Sep 11th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
More Elitism
Oh here goes Steve Benen again with elitist talk about how Sarah Palin wanted to ban books from the Wasilia, AK library. What’s the matter, no Widener Library in small towns so you look down your noses at that? Here ABC News’ Brian Ross sneers at Palin’s working class background by suggesting that it’s dishonest to say stuff that isn’t true:
I just don’t understand why it is that liberals keep smearing Palin’s kids by bringing up this business about their mother’s policy record and about whether or not John McCain and his campaign are telling the truth about it.
36 Responses to “More Elitism”
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September 11th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Maybe small town Alaskans don’t need no damn nosy outsiders tellin’ them what books the liberry got to keep or not, or putting arugula all in the pages or whatever Satanic things you cosmopolitan weirdos with your European ideas do.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Dude, you are not showing anywhere near the level of deference required of a potential President. Less sarcasm, more fealty!!
September 11th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Sometimes I wonder if the wingnuts took us too literally when we said the emperor has no clothes in reference to Bush. Its the only explanation I can find for being so excited about having Palin so close to becoming emporer-ess. As someone pointed out, maybe here I can’t remembe, she looks like the stripper teacher from Friday Night Varsity Blues Lights.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
I’d like to think that it’s the word “deference” that has put some life into the press.
The way they’ve acted for the last 8 years, I imagine that they’ve heard the word in private, but it’s the publc utterance that’s so galling.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Rhetorically speaking, Officer, what would your response be if I offered you $100 in cash to forget about that speeding ticket you are about to write?
September 11th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Sometimes I wonder if the wingnuts took us too literally when we said the emperor has no clothes in reference to Bush. Its the only explanation I can find for being so excited about having Palin so close to becoming emporer-ess. As someone pointed out, maybe here I can’t remembe, she looks like the stripper teacher from Friday Night Varsity Blues Lights.
5 times a mother. 44 years old.
Trust the old guy. You do not want to catch a peek here. Time and Gravity are merciless.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
I just don’t understand why it is that liberals keep smearing Palin’s kids by bringing up this business about their mother’s policy record and about whether or not John McCain and his campaign are telling the truth about it.
Yeah! And her glasses are expensive!
September 11th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
That sounds reality based. FAIL.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
“…working class background…”
Wasn’t her father a schoolteacher?
I think most people would say that schoolteachers are middle class people – even ones who hunt and live in Alaska.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
I have to admit it – ABC did a perfectly competent job with this one; they cover all of the pertinent points in under 3 minutes, without being melodramatic about any of it.
If anyone ever wonders why librarians (not government workers in general, nor college professors) are typically rated as the most liberal profession (Laura Bush aside), this is a good reminder: conservatives, generally speaking, want to repress and/or control the flow of information; liberals, generally speaking, want to permit the free flow of information.
This sort of thing, incidentally, plays very poorly in public schools, even in conservative areas – a librarian I know has been spreading this around her exurban school, and several very conservative teachers have said in response that this is what will push them over the brink into voting for Barr.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/12444.html
It’s amazing that Bush, Cheney, McCain, et al have the gall to crawl out of their holes and to lecture us today.
McCain is a man who can’t answer how many houses he owns, because it’s too embarassing that the true number is something like 13. McCain is a man who has told us all with a straight face that he thinks that you can’t be rich if you have less than $5 million. In a saner world, there would be no question that this guy wouln’t be elected president, because barely anyone would be willing to vote for him.
The Republicans are a dishonor and shame to us all.
They have skyjacked our institutions– they have hijacked our media, our government and our military through lies and dirty tricks, and they are crashing our own institutions into us, ruining our environment, teaching our kids lies about science and reality, sending our people off to die in pointless military theatres of operations, squandering our public money and freeing the rich from paying a modest amount of taxes as the price for being extremely successful and powerful in this country. These “Republicans” beray us and stab us in the back every damn day, just like they did leading up to and after 9/11.
Remember, it’s not just McCain– every single option the Republicans put in front of our noses as a potential Presidential candidate this year has been a corrupt incompetent. Rudy Giuliani, who recently as last night was credited by Barack and David Letterman with somehow helping around 9/11 (probably due to media lies or Republian coercion) was actually working against first responders and 9/11 families both before and after 9/11. Rudy Giuliani was specifically responsible for making sure the firefighters had faulty equipment (like the Republicans never gave New Orleans proper levies before Katrina– probably because they didn’t like how black the city was before Katrina), for moving the City’s emergency command headquarters to a much less effective location so it could be a convenient babe-nest, and for working against the wishes and interests of First Responders who worked on 9/11 and of 9/11 families and widows in the days, weeks and months after the attacks. Yet the piece of walking scum takes credit for the work of people who actually helped on 9/11 and tries to turn the attacks into a political boon for him. In a saner world, this guy wouldn’t be able to get a single minute of air-time on any television station, except to report on how corrupt, unworthy to call himself an American, and assinine he is.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
How many times can they say that the firing was “unrelated” before someone asks, “So why was she fired?” Apparently, quite a few. This strikes me as a somewhat obvious question. Oh wait. They don’t answer questions.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
And how dare liberals talk about John McCain’s mother’s son. Children are completely out of bounds.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Hey Brian Ross, which administration official(s) tooled you on the bogus Al Queda/Anthrax story?
September 11th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
And re-puke speak for the word UPPITY is Elitist.I wonder what McPalins definition is of working class and Elite are.
September 11th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
At the end of the story it’s mentioned that the librarian later quit because it was too hard working for Palin. Wow. I know it’s a small town, but Palin must be pretty controlling if the librarian can’t just do her own thing. It’s not the sort of job that requires daily briefings to the city council.
Also, why can’t they find this woman and talk to her? It’s odd that none of the stories I’ve read even go so far as to say “Edmonds could not be located” or “Edmonds declined to comment” or something like that. Annoying that there’s so much hearsay involved.
September 11th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
I enlisted the assistance of #379 – who, when not serving on the VRWC’s Hospitality Board is a third-grade teacher – to ask her class about Benen’s “thinking”. Here’s a partial transcript:
TEACHER: Class, I’m going to ask you what’s wrong with Steve Benen’s/Matt Yglesias’ thinking. Please think about this paragraph: “Palin became mayor, her church was interested in censorship, and soon after, Palin asked a “rhetorical” question about how books might be excluded from the public library. When the librarian resisted, she was, at least initially, fired.” Can anyone see anything wrong with that “thinking”?
BECKY, 8 YEARS OLD: Oh! I know, all those things might not be related. What’s that called again, ‘correlation doesn’t equal causation’?
TEACHER: Very good Becky!
JIMMY: In fact, there could be many, many other things involved. We don’t know everything that went on.
TEACHER: Very good Jimmy!
[The transcript goes on like that. Perhaps MattY should run his posts by 3rd graders first.]
September 11th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
How long do we have to read the transcript before we get to the part where the third grader explains the concept of circumstantial evidence to the teacher? And the part about how we’re not trying to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt?
The only thing funnier than stupid hack trolls are stupid hack trolls who think they’re clever.
September 11th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
I didn’t know what the Widener Library was. Google solved that but the joke was kind of lost in the process. IF you are going to make snob jokes you have to talk about elitist things that regular people know about.
September 11th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
No, no, no. The fallacy, if there were one here, would not be “correlation does not equal causation.” Correlation is a statistical term that requires an N of greater than 1. Perhaps 24Airhead needs to take a course in elementary logic.
What the troll objects to is a potential ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ fallacy. First the librarian won’t agree, rhetorically, to remove books, then the mayor fires her. We don’t know, it’s true, that the first caused the second. It could be something entirely different, and naturally, the Governor Palin will be happy to sit down with ABC TV and explain the real circumstances, right?
September 11th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
TEACHER: Very good, PQuincy! You get a gold star! Now, help fit MattY and Steve Benen for their dunce caps.
September 11th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
As I understand it she was merely looking into how one might go about banning books from the library. When the librarian said there was no way in hell she was going to ban some books, she was fired. After some outcry she was re-hired. So, Palin never really got around to banning the books per se. She should have just taken the books out of the library and burned them like any good bigot.
September 11th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Wait, I thought correlation was between 1 and -1, with 1 being the maximum correlatedness, -1 being inverse correlation, and the closer you got to 0, uncorrelated.
September 11th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
I’m sure the librarian was fired (before being reinstated) because she was hosting huge sex orgies with the Department of the Interior and oil lobbyists.
September 12th, 2008 at 1:22 am
I want to know what kind of person it is who, upon becoming mayor of a small town, immediately runs to the town librarian and asks what the librarian would do upon being asked to ban some books. Not a hi-hello-how’re-ya kind of question, but a what-about-banning-some-books-for-me question. The intent is clear. And so is the librarian’s answer that the two years spent working for Palin were so bad that she doesn’t want to even recall them. I may be guessing here, but I can’t imagine that a librarian’s job would be very stressful. Sure there’s the budget and the overdue book rate, but what could possibly make the job so horrid that years later the memory of the job would be so distasteful that you wouldn’t want to talk about it? What kind of political torture did Palin put that poor woman through for two long years? There’s a pattern beginning to emerge here, and it’s not a one-time thing.
September 12th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Ohbyallthingsgodly — puh-leeze, folks, focus on Go Ask Alice.
It’s an anti-drug story. Wingnuts want it banned BECAUSE THEY HAVEN’T READ IT.
There IS a pattern here — Palin wants abstinence education, which obviously doesn’t work; she tried to ban an anti-drug book and fired the librarian who defended freedom, she was warned of borderline child abuse for her attacks on her former brother in law AND then she fired the decorated top cop cuz he wouldn’t go along with her crap (replacing him with a sexual harrasser, no less); she found money to hire an Abramoff lobbyist but was the only mayor in Alaska to charge rape victims for evidence kits — a practice banned by the Violence Against Women Act, sponsored by Joe Biden, btw.
Enough with the snark, it loses votes. FOCUS.
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