[The Best of] Oh Crap, I Have A Crush on Sarah Palin

Giving My Friends A Break

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 02:20:00 +0000

Poor dears who syndicate OCIHACOSP that don't allow the n-word a la "N-wordhead Follies" on their blogs.

This post is giving them some relief.

Oh yeah and Governor Thang isn't running for president. Like I said at The People's View, I suppose that means I'll have to make a blog called "Oh Crap I Have A Crush on Herman Cain".

Crankage Creep Part 4: Cynthia McKinney, Herman Cain, and the Christian-Shariah, States Rights Crazy Train

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 07:20:00 +0000

A version of this post has been crossposted to The People's View.

"Don't Tom for Mr. Charlie"
-- Civil Rights era saying

What comes after tokenism?

These days, I've been discussing a trend I've noticed, not only on the states rights Christian-shariah right but the crankodoodle left, as well. Beyond political pandering and 1960s-2000s tokenism, it concerns the use of Black spokesmodels as morality chips to advance regressive politics or views that tug at the heartstrings to evince a particular political result. Neither pandering nor tokenism are anything new. But in the age of The First Black President®, the trend is one to watch, because it's not going away.

Quoting the self:

Does anyone think it's a mistake or coincidence that it's the Black man in the GOP race who articulates these anti-Muslim views the loudest?

Does anyone think it's a mistake or coincidence that people let Alice Walker get away with playing the "freedom ride" card when discussing the Gaza flotillas?

Cynthia McKinney, Professional Crankodoodle, has been known to blather Third Position/"beyond left and right" views to whomever will listen.

Some Black people are allowing themselves to be mouthpieces for agendas that either don't care about us or seek to actively suppress us. Don't expect me to be one and don't expect me to condone it. If this sounds like a non-sequitur thinking, it's not.

As much as they recoil from the word, the American rightwing is quite diverse. But our adversaries in any rightwing faction have no qualms with using lefty ideas -- and ideals -- to forward repressive, regressive ideas and policies. Anders B. Breivik, the Norway mass murderer called it using multiculturalist ideas against us to destroy us. Years ago, Chip Berlet of Public Eye labeled it right-woos left. I call today's iteration the leftwing of the far right. In our celebrity culture in the post-Civil Rights era, it goes hand in hand with political showbiz.

Leave it to Ms. McKlanny and her A.N.S.W.E.R. Traveling Carnival Exhibit of Suppport for Genocidal Dictators to once again scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Today, in my usual perusal of RWNJ sources to see what they're up to, I went to American Free Press, a longstanding antisemitic crankodoodle site. AFP is a Willis Carto publication.

Guess who's face is featured at the top of the front page, with a link to an interview with one of their bigots. Go on, guess.

In the interview, Ms. McKinney laments a "shift to the right" (5:44) on the part of the Democratic party. As Michele Bachmann might tell us, she's got a lot of chootspuh, given that American Free Press has been a longstanding mouthpiece of the Elizabeth Dilling/Francis Parker Yockey right.

Who?

Elizabeth Dilling, whose red- (and Jewish-) baiting agitation Glenn Beck was caught peddling on his show.

Francis Parker Yockey, a godfather of today's confederate/neo-nazi rightwing of buttondowns.

Over time, Yockey contacted or worked with many of the far-Right figures and organizations of his day. These included the German-American Bund, the German-American National Alliance, William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts, Sir Oswald Mosley's Union Movement, George Sylvester Viereck, the American H. Keith Thompson, Gerald L.K. Smith, and James H. Madole's National Renaissance Party. Thompson and Madole, in particular, became advocates of Yockey's worldview. While Yockey's pro-Fascist activities began in the late 1930s, they did not end there. Unfazed by the defeat of the Axis in the Second World War, Yockey actually became even more active in neo-Fascist causes after 1945. From this point forward, he remained dedicated solely to his cause of reviving Fascism. He dispensed with any semblance of an ordinary life, and remained constantly on the move, travelling to wherever he felt he could pursue his goals most effectively, and cultivating countless contacts along the way.

Yockey's ideas were usually only embraced by those, however, who could countenance the necessity of an alliance between the far Left and the far Right, which was a fundamental pillar of Yockey's ideas. The American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell, for example, rejected Yockey on the basis of his anti-American attitude, as well as his willingness to work with anti-Zionist Communist governments and movements, as the ANP adhered solely to the ideals of absolute anti-Bolshevist National Socialism, as had been advocated by Hitler.

(Emphasis mine.)

With American Free Press, the nut did not fall far from the tree; in fact, it's still firmly attached to the tree. AFP was the old Spotlight magazine of the Liberty Lobby, started in 1955 by Yockey-ite Willis Carto. Carto is another living historical figure on the neo-confederate, neo-nazi populist right.

Via ADL:

Carto's chief aim was always to mobilize opinion against Jews. Liberty Lobby was his chief instrument to bridge right-wing constituencies -- hard-right or paramilitary libertarians, conspiratorial anticommunists, racists -- by inflaming their anti-government and nativist fears and identifying Jews as the country's chief threat. "Zionists," in the group's disingenuous rhetoric, and the "Zionist lobby," were the driving forces behind integration; Communism; the United Nations and internationalism; the moral decline accompanying liberalism; and, obviously, Israel. These sentiments were widely conveyed by Liberty Lobby's weekly tabloid, The Spotlight, which debuted in September 1975. Written and edited by the organization's staff (including, occasionally, Carto himself),7 the flagship publication reflected Carto's conspiracy theory of history, a nightmare vision in which hidden forces -- including elite policy groups like the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations -- manipulated governments and media around the world. Jews continually turn up, not just as Zionists but in other coded forms, including "Israel's American supporters," "dual loyalists," "cultural Marxists" and "international bankers."

Nothing has changed in its incarnation as American Free Press. If there's a conspiracy theory that blames Jews for every evil in the world, you can bet American Free Press will promote it. As we could expect, Ms. McKinney goes into her usual dance around "string-pullers" behind Obama (and now the oligarchs in the Russian Federation) and other predictable, Protocols-lite b.s. in the interview. Another day, another dose of right-woos-left crankage.

So yes, Alan Maki of New Progressive Alliance and other anti-Obama Disappointeds ready to throw in the towel after two years. Ms. McKinney's bedding down with idiots like Daryl Bradford Smith, the pro-Gadhaffi, pro-dictator A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition (which this AFP podcast was intended to promote), and now open association with American Free Press discredit her, and sully your movement. So sure, go on and keep kicking around Cynthia McKinney's name in these absurd "primary Obama" exploits.

Hey, anything beats the their last pandering/educational attempt, sending some ridiculous "Obama is a Republican!!!!" bus around majority-Black neighborhoods. How's that working out for them these days?

__________

Contrast McKinney's forays into the anti-Zionist extremist right with people like Herman Cain, and the Christian Zionist leftwing of the far rightists attending Rick Perry's Ginormous Prayer Meeting. Called The Response, it came and went yesterday in Houston, attracting 20,000 adherents, give or take a few thousand.

Although Paul Rosenberg at Alternet lapsed into No True Scotsman fallacy by the end of his piece, its also worth noting:

“It's surprisingly multiracial, that is, surprising if you you don't understand why,” [Peter Forrest Wilder of the Texas Observer] said. Consequently, people should not expect The Response to be "this white bread crowd that people would expect Rick Perry, this white conservative male would be putting on. In fact, it's a pretty racially diverse movement of people, in part reflecting its deep involvement in overseas evangelizing."

“There's this interesting kind of veneer of racial reconciliation,” Wilder continued. “I wrote about in the article. There's this kind of instrumentality to it, not that it's not sincere, but there's a goal that's attached, trying to overcome racial problems within this community or Christianity or even conservatism, if you want to keep going with it. And that's that, at a base level, you look at what Lou Engel said. He wants a new breed of black prophets to rise up and use their social justice civil rights kind of bona fides to lend authenticity and credibility to the anti-abortion movement.”

A similar critique and catalog of some of their exploits can be found throughout my blog, in tags like Neo-Pentecostal/Charismatic Girls. I've said in other places that my parents could easily have been on The Response's roster. Having had both parents as leaders in a regional Apostolic prayer network and Bible school promoting racial reconciliation, however, it's a mistake to doubt the commitment (and thus the political pull) of grassroots whites and nonwhites involved in it.

I watched with interest this past week as Herman Cain had a falling-off-his-horse moment around his Muslim-baiting, and the immediate smackdown reaction of American Family Association's Bryan Fischer. The AFA was the main sponsor behind The Response. Rewriting the First Amendment by playing a very confused Christian-Confederate card:

States are given, under our Constitution, virtually unlimited freedom to manage religious liberty affairs as they see fit. They even maintain the constitutional right to “establish” a church if they choose, that is, to pick one Christian denomination and make it the official church of their individual state. It would be a bad idea, but not unconstitutional. Nine of the 13 original states had established churches at the time of the Founding, a practice the First Amendment was designed to protect. (They wised up and dis-established them all by 1833.)

And states also maintain the right to restrict dangerous religious expression as they see fit, whether we’re talking about the KKK and its burning crosses or Islam and its virulent anti-semitism. The federal government is forbidden to interfere but the Constitution places no limits around what state governments may do to deal with religiously-inspired threats to their security, peace, freedoms and individual rights. That’s a matter for state constitutions and lawmakers.

I’m afraid it may be too late for Herman to find his voice again on Islam. But it’s not too late for the United States of America.

This, from the same race-baiter who has also recently claimed Obama wants to give America back to the Indians. Oh brother.

A couple days later, he got another smackdown attempt from Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, ironically one of the few GOTP influences to speak out about it. Playing an overdue, very tattered "but he's Black!!" card, Land fingerwagged,

The glorious First Amendment to our Constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an Establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Ever since the Civil War and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 it has been the firm and uniform opinion of the Supreme Court and the entire federal judiciary that all the things the federal government is forbidden from doing in the Bill of Rights, all local and state entities are proscribed from doing as well.

It is surprising that a man of Mr. Cain's ethnicity and age would be so insensitive to this issue. Thank God we put a stop to the "local option" that Southern states put on African-Americans' civil rights during the Jim Crow era. As a result of the bravery of the thousands who marched with Dr. King, Selma and Birmingham no longer have a "local option" on allowing full citizenship to their African-American residents.

That sure is interesting, coming from the head of America's largest church body that formed as part of the pro-slavery Confederate south. The inevitable anti-Black racebaiting of Herman Cain has begun, just like they did Condi and Colin. It never takes these bigots long to start racebaiting the very people some marketing genius told them they need on board, to win over the most symbolic voting bloc in the country (even as our numbers start to decline, our symbolic use as a group will still count in the minds of opportunists for another couple generations.)

Oh and congratulations, Rev. Fred Luter, one of the 17 Black members of the SBC who just last month was elected to First Vice President of the Convention.

Woohoo, I love the scent of progress in 2011.

Snark aside, much like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry/Jeff Davis-lite himself, it's a mistake to write off or deliberately misunderstand this faction of conservative Christianity. Crazy may they look to some, stupid may they sound to others, bat-shyt may we think they act, they've never died down, their ranks have only grown. Yesterday's rally was less a revival meeting with a Web 2.0-friendly website, than a show of numbers and potential political clout.

I would not be surprised to find Rick Perry on the GOP ticket if not in the P slot then in the VP one. "The Response" is just the beginning; the extremists of the rightwing have been working towards anti-Civil Rights goals for an entire generation.

(H/t Kris Peterson on the Alternet article.)

Leftwing of the Far Right Pandering: Befuddled Palinite Tries to Pinkwash Sarah Palin With OCIHACOSP. LOL!

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 04:59:00 +0000

Pandering.

This post is one in a series on political pandering.

1 - Academic Showbiz, Celebrity Profs, and Crankage-Creep on the Left
2 - Prophetessor West: Crankage-Creep Part 2
3 - Crankage-Creep Part 3: Black Whackodoodles, Advanced Tokenism, Minority Authenticity, and Blackaphilia
4 - (Not) Queer Like Me

Just when you thought the mindless meme of a Palin-Bachmann catfight was so last month, Michele Bachmann's recent signing of the litmus test proffered by Christian sharia group THE FAMiLY LEADER, has provided another jump-off point for Bachmann-Palin comparison. Rick Santorum also signed it, but you will not hear much about that, since it doesn't generate eyeball counts.

Des Moines Register:

It notes, as the first piece of evidence toward its thesis that "the Institution of Marriage in America is in great crisis," that "Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President."

Signers agree to support making divorce more difficult and reject "Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control." And they agree to call for "humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy — our next generation of American children — from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion and other types of coercion or stolen innocence."

Lovely.

Meanwhile, this link to a blog by M. Sheppard kept showing up in my referrers today: Gays Commence Bachman Destruction-Palin's Advantage Is Their Love.

The threat of Bachman winning the nomination has been recognized by the Beltway insiders, who have commenced their hatchet jobs "The rise and fall of Michele Bachman" already. This would be a drop in the bucket compared to the unleashing of the full fury of a community which felt threatened. A Bachman nomination could, without a doubt, result in an election defeat worse than Mondale's as the Obama team would not, as the courtly Reagan did, to not unduly humiliate Mondale by him losing all 50 states, refuse to campaign in Minnesota.

On the other hand Sarah Palin is seen as a moderate on social issues by many in the Gay and Lesbian community, including some high profile media personalities. Hillbuzz, a significant Gay voice is hugely supportive of Palin, as is Tammy Bruce and, eccentrically and perhaps for libidinal reasons so is this gay site "Oh Crap I Have a Crush On Sarah Palin". It would be difficult for the leftist Gay sites to attack Palin as homophobic, when everything she has done in public life (and private) points to the other direction.

E for effort; F for the Private School Vouchers Grad analysis.

I really love it when white social conservatives purport to appoint pre-approved minority leaders for us, such as Herman Cain, Alveda King, Tammy Bruce, and cetera. It's even funnier watching the response when their choices are invariably rejected, and sent packing.

In fact, I would say "the leftist Gay sites" generally don't care one whit about what race-baiting conservogays like Hillbuzz and Dummy Bruce have to say about anything, let alone their unyielding love for Sarah Palin and her ridiculous, eyeroll-generating policies. In fact, I'm probably the only one who pays them any attention.

With this latest litmus-testing stunt, THE FAMiLY LEADER reveals the converging points of the far right's slavery-nostalgic, anti-Black pathologies. Though, somewhat predictably, the single-issue name brand gay sites today seemed utterly oblivious to the slavery-bait in the pledge (which can be downloaded at Think Progress.

(And although he showed up to their latest Presidential Lecture Series, no word yet on whether the only Sharia-baiting, gay-hiring, self-identified emancipated slave in the race thinks about this comparison of today's Black families to a whitewashed, agenda-laden, pandering caricature of the slave household. I'm guessing, probably not.)

Black-interest sites like Jack and Jill Politics chimed in with stuff like this:

Given that families were broken up regularly for sales during slavery and that rape by masters was pretty common, this could not be more offensive. I mean, putting aside the statistics on this, which are likely off-base, I could not be more angry. When will Republicans inquire with actual Black people whether or not we’re ok with invoking slavery to score cheap political points? It has to stop. It is the opposite of persuasive and is another reason Republicans repel us. It’s hard to believe that Michele Bachmann would be foolish enough to sigh this pledge.

But proving Bachmann may be crazier and more hardcore than Sarah Palin, she has.

What do you think? Will this torpedo her primary bid or propel her forward with the GOP base?

Those have got to be rhetorical questions. The answers would be: NEVER, and NO. Why bother asking.

Sheppard, on the other hand, indulges a delusional fantasy that the extremism of the Bachmann candidacy is really acting as a red herring to promote a more electable Governor Guess-Who as the more desirable Christian conservative. Since she's so popular with and loved by eccentric queers such as yours truly. Read/weep:

The media, at least some anyway, had a residual shred of decency, and Washington Beltway insiders Douglas Kahn and Eleanor Clift "Bachman's Rise And Fall" couldn't stomach the charade and ran a column, which is quite prescient in retrospect (although it would be hard not to have come to their conclusion give Bachman's record).
but the Gay community sounded the real mass alarm, followed very quickly by a wider commentariat-including Rachel Maddow who has a foot in both camps, and who confirms the tenor of my previous post that the Gay community will show Bachman no mercy, and have influence out of all proportion to their numbers.

This leaves Palin, who is adored by many in the Gay community, once again showing her brilliant strategic qualities, as she has let each new bright shiny object rise and self-destruct whilst finalizing her decision to run or not.

If she does she can only look better for Bachman having self-destructed, and will appear in an even better light to the Gay community. Further, whilst her support from those quarters will be even more firm, the possible antagonism by the liberal Gay element will be blunted by the comparison with Bachman, whom a cynic might think is deliberately making Palin, whom she secretly wants to win, look good in contrast.

I would suggest Sheppard read what Tea Party Express's Pwn(ed) Professional Black said about this conundrum of inelectability.

I hate to keep sounding like a broken record on this topic, but I must ask. Is Michele Bachmann the NEXT Sarah Palin? Several patriots have said, “I adore Sarah Palin. But, she has been so destroyed in the media, she would be a disaster as our republican presidential candidate”.

Well to all of you who subscribe to this opinion, have you seen the shock and awe campaign launched by the liberal media to destroy Bachmann, since officially throwing her hat into the presidential ring a few days ago?

If Bachmann becomes our nominee, suddenly the liberal media will portray Sarah Palin as the far more reasonable candidate rather than the ultra-conservative idiot nut case, Michele Bachmann.

Should we kick Bachmann to the curb adding her with Palin on the list of unelectable candidates on our side; considered too toxic, too tea party and too conservative to win?

Talking loud with nothing to say, Lloyd Marcus concludes, "Patriots, let's go for the gold and select an unapologetic conservative who will speak to ALL Americans without pandering to any group."

And that would be whom, Lloyd? Just as Palin's followers and defenders whimper about "sexism", both Marcus and Herman Cain talk incessantly about race. They should revel in their quota slots as martyrs of Black liberals, while they still can.

White social conservatives rather legendarily resent and hate nonwhites who talk about race -- in ANY context, with a special rage reserved for we Black nonwhites. The leftwing of the far right types will temporarily allow it from the few Black people trying to impress them, in this Age of Obama. But eventually, they'll get the Condi/Colin/Kicked-to-the-curb treatment when defeating Obama stops being the goal.

And yet, have I not predicted many times over that Breitbart/HotAir tokenists like Sheppard would use Bruce's Sarah-crush and Palin's near-silence on gay issues to do exactly what Sheppard does, above? Yes I did. Oh, yes I did.

OTOH, Sheppard can put down the oxy pipe and read what this author has had to say about Palin's leftwing of the far right politics for the past three years.

Poor Palin diehards. I know they are getting desperate in their zeal for Esther/Deborah/Moses 2.0. But I didn't think any were so desperate to try and hammer and saw this blog into being even remotely pro-Palin politics.

Rotfl!

(Not) Queer Like Me

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:16:00 +0000

My mother used to love that book, Black Like Me. Griffin was his name.

Personally? I never could stand it. Today, I'm reminded of exactly why.

As we discussed a couple days ago, a bunch of people have resigned from GLAAD's board after the organization was caught shilling for AT&T. Or so it's perceived.

The community bona-fides of a remaining board member, known for his work with conservative and antigay organizations, are also in heavy dispute.

And just as marriage equality passed in New York, another Prop 8-style anti-gay marriage measure is up for a vote in Minnesota, in November.

Speaking of Minnesota, I expect any minute now for poor Michele Bachmann's star to get eclipsed by the Former Governor of You Know What Overgrown State. (Again.) The Palin Traveling Circus of Crazy pulls into Iowa today, for the premiere of The Undefeated. It's widely speculated the Palin camp will use the big-screen infomercial to launch a 2012 campaign, but Sarah is the master at that old parental "we'll see" game. Nobody tops her at it.

And just when the snewse was coming around to comparing Rep. Bachmann to Saint Ronnie, and everything. Tsk, tsk.

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

Right in time for an OC screed on pinkwashing-for-anti-Zionism comes this Lede story from the NY Times: Israeli Video Blog Exposed as a Hoax

A YouTube video featuring a man who presented himself as an American gay rights activist disillusioned with the latest Gaza flotilla campaign has been exposed as a hoax.

The man in the video, who introduced himself to viewers as Marc and claimed that the organizers of the latest flotilla of ships bound for Gaza had rejected his offer to mobilize a network of gay activists in support of their cause, was identified as Omer Gershon, a Tel Aviv actor involved in marketing, by the Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian Web site.

Watch the clumsy, textbook-case pinkwash attempt:

The story about the hoaxed video kicked around on Max Blumenthal and some pro-Palestinian blogs, but now that the NY Times has picked it up, expect those hit meters to peak.

Way to get your message against crawling in bed with cranks buried, fellas. Use a prominent Israeli public figure who was easily recognized, right off; then go screw up the tweets. Nice job.

This tale about a tall tale is itself on the heels of another online gay hoax that went viral a couple weeks ago, with two prominent homobloggers being outed (reverse-outed?) as heterosexual men.

The male American PhD student who confessed to being an internet hoaxer masquerading as a lesbian blogger in Damascus has spoken publicly about the reasons behind his deception, saying he was motivated, in part, by his own "vanity".

Gay activists in Syria and further afield have reacted furiously to the revelation that the blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus, was written not by a 35-year-old woman kidnapped by security forces last week, but by Tom MacMaster, a married, 40-year-old American studying at Edinburgh University.

Speaking via Skype video to the Guardian, MacMaster, who is on holiday in Istanbul with his wife, expressed some contrition for the blog, which he began in February after constructing an elaborate web identity for Amina Abdallah Aral al Omari, a fictional lesbian Syrian, over more than four years.

He said: "I regret that a lot of people feel that I led them on. I regret that ... a number of people are seeing my hoax as distracting from real news, real stories about Syria and real concerns of real, actual, on-the-ground bloggers, where people will doubt their veracity."

Informed that Syria's official news agency, Sana, has leapt on the controversy, claiming the fictional blog had perpetuated "continuous fabrications and lies against Syria in term of kidnapping bloggers and activists", MacMaster said: "Yep. I regret that."

MacMaster is evidently a graduate of the Anthony Weiner School of Internet Recreation, Remedial Division. Interestingly, Ali Abunimah's Electronic Intifada is central to both stories.

MacMaster was recently caught socking -- Lou Sarah style -- on Mondoweiss. The Guardian, again:

Tom MacMaster, the US graduate student behind the Gay Girl in Damascus blog hoax, has been accused of creating another fake Arab female online identity to defend his own reputation online.

A comment on the website Mondoweiss under the name "Miriam Umm Ibni", mounting a spirited defence of MacMaster's conduct in posing as "Amina", a lesbian Syrian woman, was traced by fellow users to the same IP address in Edinburgh that he used for the Amina hoax.

The Guardian has seen screengrabs of the IP data, emailed by one of the site's hosts Adam Horowitz, that show the post originated from the address 188.74.64.53.

Journalists, bloggers and web users unmasked MacMaster earlier this month as the unlikely hoaxer behind the Amina blog, in part after its posts were traced to the address.

In an email, later posted on the site, MacMaster acknowledged that "Miriam Umm Ibni" was a fake identity, but denied being behind it, saying a "friend of mine who would really like to remain nameless" had posted the comment in his defence. It came from the same IP address because she had been staying with his wife and him, he wrote.

"Like many of my friends, many of whom are committed pro-Palestinian, anti-war and anti-colonialist activists, she was outraged by some of the slanders made against me online. And, like many of my friends, she's been urged by me to defend me. She did so. She's that kind of person."

MacMaster said he had received death threats after being exposed as the Amina blogger, who shot to international attention after he wrote a post, posing as the blogger's cousin, saying "she" had been kidnapped by Syrian security forces.

In the course of uncovering the MacMaster hoax, whose "Gay Girl in Damascus" episode was taken up by Lez Get Real, it was also discovered that one of Lez Get Real's editors, well...former editors... is named Bill Graber.

Though one hoax in turn revealed another, that is their only connection. I guess.

EI has also uncovered some shadowy "ventriloquists" [groannnn] behind the Gay Middle East dating and tourism blog. Another, related spin/propaganda/confidence flap has thus ensued. Maybe EI was upset that CNN went to GME for comment on the "Gay Girl in Damascus"/Tom MacM incident, instead of the group that broke the story yet isn't centered on gay issues in Syria, or anywhere else.

Sigh. Just a guess; who knows.

-----------

John Griffin's book and movie about donning dark makeup to pass (reverse-pass?) as Black, to see what it's like, came out a generation ago. Sockpuppeting and -washing aren't new. Neither is blackface, brownface, yellowface, arabface, nor drag. Nah, don't write in to tell me we good 90s-era queers aren't supposed to be linking potentially revolutionary performative acts like drag with blackface, or pinkwashing, or shilling, sockpuppeting or other forms of psychological manipulation.

Call me a terrible Butlerian subject. I won't care.

But it looks like oppression and masquerades as perceived otherness has gotten quite stylish these days. I must have missed something in the past couple years: when did it become fashionable for confidence tricksters, serial liars, and ripoff artists to latch onto LGBTQ politics?

You did not read about "Gay Girl in Damascus" on OCIHACOSP -- neither about "her" alleged "capture" by Syrian state forces, nor about the outing of hetero-frauds Tom MacMaster or Bill Graber -- not because my b.s. meter is so finely atune (which it is).

I've simply grown weary of bandwagonism, either by us gays or about us gays. Being the constant target market of spin, propaganda, and other emotional appeals is one thing. Happens to everyone. Being used as a mere symbol in someone else's journey towards racial redemption or social epiphany against one's will and protest, well, that comes with the territory of being an outspoken person. It's old-hat.

The only new-like thing about it is this newfound acceptance/tolerance of same-sex, complete with marketing tools. This nasty spate of very public hoaxes and symbolic/representational games remind me of why I don't trust it, yet.

Someone write in and assure me my suspicion of this sudden cultural turn is just me being a cynical, get-off-my-lawn catlady type. Because honestly, people...really. Somebody in and around Homotopia is not ready for prime time.

Crankage-Creep Part 3: Black Whackodoodles, Advanced Tokenism, Minority Authenticity, and Blackaphilia

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 13:54:00 +0000

Find Crankage-Creep Part 1 here

Crankage-Creep Part 2 is here

So um, who actually bought into this representational nonsense?

Two items: One from We Are Respectable Negroes:

Herman Cain, Grand High Vizier of the ~~black garbage pail kids~~ black conservatives and political coprophagist is upset that John Stewart mocked him. Apparently, when he gets called out for flubbing the Constitution, rank bigotry against Muslim Americans, or silly talk about a 3 page maximum limit on all Congressional bills, it is an act of racism. The critical self-reflection rule would seem not to apply, as Cain, in an act of self-delusion that is enabled by his white populist fan base, quite literally has the complexion for the protection.

And one from The Propagandist

Even after the President dismissed Hamas as a peace partner, said a unilateral Palestinian statehood push is a dog that won’t hunt and promised to veto any such resolution at the UN security council, right-wing activists called him “the worst President of the United States that Israel has ever had.” This is a piping-hot crock of bunk. The sole purpose here is to scare grandma. And if a picture tells a thousand words, what better way to illustrate Republican Israephilia than for the Tea Party's biggest rock star to wear a Star of David around her neck on Yom Yerushalayim. What’s next? Piper’s bat mitzvah?

Today's topic is political solicitation and pandering. It's not just the Republicans trying to rack up all those upper-middle-aged Jewish votes from Florida, or letting people like Herman Cain absorb and deflect the anti-Black race rage of their constituencies for them, all while labeling everyone else with the world's most infamous shut-up, "racists!!!"

It's also leftydoodle Cynthia McKinney's traveling A.N.S.W.E.R. Circus of Crazy, which I was remiss to have missed at the local Universalist-Unitarian church last week, because I was on a deadline. I really wish I could have shown up. Ah, I've no doubt there will be plenty more amusements in coming months.

The New Progressive Alliance (NPA), the latest lefty factionalists who showcase such steering committee members as Cornel West and Cindy Sheehan, is on some pander tour around the Black parts of Washington DC. Which is to say an awful lot of DC, minus the Capitol and toney areas. They are there to inform, um, certain people, that Obama is a Republican!

Just like MLK! oh wait...

Curious Negro Re-education campaign it is, which suggests people not to vote for Obama, yet offers no alternative of their own. Read a fantastic takeapart of this obvious get-the-country's-most-coveted-voting-bloc-to-forfeit-their-numbers-from-Obama campaign at Angry Black Lady's.

Not to be outdone in the downward slide into offline sockpuppetry, there is an emergent, please-pander-to-me type, who raises the concepts of "shill" and "sellout" to the level of a sacrament; who seems to think tokenism is good, desirable, and a symbol of status (even as they are used as status symbols themselves.)

After a tumultuous two weeks for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which included the resignation of the organization’s President, Jarrett Barrios, and seven members of the Board of Directors, Troup Coronado, a former AT&T executive at the center of the controversy resigned from the Board of Directors yesterday of his own accord, according to a statement from GLAAD.

Coronado wanted “to do what was in the best interest of GLAAD,” the press release stated.

Little else was available about the Board member’s departure, but the Board did release parts of Barrios’ letter of resignation from this past weekend.

“Of utmost concern and foremost in all of our minds must be the well-being of GLAAD,” Barrios wrote to the Board. “The staff continues to work hard and does not deserve to work under a cloud, nor do they merit the distraction that it has become from our organization’s fine brand.”

According to Michelangelo Signorile’s blog, Coronado remains on the Boards of several LGBT organizations including the Equality California Institute. While GLAAD stood at the center of the scandal, the spotlight is beging to shift to other organizations tied to Coronado through his work as a Board member or supporter, or his work at a liaison to LGBT organizations from AT&T.

Speaking of Equality California Institute, this scandalette peaked just in time for our transition from celebrations of mere pride to celebration of legal equality.

Nice going, fellas.

This advanced form tokenism conflates being a target market with having political clout. That's not a new observation in the queer community; the critique of the corporate-sponsored commerciality of pride parades, for instance, have been around strong for at least 15 years. I fit your narrow standard of beauty and have lots of money, it says; market your political platform to me and I might reward you with a vote. Regular people call this being a tool. I'm dating myself, here, but we used to call it After the Ball syndrome. Today, that critique goes by that mean epithet, Gay, Inc..

It gets worse in Homotopia. Oh Crap has mentioned before this BDS-creep into the political lgbt world. Ostensibly standing against "pinkwashing" on the part of Israel, this movement seems a pinkwashing, pandering effort itself, to put a gay face on anti-Israel/anti-Zionism.

Hey now don't get me wrong. It's a free country, so far be it from me to stop anyone's boycott of high-end foodie olive oils and fine bath salts I can't afford, anyway.

BDS campaigns seem pretty easy; a lot easier than the boycott of the originary Apartheid state in the 80s and that was even prior to Usenet and Compuserve! Just tack scare words like apartheid and human rights to your social media. That should help in getting the lecture circuit's hottest walking commodities to lend credibility to your cause, and say it's a Freedom Ride, or something. The more Black people recruited for that effort, the better for your perceived, symbolic moral/civil rights standing.

Anyone who thinks I've jumped off the deep end of cynicism should try it, it works (major caveat: if you can find someone to play that role for you.)

Or, you could just slather those three magical letters "MLK" all over everything. Since we're monolithic, single-issue voters mesmerized by those mystical, thought-stopping initials, I'm sure that will work, too, just like it's working so well for the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln that also campaigns on the Confederate flag...oh wait, you mean that might not work??

Oh.

The United States of Social Hysteria

Pandering efforts towards ethnic, religious, and racial minorities are about as old as they are completely transparent. Yet, they work...for someone. Somewhere.

With Cain and Palin becoming the public faces of both Christian Zionism as well as the victimized-conservative narrative the states' righters have apparently been chomping at the bit to finally try out for themselves;

with white nationalist professional gay-baiters like the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer callously attempting to bless Muslim-baiting Cain as the "real", "authentically-black man in the race"

and Cain, just as antigay, turning right around to say he'd welcome gays and lesbians into his fantasy/fictional presidential cabinet, based on some confused ideas about "Shariah law";

with crankodoodles like C. McKinney and those A.N.S.W.E.R. creeps who never seem to have met an antigay Muslim-supremacist dictator they didn't like (this is currently passing for some form of "progress");

with LGBTs who litmus test on how much you hate Israel, as if that has jack crud to do with anything;

with their absurd Homocon counterparts like Michael Lucas parroting skinhead arguments against Islam and Muslim immigrants to "defend Israel";

and with some of mainstream rightwing's second-string unhinged crazies on board looking like tea party tokens Allen West and Alveda King, the Innisses of CORE, ("A Black Pastor") Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, Palin Mama Black Bear Endorsees Star Parker and Angela McGlowan,

...I don't know who that "someone" is going to be, in the coming election season.

Indeed, it seems the Obama Age is the era in which a noted presence of Black People™ stands not only as symbolic racial redemption, but also are becoming the go-to face for the crazy. Like Chauncey often relates, this gives me the frowny-face.

Meanwhile here on terra firma, Sarah Palin is often derided for her moneybags attitude in racking up those speakers's fees, but she's by no means alone.

Does anyone really believe the Republican party or the hate-Obama left truly want Black constituencies, or a Jewish one? or a Muslim one? No, they want hashmarks at the polling place, a lot like the theater owner wants rear-ends in seats: temporarily, then quickly shuffled out to make room for the next batch of dupes. Neither are poised to get it, in my view.

Showbiz...

ETA: Link corrected.

Prophetessor West: Crankage-Creep Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Mon, 23 May 2011 13:00:00 +0000

See this post for Crankage-Creep, Part 1. Part 3 is here.

Oh, how the Twitter device is aflutter about this "New Progressive Alliance" outfit out of Leftybagger Central, Firedoglake.

Oh Crap has been onto them since December. Irregular Times has made several posts on them. Deaniac83 at The People's View had some fun at their expense. The Reid Report's recap of This Week in Race on the Left here.

And while Angry Black Lady caught them trying to post a call for candidates on Craigslist, OCIHACOSP caught early their latest, ridiculous antic, using Cornel West as some kind of red herring to teach the Blacks a lesson.

Time to make – by educating Afro-Americans, and eventually the rest of the counrty – some enemies in high places, no? The folks at blackagendareport.com could also be key allies.

With so-called "allies" like leftybaggers, who needs the tea party.

Regular readers of OCIHACOSP already saw this latest form of whackjobbery coming. Quoting myself:

I don't think the choice of [Chris Hedges' May 16 Truthdig column] title, "The Obama Deception", is by chance. I own the freely-distributed DVD, which finds its home in my crankage stash along with the rightwing, segregationist, and nutball Evangelical materials. I acquired it from a friend who had the displeasure of being in the Haight-Ashbury district the day Cynthia McKlanny's "Power to the Peaceful" chemtrail circus came to town, distributing We Are Change 9/11 truth paraphernalia. With such has-been luminaries as rap artist KRS-One and reformed Jew-baiter Professor Griff, The Obama Deception video is directed squarely at pro-Obama Black youth. Upon viewing, one is to come away with the idea that Barack Obama is a puppet on the string of evil/sinister forces, such as international bankers and the vague, nebulous New World Order.

Hedges' piece, unsurprisingly, uses Dr. West to articulate and repeat similar, tired old tropes.

Hedges isn't the only one, apparently. Dr. West has lent his name to the steering committee of this (supposedly New) Progressive Alliance, along with Inside (hand)Jobber Cindy Sheehan.

Sheehan the Peace Mom, who broke with "the left" years ago, has associated herself with Alex Jones of "Obama Decption" fame since 2007.

As far as I can tell, these "progressives" are retreads of the old "anybody but Bush" so-called "movement", which was so wrapped up in their anti-Bush identity many follwed their leaders like Sheehan and Cynthia McKrankypants into the same J%w-baiting/Zionist-counting 9/11 Trutherdom that sunk Van Jones.

Jones ended up with his name signed to some stupid document at Rense.com, a UFO paranoia site which has long since gone full-blown David Duke (caution: hate site.)

Some of us tried to tell our fellow lefties prone to moonbattery and thus wingnut recruitment into causes against their own interests: check and double check those people's sources, check the sites they promote and constantly peddle (e.g. ; do not believe everything you read just because it's on the internet. And if it tells you what you want to hear, question it even further.)

Predictably, we were (and still are) called Bush-lovers, paid government shills, left-gatekeepers, sellouts, closet-cons and the like, even as literal cons and neo-nazis were recruiting and exploiting them. Too bad Jones' hubris got the best of him, and he did not have the integrity to tell the Obama administration of the views that could and did land him in hot water, ironically, with Elizabeth Dilling-hugger Glenn Beck.

Oh look! Now Prof. West has now been beatified by Chris Hedges into Prophet West.

Prophets put forward during their day ideas that the mass of people, including the elite, denounce as impractical and yet at the same time sense to be true. This is what invokes the rage against the prophet. He or she states the obvious in a society where the obvious is seditious. Prophecy is feared because of the consequences of the truth. To accept that Obama is, as West said, a mascot for Wall Street means having to challenge some frightening monoliths of power and give up the comfortable illusion that the Democratic Party or liberal institutions can be instruments for genuine reform.

Etc., etc. By the way, the exact phrase was, "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats".

Does anybody else wonder why Chris Hedges deems it necessary to showcase Prof. West, or is it hide behind the words of West to call Obama a black so-and-so, as a lot of these other leftybaggers?

How would our supposed allies respond -- how DO they [sometimes rightfully] respond [even if by accident] -- if/when Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, and other celebrity talkers use racialized language regarding the president?

How did the dumb teabaggers respond when a Black liberal man used it regarding Herman Cain? Where are all their loud wails of protest, now?

Why did Hedges decide to refashion West's words and censor out the black-on-black criticism in his latest article when he featured it in his first? Did the inevitable pushback that prompted his latest attempt at West hagiography hit too close to home?

Probably.

My city has long stood as an outpost of moonbattery, some of it deadly. "Drank the koolaid" can be said to have originated here. Carol "Cookies for Truth" Brouillet and her absurd, right-woos-left "Deception Dollars" were a staple of the antiwar left throughout the '00s.

At the same time, under the "antiwar" and "anti-imperialism" guise, straight-up neonazi Wendy Campbell went all over gullible progressive radio station KPFA and Indymedia to peddle her bigoted wares, also showcased at LaPena Cultural Center. Countercurrents published her Nazi 2.0 screeds as late as 2008. This time last year, they were featuring Cynthia McKinney.

Across the bay, they still haven't learned one goddamned thing. According to Adam Holland, professional bigot Gilad Atzmon >appeared at Lake Merrit United Methodist Church, just two weeks ago. Countercurrents still carries Rense.com featured "artist", Gilad Atzmon. It's just a hop/skip/jump to crankodoodlery of the heinous kind, with some elements of the so-called progressive left.

They -- the truthers, the supposed "anti-Zionists" peddling neo-nazi ideals, the Innises of CPAC/CORE, the Alveda Kings, the Cynthia McKinneys, the Cornel Wests -- get away with this behavior because we allow it...just as we allow(ed) Sarah Palin to run roughshod over the populace for two years straight.

From where I sit, yeah, they look the same to me: celebrity opportunists looking out for their personal legacies and not the people they claim to represent. The right-woos-left crankodoodle set deserve each other as adversaries and colleagues. They can have each other.

Academic Showbiz, Celebrity Profs, and Crankage-Creep on the Left

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Wed, 18 May 2011 02:18:00 +0000

This is part one of a series. You can read parts two and three here
and here.

Here at OCIHACOSP, I do love my showbiz. I can't stop talking about it. It could be political showbiz of the Palin/Trump ilk that melds tabloid television with politics. It could be medicine shows, vaudeville, and classic film, like what's covered at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule or at Ivan's Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.

Who could forget February's DeVega vs Cain Revue?

Or it could be one of my favorite forms of showbiz: the academic sort.

It was bad enough when Judith Butler, otherwise an intellectual hero, got into a fracas after calling Hamas and Hezbollah "left movements". Oh, please. Male-supremacist bigots and genocidal homophobes have nothing in common with me, I don't care how loudly they claim to be fighting oppression. They'll live without my support, I'm sure.

The latest place to see and be seen on the academic showbiz circuit is apparently the Israel-critical BDS/Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement, complete with whirlwind tours, and rising starlet profs. Everything's a holocaust, now. Everything's apartheid, now.

The Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights Movement have now been repurposed as Perdana "peace" flotillas, so sez Alice Walker.

The ongoing handwringing in Black academia over the person and symbolism of Barack Obama would be just as merely amusing/annoying, were it not for the celebrity status of profs like Cornel West.

Recalling the Alex Jones conspiracy movie title, this Chris Hedges piece showcases -- or is it trots out -- West's discontent with Barack Obama the man, not Barack Obama the president. One gets the sense it's in the service of something much larger than West's personal dismay with the POTUS.

Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of [former Obama administration chief of staff Rahm] Emanuel was always the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends. West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”

And on it goes.

I don't think the choice of title, "The Obama Deception", is by chance. I own the freely-distributed DVD, which finds its home in my crankage stash along with the rightwing, segregationist, and nutball Evangelical materials. I acquired it from a friend who had the displeasure of being in the Haight-Ashbury district the day Cynthia McKlanny's "Power to the Peaceful" chemtrail circus came to town, distributing We Are Change 9/11 truth paraphernalia. With such has-been luminaries as rap artist KRS-One and reformed Jew-baiter Professor Griff, The Obama Deception video is directed squarely at pro-Obama Black youth. Upon viewing, one is to come away with the idea that Barack Obama is a puppet on the string of evil/sinister forces, such as international bankers and the vague, nebulous New World Order.

Hedges' piece, unsurprisingly, uses Dr. West to articulate and repeat similar, tired old tropes.

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.

“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.

West's characterization of Obama the person has not been lost on his colleagues, or mine. MSNBC's Ed Schultz staged a little fight between West and Princeton colleague Melissa Harris-Perry. For those looking for sparks, no one was disappointed.

My colleague Deaniac83 at The People's View caught it:

See, Barack Obama is the child of a brilliant black father (read: a black man with books is obviously acting "white" unless he uses his intellect to talk only about racial issues) and a white mother (how disgusting that West has to get into a latent bias against interracial relationships between a black man and a white woman). Being a child of diversity, evidently, makes him "rootless." And since Barack Obama, a brilliant man himself, also did not spend all his time fighting and talking about racial issues, he must not count as black.

I didn't know you could be this offensive to this many people in the space of two short paragraphs, and I wouldn't have believed it had I not read Cornel's screed. Barack Obama is a "white man with black skin" - why don't you just call him an Oreo, Dr. West? I am neither black nor white, but I am wondering just who gave Cornel West the right to define what a black man is, what a white man is, and when someone can be pejoratively called an Oreo.

[...]

I am tired of this divisiveness, racism, religious intolerance and every other form of tearing us apart - no matter whether it is employed by Glenn Beck's fringe Right or Cornel West's fringe Left. I am not the only one.

No, Deaniac83, you're not. Did we not already go through this with Ralph Nader's expression of similar Uncle Tom/talks-white sentiment?

There is a cynical game being played with historical imagery here. If celebrities like Judith Butler, Alice Walker, Cynthia McKinney, KRS-One or Cornel West say so -- whatever it is -- no one is supposed to take issue because of their status, as Hedges puts it re: West, as moral authority figures. Well, I disagree with that.

Is anyone else tiring of this crankage-creep on the left?

The Chauncey DeVega vs Herman Cain Revue: A Farce Full of Ironies

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 15:07:00 +0000

A version of this essay first appeared as a guest post at Chauncey DeVega's We Are Respectable Negroes. Formatting and style have been adapted for Oh Crap's template.

Note to Republicans: hire some new PR people. The minions you've sent out screaming "Democrat Plantation" at Blacks in an effort to make a dent in the largely Democratic voting bloc are an abject failure. Read on to find out why they are consistently rebuffed, and treated with the all the derision and ridicule a fool deserves.

Still in the Shadow of Uncle Tom: This Week's Political Showbiz and the Race-Based Melodrama That Ensued

I was raised by Reagan Democrat(ic) Moral Majority Christian Coalition parents, both ordained ministers, who were primarily "race people". That is, they saw their own work as the first/only Blacks in their places of employment, our positioning as the first/only Blacks in our neighborhood and their decision to send me to all-white Christian schools as desegregation part 2. Many liberals do not know about, or understand, this aspect of Black conservatism. I do, because I lived it, and am a product of it. I spent three years at Fundagelical U., where I had my first more-than-friends same-sex set of events (oh, the things that go on in those sex-segregated dorms...) My father was emeritus and board member of a Christian college with ties to the New Apostolic Reformation. My first vote was for Pat Robertson.

And yes, I really do have a crush on Sarah Palin.

With those ex-conservative bonafides out of the way, I can say with certainty there's good reason not to trust people like Herman Cain, Unhyphenated-Americans like Lloyd Marcus, and the seven other Black characters on the Tea Party circuit. Their sincerity is in question, due not simply to their skin color, as Chauncey's detractors wish to make one believe, but because of their behavior which fits longstanding patterns of race-opportunism.

Enter: coonery, tommery and minstrelsy--the popular American art form infamous for distorting and misrepresenting Black people to their audiences. Make no mistake: Race minstrelsy continues in the 21st century.

Ask yourself the following. Do tales of black incompetence, vindictiveness, threats of socio-political instability, and white slavery sound familiar? They're really old complaints.

Have you ever noticed that Republicans, for with all of their loud wails of being the "party of Lincoln," do not mention the postbellum era of Republican Reconstruction, 1865-1877? Though "Jim Crow" was a character out of blackface minstrelsy, white state's rights conservatives imposed this formal type of racism on all non-whites immediately after the end of the Civil War, with this period of de facto white supremacy being codified into law with the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy vs Ferguson (1896). Furthermore, in many regions of the US, such as the west, south, north and midwest, this condition lasted into the late 1970s and sometimes decades beyond.

So of course Republicans don't mention the problematic era of Reconstruction--at least not in their outside voices anyway. Why? To do so would alienate their state's rights, Confederate flag-fetishizing constituents.

Hey you, the voter with all the values! Have some Obama waffles!

For example, the Obama Waffles caricature, based in Aunt Jemima visual rhetoric, is directly out of minstrelsy branding. Black conservatives know this. The Muslim-baiting, McCarthy-lite inside content was even worse. But how many conservatives, outside of one, professional homo-hater Bishop Harry Jackson, have ever dared to speak up against such bigotry?

Have you ever noticed how these "lovers of the Constitution" are silent on Tammy Bruce's almost-daily characterization of President Barack Obama as "Urkel?" What is a reference to a 1990s-era sitcom character that scholars Mary Dalton and Laura Linder associate with minstrelsy stock characters such as Sambo the coon. Moreover, it never made the news when Bruce asserted back in January that she gets to call gays "homos" because she is one.

Of course, we heard a few grumbles from their corner when Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.com posted an illustration of Senator Joe Lieberman in blackface. But, I do not recall it making the news at Fox News.

And no maliciousness or death wishes are ever directed at those who wield the epithet "race-pimp", which on the American right is synonymous with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Yet we saw it happen against Mr. DeVega over at Alternet.

Conservative jihadis from the lowliest twitterers to the twits at Fox/Kingdom Holding News Channel seek to silence Chauncey DeVega's so-called "racism" as they are quick to condemn and police the behavior of every Black person outside the conservative fold. Ultimately, a Black man speaking his mind about the behavior of a Black conservative without the permission of white overseers, and without apologies or reservation, is an affront to their white authority.

To white states rights conservatives, this is bad behavior. Moreover, it is bad behavior that must be punished. Preferably, with repeated epithet strings like like "you're on the Democrat plantation"; "only Black conservatives (i.e. 5% of Black voters or less) think for themselves"; The KKK is the Democrats Robert Byrd; Nazis are Socialists; Read some Ayn Rand, etc. etc. etc.. We observed this behavior from freeper after freeper over at Alternet.

Nobody with common sense buys their stale old Reconstruction-era hysteria. This is the fundamental issue conservatives have with Chauncey DeVega's article, and his subsequent, rage-inducing refusal to be intimidated by even the loudest, most obnoxious Right-wing bullies.

For Herman Cain's part, he is simply using this as a free publicity grab. He should be thanking Chauncey DeVega and giving him 15% for putting Cain on the cultural map, instead of leaving him to stew in Tea Party obscurity.

At A Crossroads of Cognitive Dissonance: The Leftwing of the Far Right

Despite what the paleoconservatives at Outside the Beltway would have us believe, images out of race minstrelsy are ugly. So is minstrelsy-inspired talk like "Sambo beat the bitch" if that was actually uttered (personally, I doubt it.) Who can blame white state's rights conservatives for wanting to distance themselves from this history?

At present, the mainstream state's rights crowd and affiliated Tea Partiers seem to be testing out another remedy.

Armed with language and concepts stolen from liberals, the left wing of the far Right is on the march. They are bringing the conservative movement to a social crossroads.

This week, we saw all manner of state's rights conservatives labeling the entire left "racists" who, like Chauncey DeVega, victimize them with "hate speech". The late 20th and early days of the 21st centuries are apparently moments when the bizarre and surreal have seemingly become the new normal and mundane.

Conservative gays like GOProud attend CPAC. Even Glenn Beck says same sex marriage isn't a threat to America and shouldn't be a priority of the right. Sarah Palin wears the label "feminist" with in-your-face aplomb, and, seeimingly, singlehandedly introduced the concept of "misogyny" to the same right-wing males who have spent the past twenty years denying it's existence. Now, they use the term with relish against anyone who disagree with her policies. The feminists who did not vote for Mrs. Palin are now "the sexists".

Two years ago, no conservative would be caught dead engaging in such leftist Marxist progressive politically-correct anti-liberty speech. Today, it's the norm in many of their circles. However ironic and problematic, given their backgrounds the lemmings cheering on Herman Cain at CPAC are going to have a much tougher time repackaging themselves as mavens of diversity and true inheritors of the mantle of abolitionism and civil rights.

During the Civil Rights era, state's rights conservatives such as the John Birch Society (which bankrolls CPAC) and Ezra Taft Benson (Glenn Beck's favorite), routinely labeled MLK and any other civil rights workers Communists, Socialists, or Marxists. They were in the right-wing gaze people who were unable to think for themselves.

Today, the GOP runs candidates who dress as Nazi war criminals in their spare time. Their gubernatorial candidate for New York sends these emails to friends on the taxpayer dime. Conservative Republicans permit governors to impose Confederate History Month onto the public, and dig in their heels when others allow KKK members to be commemorated on state license plates. A Republican women's organization in South Carolina recently held a "Southern Experience" ball, complete with Confederate generals (Glenn McConnell, R - SC State Senate President), and rent-a-slaves. McConnell's colleague in the senate, Jake Knotts, called other GOP politicians "ragheads".

For me, this grand burlesque of extreme cognitive dissonance has been the week's entertainment. Save for a couple shows on Fox and the usual suspects on the Right-wing side of these Internets, their predictable antics in trying to shut down Chauncey DeVega turned out to be a flop. In a tragicomedy of sorts, conservatives have become the very anti-First Amendment PC police they have spent the past two decades decrying. And it is high comedy watching them try to fulfill this role on the public stage.

Stop Being Paranoid of Sarah Palin

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:29:00 +0000

This post is crossposted at The People's View

From the cover of Mother Jones mag, 11-10

This loud, shrieking noise about the AZ mass shooting + "Sarah Palin" has got to stop.

How is it that one person so quickly became such a lightening rod, this larger-than-life focus, yes, a target, for such hasty blame-assignment? Easy: we enable her. Easier: we love to hate and deeply cherish our despised scapegoats. Easiest: she permits herself to be used in this way.

Sadly for Sarah, she misplayed her political cards this weekend. David Frum, one of Palin's conservative detractors put it best this morning.

Palin’s post-shooting message was about Palin, not about Giffords. It was defensive, not inspiring. And it was petty at a moment when Palin had been handed perhaps her last clear chance to show herself presidentially magnanimous.

Don't count on that. Sarah Palin has never shown any interest in appearing "presidential", so I'm still not clear on why people like Frum still expect presidential behavior from her.

Insinuating the Palin name into every oversized news story of the hour has served her and her family well, financially, at least. Who really expects her to change up her pitch today, when her beleaguered camp can now point to every liberal blog on planet earth (except Oh Crap) and cry about how unfair everyone is to poor, martyred, messianic/angelic her?

Jared Lee Loughner's story -- what little we know of it -- reads like that of a poster child for increasing mental health services in Tuscon. We hear endless speculation about that idiotic, infamous scope graphic taken down from SarahPAC (while left up on Facebook), yet nothing about his parents.

We know nothing of his motive(s), yet; and zero about his actual political ideology, if he even has one. But so many are CERTAIN his actions were the result of "Sarah Palin" and her behavior on the internet.

With that in mind, consider that it's only January 10 and in Oakland, CA, there have already been five homicides. Whose marketing copy is to blame for those? Does anyone care? Is it news?

It's much easier to latch on to "Sarah Palin", no longer a person, but now the metonym for all of rightwingery/teabaggery. Except...there's indeed a person there.

We know this from the predictable rounds of fundraising appeals, the absurd calls to tell Sarah Palin this, or petitions to the DOJ with equally useless "indictments".

Read, again, what constitutes "incitement", as of 1969 (Brandenburg vs Ohio):

"The constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

Unless someone is planning to challenge a 40+ year old incitement law so strict it allows the Klan to scream they're gonna kill the Blacks and Jews, people can forget about trying to "indict Palin" based on an internet graphic from last March. But man, does it feel good to wallow in the idea of her getting what's coming to her.

Right? Because her magical words can kill. Right? She can command such unprecedented, unwieldly power over her followers, and they all do what she says, so we all tremble at the prospect of a Palin presidency. Right?

Oh Crap covered this odd vision of political messianism, this charismatic authority, in a thing called The Poetics of Plain-Talk. If I may quote the self at length:

Ah, Sarah, poor dear. She was, remains, and will go down in history as, the breaker of multiple public taboos, at once. American politicians aren't supposed to act like that. They're not supposed to look like that, dress like that, trot their kids around like that, express themselves like that, or throw their head back and laugh so confidently, unpretentiously, in their sexy wrongness like that. Not while having those kind of political views, or going to those kinds of churches, or giving interviews in front of dying Thanksgiving turkeys like that.

Alas, she did. She certainly signed up to the clothes, the enhanced accent, the GOP/RNC fiddling with her own lyrical rhythms, and the general manipulation of her own image by them of her own you-go-girl empowered volition.

But I seriously doubt she signed up for this other psychodoodle weirdness of the taboo and ambivalence we of the neurotic American electorate -- Paglia and other pundits included -- have collectively projected on to her, transfiguring before the cameras into every strange spectacle we needed her to be for us in that political moment, regardless of what party we ended up voting for.

Two years later, her antics have landed her in this strange boat, in which people are convinced that federal laws must be altered to prevent certain types of imagery for political fundraising.

Don't think such laws won't ever be used against the left, or won't be twisted to "get Obama". Pass conservative laws like that, and the conservatives win.

No one has to be paranoid of Palin to the extent that we have to revamp our laws or political speech due to year-old crap her staff once put up on the internet.

Stop being afraid of her. She's just a politician. Get a grip, America. Snap out of it.

The Value of Nothing: Social Conservatives and the Self-Loathing Logic of Xenophobia

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:21:00 +0000

Bear with OC as I wax esoteric for a minute.

"Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground."
-God, Exodus 3:5

"Ground Zero", Macmillan Dictionary:

1 - the point on the surface of the Earth directly above or below where a nuclear explosion has happened

2 - a place at the centre of changes that are happening fast or violently

Zero:

The first recorded zero appeared in Mesopotamia around 3 B.C. The Mayans invented it independently circa 4 A.D. It was later devised in India in the mid-fifth century, spread to Cambodia near the end of the seventh century, and into China and the Islamic countries at the end of the eighth. Zero reached western Europe in the 12th century.

"Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground."
-Our Messiah, 8-13-10

The following mutual pleasuring session between fellow crushgirl Greta van Sustern and Twittercuda is basically unwatchable, but it's worthy of a gander as context for the rest of the post. (Link)

When nutjob-style conservatives yap on about "sacred ground" what do they mean? What did the president mean by it? Why are they currently all wee weed up over the fact that it was Him™ that uttered the phrase?

By now, Darryl Lang's little photo essay marking the banal secularity of the supposedly sacred ground has made the rounds.

So, what do the RWNJ, most of whom are deeply threatened by diversity of Manhattan and other US cities think they are talking about?

Where do they get their concept of holy ground? Do they even know?

Don't they know their own concept of the "zero" in "ground zero" comes in part out of algebra (al Jabr, "restoration", [disRefudiation]), itself from Babylon (Iraq)?

Have they forgotten how loudly they STILL shriek unamerican at those of us originally against the rediction of Afghanistan and Iraq to zero, through wars using 9-11 as a pretext?

When will the RWNJ learn: your xenophobia will always come back to bite you in the rear. Tell Mr. Ouroborus about it.

Social conservatives often end up rendering themselves powerless through their own hypocrisy. The louder they holler about Ground Zero, the more they strengthen their opponent's resolve to balance them out. Take it from Ouroborous, one of the key symbols of "zero" to come out of alchemy; we will use their hate to cure them of their hate. We will use their poison as our inoculation. They bring this condition on themselves.

We've gotten pretty good at it over the years.

Just as social conservatives from the mid 19th century onward looked at Blacks to reassure themselves only they are the free ones, their progeny today need to look at someone they deem "illegal" to conceive of themselves as the legal ones. They can't do that without birtherism. They can't do that with teabaggerism. They can't do that without secondclassing samesex marriage. They can't do that without, er, clarifying the 14th Amendment. Or at least talking big about zeroing out birthright citizenship, even if they have no real intent to do so.

"Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siècle. What holds humanity together today is the denial of what the human race has in common."

-Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917), Lecture to the American Anthropological Association.

Palin's divide between Real America and what I can only presume at this point she means by Imaginary America is getting starker and shriller by the hour.

Dr. Math explains imaginary numbers in terms even a social conservative can understand.

Imaginary numbers are numbers that can be written as a real number times i.

So what is a real number, and what is i?

Well, the real numbers are all the positive numbers, negative numbers, and zero. These are numbers like

5
-2.9
-4/3
0
1.11211211111221312211131122211113213211...
(bonus points if you can tell us
what the next few digits are and why!)

So the real numbers are the numbers that you probably already know: they're the ones on the number line.

What is i? It's the square root of -1 (see footnote below). And it's NOT a real number. i was invented because people wanted to be able to take square roots of negative numbers, and you can't do that if you limit yourself to real numbers.

Hm. Interesting. Without the concept of zero there can be no negative, thus no imaginary numbers. Without the demarcation line of the zero, there can be no Real numbers. Without us, or the spectre of us, whatever they think "us" is, the xenophobes within Real America don't know who they are. Without us, those whom Real America deem outside the realm of legitimacy, Real America has no identity.

I feel bad for the xenophobic set in Real America. For one, it's sad to watch people root their identity in imaginary non-entities like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder. What's worse: when you misconstrue the other and your identity-constitution is predicated on defining yourself based on who you're not, then you are bound to end up with a deeply distorted view of yourself. This is the foundation of xenophobia. They are like the unfortunate snake, hellbent on its own destruction, who eats itself.

This, I believe, is why they run around anxious and confused, and ready to blow things up all day, and eliminate those whose existence threatens their identity, to zero. They bear little difference from the same extremist jehadis they decry. They only decry them because they are the competition.

That's where demagogues like Palin and Prince bin Talal of Fox/Newscorp come in. They make lots of money reminding Real America of what they are, itself a concept grounded in who they are not.

I'll be interested to see in the coming days whether Mrs. Palin hops aboard the 14th Amendment = Loophole bandwagon like she has the anti-mosque bandwagon. So far, she's stayed curiously silent. Her pro-life, pro-fetus, therefore pro-anchor-terrorist-baby credentials just might be getting the best of her.

There's more to come on the heiligen Grundenses and the via negativas of social conservatism, and why it leaves them so perpetually confused when they've exhausted people -- gays, liberals, progressives, muslims, mexicans -- to define themselves against, how/why this results in turning their own concepts of "liberty" and tolerance against us and, inevitably, ultimately, against themselves. Stay tuned.

Sarah Palin Gets Gay-Baited

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:52:00 +0000

Sarah bestowed a couple new endorsements, today, using one as a platform to soapbox about the true real feminism, or something. The other, Karen Handel, is said by her opponent to be a pro-homosexual, ooo.

This morning’s endorsement of Karen Handel by former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin has already ratcheted up the tension level in the Republican race for governor.

A formal response by the campaign of Nathan Deal, the formal congressman, expresses disappointment – and immediately accuses Handel of voting to fund gay “outreach” to “kids.”

It’s disappointing that Sarah Palin has chosen to back the most liberal Republican in this race.

In past races, Karen Handel endorsed taxpayer-funded domestic partner benefits and gay adoption — and she’s been caught lying about it. Just last night, Handel finally admitted she’d written a check to a gay rights group — when previously she said the check was a forgery and she never lived at that address.

The endorsement is getting mixed reviews by the easily-led who populate Mrs. Palin's FB. Let's hope her froth-mouthed followers don't turn their legendary pitchforks on her again, like they did over the Fiorina endorsement.

When all else fails, gender-bait, race-bait, gay-bait, sex-bait, liberal-bait.

Don't social conservatives have anything better to do?

Palin and "P0rn" Part 1: Don't Hate Sarah Palin Because She's Not Afraid of Her Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 06:40:00 +0000

A version of this article was first published as Palin and "P0rn" Part 1: Don't Hate Sarah Palin Because She's Not Afraid of Her Beauty on Blogcritics.

When you've been blogging about the "Sarah Palin" phenomenon for a year and a half you notice something: when someone asks "Is Sarah Palin _______?" the answer, whatever the question, is usually "no".

Julia Baird's article in the current Newsweek recalled this theory when she reprimanded everyone to stop ogling Republican women.

There seems to be an insistent, increasingly excitable focus on the supposed hotness of Republican women in the public eye, like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Malkin, and Nikki Haley—not to mention veterans like Ann Coulter. The sexual references are pervasive: they come from left, right, and center, and range from gushing to highly offensive. Harper's* asked, “Is Sarah Palin Porn?” as others quizzed the former governor about whether she had breast implants.

Right Wing News compiled a list of the hottest conservative women in new media. Playboy even ran an outrageous piece titled “Ten Conservative Women I’d Like to Hate F--k,” which read like a sick attempt to make rape cool. “We may despise everything these women represent,” wrote the author, “but goddammit they’re hot. Let the healing begin.” Moron.

I didn't see any analysis implied by (one of) her title(s) "why we sexualize GOP women", though Gloria Steinem's Women's Media Center offers one. A corollary question seems also studiously avoided by anyone doing these sexism-watches: what do you call it when Republican women, or any women, sex themselves up, or sign on to being sexed up in the service of something else? Like, say, winning a political campaign for top office in the world's most powerful nation? Since the announcement of Sarah Palin for VP in 2008, not only feminists but the voting populace in general have been grappling with these questions of sexism, objectification, and one's own participation in being on display, like never before.

It's funny reading this in Newsweek, which has been raked over the coals by socially-confused conservatives for it's own "sexist" Palin covers. Who could forget the ignorant mountain/molehill conservative screamers on Fox, crying "sexism" because Newsweek didn't retouch my favorite cover photo? In the upside-down universe of Neo-PC Conservatopia, showing natural beauty, and thus one's humanity, is now "sexist". Every woman, they said on Fox, should be mortified by that cover. (Weren't.)

Then, there was the infamous cover photo originally taken from Runners World. Oh, the wails of "sexism" we heard from conservatives, suddenly sounding like the same feminazi threats they believe are policing their thoughts and destroying the very fabric of humanity with our calls for the end of gender inequities.

From Palin's own Facebook entry:

The Runner's World magazine one-page profile for which this photo was taken was all about health and fitness - a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to this nation. The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin. The media will do anything to draw attention - even if out of context.

This charge of sexism rings hollow, coming from someone paid to bloviate by Prince bin Talal of NewsCorp, whose own country does not allow women to drive, much less vote, or run for public office, or appear in public alone.

Was the Newsweek cover mean-spirited, below the belt, relevant to nothing, and a cynical (albeit successful) ploy to sell print copies of magazines? Yes. "Sexist"? No. Palin posed for that campy Runners World photo shoot of her own volition, of her own agency.

But is Sarah Palin p0rn, or not? If the Oh Crap theory is correct, we already know the answer. A better question is, Do people make porn out of "Sarah Palin" or the Sarah Palin public image? Obviously, the answer to that is "yes".

Jack Hitt's hit fluff — in the June '10 Harper's, not The Atlantic — doesn't answer what it purported to ask, either, though he did manage to write a money shot. While Mrs. Palin saw sexism in the Newsweek cover, Hitt sees in it the same pR-n Palin saw in Levi Johnston's Playgirl poses:

She seethes at the mention of her daughter’s old boyfriend, Levi Johnston, cattily characterizing his Playgirl photo shoot as “aspiring porn.” Her Facebook updates are as bitchy as those of any fourteen-year-old girl. And her treacly tweets are classic examples of what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls “deepities” — vagaries that can easily pass as profundities ....

She can also do, by her own standard, some “porn.” She showed off major leg in a racy spread in Runner’s World, wearing a pair of tight, short shorts, with an American flag chucked on a chair like a sweat towel. In other pictures, she wears skin-tight leggings and assumes saucy “warm-up” positions. For her fans, it was an issue to keep in that special place where Mom never looks. When Newsweek ran the tight-shorts pic as a cover image, Palin swiftly denounced it as “sexist.” But she recently showed up at John McCain’s side in Arizona and thrilled her followers by wearing a black leather jacket, cut in butch style, with zippered accents defining her breasts. Palin knows her fan base, and she knows what they want: a brief tour of Google reveals dozens of Photoshopped Palin fantasy images — and it’s clear that they’re not posted by her enemies.

Oh, the act of defining "Sarah Palin's breasts". Ah, the fortunate jacket that got the honors, the one that sends site stats through the roof, the one Ms. Palin made look so, er, showstopping; no, not "butch" at all but rather femmed-out biker-girl.

As for those p0rn-based photoshop fakes with Sarah's noggin on them, an old email sig of mine reads: "All photos SFW, no fakes/photoshops, ever." Their persistent demand in trade determines, in part, what kind of images I'll put on my own site for both lofty feminist and practical reasons. Who wants a bunch of catcalling repressives trolling one's site for nonsense?

This brings us to the central question of this post: how do you theorize-so-you-can-talk-about-it all those second wave concepts — "objectification" "ogling" "the gaze" "sexism" — when the object embodies such in-yr-face agency? when the objectified individual is running for governor, senator or VP? when the objectified subject wink-winkies at the voting populace or steers movement conservatism from behind Facebook or uses the word feminism to argue against women's physical autonomy while so evidently comfortable in her own skin?

I enjoy this about Sarah Palin or at least the consumable, tabloidable, retweetable "Sarah Palin" image. She's got "it", she knows it, and she's not afraid to strut it. If it shows in a body-hugging leather jacket, or a t-shirt at a horse race, in a form fitting shimmery dress suit at a VP debate, or in Naughty Monkey red pumps that still have people like J. Hitt fidgeting two years later, then great. If it doesn't show, equally great; she doesn't seem to give a dern about it, either way.

Like it, hate it, be turned on by it or try to ignore it; Palin's rare form of straight-girl camp is worth paying attention to, if only because we have not seen the last of it. (And what self-aware queer doesn't appreciate watching a wry game of dress-up at the viewer's expense?)

For Part 2: In light of a pR#n undercurrent strong enough to spawn look-alike stripper contests, a complete news cycle ruminating on her cup size, a Hustler video series, a line of sex toy dolls that aren't her, and those silly photoshops; as a conservative feminist doing something different with gender imagery and the politicized female body in the public sphere, and with children sexting themselves to each other, just what is porn, anymore?

Do you, like Justice Potter Stewart in 1964, know it when you see it?

Is Sarah Palin pornography?

Do we know Sarah Palin when we see her? Well?

Sarah Palin Is A Title IX Feminazi

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 06:02:00 +0000

Article first published as Sarah Palin Is A Title XI Feminazi on Blogcritics.

The silence from jewsforsarah.com on Glenn Beck's promotion of Elizabeth Dilling is like a tree falling in the woods. I wouldn't wonder what they think if Palin were not sharing a bill with Beck on August 28 at the Lincoln Memorial. That's "I have a dream" day, in case anyone missed the significance.

Other people are hearing that tree fall. A couple days ago, the NAACP and Urban League expressed their intent to keep "I have a dream" where it belongs, not with Dilling-hugging white nationalists like Beck, but with the communities that gave it life.

The loud wails from the traditional feminist left over whether people like Sarah Palin can label herself "feminist" or not, however, that's a different matter. Yesterday, Kathleen Parker weighed in. Today, Gloria Steinem did.

In an interview for @katiecouric, writer and activist Gloria Steinem responded to Sarah Palin calling herself a feminist, saying, "you can't be a feminist who says other women can't" have an abortion.

Couric was joined by Steinem and Women's Media Center president Jehmu Greene. The discussion ranged from sexism in reality TV to the latest field of female GOP candidates.

Greene is a Steinem protege and a rising star within the DNC.

Like a typical rightwing woman, Parker — noted for her call to Palin to step down from VP candidacy — and her gender politics are on the right track, but going the wrong way. Needless to say, Parker, "as a woman" as they say, sounded embarrassed of and for Palin's damaged performance in the early days of her announcement. Like many, her attitude towards Palin has shifted since then. From yesterday:

Palin's full house and career haven't happened without the manly support of one Todd Palin. Real men don't hold their wives back.

Oh Kathleen, for shame. This is an unprovable assertion. There are plenty of successful mothers in both the private and public sectors who did not have or do not need a man's blessing to be successful.

Such women raise boys to become presidents.

The reason Palin so upsets the pro-choice brigade is because she seems so content with her lot and her brood. One can find other reasons to think Palin shouldn't be president, but being a pro-life woman shouldn't be one of them.

Though this is ancient history for me and my generation, some of whom are now welcoming grandchildren into the world, some of the lessons we've learned bear repeating. Chief among them is that many women who have had babies find it harder, if not impossible, to see abortion as nothing more than a "choice" to eliminate an inconvenience.

This is a classic peter pan antifeminist argument, that the only true real women bear children, and that those women who have not borne children are naive enough to think reproductive autonomy is a choice out of lazy, amoral convenience.

Some of us women do not have the luxury of putting all our eggs in the reproductive-rights basket.

In the confused, gender-conflicted world of white rightwing feminism, the only women who count as "women" are those in traditional relationships, preferably with natural-born children, and those with children acquired/purchased by adoption coming in a distant second.

Though they readily (and sometimes rightly) castigate the Steinems of the world as basing "feminism" on one's abortion stance, they ultimately need "women's issues" to be defined solely in childbearing, and child rearing, because that is all their limited experience has afforded them. Why else would nonsense like career-politicians-as-hockey-moms, and mama grizzlies, and barracudas, and pink elephant stampedes, and other ridiculous metaphors like pitbulls-with-lipstick appeal to them? What else, outside of forced-childbirth/childrearing and state-based criminalization of non-traditional relationships, are their stale old elitist, exclusionist, special-rights-for-"opposite-marriage" values based on?

Love? Please. American conservatives define themselves by who and what they hate. American conservatives have little individual identity of their own outside of what groups they are told to despise. Without a hate-object, they are disoriented people.

Of course, that's not what Parker is getting at in her piece. Call it low expectations, but no one would ever expect a Parker critique to ever be able to encompass more than a myopic/white conservative, abstract/pie-in-the-sky/ivory tower point of view. And yet, to some degree, I end up agreeing with her over Steinem though for far different reasons.

Fact: the word "feminist" is a lot like the word "Christian". Just as there are "Blacks against Obama" Blacks, Christians and feminists are no monoliths. Still, Christianity survives and persists; so do Black people. Thus, OCHIACOSP's sentiments on the matter remain the same as ever; I don't accept these fallacious No True Scotsman arguments for who is and who is not a "feminist". Let Sarah Palin do the heavy lifting of making "feminism" interesting and popular again. Then when people inevitably inquire about what "feminism" is, simply tell them, based on actual history rather than Palinoid revisionism which seeks to topple pro-choice feminism, completely.

If we tell them, about our Civil Rights legacy, about feminism's legacy, they will come. I have that much faith in our history, and its full story. In Evangelical terms, this is called witnessing, or testifying. It's a principle that works well, in our Protestant Christian-dominant culture.

Let it also be noted again, probably for the millionth time, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, even as many of those mama bears try to eschew what they see as a stigma.

For her part, Our Pretty Tomboy is very quick to cite the federal statute Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972 in her own personal success story. But don't hold your breath for how long it takes the the confederate redmeats/conservative male-supremacists of the right to label Sarah Palin a feminazi. That word is reserved for the rest of us, even if on the same grounds.

So, in the meantime, go Sarah Palin. It's good that she is teaching these mouthbreathing teabaggers a thing or two about "feminism", and the gender inequities their side has spent many generations perpetrating. And maybe some day because of her, they'll actually get up off their lazy bee-hinds, go to wikipedia.com, and look up "sexism" and "misogyny", newly-discovered-as-of-2008 terms they were finally forced to take seriously after three waves of feminism, once "Sarah Palin", the phenomenon, burst upon their scene.

Posner Weighs In on Palin, Feminism and the Christian Right

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:16:00 +0000

I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.
-- Apostle/St. Paul, 1 Timothy 2:12

The teabaggers are bound to wax themselves into a corner around gender. With working mom Sarah Palin on the one hand and the ascent of Sharron Angle as the challenger for Senate majority leader Harry Reid on the other, The Sarah is once again going to be challenged to crap or get off the pot when it comes to the tea party. Sharron doesn't approve of households where both parents work. I suppose she intends to get small government to impose this on America's families, somehow. Along with getting the fluoride out of the water, and Alex Jones onto the basic package of every ISP and cable company in America.

Vague sentimentalism like the bumper-sticker sloganeering Palin uttered during that ridiculous Fox Business "summit" are going to wear thin for her if she doesn't make a decision about the whackodoodle direction of the tea party, soon. The same is true for her Christian beliefs. She's going to have to fish or cut bait, to keep them reigned in by (and of course voting for) the GOP or cut them loose.

And yep, it's true: Sarah's got people talkin', and thinkin' (and you thought that wasn't possible. Well, it is.) Regarding her political aspirations, there are a lot of people besides traditional feminists and the general left who feel they have a stake.

If it's one thing I've learned, it's when people ask "Is Sarah Palin __________?" the answer is usually "no", or "probably not", at best. Sarah Posner asked at Religion Dispatches today if Is Sarah Palin The New Leader Of The Christian Right?, in response to Lisa Miller's Newsweek cover article. I concur with her conclusion, "no", but for somewhat different reasons than Posner gave.

Along with the now-conventional wisdom that Sarah is not permitted to use the "f" word to describe herself and her sisterhood of female bigots, Posner takes up the idea that Palin could be considered the leader of the religious right. At issue is the age-old question of gender roles, Biblical interpretation, and the future of both the feminist and religious right movements.

Cutting to the chase,

Palin will no more become a leader of the religious right than [Marjorie] Dannenfelser will, because Dannenfelser, like Phyllis Schlafly before her, will be lauded but still marginalized by the religious right men.

That may be true, but it's only part of the story. Firstly, Sarah Palin has the religious right discussing the issue like no one else before her, not even Aimee Semple MacPherson, mentioned occasionally on these pages, and in Posner's article. The main reason Palin will not become head of the religious right is primarily theological. Her lack of a strong, clearly-stated personal theology -- including one that grounds gender roles as interpreted through the Bible -- may be working for her now, but it will work against her in the future.

This is a recurring theme at OCIHACOSP. From 10-20-08:

This just in from the Day Late/Dollar Short Department: "YouTube Videos Draw Attention to Palin’s Faith".

Ms. Palin responded by speaking generally, but extensively, about how she counts on God for strength, guidance and wisdom. “My faith has always been pretty personal,” she said. But she did not talk more specifically about her church affiliation or her beliefs.

She's not likely to. As covered earlier by this site, Sarah Palin keeps her theological views under wraps and is not likely to disclose them.

Appearances to the contrary, she is actually something of a cipher when it comes to "religion" and just what she believes.

Fact is, we don't know what she personally believes about much of anything because she never says, and seems content to just let people wonder and/or presume. Evangelicals and Fundamentalists prefer certitude to ambiguity, and do not trust the latter. Add to this that Palin employs weasel-language like the more neutral "pro-family" as opposed to yesteryear's "traditional family values"; outside some weasally ramblings on supporting a federal marriage amendment and that crank/dogwhistle comment about her gay best friend, rarely says much against homosexuality.

Expect theological litmus tests to be ramped up against Mrs. Palin as she rises in the political arena. At the rate she is going, she'll never pass very many of them.

Posner continues,

Miller talks about how the religious right base sees Palin as an Esther figure -- or, as I wrote during the campaign, an anointed figure. But that's not the same as being a religious right leader. When the religious right talks about an Esther figure, or an "Esther moment," it's a means of motivating the base to believe that anyone, like Queen Esther, can step up and save the world from evil. (Sure, Esther was anointed to save the Jews from genocide, and that's pretty much the same as saving America from socialism, eh?)

When the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land tells Miller that Palin "is going to be able to raise a lot of money for people she wants to support, and she will make a big difference in the primaries," he's referring to her Esther-mobilizing capabilities. And the religious right, and the Republican Party, are undoubtedly grateful for her ability to rally the shock troops and bring in some cash. But it's hard to imagine that any of the big guns would willingly let Palin compete for a leadership role. She may be leading a movement comprised of women, but that's not the same as a women's movement.

Esther is one Biblical figure; Deborah is another. Writing for his blog and as editor of Charisma magazine, J. Lee Grady covered this topic, a couple weeks after McCain's VP announcement.

When McCain announced that he had chosen Palin as his running mate, I was reminded of the biblical story of Deborah, the Old Testament prophet who rallied God’s people to victory at a time when ancient Israel was being terrorized by foreign invaders. Deborah’s gender didn’t stop her from amassing an army; she inspired the people in a way no man could. She and her defense minister, Barak, headed to the front lines and watched God do a miracle on the battlefield.

In her song in Judges 5:7, Deborah declares: “The peasantry ceased, they ceased in Israel, until I, Deborah, arose, until I arose, a mother in Israel” (NASB).

Sometimes it takes a true mother to rally the troops. I hope that Palin, a woman who believes in prayer and is filled with the Holy Ghost, will take her hockey stick and smash the glass ceiling in American politics once and for all.

Leave it to a Neo-Pentecostal/Charismatic man to detect this potential in Palin (though there is no evidence whatsoever she is "filled with the Holy Ghost".) That shameless, brazen gender card is what Miller chronicled in Newsweek. So far, it's worked very well for Palin.

Contrast Grady with what Brian Abshire of über-Reformed/Christian Reconstructionist Institute for Christian Culture wrote, the following week:

Sarah Palin, who affirms so much that is good, true and praiseworthy, may well be another Deborah in that she is living proof that the Republican Party is gutless, effeminate and cannot find godly men willing to take a stand on pivotal moral issues or that the ones who do will not be allowed to run for the highest office. Literally, she is the BEST that the Republicans can put forward and that ought to make Christian men in America hang their collective head in shame as they realize just how badly we are being judged.

I do not fault Mrs. Palin for having the wisdom, courage and ability to rise to the governorship of her state, or aspire to the office of Vice-President; but I criticize the party and the men who have rejected God and now face His judgment because they will not step up to the plate and be MEN.

Though Christian Reconstructionism, the more big-tent "Evangelical", and Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) are often opposed theologically, depending on the issue, socially, they share many of the same goals, and some of the same personnel. This Palin ≠ Deborah sentiment is echoed by James Dobson cohort Gary DeMar, one of the primary Christian Reconstructionist authors of this generation.

It was big news within rightwing Christendom when, as Pozner wrote about, the Council for National Policy vetted Palin, with the blessing of Dobson himself, one reason being that though Focus on the Family and James Dobson are associated with Evangelicalism as opposed to Christian Reconstruction, FoTF promotes and sells DeMar's books. Land, for his part, was taken to task by the CRs for endorsing a person with the wrong body parts for potential head of state, to impose his conservative-religious bigotry on the populace, even as he would deny Sarah Palin a pastorship even the smallest SBC church.

Palin’s candidacy took a bright yellow highlighter to that contradiction. This is good for us. The more she keeps them squabbling over Bible verses, the more we can get done.

To be continued...

OCIHACOSP Does Not Have A Category Called "Sarah-As-Savior" For Nothing

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:51:00 +0000

Funny lede from stupid HuffPo today:

How do you generate buzz if you're a magazine up for sale and fighting claims of irrelevance?

Combine two of your most reliable go-to topics: Sarah Palin and religion.

Interesting, coming from them, since they are well-known for shoving the words "Sarah Palin" into headlines just for clicks, themselves.

This will make what, 5 Palin-adorned Newsweek covers, and the second with totally-wrong and/or misleading-context?

Taking up two recurring issues at Oh Crap, I Have A Crush on Deborah/Esther/Moses2.0, Newsweek's feature story calls itself covering "what Palin's appeal to conservative Christian women says about feminism and THE FUTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT". After reading Lisa Miller's article, I wish she would have come read OCIHACOSP first. The focus on abortion is a grounding enough for the article, but there's much more to Palin's appeal to rightwing women than just her Trig stories and anti-abortion stance (which, by some counts, isn't nearly anti-abortion enough).

Restating Oh Crap's position,

1. What Sarah Palin is doing with the word "feminism" may be new for this generation, but politically-mobilized rightwing/reactionary white women is not a new phenomenon

2. The left should not once again make the error of dismissing or writing off that phenomenon. It leaves us with things like Viguerie/Weyrich New Right inventions like the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, Prop 8 and its popular cultural products: Ralph Reed, Glenn Beck, Bob McDonnell, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, who are in prime positions to influence opinion and thus the voting populace. This is by design, since educating students to go into public life and take it over for Jeezus is precisely what schools like McDonnell's and Bachmann's alma maters were founded to do. They make no secret of it.

More Miller:

Palin has been antagonizing women on the left of late by describing herself as a “feminist,” a word she uses to mean the righteous, Mama Bear anger that wells up when one of her children is attacked in the press or her values are brought into question. But while leftist critics continue to shred Palin as a cynical, shallow, ill-informed opportunist, and new polls show her unpopularity rating to be at an all-time high—53 percent—Palin is now playing to her strengths. Even if she never again seeks elected office, her pro-woman rallying cry, articulated in the evangelical vernacular, together with the potent pro-life example of her own family, puts Palin in a position to reshape and reinvigorate the religious right, one of the most powerful forces in American politics.

Miller nails the left's reaction, and in my estimation, that reaction is a mistake, one the left makes over and over regarding rightwing Christianity. Conservative strategists bank on it. They are usually right.

3. If the left is often confounded by whatever the h. Sarah Palin seems to be doing, they're not alone. To the extent that the left is frustrated with her apparent, for-now staying power, she's got the right in ever the same bit of a tizzy

4. With that in mind, her pretend-preacher, ersatz Esther act is only going to carry her so far with the Christian right crowd, who, hopefully by now has learned something from having repeatedly followed her fellow Pentecostal girl Aimee Semple MacPherson into scandal, her fellow bull-headed bumpkin in a suit William Jennings Bryan into multiple public humiliations; rightwing televangelists into 900-foot visions, dozens of ministry scandals, and their Moral Majorities and Christian Coalitions into crumbling institutional impotence.

Some day, the left is going to get it through our collective heads that "trying take down a chick" like Palin, who models herself on Teflon Ronnie, isn't really going to work. Palin-gates and Trig Trootherism: didn't work. Calling her every gender-based epithet in the book: didn't work. Newsweek's silly cover from her Runner's World shoot: didn't work. Focusing on (and getting distracted by) her sexy looks, her nice body and starting ridiculous whisper campaigns about how big she may or may not be "up there": you know the drill; don't think she doesn't either, or doesn't effectively use this kind of behavior to her advantage. She does, like no other. So, keep yearning for that "final undoing" predicted in the press since some time in late 2008, but don't hold your breath for it.

That's because heckling from the orchestra never works, when people are playing to the balcony.

From a personal standpoint, had someone like me -- growing up queer while steeped in New Right/Post-Civil-Rights Christianity -- had a role model like Sarah Palin, my exit from the rightwing would have been hastened far sooner. So feminists quit fretting about the definition of authentic "feminism" in order to exclude the Palins of the world, let Sarah Palin go make the word "feminism" popular again. All we have to do is 1- kick our own institutions and educational drives back into gear and 2- provide a place for young women interested in Palin feminism to land, with a better understanding of what "feminism" is.

That's boon city, peeps. Miller, again:

Behind the Christian-military rhetoric, though, is a theology that’s generic, Griffith and other scholars say. (Though the video clip that made the rounds during the campaign of Palin being prayed over by an African minister gave foes on the left the willies, most churchgoing conservative evangelicals were completely unfazed.) In her speeches, Palin never damns anyone to hell. She never talks about sin: discussing her daughter Bristol, accidentally pregnant at 17, she talks about responsibility.

When Palin writes about her born-again experience, she talks not about an encounter with Jesus or the Holy Spirit, as so many evangelicals do, but of a sudden awareness of the awesomeness of creation. “Looking around at the incredible creation that is Alaska—the majestic peaks and midnight sun, the wild waters and teeming wildlife—I could practically see and hear and feel God’s spirit reflected in everything in nature.” Palin refers often to Ronald Reagan in her speeches, and even critics concede there’s something Reaganesque about the way she approaches faith. It’s easy. It’s optimistic. It’s future-oriented.

As has been covered numerous times here, Sarah's ambiguity on her theological positions is going to get her in hot water with these voters. Note to Palin: these same voters dumped Reagan in a big way when he wasn't "born again" enough for them, when Roe v Wade wasn't overturned (Republicans have a stake in it never being overturned; what else would they have to campaign on if they did?), when Gog and Magog remained dormant, when Reagan never ushered in the antichrist, when Jesus did not return to earth, on a horse, with a sword in his mouth.

Taking people on big rides is just one of the things demagogues do. The lesson for the left, which the left never seems to learn is, never underestimate the political power of religious bigots. Laugh at them, but don't write them off. Sneer at them, but don't make the mistake in believing that will ever make them go away. They will never go away. There will always be another Sister Aimee, another fundamentalist politician like Bryan, and yes, the next Sarah Palin.

We'd do well to follow the lead of Nina Simone, and leave the backlashers with the blues.

Sarah Palin's Big B®3@sts

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 03:19:00 +0000

Sarah Palin on the 2008 campaign trail

Nah, don't be writing in that I'm repressed because I said B®3@sts instead of the actual body parts. Lord knows I get enough dumbbells coming in here on Sarah Palin p00rnn searches; who needs more of those dorks? So, "b®3@sts" it is.

This is not the first time OCIHACOSP has written on this topic. Sarah Palin made us consider, even if in a downlow, unacknowledged way, The President's Body, and The President's Breasts. We as in the cultural "we" are still contemplating such things, evidently.

Lol, OCIHACOSP noted yesterday how a bunch of people are all verklempt about Sarah's buxom t-shirt pictures (though in everyone's haste to gawk at the mamm@ries, they're missing the real treat, which is Sarah's hecca gorgeous arms.)

It looks like the scandalized whispers have yet to die down. I think it's funny.

A roundup for Winks and Nods:

Google: " 'Sarah Palin'" 'implants' "

Spike TV For Laughable Males: Sarah Palin Gets Breast Implants by Busty Heart Classy!

Gawker: Did Sarah Palin Get a Boob Job? A Photographic Investigation Forget former Todd Palin employer BP, forget Helen Thomas, forget even that Lady GaGa released a new single today, this is the question on everyone's minds.

Jezebel: Sarah Palin's Possible Breast Implants Prompt Thoughtful Discussion I thought irony meters were passé. Guess not.

Washington Post: Sarah Palin (DD - Alaska)? She only wishes she could see Sarah's spectacular chest from her house.

Wonkette: Did Sarah Palin Buy Herself a Couple of Luxury Items? Probably not, but who's counting? (Apparently, a bunch of people named "Laura".)

Desperately Obsessed Palinluvvaz: Oh Sarah! - Open Thread - Update! Complete with six updates. She had somebody at palingates screaming "Oh Sarah!", indeed. What else is new.

Oh Crap, I'm Badly In Love With Sarah Palin But Can't Admit It: “First Dude” is a Stallion, You Betcha! Malia Litman is way farther-gone than I am, po' baby.

Just a couple more reasons one can't help but like certain things about Sarah Palin.

Laziest Post Ever in the History of Blogging: Sarah Palin Newsweek Cover 11-09

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:37:00 +0000

Hey, can I help it that's what people are looking for this week?

Sarah Palin Broke the Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:45:00 +0000

From "All Things Digital", Sarah Palin, Please Come Back! Hulu Traffic Drops in November:

File under “interesting, but understandable”: After a flurry of election-related interest in October, traffic to red-hot Hulu fell off in November. Blame Sarah Palin–or the lack of her.

ComScore says that traffic to the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC fell 10.8 percent from October to November, dropping from 5.3 million unique visitors to 4.8 million. (Hulu’s PR team notes that ComScore’s separate “VideoMetrix” panel assigned a much bigger audience to the site last month: 24 million uniques.

...

And all sorts of Web sites that enjoyed a bump during the run-up to the election have tailed off a bit since then. ComScore says the Huffington Post, for instance, is down 20 percent– from five million uniques to four million.

She'll be back to bump up the internet. I can guarantee it.

The Poetics of Plain-Talk: Palin As Scapegoat and Totem

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 10:52:00 +0000

What is the secret that the firm, erect, sticking out thing holds? Unused, it is a frontier, where no man has gone before. What is the secret that lies beneath the power of this image, this object? What most desired and most feared thing is masked behind the desire to be the first, or the biggest? What does (M)other lack? (1)

A few articles in question regarding Palin and language, starting with one from Julian Gough at The American Prospect, and an older one by a long-time blog colleague, Anil Dash.

Long time ago, OCIHACOSP asked, rhetorically, if Sarah Palin wasn't being set up to be a scapegoat for a GOP loss. This was long before the post-election bus-throwing and other tantrums by Newt and other prominent conservatives.

Turns out I was right.

Her use and abuse of the English language was part of the ploy, the game, and the show. And her gross mishandling by the GOP/RNC. A month and a half after the elections, some people are still falling for the act, apparently.

Though Gough may have been writing with tongue in cheek, there is something to what he says in such a funny way.

Here she is, in a work I have taken to calling “The Relevance of Africa.” (Not a single word or comma has been changed, but the line breaks are placed where they naturally fall.) In it, Palin blends the energy of free verse with the austerity of a classic 14-line sonnet.

It reads: “And the relevance to me /With that issue, /As we spoke /About Africa and some /Of the countries /There that were /Kind of the people succumbing /To the dictators /And the corruption /Of some collapsed governments /On the /Continent, /The relevance /Was Alaska’s.”

A great poet needs to leave open the door between the conscious and unconscious; Sarah Palin has removed her door from its hinges. A great poet does not self-censor; Sarah Palin seems authentically innocent of what she is saying. She could be the most natural, visionary poet since William Blake.

Ohh, does OCIHACOSP love this imagery, since in my opinion this was the very door unhinged by the Sarah Palin pick, itself, her often-baffling use of English, included. A brief trip to Wikipedia's entry on Totem and Taboo explains it best.

In this essay, Freud considers the relationship of taboos to totemism. Freud uses his concepts 'projection' and 'ambivalence' he developed during his work with neurotic patients in Vienna to discuss the relationship between taboo and totemism.

Like neurotics, 'primitive' peoples feel ambivalent about most people in their lives, but will not admit this consciously to themselves [OCIHACOSP, in case it's not crystal clear by now, does not support this]. They will not admit that as much as they love their mother, there are things about her they hate. The suppressed part of this ambivalence (the hate parts) are projected onto others. In the case of natives, the hateful parts are projected onto the totem. As in: 'I did not want my mother to die, the totem wanted her to die.'

Freud expands this idea of ambivalence to include the relationship of citizens to their ruler. In ceremonies surrounding kings, which are often quite violent, – such as the king starving himself in the woods for a few weeks – he considers two levels that are functioning to be the "ostensible" (i.e., the king is being honored) and the "actual" (i.e., the king is being tortured).

What about citizens and pols who are potential rulers, especially those whose public image is geared to appeal directly to the libido, resulting in unintended consequences (such as perhaps this very blog) like behind-the-scenes reports of the very machinery masked by the wizard?

Dash's article, a linguist's analysis of Palin's speech patterns does find time for politics, begrudging may it be.

Key:

I firmly believe that Sarah Palin is a smart, talented public speaker who makes deliberate choices about her use of language to elicit particular responses from different segments of her audience. She's college-educated and has been a professional broadcaster, understanding the nuances of addressing a large audience. She is certainly experienced enough to understand that signifiers like "hockey mom" and "Joe Six Pack" are explicitly communicating to an audience that is white, overwhelmingly not college educated, and lives in rural or suburban areas.

This particular analysis goes against the grain of Palin-as-dipshit as promoted by television and online comics. But it's in line with OCIHACOSP's insofar as I feel that Mrs. Palin is very deliberately taking the far-right conservatives she and her glorious body were pimped to, on a major ride.

(Along with the conservative women who think she actually gives a damn about them, outside their vote.)

Is Camille Crushgirl Paglia one of them? Let's hope not. Her latest reflection invokes the everpresent under-buzz of Palin Messianism, called, "The Resurrection of Sarah Palin". And what is/was the Christian Messiah but the ultimate scapegoat, the king with the tarnished, underappreciated, woefully misunderstood crown; thrown under the bus by the once-adoring audience? I don't recall Palin having died being nailed to a tree, or really ever going so far away, but she is again used here as a stick to beat back Paglia's own bugbear, The Ivy League Academy/elitists/leftists/same thing.

I am very sorry that [a professor of hers at Yale], and so many other members of the educational elite, cannot take pleasure as I do in the quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant way that Palin speaks -- which is closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.

English has evolved, and the world has moved on. There is no necessary connection between bourgeois syntax and practical achievement. I have never had the slightest problem with understanding Sarah Palin's meaning at any time. Since when do free Americans subscribe to a stuffy British code of veddy, veddy proper English? We don't live in a stultified class system. In the U.K., in fact, many literary leftists make a big, obnoxious point about retaining their working-class accents. Too many American liberals claim to be defenders of the working class and then run like squealing mice from working-class manners and mores (including moose hunting and wolf control). What smirky, sheltered hypocrites. Get the broom!

Anti-intellectual academics...embrace the ambivalence, indeed.

The jazziness of blogspeak? Just where IS that whitey tape, anyway, hm. Same place as the smoking photos of a flat-stomached Sarah, and BHO's original birth certificate, I'm guessing.

OCIHACOSP is so disappointed that someone on the Blog Parent roll would engage in such a blindingly obvious straw man/person, playing the class card like a potential suicide in Las Vegas.

Again, the race card just begs to be played as well: had Sarah been Black, or if Condi had been the VP pick and spoke East Palo Alto as opposed to Stanford; had she had any kind of "ethnic" accent associated with anything but whiteness, there would have been no way, and/or we'd have NEVER heard the end of it from conservatives, busy busy busy yapping about the unmerits of "affirmative action".

What we're seeing now, as opposed to what Paglia considers "more neutral" coverage by news sites "and even laudatory, signifying that a shift toward reality is already at hand", is the pre-VP nom Sarah Palin, before the played-up accent and dropped-g's, before the winks and nods, before the size-too-small suits and crazy-sexy suede boots. That is the "shift" reflected in news coverage, that, and her own "laudatory", conciliatory, supportive attitude towards the President Elect.

Say it with us, Ms. Paglia, B-L-A-C-K-P-R-E-S-I-D-E-N-T-F-R-O-M-C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A-A-N-D-H-A-R-V-A-R-D.

Ah, Sarah, poor dear. She was, remains, and will go down in history as, the breaker of multiple public taboos, at once. American politicians aren't supposed to act like that. They're not supposed to look like that, dress like that, trot their kids around like that, express themselves like that, or throw their head back and laugh so confidently, unpretentiously, in their sexy wrongness like that. Not while having those kind of political views, or going to those kinds of churches, or giving interviews in front of dying Thanksgiving turkeys like that.

Alas, she did. She certainly signed up to the clothes, the enhanced accent, the GOP/RNC fiddling with her own lyrical rhythms, and the general manipulation of her own image by them of her own you-go-girl empowered volition.

But I seriously doubt she signed up for this other psychodoodle weirdness of the taboo and ambivalence we of the neurotic American electorate -- Paglia and other pundits included -- have collectively projected on to her, transfiguring before the cameras into every strange spectacle we needed her to be for us in that political moment, regardless of what party we ended up voting for.

(1) Jennifer Bloomer, "Big Jugs", in Fetish: The Princeton Architectural Journal, vol. 4, Princeton Architectural Press, 1992, p. 78.

Other Things I Like (But Am Not Supposed To, Oops, Oh Well.)

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:10:00 +0000

Tom Cruise - cute body, cute smile, like his movies, even the weird, inane ones like Vanilla Sky

Head cheese

McDonalds

Buffalo stew

Eleanor's body over Cyd's

Can personally relate to the tale of Jakie Rabinowitz/Jack Robin

Eddie Cantor fan (so was Harold Nicholas. Pee Wee Herman has NOTHING on Eddie.)

Not a big Ella fan (utter blasphemy, I know)

Not a big Eartha fan (see above)

Stronger on rock and roll than on jazz (totally heretical, I know)

Nelson and Jeanette (though Ethel Waters having to play second fiddle to her in Cairo totally p'd me off)

I've been known to go to church, once in a blue moon.

Sarah Palin is a Feminist

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:44:00 +0000

I know. It's a horrifying thought, isn't it.

The Maid of Wasilla, with her visions of plowing through White House doors at the behest of God, would do well to heed the fate of Joan of Arc, whose unwavering religious fervor won her the favor of the illiterate hayseed/redneck French countryside, yet cost her something far, far greater.

As predicted in "Sarah Palin, Superstar", the very people who ushered her in with palm leaves in September are now grumbling about her in November.

If the Bible is to be believed, and I don't think it is, we have seen this tale, before.

Just in time for the appreciation post lauding Palin's ability to mess with conservative christian men and their massive gender hangups, some christowank at Crosswalk is currently grappling with his hypocritical Christian innards:

It is in this spirit of honest, forthright engagement with God and his word that I'd like to ask a question that couldn't help but come to me as I was reading the Bible this morning. I was in 1 Timothy 2, when I read this: "I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes .... A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent."

Now how in this world could I read that and not think of Sarah Palin? I didn't want to think of Sarah Palin. I didn't want to think of anything besides the glory of God's word. I hardly waded into my Bible this morning looking for trouble. But (alas) there it was.

So I'm honestly and truly asking, simply because I don't understand and want to: How do Christians who embraced and supported Sarah Palin in particular for her adherence to "traditional" Biblical values reconcile how utterly she violated Paul's injunctions to women to not wear expensive clothes, to stay quiet, to remain submissive, and to have no authority over men? If vigorously campaigning for Vice President of the United States (while, as we all know, wearing expensive clothes) isn't in direct, overt, purposeful, and sustained opposition to all four of those things, then ... then King Kong was a leprechaun. I would think evangelicals and Biblical fundamentalists would reject Ms. Palin for ... well, for one, so ambitiously seeking authority over men.

What do I say to non-Christians when they assert that Christians are being blatantly hypocritical and even opportunistically bigoted when they use Paul's words as justification for the condemnation of homosexuality, and at the same time ignore Paul's very explicit words when doing so suits their own personal desires and ambitions? How do we use Paul to argue for California's Proposition 8, but not use Paul to argue against Sarah Palin?

Poor thing. So confused. All it takes is a wink and a skirt. That's all it EVER takes with these males. Sorry fella, you've been punked by Sarah Palin; butch up and deal with it.

Meanwhile, the Iowa Independent further charts the Christian right's hypocrisy on the issue of a woman drawing attention herself and above all, holding authority over males, noting as John Shore did above, their utter failure to reconcile what the Bible states about women with what it allegedly proclaims about The Gays.

The charitable Christian will leave aside the implications of this injunction for Palin’s notorious $150,000 clothes shopping spree, and ask how biblical fundamentalists can accept Timothy’s teachings and still celebrate a female politician skilled in forthright rhetoric.

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.” ~ 1 Timothy 2:8-15

The answer is: Not very easily.

For those who believe that there is an all-encompassing plan by God as delivered in the Scripture, the complementarian view is fundamental. The belief in specific gender roles with men being in leadership positions over women cannot be separated from the order that the Bible says God created:

“But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.” ~ I Corinthians 11:3

These two findings help make up one reason I can say I appreciate Sarah Palin, not for being a "feminist" as defined by conventional 2nd wave pro-choice pro-equality activists, but for sticking it to her own conservative valiant male warriors, making them whimper and cry, and even go back to their Bibles to read what it actually says and think about it, as opposed to accepting what they have been told about the Bible and gender roles.

Yes, I appreciate that, very much. Thank you, Brown Eyes. In fact, these guys ought to be grateful she made their party lose, because if the McCain/Palin ticket had won, all you antiabortion control freaks trying to use Sarah Palin as a stick to beat the feminists would indeed find themselves with "a woman" "one heartbeat away" from being Commander in Chief, above countless males not only in the military but in the cabinet.

Oh, the travesty.

I always thought her "equality" and "progress" rhetoric would get her in trouble with the christofreaks from which she draws her support. I didn't expect them to jump ship before the elections, keeping themselves up for grabs. But I also didn't expect them to start throwing her under the theological bus so soon, not even a month after the election.

I guess it's a mark of the sore, male conservative loser: as with the cases of Eve, Lilith and Pandora, we can set our watch to the moment they blame the woman for their own strategic and tactical failures.

Too bad Sarah Palin seems so immersed in this world of scapegoating the always-already scapegoated, she can't quite see just how deeply scapegoated she is going to become amongst these people. Like Eve and Pandora who came before her, she may never be able to see it.

But those of us who can't stop watching, can. And after all the rightwing males suddenly discovering "sexism" because of her, after all the staunch ideological feminists trying to protect her from the same, it will be those of us who can see her for what she is -- the femme top Lilith/Pandora figure that just might have the ability to lift "feminism" to a height previously unknown and unfulfilled by the Steinems, the Lordes, the Paglias.

Welcome to Second Wave, 2.0, folks. A leftist didn't bring it on, a rightwing extremist did.

We're going to have to learn to reconcile it, because this is what history is going to recount.

[Eyeroll] Another Conservative Male Discovers Misogyny [/Eyeroll]

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:11:00 +0000

(This Is Why I Tend to Be Dubious About "Kill Him" Reports)

Mark Whittington of Associated Content says,

Commentator Tammy Bruce, who is both a feminist and a conservative, suggests that this kind of thing reveals an undercurrent of misogyny that has existed in the Obama Campaign since the primary fight with Hillary Clinton. Bruce said, "It transcends gender and race. It transcends class. The truth of the matter is, is that one of the most popular t-shirts when Barack Obama was running in the primary season was a t-shirt that said 'bros before hos.'"

O'rly, Tammy.

Never heard of it 'till now. Do tell us all about it.

I say something similar about the "kill him" remark; there are two being reported, now.

It's certainly not that I put it past any of these angry/bitter Palinites that show up in droves to see their magical messiah. But like the "bros before ho's" claim, I want corroboration and proof, because unlike speech on a t-shirt, people who are calling for Obama's death need to be put away, AWAY from normal people, ASAP. By end of business, today.

Hell, these rightwingers drooling for Palin love torture so much, send them to Gitmo where they'll have a grand old time without all that pish-posh of enduring something as tedious and silly as having their rights read to them.

Calling for people's death -- especially that of a presidential candidate -- is not protected speech, anyway, so I don't know who these conservatives think they are kidding, trying to change the topic to bro/ho t-shirts, allegedly all over Obama rallies. Why aren't they all up in arms over the t-shirts at pullinforpalin.com? Oh right, conservative white males with that legendary entrepreneurial spirit run that one, and there's no Black English anywhere on it, so that gets a pass from the Tammy Bruces and Mark Whittingtons.

We can't afford to f' around with ANY of this stuff -- not bros before hos, not illegal, criminal calls for people's DEATH, come on, now. The climate is already a tinderbox, as it is.

The President's Body

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:20:00 +0000

The subheader of this post should be "Looking At Sarah and Her Paranoid Style", but this layout doesn't do subheads, so..

Nobody ever thinks about things like "The President's Breasts" or "the President's body". That is, not until Sarah Palin.

As I stated earlier in "Feminism, Fraud and the Fisherman's Wife", when it comes to the "Sarah Palin" phenomenon, the style IS the substance. This week's events aboard the Lynchmob Express set that in stone, both in rhetoric and appearance. Back on September 7, Booth Moore in an LA Times article said (or hoped),

because she's a relative unknown, style is a lot of what we know about Palin right now. No doubt, in coming days her positions on the issues will eclipse our fascination with the brand of eyeglasses she wears. If they didn't, that would be the worst double standard of all.

Far from it, the double standard has gotten worse, with this blog contributing, sad to say. But if it's anything the past month has taught us, it's that whether they like her or or hate her, people love to be looking at some Sarah.

Looking at her style

Looking at her flag pin

Looking at her body language

Looking at her hairstyle changes

Looking at her wink

Looking at her jewelry

Looking at whether or not she's wearing her wedding ring

Looking at her lipliner

Looking at her legs

Looking at people looking at her legs

Looking at people looking at her rear end

Looking at people looking at her chest

Looking at her glasses

Looking at her mascara

Looking at her face, her neck

Looking at her body

Traditional feminists like the people at Sarah Palin Sexism Watch (no link, as I will no doubt end up on their list sometime soon) are quick to point up all this looking i.e. "objectification" as a by product of sexism and misogyny.

One would note, here, that I've deliberately left off the all-hetero-male subculture that's emerged around "looking" at absurdly bad, naked, obvious photoshops. Again, I don't have a problem with porn intellectually, but most days, the airbrushed, overproduced fantasies that make up the bulk of straight male porn just looks ridiculous to me.

In contrast to the "objectification" argument, I say, we like looking at crazy-ass Sarah Palin because she so clearly enjoys being an over-the-top exhibitionist. But the "Sarah Palin" image is changing, and with it, the entire phenomenon.

Robin Givahn is going to have to revise her ideas on SP's "unassertive fashion statement", though it's not even three weeks old, if only because her "style" has been a work in progress for the past month (at least).

Palin's style serves as evidence that a woman can step onto the national political stage without having to manipulate her wardrobe into some torturous costume calibrated to make her look authoritative but not threatening, feminine but not sexy, serious but not dour. Palin proves that a woman can wear red patent-leather shoes and still take questions on foreign policy and the economy.

The test, of course, is whether this particular gal knows the answers.

The other reason being, Sarah Palin just flat-out did not know what to wear, anywhere, before this campaign. That much is clear from her pre-campaign photos, oy. Suffice it to say, she does now.

The style shifted drastically this week, thus did the image. It's going to do so again, too, just watch. It's not a coincidence that it's doing so, post-cloister September, post-VP debate; after which she wasted no time coming out swinging against Obama on issues of judgment and character. Somebody ought to notify the sullen Karl Rove that his ruthless, violence-inducing tactics have already gone before him this week, and he's not telling the Palin/McCain ticket anything they haven't already learned from him.

Not only is The Hair making a dramatic change from what quickly became an anti-fashion icon to a generic Republican white woman who-doesn't-go-gray-but-goes-blonde, the clothes, particularly her tops, are getting trimmer and tighter.

The goal is for the milkshake to bring all the boys to the yard.

Her handlers started what seems to be a very cynical experiment with her New York City trip, which introduced us to what I label The Gray Jacket, reprised at Wisconsin's ~~town hall meeting~~ klan rally this week. Paired with black slacks, it's a form-fitting Nehru collared thing with large black buttons and a cloth buckle belt. The piece flatters her curves all too well.

Sorry, but no 40+ year old professional woman with that kind of body could get away with that outfit at work, without being asked to go home and change.

I would say, expect more of this to come as the election season lumbers to a close with the Palin/McCain campaign lagging. But without the signature Kennedy-era beehive, the representation of all that exotic, idiosyncratic Wasilla beauty and all that connotes, something's missing, and let's hope it's enough to affect what happens on November 4th.

Since the week ended on an extremely sour note for the campaign -- with numbers-down John McCain not only getting booed at his own lynchmob but the campaign openly denouncing the use of ~~Willie Horton's~~ Barack Obama's middle name -- those on the right so loudly crying "sexism!!" are going to end up using Sarah's body as a blindingly obvious votebanking tool, given it's about the only thing they have left.

Milkshakes bring all the boys to the yard, so we've been told.

She doesn't seem to give a damn, so the better part of me feels she gets what she deserves. They're pulling the same old gag that the medicine show does when the soft sell doesn't work: cut to the hard sell. It's already been reflected in Palin's manner, look for the same to be reflected in the style. She permits it to happen, and said yes to these humanity-crushing, individuality-repressing makeovers. Thus, I don't see the point in defending her as so many of these online "feminists" have taken to doing, in the name of the very sisterhood Sarah P. both shuns and appropriates to her own ends, whenever convenient.

Then again, she seems to be running her own campaign right now anyway, so wtf-ever Miss Top-of-the-Ticket. McCain's people even used identical apology language as Palin's people, after their little Mike Scott incident earlier in the week: “We do not condone this inappropriate rhetoric which distracts from the real questions of judgment, character, and experience that voters will base their decisions on this November.”

Who are the people they pay to come up with this b.s?

EDIT: Picture added.

Newsweek Cover Dustup

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:34:00 +0000

Look at these two rightwing idiots at Fox Snooze, wailing about the upcoming Newsweek cover of SP.

I paged through the issue while at the bank a couple days ago and like a silly fangirl, dutifully ran out to see if it was on the shelves, yet. It wasn't, so we'll just have to wait.

The cover photo looks great, and if the two conservative dunces in the video had the brains god gave a turnip, they'd realize that it's actually a testament to how photogenic Sarah Palin is.

Of course, Andrea Tantaros plays the conservative gender card like clockwork, whining, "any woman who sees this cover would be shocked and horrified..."

Now watch this weeks' issue of Newsweek fly off the shelves.

Idiots.

The President's Breasts

noreply@blogger.com (Oh Crap) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:10:00 +0000

There are some days when Sarah Palin looks just...weird. The hair is all wrong, some of her outfits from her pre-VP candidate/hidin'-the-baby-bump days are totally atrocious, and she seems to have an ongoing issue with posture.

Then there are the days when her body is just plain smokin'. Some days, she's got it goin' on.

She seems to know this. I think it pisses a lot of people off, because we just have not been confronted with the topic of The President's Breasts in this way before, not in this country. I'm noticing a lot of anger about it, even within myself. Thus the name of the site, right?

I know, I know, she's a horrid person, with vicious politics, and nothing redeeming in her vacuous, ideology-driven "worldview", is likely a supremacist of several various types, has these funny-looking aspects to her beauty; yeah, I already know the laundry list of everything we hate about Sarah Palin. But when those things become simple disclaimers which are really a mechanism for denial, then it's time to take a look at difficult facts that are cause for the panic.

Because yes, there is a certain kind of panic that Sarah Palin -- or at least the "Sarah Palin" image -- arouses. That is likely because part of that image is "getting away with it".

Is there a such thing as a subjective fact? Dunno. But I would prefer to say something like, "some of her pictures are cute, others...not so much, AND she's also a raving loon." I don't think the two have to cancel each other out. I prefer both/and to either/or.

Those of us who are social products of both the Civil Rights Movement and second-and-a-half-wave, post-Ferarro politics, I think, were handed something of a bill of goods when it came to defining and identifying "sexist" behavior; one which doesn't really allow for, or completely marginalizes, a developed sense of visual pleasure. I'm talking about with regards to other women. Women's visual pleasure of other women, even for the outest and proudest, still remains a guilty one, for many of us who enjoy women.

Strange, how other countries -- several of them Muslim and conservative Catholic -- have had female heads of state, many of them conventionally, youthfully "beautiful", like Benazir Bhutto.

Is Sarah Palin a sexist? For wearing those tight suits and coquettish ruby red pumps? For toying with the cameras in a debate for second highest spot in the world's most powerful country? Is she playing to all those straight guys who want to you-know-what, or is she just workin' it, in general? Is she a sexist because the audacity and absurdity of it all is what in fact lets her get away with it?

Could a liberal/left mother of 5 who likes guns game stew play the game this way without being called a slut, a bad mother, or something worse?

Whether one falls into the image, like I and a lot of other people have, or one doesn't like "that type", or whatever, we're being played. The game is obviously for the polls, and that kind of polling will never work with me personally, because I don't vote based on skin color or body parts or base my preference for a candidate based on my libido. But that's just me. Some of these other people, though...uggh. God.

What about Obama girl? Is she sexist for running around in tight tops and singing about her crush on Obama? She really begged the question: what kind of person doesn't have a crush on Obama? The answers to that, I think, are not pretty, though he certainly is.

We observe the same kind of panic regarding Obama's good looks, especially in white conservative males. Frankly, I'm not really interested in exploring that here, because AFAIC, that is a pathology that dates back to Othello and beyond.

More on this at another time. These are just preliminary musings.

I know I keep saying that, but stay tuned. It's all true.