THERE THEY GO AGAIN

I’m afraid we’re in for a bumpy ride.

The Palin phenomenon reminds me of nothing less frightening than the Reagan one.

Peagan was a second tier Hollywood actor who had a great smile and came across like a nice guy, mostly, (though he could get angry in a very self-righteous pinched mouth way) but who represented ideas that a majority of U.S. citizens reject (the most stridently extreme being a belief in the imminent apocalypse which made worrying about future generations pointless and the belief in consulting astrology to determine what dates and numbers were best suited to governance decisions!).

His politics were much further to the right than most “Americans,” and his image and experience was built on a structure of half-truths and outright lies. But he was known as “the Teflon candidate” and later “the Teflon president,” because no matter how many of his, or his administration’s, lies were exposed, the charges mostly didn’t stick.

He actually would talk about WWII combat experiences when in fact he spent the war making movies in Hollywood, and the general populace (uninformed and unfortunately poorly educated when it comes to thinking objectively) would buy it totally and the media would let it drop.

Palin seems, to me at least, a new and even scarier version of that. And if her sudden rise to enormous national popularity helps McCain win the white house, and McCain declines or is unable to run in four years because of his age or age related illnesses, she could possibly extend their rule for another eight years.

The media will be a big help in all this, as they already have been. Notice there are no cries from the rightwing Republicans about how much attention she’s getting from the press (unless it’s press that questions her experience or attempts to expose the truth behind her many lies), whereas all they did was complain about any good press for Obama and spread the lie that he was getting more positive treatment from the media than McCain (when studies showed it was the opposite).

THE BIG LIE technique of the Republican Party—as I have written about before I know (as far back as the 1960s when I was a political columnist for various “alternative” newspapers, among other outlets)—isn’t much different (if at all) from those who most notoriously used that technique, the Nazis and Stalin, and his successors in the U.S.S.R.

I want to make it clear, though my rightwing critics won’t notice this, that I’m not saying every Republican or those who are sucked into voting for Republicans are liars. I have Republicans in my extended clan who genuinely believe these BIG LIES and don’t have the wherewithal, either intellectually or emotionally, to question them and are convinced by their leaders that it is the opposition that is lying about them!

But my point is simply that Palin may well become another “Teflon candidate”—as she seems to have been in the past in local and state politics in Alaska. There are plenty of her fellow Alaskans who don’t like her or trust her or believe she is a liar and a political opportunist. But the majority of the voters in that state approve highly of her tenure.

They either don’t believe or don’t care that she supported the “bridge to nowhere” until it was no longer politically expedient, and then presented herself to the world as someone who “fights corruption” and stood up to “the bridge to nowhere.”

Unfortunately the Democratic strategists seem incapable of creating an ad that shows footage of her supporting the bridge and then being against it after everyone else was, exactly as the right accused Kerry of doing on the Iraqi war.

His change in position was based on more knowledge and the experience of what Junior’s administration did with the authority to deal with Iraq and the war. It was a reasoned and principled change of heart and mind. But he defended that change poorly and his party did an even worse job of it.

Palin’s flip flops are way more politically opportunist and obvious, but, and it’s a big but once again, she has that rightwing Republican BIG LIE expertise combined with that Reaganesque attractive presentation of unattractive ideas, so she just sticks to her story, no matter how fabricated, of standing up to the powers that be when it comes to earmarks (“pork”) and the press mostly goes along with it.

But even if the press exposes some of her flip flopping and lying about it, or the frightening parts of her political and religious beliefs that are NOT shared by most “Americans,” her smile and generally attractive image, her seeming to be just an ordinary “hockey mom” (which some see as code for “white” since it’s not a sport known for its racial diversity) will convince a lot of folks, especially those not educated about these kinds of BIG LIE tactics (which means most “Americans” or else they wouldn’t spend so much money on unnecessary and often badly made and bad-for-them-and-the-world-in-general consumer goods etc.) or how to see through them.

Nope. They’ll paint the media and Democrats as anti-regular-folks-like-Palin-and-them, and maybe win this thing and have a heartbeat from the presidency someone whose record shows that a lot of what her party claims for her and she claims for herself is based on lies.

And let’s not even get into the lies McCain and she are telling about Obama (the three top ones in the past few days have been that Obama will raise average peoples’ taxes, that he’s never accomplished anything as a state and United States Senator, and that he’s too partisan (or too “liberal”) to reach across the aisle—all completely and easily provably false, but if repeated enough, most voters will believe anyway).