Right now, the public isn’t ready to believe an argument that Jared Loughner was motivated by right-wing rhetoric. Fortunately, nobody has said that, because it’s the wrong claim to make. Nobody has claimed that crosshairs on a map or talk of Second Amendment remedies is specifically to blame (some on the right have blamed heavy metal music and a skull in his backyard, and that’s just as silly). The main claim is that the toxic stew of noxious rhetoric, particularly in Loughner’s home district and home state of Arizona, creates an environment that amps up a lunatic fringe. Loughner couldn’t help but trip over that, and indeed his writings do have a cockeyed resonance to some of the really far-right groups like Posse Comitatus and the Patriot movement. That doesn’t make those practitioners of angry rhetoric culpable, but it sure doesn’t mean what they’re doing helped, either.

Leaving aside the obvious, that liberals were, in fact, trying to induce the public to believe that people like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, as well as amorphous groups like the Tea Party, bore responsibility for the Tucson killings, the new line isn't very compelling. Indeed, it's pretty hard to understand as demonstrated by Hamsher's muddy analysis. Palin didn't cause Loughner to do what he did, but acted irresponsibly. I guess that's what you fall back upon when you are caught out with no evidence. After all, how does one defend one's self against that? If it justifies a political death sentence, as she asserted in regard to Palin yesterday, then there are lot of other politicians and commentators who are going to find themselves sentenced along with her.

More specifically, Hamsher condemns Palin because she exhorted people to reload, not retreat. Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it, unless you frequently peruse the comment pages at firedoglake. One wonders whether Hamsher is going to double the number of moderators going forward. Dayen's iteration isn't any more helpful. Let's see, they aren't culpable, but they haven't helped, either. Like millions of others Americans, I guess. Looks more and more like Olbermann, the Witchfinder General of American liberalism, is hanging out there in the wind by himself. Anyway, I should probably not be so hard on Hamsher and Dayen, just look at the bright side, and recognize that firedoglake is trying to extricate itself from this embarrasing episode, and return to what it does best, exposing how the Obama administration continues to make policy decisions in favor of the plutocracy at the expense of the rest of us. If so, not a moment too soon, because they aren't many journalists and websites that do it better with such dogged persistence.

INITIAL POST: All that's left is to forcibly seize Sarah Palin, put her in the helicopter position, place a dunce cap on her head and turn up the klieg lights for a round of self-criticism. Maybe, it can be staged live on an upcoming Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

If Sarah Palin, whose website put and today scrubbed bullseye targets on 20 Representatives including Gabby Giffords, does not repudiate her own part in amplifying violence and violent imagery in politics, she must be dismissed from politics - she must be repudiated by the members of her own party, and if they fail to do so, each one of them must be judged to have silently defended this tactic that today proved so awfully foretelling, and they must in turn be dismissed by the responsible members of their own party.

If the Tea Party leaders who took out of context a Jefferson quote about blood and tyranny and the tree of liberty do not understand - do not understand tonight, now what that really means, and these leaders do not tell their followers to abhor violence and all threat of violence, then those Tea Party leaders must be repudiated by the Republican Party...

If Glenn Beck, who obsesses nearly as strangely as Mr. Loughner did about gold and debt and who wistfully joked about killing Michael Moore, and Bill O'Reilly, who blithely repeated Tiller the Killer until the phrase was burned into the minds of his viewers, do not begin their next broadcasts with solemn apologies for ever turning to the death-fantasies and the dreams of bloodlust, for ever having provided just the oxygen to those deep in madness to whom violence is an acceptable solution, then those commentators and the others must be repudiated by their viewers, and by all politicians, and by sponsors, and by the networks that employ them.

Of course, the most obnoxious aspect of Olbermann's statement is the degradation of the Tucson tragedy into yet another media circus, with Olbermann engaging in the television equivalent of a staged food fight with Beck and O'Reilly in order to improve his ratings, although I will concede that there is the happy coincidence that he does, no doubt, believe what he says. Few things are more pleasing than when ones values are congruent with one's economic self-interest.

Naturally, Olbermann doesn't allude to any reports that Loughner was actually influenced by anything that Palin has said or done, because, last time I looked, there aren't any. Indeed, I haven't encountered any reports that Loughner has ever mentioned Sarah Palin in any context, or even knows who she is, despite numerous interviews of friends and classmates, as well as information taken from his Facebook page. You'd assume that he does, given her celebrity, and her frequent appearances in Arizona, but, if so, it hasn't been reported.

And, likewise with the Tea Party and Glenn Beck. Has anyone encountered anything to indicate that Loughner was aware of the mischaracterized Jefferson quote and Beck's obsession with George Tiller? Did Loughner pay any attention to Beck and the Tea Party at all? Apparently, Loughner did describe a woman who read a poem about an abortion in one of his classes as a terrorist for killing the baby, so, maybe, by Olbermann's journalistic standards, that's enough to establish a connection to Beck.

We may have also encountered a curious instance of projection whereby Olbermann has subconsciously attributed his experiences to Loughner, something which may partially explain the hysterical liberal response to Tucson more generally. If liberals like Olbermann paid scrupulous attention to Palin, the Tea Party and Glenn Beck, then, without question, Loughner did as well. Factual confirmation is unnecessary. Such projection results in the erasure of Loughner as a human being with an independent agency, reducing him to a recepticle for liberal fears and anxieties about the far right.

Amazingly, liberals like Olbermann, and other bright, skillful ones like Jane Hamsher, should know better. We are, as they say, in the early innings, and there is much still to be learned about Jared Loughner and why he decided to try to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. As I observed yesterday, Timothy McVeigh made reference to the Second Gulf War as one of his justifications for the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. One cannot exclude the possibility that Loughner will make reference to other reasons for his actions, ones that will prove embarassing to liberals, such as, just to throw out a few, the bank bailout, the failure to provide assistance to people facing foreclosure, the war in Afghanistan, or even more obscure possibilities, such as US support for Saudi Arabia. Loughner the person still possesses an unpredictability that Loughner the liberal caricature does not.

Which is why I persist in my stubborn insistence upon factual substantiation for the liberal claims that the atmosphere created by Palin, the Tea Party and Beck was responsible for the Tucson tragedy. There are lots of reporters out there on the story, as well as many federal and state investigators as well, they shouldn't be too hard to find. I appreciate readers of this blog, whatever their political persuasion, that forward such information to me, as I do in any other context. After all, I can't read, watch and listen to everything. Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't point out the brazen hypocrisy of Olbermann's statement that Beck and Bill O'Reilly should apologize for having provided just the oxygen to those deep in madness to whom violence is an acceptable solution.

Any list of such people that does not start with President Barack Obama, former President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others, should be promptly disregarded as self-serving. For they, more than any others in this society, have been perpetually insisting that violence is an acceptable solution to the global challenges faced by the US. And, more than that, they have unapologetically asserted that the US may kill people indiscriminately in order to achieve their aspirations for global domination. While I find people like Beck and O'Reilly detestable, they are merely the media house servants for those who are truly responsible for having persuaded many Americans that the US must engage the rest of the world through policies of preemptive war, preventive detention and torture.

Hat tip to Jack Crow.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Barack Obama, firedoglake, Liberals, Mainstream Media, Political Violence, Sarah Palin, Tucson Tragedy

UPDATE 2: From Louis Proyect:

I think what leftists have to understand is that violence and repression today directed against the popular movement is far more based on legality than mob violence or terrorism.

For example, the day before the gun attack, this assault on the rights of Mexican-American students in Tucson took place sanctioned by law:

The class began with a Mayan-inspired chant and a vigorous round of coordinated hand clapping. The classroom walls featured protest signs, including one that said United Together in La Lucha! — the struggle. Although open to any student at Tucson High Magnet School, nearly all of those attending Curtis Acosta’s Latino literature class on a recent morning were Mexican-American.

For all of that and more, Mr. Acosta’s class and others in the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American program have been declared illegal by the State of Arizona — even while similar programs for black, Asian and American Indian students have been left untouched.

So reported an article in the New York Times titled Rift in Arizona as Latino Class Is Found Illegal. This is the real strategy of the Tea Party movement, to elect politicians who pass such racist laws—not to organize mobs to go into the barrio and brutalize activists. If the left cannot figure out what phase of the struggle it is in, we will not be effective, I’m afraid.

While Proyect is, in the broad sense accurate, I do think that he misses the synergy between incendiary rhetoric, violence and legal suppression that the far right relies upon to achieve its ends. They do not preclude one another, although, to be fair, he does appear to indirectly recognize this interrelationship when he says that the repression is far more based upon legality, thereby refusing to exclude the role of threatening language and violence.

Regardless, it does justify some slight elaboration. Consider, for example, how politicians have cited public anger as a justification for more rigorous enforcement of the immigration laws, resulting in skyrocketing numbers of deportations, a record 800,000 people in the last two years. As with fwoan's post, one should read Proyect's post in its entirety as well, as he presents a number of other well researched insights, especially in relation to how the far right has historically attained its objectives in Arizona. Left for further investigation is the question as to the extent to which Democratic party neoliberals have exploited rightist populism to pursue its capital friendly program.

UPDATE 1: From fwoan, a different way of looking at it:

The power structure is using this to limit what is an acceptable idea to convey, because they themselves were unable to keep their ugly, crazy mouths shut.

Of course, the post should be read in its entirety.

INITIAL POST: Yet again, I find myself in the odd position of defending Sarah Palin against liberal criticism. In October 2008, I finally reached my tolerance of e-mails from liberal friends about Palin's ignorance and lack of qualifications for the position of Vice President, a position held in the past by such luminaries as Spiro Agnew and Dan Quayle, and pointed out that her opponent, Joe Biden, arguably a contemporary manifestation of Agnew, is a buffoon known for frequently putting his foot in his mouth, as he most recently did when he called Julian Assange a high-tech terrorist. Strangely, I haven't heard any liberals criticizing that statement in the last couple of days after the killings in Tucson, especially given the fact that a number of prominent Americans, such as Washington Times columnist Jeffrey Kuhner and former Democratic Party campaign consultant Robert Beckel, have called for Assange's assassination.

No, we are instead being subjecting to an endless barrage of articles, blog entries and comments that purportedly establish that Palin bears some sort of amorphous responsibility for the actions of the man who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others, Jared Loughner. And how is she responsible? Last spring, she posted a map of the United States with crosshairs identifying 20 Democratic congressional representatives that she wanted to see defeated in the November election. Of course, she didn't say that people should shoot them, nor did she personally issue threats against them. She obviously wanted people to vote against them, not kill them. Furthermore, I don't recall anyone commenting on the map at the time, although fwoan remembers otherwise, so I defer to him as I probably, rightly or wrongly, just tuned it out as typical partisan argument. In any event while one can certainly criticize the map on the grounds of tastelessness, it is evident that few, if any, people took it literally. Now, in the wake of the Tucson shootings, there is a new liberal revisionism, one that possesses as much intellectual credibility as those who contend that the Harry Potter series promotes witchcraft. Even Alexander Cockburn has gotten in on the act.

Certainly, there is no doubt that Sarah Palin has said some intemperate things. Nor is there any doubt that people like Giffords and another Democratic congressman nearby, Raul Grijalva, have been subjected to death threats and the vandalism of their offices. Jane Harman of firedoglake maintains that Palin, by posting the campaign map on her website on March 23rd of last year, after the health care debate and vote that resulted in acts of vandalism against the offices of some congressional Democrats around the country, poured gasoline on the fire. Her chronology looks persuasive, until you realize that Palin posted the map nine months ago, and that the election that it references ended two months ago, with the Republicans taking control of the House after several of the Democrats identified on it had been defeated. To date, there is no indication that Loughner paid any attention to anything that Sarah Palin has said or done.

Instead, there have been reports that Loughner is a mentally disordered individual who troubled those who came into contact with him, known for unusual statements with an elusive political content. Upon persuing articles published by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, the only possible explicit connection between Loughner and a far right political figures that I encountered was a mention of the possibility that he may have shared the views of David Wynn Miller, a far right figure who apparently believes, like Loughner, that the government seeks to manipulate us by controlling grammar. It is not uncommon for people who suffer from serious mental disorders, such as those with a paranoid schizophrenic or bi-polar diagnosis, to develop highly refined, baroque conspiratorial beliefs which sometimes result in a fixation on a particular person, as happened here, but they are, by their very nature, highly individualistic, and contrary to the sort of linear, rational causation suggested by those who seek to blame Palin. It will be interesting to see if law enforcement, which now has a wealth of digital information in its possession, discovers anything that indicates a more direct political connection to Loughner.

So far, we are encountering a form of analysis that privileges political beliefs over others as the basis for human agency, as we did recently in regard to Julian Assange. Assange has publicized confidential records that embarass the US, so, ergo, the Swedish attempt to extradite him to Sweden on possible sex crime charges must be a pretext for delivering him into the custody of the US. The possibility that Assange may be a publicly heroic figure and a privately despiccable one capable of sexually abusing women is dismissed. In this instance, we see the process taken a step further: the insistence upon imprinting a political explanation for Loughner's violent actions in the absence of any evidence in support of it. The more compelling explanation, that Loughner is a confused, mentally disordered person who didn't receive the care that he needed, is subordinated to this quest.

Of course, there is an underlying ideological motivation for this kind of analysis, as described by Jack Crow earlier today:

1. If you (a) hold elected office or (b) a position of power and influence in a media conglomerate, and (c) plan, execute, fund or euphemize sky robot murder, starvation austerity, war powers expansion, occupations and escalations, coups d'etat, wetwork, black ops and the militarization of public space - you bear no responsibility for the decisions of those following your direct orders, or who act under the cover and normalization you promote. If you apologize for those who, under orders, commit the acts which directly contribute to your wealth and comfort, and to the maintenance of a continent spanning system of degradation, imprisonment and oppression, you bear absolutely no responsibility for the consequences of the systemic destruction of human life which you support and promote. You are a public servant. A leader. An exemplar of civilization.

2. If you use campaign rhetoric which does not sanitize political conflict, or read books which do not pass official muster, or if you do sit not in current favor with those who have the wealth and influence to arrogate to themselves the arbitration of taste, worth, sanction, viability and validity, you bear complete responsibility for acts of violence committed by persons you have never met.

Just as Sam Spade and Kasper Gutman needed a fall guy at the conclusion of The Maltese Falcon to escape responsibility for their crimes, so, too, do the global purveyors of violence in the Pentagon, the CIA, the Congress and the White House. Upon the eruption of violence within the US, it becomes urgently necessary to identify someone and some political group as responsible, in this instance, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, so as to conceal the fact that those who govern the US do so by perpetual recourse to it. Examples are too numerous to mention, but one need only look to Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to get a general sense of the problem. In regard to the drone strikes in Pakistan, a Brookings Institute analyst conceded the likelihood that ten civilians are killed for each militant, with another account estimating the ratio at fifteen to one.

By treating the subject of the motivation of Loughner's violence as domestic in character, the proponents of such an approach preempt any inquiry into the pervasiveness of US violence around the world. If one is going to open the door into the the uses and motivations of American violence, it should be opened fully, instead of slightly cracked. Beyond this, there is the prospect that, if an explicit political motivation for Loughner's action is found, it may well have both domestic and international components, as was the case with Timothy McVeigh, who, as a Gulf War veteran, condemned the brutality of the US invasion of Kuwait while also expressing far right, white supremacist beliefs, including, quite reasonably in my view, anger over US government actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco. My impression is that many Americans are aware of McVeigh's far right political motivation for bombing the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, but few know how his military service contributed to it as well. Expect a similar kind of suppression if Loughner is found to have discomforting political motivations to the extent that we may see the government and the media embrace the currently out of vogue psychological explanation for the killings.

Labels: American Empire, Pakistan, Political Violence, Sarah Palin, Tucson Tragedy, US Military

Barely a day goes by without me receiving an e-mail about Sarah Palin and her purported inability to effectively serve as Vice President, or, heaven forbid, President. Liberals are gleeful that, for once, much of the public and the media are seeing things their way. Palin appears to have damaged the McCain campaign in numerous battleground states, like Ohio and Florida.

But does this mean that the Democrats and their enthusiastic liberal partisans are correct in their condescending putdowns of Palin? No, it doesn't. In fact, Joe Biden is every bit as misinformed as Palin, as the recent Vice Presidential debate revealed, especially in the area of foreign policy. And, of course, there was his assertion that FDR immediately calmed the country after the 1929 stock market crash.

Furthermore, like Palin, Biden has an incorrigible tendency to talk without thinking, and, once he has started talking, to persist in the hope that a more extensive exposition will result in greater clarity instead of the usual outcome, a descent into outright confabulation. Both Biden and Palin just can't stop talking until they reveal their pretentious belief that they know everything about subjects about which they know nothing. Or, more accurately, they stand as proof of the old adage about knowing just enough to be dangerous.

Biden gets away with it for obvious reasons. He's been around DC forever, and, hence, he is considered a statesman, despite all evidence to the contrary, and she hasn't. He is the senior Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and she isn't. He has appeared too many times to be mentioned on the Sunday political talk show circuit, and established a warm rapport with the disproportionately male hosts there, she hasn't.

Palin is a woman of local accomplishment with no national credentials; Biden is a man of national credentials with no accomplishments. It's an old story. But there is more to it than just old fashioned sexism. Palin's social experience is too far removed from the political establishment to be acceptable. No Ivy League education, not even a respected Catholic or state school one, like Berkeley or Michigan. She didn't go to law school, as the vast majority of successful politicians have done. She certainly didn't teach constitutional law at one.

No, Palin is the worst nightmare of the political establishment: someone who was actually personally motivated to enter politics at the local level and through a combination of drive and ruthlessness, became governor of her state. Her politics are therefore heavily influenced, dangerously so from an establishment perspective, by her local, as opposed to elite, experiences. With someone like her, there is always this fear, who knows what she might do? In other words, she might not do what we say. And, even worse, she might even encourage the lower middle class to believe that they actually have power and exhort them to use it. In this respect, comparisons to the career trajectory of Ronald Reagan are apt, and she, like Reagan, will eventually find elite acceptability when it becomes obvious that she is no threat.

Labels: Democrats, Elections, Elitism, Liberals, Sarah Palin, Sexism

Has the New York Times provided us with a deliciously postmodern Brecht and Weill in the wilds of Alaska? A reverse gendered Mahagonny, with Sarah Palin as Jimmy and her husband as Jenny?

It's easier getting gold out of men than out of rivers:

Indeed. But one doubts that Palin will receive the puritanical frontier justice meted out to Jimmy, or that the social order of provincial crony capitalism in Alaska will disintegrate any time soon. One is, however, rendered breathless by the nerve of the Times for posting such a critique of Alaskan socioeconomic culture, no matter how enjoyable, given that the Times, along with the Wall Street Journal, is one of the primary voices for the denizens of the capital of global crony capitalism, Manhattan.

Labels: Elections, John McCain, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Sarah Palin, YouTube

Sexual abstinence, it seems, is always for everyone else, not for the people who insist upon it. Accordingly, it reminds me of those who have attacked others for marital infidelity, while enjoying it themselves. Is it possible that we must practice abstinence because they lack the capacity to do it themselves?

In any event, the most recent participant in the moral hypocrisy parade is Sarah Palin, John McCain's selection as his vice presidential running mate. Palin, a public proponent of abstinence only education in the public schools, is someone who has conformed to the moral constraints that she insists should be taught to others . . . well, not quite:

The Palins eloped on Aug. 29, 1988, and their first son, Track, was born eight months later, a fact that Maria Comella of the McCain campaign, declined to elaborate on. “They were high school sweethearts who got married and ended up having five beautiful children together,” Ms. Comella said.

Perhaps, then, Palin was successful in persuading her 17 year old daughter of the importance of abstinence? Well, again, not quite:

On Monday, Ms. Palin’s announcement of her daughter’s pregnancy was much of what people were murmuring about inside the halls here, at the cocktail hours, even along a route meant for protesters.

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned,” read a statement issued on Monday by Ms. Palin and her husband, Todd. “We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support.”

The Palins said that Bristol, who was named for Bristol Bay, the salmon fishery, would marry a man they identified only as Levi, later confirmed to be Levi Johnston, a Wasilla resident. “Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family,” the statement said.

Is is really too much to ask that people like Sarah Palin get their own houses in order before they presume to tell the rest of how to behave?

Back in the day, there was a word for people like Palin: busybodies. It was not complimentary. They were ridiculed, and rightfully so. The classic stereotype was character of Mrs. Kravitz in the 1960s television series, Bewitched. She obssessively looked through the windows of Darrin's house to find proof that his wife, Samantha, was a witch. Her efforts always caused her to look like a buffoon.

Unfortunately, unlike the rest of us, fundamentalists gobble this sort of thing up with a large spoon. Nothing delights them more than someone who has fallen, recovers to see the light of the way of Christ and then insists that our conduct be subjected to a standard to which they have exempted themselves.

Labels: Christian Fundamentalism, John McCain, Republicans, Sarah Palin, Sexuality