K-Lo Goes To Confession

K-Lo: Bless me, Father for I have sinned. It's been two days since my last confession. Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for the horrible meanies who say all those horrible things about Mrs. Ex-Governor Palin. They make me sick. Levi Johnson probably isn't even Catholic. Just look at his name! Is Levi a Catholic name? No, it is not. Levi Johnson is making baby Jesus cry, I just know it. And not a little whimper, either, a big fat crying, like lots of angry babies--.

Father: Kathryn Jean, please, calm yourself. You know how much People upsets you, maybe you should---.

K-Lo: It was Vanity Fair and it was for work, Father, I promise. Our future First Lady President is under attack and I had to defend her. She was nursing a viper at her breast, Father, feeding him the milk of human kindness ,and he threw up the barf of disloyalty all over her.

Father: Kathryn Jean, please---.

K-Lo: Sorry, Father, I didn't mean to be vulgar. Hey, it's kind of convenient to sin in the confessional. You don't have to wait to unburden yourself and risk eternal damnation by getting hit by a bus before you go to Church.

Father: Speaking of sinning, Kathryn Jean, do you have anything else to confess?

K-Lo: I thought about taking a life, but just for a second, Father. Fortunately I carry Jesus in my heart at all times and He turned me away from hatred just in time. Although I don't think I'll get my deposit back at the gun shop, a punishment I gratefully accept for opening my heart to sin.

Father: Kathryn Jean, you may not have a gun.

K-Lo: But the socialists want to take away my freedoms!

Father: No.

K-Lo: I need a gun to defend my right to protect myself from liberals, Father. They eat people, just like that zombie movie I saw on tv when Mama and Daddy left me with a baby-sitter. Sure, it's just a finger today, but tomorrow it'll be brains and Jonah says I can't spare any.

Father: No.

K-Lo: But---.

Father: Kathryn Jean, no. No guns. God watches over us all, and He'll protect us from any zombie attacks, I promise.

K-Lo: True, it won't be His first zombie attack. Thanks, Father, I feel better. And I promise not to shoot Levi Johnson, even after he said that Sarah doesn't care about Baby Trigg. Of course she loves him, Father; she didn't have an abortion even though Obama told her to.

Father: Kathryn Jean, Obama did not tell her to---.

K-Lo:: I read it on the internet, Father, it has to be true.

Father: Try to look for the good, Kathryn Jean. And the truth, that would be good as well.

K-Lo: I am, Father. If it's true that Mrs. Palin doesn't really love Todd, maybe she'll move to Washington, District of Perversion, and we can be roomies. I'll bring her coffee and cokes and breakfast in bed every day if she wants. She likes people who are helpful and giving of their time.

Father: Kathryn Jean, say ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers. And for Heaven's sake, stay away from chainsaws.

Sinners, Beware!

I like Lisa Schiffren. Her moral scold instincts are even greater than her political instincts, and we end up with a post that snarks on Bristol Palin instead of a more Party-friendly response.

Mr. Johnson, who sees the baby frequently, will continue to be an involved father, the story reports. Or maybe he won't. Or perhaps he will sometimes, when he isn't busy, unless he gets involved with someone else who doesn't want that. Ms. Palin will continue to be the mother full time—because she doesn't have a choice.

Heh.

I certainly don't know if they should have gotten married. You'd have thought so . . . even if it didn't last forever. Better odds for the kid. If the parents didn't like it, well, they should have thought about that when they were drinking and fooling around. But, as we all know, shotgun marriages lead to plenty of unhappiness, some of the time. And very young marriages have a lousy track record. So parents of the expecting teens are not willing to push. And maybe they are sometimes right. Still, the default position of the girl, left on her own with the baby, now in serious and immediate need of further education and a set of remunerative skills with which to support herself and Trip, but which will be harder to acquire with her maternal responsibilities, isn't much of a happy picture either.

You go, girl. Why should a rich girl get away without suffering from her sinning when a poor girl can't? But Schiffrin's approach isn't typical. The proper response, in conservative circles, is to cry privacy and beg others to leave the poor child alone, now that they can no longer flog her situation for political gain. And when you want mindless cliches and horse-blinkered myopia you go to Miss Kathryn Jean Lopez.

On the specific story here: I wish the name Bristol Palin never appeared in any political commentary, but here we are. [yap yap yap] Let the girl live in peace with her child.

While you hound every other unwed girl in the county, of course.

Fantasy Is Such a Comfort

Too funny. They make their own reality, you know.

How is the outsider doing? Throughout the campaign, Sarah Palin has
remained poised and articulate. As far as I am aware, she has committed not a
single gaffe. Speaking with Charles Gibson of ABC during the first of the two
major interviews she has so far given, she sometimes appeared tense. Even then,
she made no mistakes. (Her much-discussed reply to Gibson when he asked if she
agreed with the Bush doctrine--"In what respect, Charlie?"--proved perfectly
legitimate. The Bush doctrine can be defined a half-dozen ways.) Speaking with
Sean Hannity of Fox News six days later, in her second major interview, Palin
proved completely at ease. In just under a week, she had mastered the interview
format.

In The Corner, the author Peter Robinson says he wrote the article before the Palin/Couric interview, and he has no desire to see it now. Why bother with reality when you can just make up reassuring lies?

K-Lo Sucks

That's some bad writing there, K-Lo. Nipping at the Benedictine again, girl?

I watched Katie with Sarah last night. And I found the whole thing jarring.
The CBS Evening News is sitting on an interview through Monday? At a moment like
this? When everyone's complaining Palin isn't talking about the press? All
substance of the part of the interview she deemed to show us last night was
trumped by what a bad programming decision I thought not showing it all is.

I think the whole interview may be online — I think Couric said it is. I
haven't made it there to find yet. If I, who live on the Internet, did not watch
it yet, I don't think most Americans will be.

And she's an editor.

More Important Than Megan.

Fish. Shoes that fit. Really good tacos. But let's talk about Palin and money.

First, money and bailouts. The money's gone. It was based on mortgage-back securities that lost value because many people couldn't afford to pay for payment increases in their creative mortgages. This seems to have been forgotten. So the securities that are going to be sold to pay back the bailout are worth less (or worthless) also. That means a hell of a lot of money disappeared, greased in its skids by fees that made a lot of Wall Street entities rich. The director of the Congressional Budget office, Peter Orszag, says:

"Ironically, the intervention could even trigger additional failures of
large institutions, because some institutions may be carrying troubled assets on
their books at inflated values," Orszag said in his testimony. "Establishing
clearer prices might reveal those institutions to be insolvent."
In an interview later yesterday, Orszag explained using the following example: Suppose a company has Asset X, whose value is recorded on the books as $100. Because of the current economic decline, Asset X's real value has dropped to $50. If the company takes part in the government bailout and sells Asset X for $50, the
company has to report a $50 loss on its books. On a scale of millions of dollars, such write-downs could ruin a company. Such companies "look solvent today only because it's kind of hidden," Orszag said. "They actually are insolvent" already, he said. And yet, he says there is no choice, and the bailout must take place.

In the end, he said, Congress must pass some sort of relief, if only
because Wall Street is expecting it. "If we did nothing, there is a significant
risk of another collapse of confidence in the financial markets," he said.

Wall Street took its money and ran, but now we're hearing how this crises "for the American people" must be solved. The free market way would be for people to lose their homes and Wall Street to lose its investments, but there is an election going on and Wall Street didn't spend eight years gaming the system, enriching themselves, to stop now. Time is running out and the Democrats might be about to take office. There's just enough time for one more smash and grab from the Treasury. And the people must be appeased until after the election. It's a bailout, and we are bailing out the people who took the money in the first place.

Speaking of the election, McCain's attempt to use the financial crises to keep Palin under wraps until after the election has inadvertently revealed something very important about Sarah Palin: She is a believer. It's what McCain is trying so desperately to hide. Like poor, pathetic Kathryn Jean Lopez, she believes what she's told about the world. Her religion is fundamentalist, her politics are extremist, and her personal life is a tangled skein of extreme behavior and willfulness. She's dangerous for the campaign because she can't do the wink-and-nod standard to most politicians, who let the masses know that they're just jollying along the fundamentalists and power-hungry folk in government, just doing business as usual in Washington.

Glenn Greenwald admits he was wrong about Palin; that she wasn't being protected by McCain, MCCain was protecting himself. He doesn't have a firm reason for that, however. He suggests:

But Sarah Palin's performance in the tiny vignettes of unscripted dialogue
in which we've been allowed to see her has been nothing short of frightening --
really, as I said, pity-inducing. And I say that as someone who has thought from
the start that the criticisms of her abilities -- as opposed to her ideology --
were much too extreme. One of two things is absolutely clear at this point: she
is either (a) completely ignorant about the most basic political issues -- a
vacant, ill-informed, incurious know-nothing, or (b) aggressively concealing her
actual beliefs about these matters because she's petrified of deviating from the
simple-minded campaign talking points she's been fed and/or because her actual
beliefs are so politically unpalatable, even when taking into account the
right-wing extremism that is permitted, even rewarded, in our mainstream.

They're both right. She is facile with talking points and issues that are very familiar to her. But when she opens her mouth, the truth comes out. Juan Cole notes:

McCain made several perhaps fatal mistakes on his Long March. He allowed
Sarah Palin to be interviewed on television again, this time by Katie Couric. It
is therefore McCain's fault that Palin was permitted to respond to a question of whether the US faces a second Great Depression, "Unfortunately, that is the road that America may find itself on."

Why did Palin make this mistake? Because she was just saying what she believes, what she was told. She doesn't have the brains to say that the problem is being solved by government intervention. And she's a believer. This will come out with every question that is asked of her. Why does did she attend a church where her pastor railed against witches? She believes in witchcraft. Why does she force her daughter to marry and carry a child at 17? She doesn't believe a woman has the right to choose for herself. Her son is in the military. She walks the walk.

Which is the problem. It obviously never occurred to McCain, the elite child of rank and privilege, the cynic who discards wives as easily as some men change their $500 shoes, that Sharia Palin actually believed every manipulative word his party has been dishing out for so many years. And now he's stuck with her.