Remember when Sarah Palin was asked "What is the Bush Doctrine?"

It was a painful, embarrassing episode for her. Here's a question for producing new gotcha moments for selected politicians: What is the Obama Doctrine?

"I will not call him the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. I'll let his wife call him that instead."

Said Sarah Palin about Rick Santorum.

"The question for many Republicans is whether Ms. Palin is rewriting the rules of what it takes to run for president in an age of Facebook and Twitter..."

"... a world where, perhaps, there are no early visits to Iowa and New Hampshire, no need for policy speeches or press interviews – or whether this is simply part of an effort to keep herself in the public eye and to influence the Republican primary."

I defend Tracy Morgan for what he said about Sarah Palin and masturbation.

"It’s unfortunate Mr. Morgan showed a lack of judgment on our air with his inappropriate comments. We apologize for any embarrassment or offense it may have caused," says TNT, apologizing in nonapology form — Sorry if you were offended — for what Tracy Morgan said on "Inside the NBA."

During yesterday’s live broadcast, co-hosts Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley handed 30 Rock‘s Morgan a microphone and asked him to settle a bet: Tina Fey or Sarah Palin? “Me and him have this argument all the time, ” crowed Smith, referring to Barkley. “[Morgan's] the only one who can settle it. Tina Fey or Sarah Palin?”

I'm going to defend Morgan. He did exactly what a great comedian should do. He called bullshit on Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley. They were doing their little show and keeping it light with fully deniable sexual innuendo. The question "Tina Fey or Sarah Palin?" implied sex. What Tracy Morgan did was not to bring sex up out of nowhere. It was seeing the sex that was already being talked about — in TV-friendly maybe-we're-not-really-talking-about-it style — and to surprise with a sudden jab of straight talk as if Kenny and Charles were already openly talking about masturbation. He called bullshit on their innuendo. Now, TNT prissily withdraws. Ha. I'm offended by their prissy withdrawal. They want the benefit of Smith and Barkley's roundabout references but they don't like the comedian undercutting the deniability.

"Let me tell you something about Sarah Palin..."

"Good masturbation material. Great masturbation material."

Tracy Morgan answers the question asked.

"His theme last night was wtf, winning the future," said Sarah Palin.

"I thought, okay, that acronym — spot on. There were a lot of wtf moments throughout that speech."

Watch your acronyms, people. Or the saucy ex-governor will watch them for you.

"Romney Wins New Hampshire Republican Party Committee Straw Poll."

With 35% of the 276 valid ballots cast. Ron Paul took 11%. Tim Pawlenty 8%. Sarah Palin, 7%.

"As a cartoonist, my main response when I saw this was..."

"... well, no matter how bad my work might be, at least I had nothing to do with Steampunk Palin."

"We Just Witnessed The Media's Test Run To Re-Elect Barack Obama."

Brilliant blog post by William A. Jacobson:

The ruthless efficiency with which the left-wing blogosphere tied Palin to the shooting, and the success of their efforts in equating Palin with mass murder, is a lesson we should not forget....

Having created a false narrative of Palin's responsibility for the shooting, the mainstream media tried to deprive Palin of the ability to defend herself against the charges. And unfortunately, some who supposedly are on our side have jumped on that bandwagon.

And all the while, Barack Obama stood back for days and let his supporters in the media rip Palin apart, much as he left it to his supporters to go after the Clintons during the primary, only then to proclaim that we don't really know why Jared Loughner did what he did. And the media narrative was how wonderful Obama was, how he helped heal the nation.

Any Republican or conservative or Tea Party supporter who dumps on Palin in any way over the Tucson shooting or her defense of herself should just stop talking now.

It does not matter whether you support Palin for President, whether you think she is electable, or even whether you like her. This is not about Palin, it is about the mainstream media's desire to have Barack Obama re-elected at any cost and to take down any Republican candidate who stands in the way.

Rush Limbaugh gave an excellent dramatic reading of this post yesterday, and Jacobson has the video. Here's the transcript, with this commentary from Rush:

If Republicans are gonna sit by and watch Palin savaged, they'd better be prepared to sit by and watch the next one get savaged and the next one. Because that's what's coming.  If the Republicans cannot defend themselves over this kind of scurrilous, baseless, libelous charge, they got no business running.

They'll not be able to elect anybody.  If we shut up and be silent on this -- if we've got Republicans like Frum who will agree with the left-wing blogosphere and the mainstream media that Palin should shut up, that she should stop defending herself and it's a horrible travesty of just what Palin did; if we're gonna have Republicans sit around and give Obama credit for sitting by for four days while his allies try to take her out, then give a speech and get credit for the wonderful things he said about it -- then we got more idiots in our party than we would want to know....

This call for "civility"? They don't want us to be civil.  They want us to be cowed.  They want all of us to become Frumized.

Go to the links and read the whole thing to see why David Frum is tagged as the exemplar of a useful idiot. Wouldn't you like to see Jacobson and Frum is a dialogue on Bloggingheads? Frum has been on many times. Based on segment headings, he's never talked about Sarah Palin, though. Kind of odd, considering how hard it is not to talk about Sarah Palin. I'm going to recommend a Jacobson/Frum pairing. I think that would be quite delicious.

"Sarah Palin, she won't listen to their bunk. Sarah Palin's coming south to hunt some skunk."

Via Andrew Sullivan, who calls this "a fantastic nugget of hathos." I call it awesome. I do think "hunt some skunk" is an inappropriate metaphor after the Tucson massacre (though this performance predates that).

I got to Sullivan through the commenter 1jpb, who said: "Sully's got some funny stuff up. And, it's very civil (as it is when cons mock the BHO tribute videos)."

Singing to the glory of politicians should always appear ridiculous if not repulsive. Let's remember the classic benchmark of absurdity:



FROM THE COMMENTS: EDH says: "Notice, the 'Sarah Palin Battle Hymn' shares a martial theme if not metaphor with Amy Chua's 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.'"

Andrew Sullivan reflects on the "difficult task is summoning the right amount of anger with the right amount of generosity of spirit."

Including the way he has treated Sarah Palin:

Here, there is no conceivable way in which, in my judgment, her presence on the national stage can improve our discourse, help solve our problems or improve public life. But that does not forbid one from noting the great example she has shown in rearing a child with Down Syndrome, whatever his provenance, or noting her effectiveness as a demagogue, or from admiring her father's genuineness or her skill in exploiting new media. I've consistently tried to do this without undercutting my still-raw amazement that an advanced democratic society could even contemplate putting such an unstable and irresponsible person in a position of any real power.

His approach to the new civility, he says, will be "generous anger: a classically Orwellian term." The idea is "to make strong and lively points without demonization."

Stanley Fish finds "a unity" to Sarah Palin book "America by Heart," but "it is not one Palin proclaims or works out discursively."

NYT readers will have their Sarah Palin processed through the Mind of Fish:

Rather, the unity is conveyed by the quotations that carry the argument, long (sometimes two-page) quotations from an impressive variety of authors, quotations that are strong in isolation and even stronger when they are laid next to one another. The book is really an anthology. The author does not present herself as controlling or magisterial; she gives her authorities space and then she gets out of the way. Her performance mimes the book’s lesson: rather than acting as a central authority, she lets individual voices speak for themselves. Humility is not something Palin is usually credited with, but here she enacts it by yielding the stage as others proclaims the truths she wants us to carry away.

Sarah Palin is doing something that is, perhaps, pure genius, and it takes the brilliant professor to say what she is doing so that the ideas are apparent even to New York Times readers, who are well-defended against the notion that Palin is anything but stupid. Even slapped in the face by Fish...



... they resist. I'll be the professor translating the diverse items into a unity for your easy consumption: NOOOOOOOOO! Favorite way of saying "no": surely, the book was actually written by Bill Ayers some ghostwriter.

Sarah Palin talks about Tucson with Sean Hannity.

The video.

Why does Ross Douthat use marriage (bad marriage) as an analogy for the way media deals with Sarah Palin?

"The whole business felt less like an episode in American political history than a scene from a particularly toxic marriage — more 'Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' than 'The Making of the President.' The press and Palin have been at war with each other almost from the first, but their mutual antipathy looks increasingly like co-dependency: they can’t get along, but they can’t live without each other either."

Why does it feel like a marriage to Ross Douthat? I'll offer 2 possible answers. See if you get it right:

1. Because Sarah Palin is a woman.

2. Because Sarah Palin is a conservative.

The correct answer is #2. If Sarah Palin were a liberal, using the marriage analogy to talk about a female politician would have been recognized as too sexist.

And, yes, I realize Douthat is supposed to be the conservative columnist at the New York Times.

I talk with Glenn Loury about the Arizona massacre.

This goes for about 48 minutes. I think it's pretty good. I'll listen to it myself now and pick out some high spots.




ADDED: I reject the distraction that is Jared Lougher:



We talk about Jeremiah Wright as an exemplar of edgy speech on the left:



Glenn is rubbed the wrong way by news commentators, after the memorial, dwelling on the topic of "Obama's got his mojo back":



The use of Native American religion in the memorial — I call it patronizing:



Glenn pushes for gun control, I push back (a bit) and do a quick lecture on federalism and the Second Amendment at one point:

Help me generate a list of smart, articulate Palin supporters who would do well in a Bloggingheads-type diavlog with a Palin-hater.

We were talking about the fact that Bloggingheads, despite endless talk about Sarah Palin, never has anyone on who actually supports her. But who could they have? It needs to be someone who would actually do it. You have to put up with and respond to whatever the other person throws at you in an unedited hour of telephone conversation. The pay is $0. Help me generate some names.

During the last episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska," TLC put up this teaser for its special "Kennedys' Home Movies."

Yes, they are both TLC shows, but why did TLC think the people watching a show about Sarah Palin and her family would be susceptible to a show about the Kennedys? (Meade raised this question in the comments to the post earlier today about "Sarah Palin's Alaska.")

Your first thought might be that it doesn't make much sense because liberals love the Kennedys and conservatives love the Palins. But let's assume TLC isn't run by idiots, that they know how to appeal to viewers. If you had to argue that a good chunk of the "Sarah Palin's Alaska" audience would like to watch "Kennedys' Home Movies," what would you argue?

I'd say: Not all American TV-watchers are strongly grounded in one political party or the other. These people are not cemented to abstract ideology. They may feel their way into politics through personalities. Or they may not care that much about politics at all and simply enjoy peering into the family lives of celebrities, and politicians are a special, elite breed of celebrity, like royalty. The Kennedys have been, for many people, America's royalty, and the Palins may be the new royal family that people who like that sort of thing like.

Obviously, there are differences. The Kennedys posed as European-style aristocracy, and the Palins present themselves as working-class Americans. But both are very much big, colorful families with a strong sense of geographical place — Massachusetts/Alaska — and a mesmerizingly beautiful and feminine woman to fascinate us. Both families have a lot of children who we get to see looking robust and active in outdoor settings — especially boats.

There's a romanticism of the family about it all. I'm not saying that's good. It's a point of entry by which political opinion seeps into a certain very common type of American brain. And it happens through television. Pay attention.

***

By the way, what do you think of the crazy culture clash that is Johnny Cash singing the Beatles ("In My Life") over home movies of the Kennedys?

Holy Jeez! What if Sarah Palin is awesome?

HuffPo makes a montage from "Sarah Palin's Alaska" in an effort to make her look like the idiot they just know she is...

... and it totally backfires. She comes across as thoroughly lovable. Remember, as NYT columnist Charles Blow said:

"She’s like the ominous blob in the horror films: the more you shoot at it, the bigger and stronger it becomes."

By the way, has Blow walked back from his violent metaphor yet? Not only did he plant the image of shooting repeatedly at Sarah Palin in the minds of America's psychopaths and assorted young left-wing idealists, he compounded it with the suggestion that she isn't even human, that she is a monster who ought to be destroyed. Come on, Charles! Does the new civility apply to you or not?

"BHTV has had 100 DV (or it seems that way) on Palin and only one BHTV head has ever mounted a real defense of her."

"Althouse did it once. And only because no one else was available. I realize BHTV is a left-wing site, but damn - it gets boring."

An apt comment over at Bloggingheads.

ADDED: "DV" means "diavlog" — that is, a video'd conversation between 2 persons. BHTV supposedly pairs people from different or opposite sides, and there really is a vision of producing something like the "civility" we've been hearing so much about lately. But it seems like I'm go-to Palin defender over there. The commenter is wrong that I only did it once. I've done it many times, and I am not a big Palin supporter. I'm more of a big critic of Palin-hating, and there's been a lot of Palin-hating out there to criticize:

September 5, 2008: I defend Palin in a diavlog with Jane Hamsher.

October 14, 2008: In a diavlog with Ana Marie Cox, I argue that Palin is good for the country — even as I say I'm going to vote against her:



November 5, 2008: In a diavlog with Glenn Reynolds, we both defend Palin.

July 5, 2009: I push back when Michelle Goldberg goes all out against Palin.

November 19, 2009: I'm re-paired with Goldberg and consequently better prepared to push back when she attacks Palin. Famous fireworks in this one, when Goldberg doesn't like it when I — as they say — punch back twice as hard.

November 20, 2010: I'm the one BHTV chose to go up against the author of "Palinisms" (a book mocking Palin).

"How many other demented people are out there? It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target."

"Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled—senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even nine-year-old girls."

One of the survivors of the Tucson massacre, Eric Fuller, says that is what he wrote down after staying up "most of the night" in the hospital, trying to calm himself down and organize his thoughts, and writing out (from memory) the text of the Declaration of Independence.

ADDED: Patterico notes:

But you never hear them ask the obvious follow up question: do you still feel this way?  And if you look at the rest of the report, created today, it is obvious that these people are completely dishonest.  They have deliberately skewed every other piece of evidence to indict the right wing, leaving out every piece of evidence that might exonerate their targets.  Why should we think they presented this man’s entire statement?