...that's pretty damned sad.

PB 2.0 - Supplement the wonk!

thus saving me the trouble, and for which i thank you. yes, the heart disease is statistically more likely to get him in the next few years. teresa seems to have sidelined her critical thinking skills on this one; her source being someone who a) had a friend die of melanoma, and b) whose medical skills seem to be of the transcriptionist variety. 1000 pages may be unusual, but mccain has probably been in the govt medical system all his life, what with being a navy brat, a navy officer, and now a public servant [more or less, on the servant part of it]. like you say, he's apparently been staying on top of the melanoma [and other health issues he's got]; my guess would be he's had lavish preventive care, diagnosis, and testing that the rest of us with for-profit insurance [or none at all] can only dream about.

now if only you'd also noted that teresa is pulling a dr senator frist and diagnosing palin with a personality disorder over the internet here, you could have saved yourself the trouble of making this comment at all.

and yes, i did read teresa's post back when lambert first linked to it.

i took that as a starting point gee, this guy sounds like a real jewel, and ended up at that adn article with its attached primary sources.

the very last item in the list of links, cpl grimes' letter of suspension, details not only the 3 latest [at that point], but also wooten's past infractions, going back almost as long as he's been employed as a trooper. palin's [and her family's and her staff's] complaints from the time of the divorce forward is so far the only bit that has received any real scrutiny.

that rattles me too, to think about, but how close to doing some of those kinds of things did hillary get when bill was president? i admit to not having paid much attention at the time.

Went to floppyasses or whatever that screed name is, read through the whole far-right winger nonsense, and couldn't find a single reference to "SFGate". Maybe buried in one of the many links, but no one should be expected to sort through that mess to find the source you claim.

Provide the source, a direct link to an SFGate article, or retract your claim.

Unexpected Bonus Update: Our old friend Designated Obama Operative, Markg8, still has a job!

... is that the initial attack on Palin was, in fact, "grotesque." (No links because it's warm enough to go outside and finish another window). The one I remember best was Jeralyn, of all people, suggesting that Palin's Down Syndrome baby was sedated at the convention, but the overall context was the usual misogynist sewage that we're all used to, including the gleeful exploitation of a 17-year-old girl's pregnancy. (Yeah, they did it too. And?) Naturally, when Obama issued a mild reproof after the damage was done (a la the RFK smear) nobody believed he was serious, and it took a statement from Joe Biden, two days later (IIRC) to get Tier Two to calm down.

So, at this point, the whole Palin story is a complete Clusterfuck because our own side pissed in the well. Several people on this blog, as you point out, have done yeoman service trying to disentangle it all. I've asked, for example, for the Dominionist angle to be straightened out, since it's a real concern after Christianist domination of the Bush administration.

As for the integration between the Obama campaign and Tier Two in the blogosphere, of course that's a given -- or at least the best model, until Axelrod writes his memoirs. Lord Kos did a little happy dance about it just yesterday. For those who follow this stuff daily, or hourly, the oppo propagation is as glaringly obvious as, say, what happened with the Killian memos and the Freepers.

As for Flopping Aces, yeah, I don't use them. However, another unfortunate consequence of this primary is that the number of trustworthy sources has dwindled to a literal handful. I well remember discovering during the primaries that FOX was at least as trustworthy as, say, the rest of the press, given their virulent hatred of Hillary and misogyny. At least FOX was completely open about their biases. Same unexpected outcome on Ron Paul: Sure, he's a right wing lunatic, but he got the empire right, which nobody "on my side" has done to this day.

Everything that is solid melts into air... And that includes many verities about Democrats, Republicans, and sources to trust.

NOTE Don't jeopardize your work for this! But by the same token, those who do this work every day may very well have derived their working assumptions on how Tier Two of the Obama campaign operates from evidence and reasoning. Eh?

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

my only assumption was -- based on what's been reported of wooten's recent behavior, i see someone who probably shouldn't be allowed to have both a gun and a badge.

so rather than take at face value the screaming palin abuses power! i dug around, located some primary sources, got a subject matter expert's interpretation of them, posted them here, and commenters here provided some analysis.

-----------------

the problems [some of them], as i see them, in left blogistan in particular, but on the left as a whole --

- an inability to distinguish between the lavish but legitimate use of power and true abuse of power [i'm all for more digging into the issues of abuse of power, if anyone else wants to do the work, but it will take work, not just the further propagating of memes]

- profound discomfort with seeing a woman wielding power, especially as lavishly as palin seems to have done, but hillary clinton was vilified for it too

- laziness, or stupidity, or maybe just plain meanness. as just one example, take teresa's assertion that it was sarah palin's own fault that we had to talk about the coverup and trig being bristol's baby and that palin should have released her medical records to prove whose baby it really was. ok, picking my jaw up off the floor now: helloooooo! palin was pregnant out to here [holds hands well in front of belly] and doing her job as governor right out in front of god and everybody! plenty of people saw it. and when someone finally dug up a photo and posted it on the internet, the nutcases all went into overtime saying it was a fake belly she was wearing. can you say C-O-L-B? sheesh.

-----------------------

so yeah, my new assumption is now that nobody* on the left can, or will, do their homework before talking about the right and that all of them are suffering from republican derangement syndrome. not that i can blame anyone for having rds, but can't let that get in the way if we're going to figure out how to get ourselves out of the mess the republicans have got us into.

* there are notable exceptions: quite a few correnteans can look muck and mayhem right in the eye and dig up and analyze the facts anyway; it's why i like this place.

and thanks for linking btd's post on that.

and like you, i'd rather keep my fond memories of northern exposure too. i loved that show.

Are we talking the Palin trooper Tier Two oppo, or the melanoma Tier Two oppo? On the melanoma oppo, it looks like the best is Stoller -- not to put Stoller in Tier Two as a partian -- but even that's of the "I asked my dermatologist" variety. I agree that the press won't cover the story, if there is a story, but must of the A list forfeited their credibility a long time ago, so it's unclear where to turn.

I do note that TNH writes about the Council of National Policy... Exactly the sort of Dominionist lunacy I'm worried about which, though dogemperor is more than a little prolix, seems to be supported, when you dig, with sourcing.

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

or started to before I got pulled away to RL. I plan to go back. So far I find the melanoma part to be the most interesting and wish the blogs spent even a tenth the space on it that they've spent on this Trooper crap. But I'm interested in other critiques of Palin as well. What I'm not particularly interested in is this Troopergate stuff because it is a tangled mess that I don't think will ever be untangled, which makes it mostly useless as a political attack. The well has been poisened by too many people and I don't just mean bloggers (in some way that's the least of it).

I'm unimpressed by the judge being closest to the case. I've been involved in too many cases where the judge got the law and the facts wrong to be very moved by that argument. And State Court judges are political creatures and here we have not only Palin involved but the police union. So who knows whether the judge was playing it straight or not? Who knows whether even if he was trying, he was competent? All I know is I've got a judge doing something that raises a red flag.

And that brings me to one of the biggest problems -from what I can tell Alaska politics is a sewer. The Democrat leading the investigation has been out advocating against Palin and has moved up the report to be before the election, which doesn't exactly make me think it's some great truth finding expedition. That Republicans have gone along with the Palin investigation is meaningless to me because it's pretty clear that the Alaska Republican establishment hates her. So saying their concurrence in the investigation is proof it's some sort of legitimate inquiry and not a political witch hunt, as Jeralyn did today, removes the context, IMO. I can easily imagine why Alaska Republicans might be out to get Palin even if it meant risking the November election. Intra-party fighting and payback aren't exactly unheard of, nor does it tend to lead to the truth.

Add into that the clusterfuck of the initial reporting on it and that it's one of those messy family battles that are always so hard for outsiders to really know the truth about and the entire thing seems like something where we can never be sure of what really happened. Too many ulterior motives of all involved, including the investigators.

From the facts I've seen that seem undisputed I can come up with a plausible scenario in which Palin may have overreached her authority, but she did so for good reasons. I can come up with one where Palin abused her authority and for bad reasons. Given the messiness of family situations and that Wooten is no saint, I suspect the truth is somewhere in between, but I don't think we'll ever know.

But then I admit this entire thing is fairly meaningless to me in that I can think of 100 other reasons not to vote for McCain or Palin. And if I can do that without have to defend an authoritarian dumbass, which Wooten seems to be just from the shit he's admitted doing, or that Alaska only gave him five days off for behavior that deserved a lot more, so much the better.

Mostly, I'm just amazed at how this has taken up so much time when there seem to be other, more clearly damning things to use against McCain and Palin. Ones that are a lot easier to explain than this one is.

Let's start with the melonoma angle from Teresa's post. If McCain is really dying, then doesn't that make his entire run a vanity campaign? Isn't he putting himself before the country he claims to love? Hasn't his entire campaign basically been a fraud? I know a lot of people will use this to focus more on Palin, but what would it say about McCain? That he set out to attain an office he knows he's likely to die in.

Not that I expect this angle to get any air what with all the arguing over he said, she said in the Trooper thing.

And that's my main problem with a lot of the Palin critique - it looks past the troubling stuff (she's right of Atilla the Hun) and gets bogged down arguing over complicated family crap. I also personally think that while it's important to go after Palin, it's even more important to go after McCain. The problem with McCain isn't limited to Palin or his choice of Palin. He's awful on his own terms and that's something I think people need to be reminded of. Constantly.

and re-read it again today. i remain unimpressed.

... it's hard to keep a conversation going, so I won't go beyond the first point.

Leah writes:

.... [T]his entire notion that there is no Palin critique possible because of the well has been contaminated by left-leaning piss..

Lambert wrote, in full:

So, at this point, the whole Palin story is a complete Clusterfuck because our own side pissed in the well. Several people on this blog, as you point out, have done yeoman service trying to disentangle it all. I’ve asked, for example, for the Dominionist angle to be straightened out, since it’s a real concern after Christianist domination of the Bush administration.

I didn't say it was not "possible," I said it was a Clusterfuck, and then recommended a course of research in an area that was less likely to be contaminated (stuff like church attendance and sermons by pastors and Christianist material is on the record and less likely to be contaminated). Which, naturally, I am also taking considerable heat for. Plus ca change.

It was my error not to put "our own side" in quotes -- in fact, I don't regard Tier Two as being especially "left" (not the word I used), because it has never been clear to me how any movement based on misogyny and leveraging false charges of racism can possibly be either left or progressive.

In any case, you have work, I have work, and I have to go do mine.

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

And that Bush was the guy everyone wanted to have a beer with. Gore ran away from Clinton (like the media wanted him to) and made possibly the worst VP selection in history in Lieberman (where did all those Nader voters come from?). He also had an incredibly inept campaign. (Hi Donna! Hi Bob Shrum!) Then there's the GOP vote theft. And the media narrative set by Fox that Bush won and so that had to somehow be overturned by Gore, making it more difficult for him. The weak Dems did not then put on their own version of the Brooks Brothers riots, but seemd to want the entire mess to go away. There's also what I consider to be, in retrospect, the poor choices Gore's litigation team made in framing the issues, although he had very good lawyers.

IIRC, polls and pundits always said Gore won the debates the night they happened. Then the next day, the RNC would blast fax their talking points and before you knew it, Bush rocked and Gore sucked.

It's not that I think Americans always make good choices, but they are bombarded by lies and crappy analysis. Which pretty much characterizes every presidential campaign I've seen in my lifetime and I'd say it's gotten progressively worse. People cannot make good decisions with bad information and people got loads of bad information about Gore. And Gore for some reason never established a connection with the American public that the Clintons did that has allowed them so often to simply bypass the media. I think it's because Gore hired people like Brazile and Shrum who aren't interested in bypassing the media (which is what Gore needed to do) and instead tried to fit the media frames. Which is how we got the Big Dog not going to Tennessee right before election day and Joe Lieberman.

The 2000 election I'd say put on display pretty much every single weakness of the Democratic party - its unwillingness to defend its candidates from awful narratives (guys like Bob Herbert were piling on, not defending Gore), the promotion of losers like Shrum (no one should have the opportunity to lose seven presidential elections), alienation of the base to appease the right (Lieberman), inability to stop or effectively counter GOP vote theft, and when push came to shove at the end, the willingness to be shoved.

So I wouldn't say I'm all that much sweeter than you, I'd say that my ire is aimed more at the millionaires who lie every day to the American public and call it "news" than those being lied to.

As for tasering, I know a number of men and women who have been tasered. Every single one of them hated it. In fact, I had one guy tell me if it was a choice between being tasered or being bitten by a dog, he'd take the dog every time. After hearing that, I haven't had any real desire to try it myself. Perhaps the difference isn't testosterone, but brain cells. :-)