Republican vice presidential candidate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Steve Schmidt, chief strategist for the McCain campaign, Bloomington, Minn., Aug. 31, 2008.
It’s not like Sarah Palin didn’t try to warn us, ringing those bells and firing those shots and argle bargling those tweets just like Paul Revere did back in the 1400s. She said .” But we wouldn’t listen. We kept on thinking that underneath this vixen’s mini skirt and word saladism had to be an erudite stateswoman.
Steve Schmidt, former McCain campaign manager, and American journalism’s most fearless armchair-warrior, Weekly Standard editor, Fox News commentator and former New York Times fail dragon Bill Kristol, are the perpetrators of the contemptuous tactic that endangered this country. These two losers chose Sarah Palin – a manifestly unqualified and incompetent politician unable to string together a series of coherent sentences – as the potential presidential successor to a psychologically and physically damaged, 72-year-old cancer survivor. back on Aug. 29, 2008.
In October 2008, the New York Times published a fascinating story recounting exactly how John McCain got all mavericky and came to select the lipsticked hockey mom from Alaska’s meth capitol off a Google page of Lady GOPers to be his co-loser in the 2008 presidential election. Steve Schmidt collaborated with lobbyists Rick Davis and Charles Black and speechwriter Mark Salter to promote Palin over more qualified candidates — after a cursory background investigation that failed to reveal her alarming lack of knowledge, intellectual incompetence, bizarre official conduct, and narcissistic temperament. One conversation, s all I need to do a full intellectual and psychological assessment of almost anybody. And I challenge anyone to challenge that.
Baby-faced fucktard Bill Kristol had been caught in a terminal erection ever since his infatuating Alaskan summer cruise sponsored by his magazine in 2007:
“She could be both an effective vice-presidential candidate and an effective president,” he gushed on Fox News. She’s young, energetic.”
Schmidt, Davis and Salter chose to listen to Kristol, literally always a political mistake, with consequences ranging from the merely absurd to the utterly dire ( invasion of Iraq, with an astronomical cost in lives and treasure that should be charged to him and his magazine, as he used to boast.)
When Schmidt, Davis and Salter presented Snowbilly to a smitten, impetuous, old-as-the-hills McCain, he accepted their judgment, ratified by Charlie Black, one of the most experienced Republican operatives in Washington, who told him that if he chose her, he might win — and otherwise he would surely lose.
It did not take the basement-dwelling bloggers very long — like, oh, maybe six seconds — to be all, “Hey, John, did you mean to pick that governor of Alaska, what is in the middle of an ethics investigation?” When journalists dared to question Caribou Barbie’s qualifications, after the puerile and titillating flush faded from her convention debut, Schmidt was belligerent — as befitted a protégé of Karl Rove:
“Her selection came after a six-month-long, rigorous vetting process where her extraordinary credentials and exceptionalism became clear! This vetting controversy is a faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee for vice president of the United States who has never been a part of the old boys’ network that has come to dominate the news establishment in this country.”
Schmidt was lying, of course, — about the process, about her credentials, about the confidence he and his imbecilic cronies supposedly had in her, and about the lamestream gotcha media questions that he knew to be legitimate.
If Schmidt and company had done even a teensy bit of due diligence and checked out ol’ Mooselini they’d have quickly learned that she’s a Grade A Nutter whose brain cells don’t spark quite right. They didn’t look past the pretty face, because boobs. So what they got was a real boob who just won’t go away. Heckuva job Schmidty.
It all went downhill from there, of course. Palin succeeded in destroying any chance McCain had at winning the election — which, to be fair to her, was … oh, let’s see, five times never plus three is … right, ZERO. During the closing days of the campaign in 2012, the losers were all blaming each other for the glaring Tundra Grifter’s mistake. Back then, Schmidt and everyone on Team McCain except for Kristol— — began to skeeter away from any association with the Wasilla Witch as soon as they realized that their ticket was going to lose the election, and that Snowbilly might well have sunk them. In assigning responsibility for impending doom, everyone piled on not only Palin herself but her cheerleaders, the most vocal of whom had been Schmidt and Kristol.
On “Morning Joe”, Schmidt came clean:
“It’s a story of when cynicism and idealism collide, when you have to do the things that are necessary to win to try to get in office to do the great things you want to do for the country. And I think it showed a process of vetting that was debilitated by secrecy, that was compartmentalized, that failed, that led to a result that was reckless for the country. And I think when you look back at that race, you see this person who is just so phenomenally talented at so many levels, an ability to connect. But also someone who had a lot of flaws as someone running to be in the national command authority who clearly wasn’t prepared. I think the notion of Sarah Palin being president of the United States is something that frightens me, frankly. And I played a part in that.”
At least Schmidt has the good grace to appear embarrassed by the shit show. Bill Kristol, whom I can only assume was the recipient of some unspeakable sexual favors from Palin on that stupid cruise, continues with his flight of fancy, saying:
“I think the way Palin would possibly resurrect herself, if that’s the right word, or rehabilitate herself I guess a better way of putting it, [is] run for Senate in Alaska in 2014. I’m not urging that, I’m just saying if she did that, suddenly — if you can imagine that — Sarah Palin, freshman senator, January 2015 in Washington having beaten an incumbent. That would be pretty interesting.”
Eat a bag of dogshit and die already, Bill Kristol. I can forgive your cruise ship boner, but I can not after she opened her mouth and her ass fell out. You who never met a thing you weren’t completely wrong about, ever-smiling warfapper and on/off Washington Post “lightning rod conservative”. If there was any justice, people would throw rotten garbage and rocks at you every time you go out in public.
Rarely is anyone in Washington, from politicians to operatives to journalists, held accountable for the damage they inflict on the body politic. Those who banged the war drums that proceeded disastrous war flit from one editorial page to the next without blinking; those who insisted on ruinous deregulation return as economic advisors to the president. The men who told us that Sarah Palin should be next in line of succession to the presidency may squabble among themselves now, but alas, they will all be back with yet more stupid, cynical advice. The bugfuck-crazy wing of the Rethugs had been slowly rising since the Reagan years; Steve Schmidt’s just the poor bastard who said, hey, let’s see what happen if we hand the car keys to this grinning lunatic. We need some fresh blood, right? “Hey ladies who wanted Hillary but did not get Hillary, here is another lady who also has a vagina, maybe you will vote for her instead even though she is nothing like Hillary except that she also has a vagina! Mavericks!” he was totes convinced that all those vaginas would totally vote for another vagina just because vagina. Worse yet, he thought all the USA American male voters would vote for her because they were fantasizing about boning her (and he was almost half right).
In 2012, Andrea Mitchell asked Schmidt whether he thought Palin had a future as a national leader in the GOP. He was unsparing in his reasoning why Palin is a destructive presence on the national political stage.
“I hope not. And the reason I say that is because if you look at, over the last four years, all of the deficiencies in knowledge, all the deficiencies in preparedness, she’s done not one thing to rectify them, to correct them. She has become a person who I think is filled with grievance, filled with anger who has a divisive message for the national stage when we need leaders in both parties to have a unifying message. . . . The lack of preparedness was a bad thing and the total disinterest in being more prepared and rectifying that is something that disqualifies.
As subject of a profile in the Washington Examiner this week, Schmidt gazes out at the smoking wreckage of the modern GOP and says that Trixie Tundratwat became a leader of an “asininity” wing of the Republican Party, hardcore conservatives looking to purge the party of moderates and anyone willing to compromise with Democrats:
“For the last couple of years, we’ve had this wing of the party running roughshod over the rest of the party.* Tossing out terms like RINO, saying we’re going to purge, you know, the moderates out of the party”. We’ve lost five U.S. Senate seats over the last two election cycles. And fundamentally we need Republicans, whether they’re running for president, whether they’re in the leadership of the Congress, to stand up against a lot of this asininity.”
Sure, let’s pretend that everything horrible about the Republican party is just the result of some new fad that cropped up the last election cycle or two. It’s not like you detestable fucknozzle terrorists have been making exactly all of that shit your stock in trade for two generations, or anything. Sounds like a strategy all right. That toothpaste should just slide right back into that tube, you betcha. Who’s really more to blame? The incoherent wingnut graft master who’d always be an incoherent wingnut, or the one-time celebrated moderate even Democrats liked who went full wingnut in a desperate attempt to get support from the crazies. lesson of Sarah Palin is totally lost on the right. She was kind of popular in Alaska prior to her appearance on the world stage. Her adoption of a world view almost totally informed by conservative AM radio made her so divisive that even Alaska despises her. Having a little nuance and thought in your positions is not a sign of weakness it is the hallmark of a true statesman.
*“For the last couple of years, we’ve had this wing of the party running roughshod over the rest of the party,”