In Defense Of Sarah Palin

I don't often jump to Sarah Palin's aid, as I generally feel that the holes she falls in are the ones she's dug, but the current controversy is so unfair that I couldn't ignore it any longer.

I'll catch you up on it, if you need it - this last Sunday, "Family Guy" premiered an episode called 'Extra-Large Medium,' the storyline of which was that one of the main characters, Chris, went on a date with a character with Down Syndrome.  I thought, in and of itself, it wasn't that bad an episode, but the Down Syndrome parts of it threw me. "Family Guy" clearly knew they were on thin ice and pulled all their punches - a few off-hand jokes during a song Stewie sang called "Down Syndrome Girl", and that was it - so the parts featuring the character were generally laugh-free in every aspect. I remember watching the episode and at the beginning saying "why do this?" and at the end saying "why do it this way? If you're going to do it, go for it and try to make people laugh, or don't do it at all. Why do it halfway?"  Apparently, the answer is: do it halfway so that you can end up being defended by the media and come out looking rosy on the other side.

There's a joke in the show where Chris asks the girl what her parents do, and she answers that her mother is "the former governor of Alaska." And there are ways that's not an offensive joke. If the joke is "Sarah Palin is stupid," then that's acceptable - Palin has that reputation and that's fair game for jokes. But that's not the joke. The joke is that Sarah Palin has a baby with Down Syndrome, which is probably caused by the fact that Sarah Palin is stupid. And that's truly offensive.

Despite what the media outlets reporting the story seem to think, Palin is well within her rights to defend herself about this. This isn't simply being thin-skinned - having a child with Down Syndrome is a tremendous struggle for a family, and regardless of whether or not Palin is a public figure, comments like this should always be off-limits. The reason people haven't gathered in her corner over this is because she's Sarah Palin, and somehow doesn't qualify for our outrage. The "Family Guy" characters aren't the only ones perceived as cartoon characters here.

Put it this way: if a more respected politician had a child with Down Syndrome - President Obama, for example - and there was a TV show that made a crack at that kid in even the vaguest way, can you even imagine what sort of holy hell would be unleashed upon them? People would be lining the streets in protest, and if Obama then spoke out against that show and denounced its insensitivity, the internet would flood with articles praising him as a brave father defending his children and the rights of children with Down Syndrome everywhere.

Instead, "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane went on "Real Time With Bill Maher" last night and laughed off Palin's comments, while Maher referred to Palin as "The Queen of Fake Outrage", referencing her calling out Letterman for making a joke about her fourteen-year-old daughter probably being pregnant by a thirty-year-old man (and how dare she make a stink about that?). Both seemed to feel that since the actress who played the character had Down Syndrome and was fine with the show, and seemed to be living a happy, contented life, Palin's arguments hold no water. Which, of course, misses the point entirely. What does the quality of life of the actress playing the character have to do with a harsh joke against a member of a politician's family, regardless of the fact that they have the same condition? It's terrible journalism to make that piece the focus of the story when the real issue is the joke, not the character.

Of course, if we're going to talk about bad journalism, we have to mention the fact that when the news broke that the actress who played the character, Andrea Fay Friedman, had called Palin out for having no sense of humor, it wasn't mentioned that the actress had the same condition as her character. Once that was uncovered, the stories started scripting the controversy as a Sarah Palin vs. Actress With Down Syndrome, as if that was really what's going on here. Most news stories are now running a picture of Palin and Friedman side-by-side, to give the impression that this is some sort of showdown between them. Naturally, the stories exempted anything that could sway perception in Palin's favor, such as:

a. Friedman seems to deeply dislike Palin, and almost every news outlet cut off the quote before her denouncement of the politician later in the letter, where she says "my mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes." Friedman is certainly entitled to her opinion here, especially on this issue, but of course that quote would never be reported since it means that Friedman couldn't be portrayed as a victim anymore. For all the posturing that "Family Guy" treated Friedman and her character like any other human being, news outlets haven't shown the same disgression.

b. Even if Friedman says "I was making fun of Sarah Palin, not her son," that doesn't take the show off the hook. She didn't write those lines, the show's writers did, and to put the actress' face on them in the press is disingenuous. It doesn't matter what her intent was, it matters what the show's intent was. Yet I have yet to read a single article that's addressed this in any way.  Apparently, once the actress spoke the lines, the show was absolved of all blame.

Not to mention that most articles have used this story to reference older Palin stories to discredit her - particularly her calling out Rahm Emmanuel for using the word "retard" but giving a pass to Rush Limbaugh - as if that had anything to do with anything. The throughline being "just in case you were going to side with Sarah Palin on this issue, here's a list of reasons she can't be trusted." And these are news stories. It's the equivalent of newspapers and news outlets covering the State of the Union by saying "President Obama, who once said he thought there were 57 states in the union and has consistently mixed up what exactly U.S. foreign policy has historically been in interviews, addressed Congress tonight to explain his plan for our government in the coming year." Evidently, we only notice a lack of journalistic integrity when it deals with politicians we like.

Two years ago, I though the Republican party was in complete disarray and didn't see any way that it could resurrect itself anytime soon. I now understand that the party doesn't have to do a thing: news outlets will just keep picking at it incessantly without justification until more than 50% of the country says "y'know, none of these arguments seem to hold any water. I think I'm gonna side with the other guys."

Best Sketches: SNL Season 34

Doing the quick-hits list of best sketches from this year's Saturday Night Live made me realize that I never did one from last season. Easy to remedy that.

I could have listed these "in no particular order", since it was one of those years on SNL - a huge pack of very solid, memorable sketches, all about equal in terms of staying power - except for the top few, which I feel we'll be remembering for years to come.

Without further ado, and with apologies to "Like A Boss" and Will Ferrell's monologue:

15. Two A-Holes At A Pitch Meeting in the 1960's

This one is only rated this low since it's perhaps too inside joke-laden - not only do you have to have seen "Mad Men" before, but you needed to have specifically seen their Emmy-nominated season finale, "The Caousel." It also wouldn't hurt to have seen Jason Sudekis and Kristen Wiig's "Two A-Holes" series before. With or without that preparation, the sketch is loads of fun - especially with the appearance of John Hamm's real-life co-stars Elizabeth Moss and John Slattery.

14. Immigrant Tale

1800's-era Irish Immigrant Justin Timberlake philosophizes about his future progeny, Justin Timberlake, and the great things he will achieve. Timberlake manages the exact balance of self-deprecation and winking self-aggrandizement - a sentiment that frankly may someday be engraved on his tombstone.

13. "Goodnight Saigon"

Season 34's final sketch featured both a who's who of celebrity cameos (Tom Hanks, Anne Hathaway, Paul Rudd, Artie Lange, et al.) and a surprisingly and weirdly moving version of Billy Joel's "Goodnight Saigon". There's a reason Ferrell ended his career as perhaps the best sketch artist in the history of SNL - he's perfectly cut out for this sort of work. Even as the sketch gets stranger, he only gets funnier.

12. "I'm On A Boat!"

This one only gets better the more you watch it. Millions and millions of people have done comic raps, but not very many go so far as to snag a hip-hop superstar (T-Pain) and do a fully professional music video while they're at it. They're also the first people to realize what's now abundantly obvious - T-Pain is fully willing to mock the horse that brought him here (see: Funny or Die videos, CMA skit with Taylor Swift, etc).

11. Madonna & Angelina Jolie

Two spot on impressions by Wiig and Abby Elliot, the best of which is both of their expressions when they say the phrase "space baby."

10. High School Musical

It's not just that Zach Efron showed some acting chops on his turn on SNL - he was exceptionably good. Especially when knocking the show that made him famous, when he shows up at his old high school as their shellshocked commencement speaker.

9. Whopper Virgins

A take on Burger King's controversial (and legitimately offensive) Whopper Virgin commercials, SNL imagines what, exactly, an actual Whopper Virgin interview would look like.

8. Mary Poppins

I knew that Anne Hathaway had a theater background, so I suppose it shouldn't have surprised me that she was excellent on SNL, but my esteem for her acting chops had risen significantly by the end of the show. Sort of the opposite of watching Matthew Fox or Tim McGraw host. This isn't the only time she's in the top 10.

7. Weekend Update: Justin Timberlake

Justin Timberlake takes us through an entire SNL episode in 3 minutes. And it's spellbinding. Because Timberlake could host SNL every week and no one would be bothered at all.

6.Wedding Toast

Really, it's 10 different brilliant new characters that all happened to be tried out at the same sketch. It's just kismet it all happened at once.

5. Couric/Palin

The first of the truly memorable moments of the season on the list, this was one of those skits that got broken down ad nauseam by the press for no other reason than Sarah Palin was such a polarizing figure last fall that the press remained deeply fascinated by her throughout the race, to a truly bizarre degree. And Tina Fey's impression of her - helped immensely by Seth Meyer's sharply funny writing - ended up a condemningly accurate portrayal of what, exactly, Palin's appeal really was.

4. The Lawrence Welk Show

It's not so much that it's an accurate imitation of what "The Lawrence Welk Show" was, it's just that doing a version of the show in the 21st century, completely irregardless of context, ended up being much more funny than doing it 40 years beforehand.

3. Mark Wahlberg Talks To Animals

I don't know why this is funny. It's just that it somehow seems totally accurate.

2. Motherlover

Because it took guts to say "y'know what the world is crying out for? A sequel to our song about hiding our penises in boxes!" It also probably took guts to call Susan Sarandon and Patricia Clarkson and ask them to be in the music video. I can't imagine how you start that phone call.

1.  Sarah Palin Rap

And the cultural zeitgest comes to rest on Amy Poehler, who, seeming to physically hold off labor while performing, raps a song that features her killing a moose with a handgun, screaming "Now you're dead! Now you're dead, 'cause I'm an animal! And I'm bigger than you!" while Palin cheerfully bobs her head in rhythm three feet away. In 15 years, we will have no way to explain this clip to our children. It will absolutely mystify them, and possibly us as well.

The election is a week away, and the press has run out of ideas.

Has anyone else noticed that Sarah Palin has entered the Michael Jackson/Mike Tyson Zone, where any news report, no matter how out of left field, is now accepted by the public without a bat of an eye? I was thinking about this as I was watching the news coverage the $150K clothes story, because apparently neither I nor CNN had anything better to do. They could have said anything while filing that story - that an additional $20K was spent on an investigation to make sure that the clothes had not been manufactured in sweatshops, that the tailoring of the clothes was carefully monitored so as to make sure that it would emphasize Sarah Palin's chest, that the clothes were partially paid for in bear meat - and we would probably have believed it.

While I'm commenting on this story, can we all just agree that this is a nonsense story? The governor of a small state where stores are habitually restocked by shipments sent on small commercial planes is suddenly thrust into the limelight, and the RNC overspends in order to get her a wardrobe that doesn't say "L.L. Bean" anywhere on it. If you just change how the story is told, it instead becomes a Cinderella moment, but current public perception of Palin just won't allow it.

All news outlets are pumping a "can we trust the polls?" story endlessly, which is cable news code for "we know the race is over but we're still flogging this horse race story because it's all we've got." It is great fun to hear inapplicable poorly-sourced evidence about polls being read one way and then the election going the other, though, especially when it's told as unlikely anecdotes - "I remember a mayoral race in Utah that looked like it was all heading towards this one black candidate..."

Speaking of news coverage, I've finally figured out how the three major cable news outlets break down:
1. CNN is six inches left of center but thinks it's only one, maybe two inches left of center. Every time it thinks this, it moves another inch to the left.
2. Fox News thinks it is two feet to the right of center, and is very proud of this - the lone conservative voice in an increasingly biased world. This is why it hasn't noticed that it is actually four feet to the right of center.
3. MSNBC is three feet to the left of center but thinks it is actually exactly on the center. It also thinks Republicans are stupid and should be taken to task, or at least talked down to. It hasn't worked out yet that these two thoughts might be mutually exclusive.

I separate them out according to this: I turn on CNN if I want to know what's going on, I turn on Fox News if I want gleefully biased coverage, and I turn on MSNBC if I want to huck my remote at the television.

Speaking of gleefully biased reporting, Rolling Stone's latest issue features Barack Obama on the cover. Again. For the third time in six months. Here are the covers in case you missed them:

I remember when I first got Rolling Stone as a teenager how there was always one article per issue that was something wildly partisan and just generally outrageous - there'd be at two-page spread that would just be a picture of a clear-cut section of the Everglades, and a small inserted picture cropped out of some photo shoot of George Bush holding an axe. The title would be "Why Bush Hates Nature: How The GOP Is Working To Destroy The Air We Breathe." And the article would go on for 9 to 14 pages. I remember as a sixteen-year old reading the first of these articles and saying "it is embarrassingly ludicrous for a national magazine to be writing something like this." But the rest of each issue was always good, so I just learned to skip the article each week and just move on.

I re-subscribed to RS about a year ago and have been disappointed ever since. One article has spread to two, and then to three. I don't mean that their heartfelt love of all things Democratic has spread to only three articles, naturally that covers the whole magazine. I mean those articles that are so insultingly inaccurate and accusatory that you only read the description under the title and then just skip over them. On the past three issues, I have made it from the table of contents to the album reviews without finding anything worth reading. I can now finish an issue in about ten minutes. I think I could get more deeply involved in an Us Weekly at this point.

This issue is particularly note-worthy as they savor the results of an almost certain election. Keep in mind I did not make these articles up:

Can The Republicans Steal The Election? The GOP is at it again, detering new voters and discarding Democratic ballots.

Death of a Red State: One rural Colorado voting district is poised to turn left. Is America outgrowing the politics of bigotry?

The main article is of course the Barack Obama interview, the description of which says "Obama's Moment: The Democratic nominee for president talks about how George W. Bush screwed up, why John McCain turned ugly and what he's learned from Bill Clinton." Very tame for them, of course, but the questions in the interview include such robust entries as:

"Were you disturbed by the disdain [John McCain] exhibited towards you during the first debate?"

"In the last two elections, the Republicans worked to supress the vote, especially in Democratic precincts. Reporting by Bobby Kennedy in "Rolling Stone" has raised questions about whether the Republicans stole the 2004 election in Ohio. Are you worried about those kinds of tactics this time around? And what are you doing in advance to keep that from happening?"

[After Obama answers with a 'you said it, not me, but yes we're doing a lot' reply] "But John Kerry said the same thing in 2004. Lawyers are mainly useful after the fact, when it's too late. Is there anything you can do before the fact to keep the vote from being tampered with?"

"Looking back over the past eight years, what's the thing that Bush screwed up the worst?"

Fortunately, they balanced their hard-hitting questions with more standard Presidential questions, like "What did you get Michelle for your anniversary," "what does your staff tease you about," and "if you could install in the White House just one play toy - bowling alley, water polo - what would it be?"

The best is naturally the photo selection, which features the highlights of any good Obama puff piece: a two page spread of a black-and-white photo of Obama gazing out a plane window with a newspaper on his lap, a wide shot of him walking away from a podium with thousands behind him cheering, another black and white picture, this time a shot of him energetically teaching class at the University of Chicago, and him and Biden laughing and slapping each other on the back as they order ice cream in Pennsylvania. Loads of fun.

Reading the article, I was struck by two things - one, that it's a lot easy to take shots at your opponent when the interviewer does all the heavy lifting for you. Whenever the interviewer would say something insulting about McCain/Bush/Hillary/whoever, Obama would give a 'let's all try to be very human and understanding but yes, yes, you're right, that person is absolutely terrible" answer. He comes off looking gallant every time. And two, the greatest failing the Republicans have had this election was to underestimate Obama as a politician. No matter what he did, no matter whether he was right or wrong, he always managed to play his cards correctly on every hand. He transformed an election that was shaping up to be about experience versus change, and made it about change versus lack of experience. The number one worry voters have with John McCain is the inexperience of his vice presidential candidate. Can we just all pause and consider what a master stroke that was? I have no idea how he did it (though, did anyone else notice he's stopped dying his hair?). Even if the press did it for him, he still managed to work everything so that it never bounced back on him. None of the last three debates dealt with Obama's lack of experience. It became a dead issue. That's remarkable.

There's a small box in the new Rolling Stone discussing how the Republicans will likely be losing more seats in the House and Senate again this year, the second election running. You have to ask yourself, how is it possible that Congress could swing left, tally up the worst poll numbers in history, and swing left again? How bad is the Republican political machine these days that they can't make political hay out of the fact that the Congressional poll numbers were within the margin of error?

Something to think about. In any case, tomorrow afternoon I'm doing early voting. There's always hope.

Palin Fatigue

I'm sorry, I've just got to say it... I'm exhausted by all this Sarah Palin coverage. I just don't want to see anything else about her. I'm done.

She's become a national obsession, and everything new that comes out is just more nonsense. Endless articles about Sarah Palin's moustache. Her latest minor gaffe while speaking. Bristol's ultrasound results. Pundits explaining the odds of McCain dying and her taking office. Various celebrities explaining in interviews how much they hate her. The constant anti-Palin blogging. Conservatives racing each other to jump off the bandwagon first. The Palin-themed porno that's about to be released (really! It's gone this far!). It's gotten unbelievable.

I can deal with the nonsense that might have some connection to whether I want to vote for a candidate or not (Jeremiah Wright), or the things that probably don't but could be considered telling anyway (John McCain's house count). That's all fair game. Let's sort the Bill Ayers from the overhead projectors from the "let's bomb bomb bomb Irans" from whatever else we've got lying around. I can deal with that.

But why did the election have to become a feeding frenzy over Palin? AVI would probably say that it's a tribal difference - the Arts and Humanities crowd recognizing one of what Christian Lander at Stuff White People Like would call "the wrong sort of white person." She hunts and participated in beauty pageants and likes being a mom and has questions about evolution and has probably ironically said "neat-o" several times in her life. She is the sort of person that the A&H tribe pretends not to despise. Unsuccessfully. Or rather, the sort of person that the A&H tribe pretends to hate individually rather than hating everyone similar to her. Unsuccessfully.

The selection of Palin was obviously going to be a controversial one anyway, but not for the reasons it ended up being. The question was supposed to be having a candidate so inexperienced after McCain attacked Obama so consistently about not being ready to be President. Instead, the debate became how McCain could select someone like her to be Vice President.

But naturally, the experience difference between Obama and Palin is embarrassingly small. And people's strong reaction to Palin's nomination should have, but did not, spark a great debate. Why is Obama so strongly considered an acceptable nomination for President but Palin is so strongly not considered one? What qualities does Obama have that Palin lacks? What qualities are we looking for that we're so certain one has and the other does not?

I wish the press debate had been about that. I wish we could have debated what it was about Palin that so divided America. But that was never the discussion. Instead, we talked endlessly about her difficulty with interviews and whether Tina Fey's impression of her would shape the campaign and the shape of her glasses.

And I'm just done with it.

It IS eerie, isn't it?

This will mean nothing to a lot of you, but if you've ever watched Battlestar Galactica, the parallels here are truly frightening:

I'd been holding to the current Presidential race = Seasons 6 and 7 of The West Wing theory, but I think I may have to abandon that strategy and go for this new theory. After all, Sen. McCain and Col. Tigh are both former POWs, and Palin and Roslin both come from education backgrounds.

Though, I suppose there's something to be said for people just naturally looking for leadership from wizened old military vets and capable women wearing spectacles.