The Weekly Meat

The Sarah Palin Dictionary

Sure, it feels a tetch like piling on, when even the righties are calling for her head, but hell, John McCain continues to claim good judgment in these trying times, and so I must continue to dispute his claim. Still, I hope for this to be the last bit of politics on The Meat for a while. Perhaps best now to just sit back and watch while that creaky, titanic old ship tries with increasing despair to avoid the looming iceberg.

The following palincyclopedic primer ought to help us through the VP debate and beyond. And yes, by all means, please contribute additional entries in the Comments field, and I'll append this post as necessary.

Alaska — 1. Giant non-contiguous red state northwest of Canada. 2. Repository for earmarks and big oil money over which Herself lords and Putin's head rears.

also — The first and last word of most Palin sentences also. Excepting, of course, those that end with "You betcha."

doggone it — Studied homespun folksiness with which Herself loves to pepper her speech. Verdict: That dog don't hunt.

earmarks — 1. To designate/gift funds to a pet project or state that could not exist without them. 2. Visible scarring caused about the otic lobe by mating Palins.

Head of Skate — "Really bad Disney movie" starring Herself as a hockey mom.

hockey mom — A group (of purported lipstick-wearers [though generally not in the author's experience]) to which Herself desperately wants to belong, though the hockey moms no longer want her kind.

lipstick — A waxy, pigmented cosmetic worn on the lips by pigs and purportedly by hockey moms (though generally not in the author's experience).

Maverick — A rear-wheel drive gas-guzzling compact that gained some notoriety back during the era of the Vietnam War.

moose stew — Purportedly Herself's favorite meal. See also faux populist back-story.

nucular — "Folksy" nuclear pronunciation favored by Herself and by George W. Bush. Coincidence, or cause for (even greater) concern?

palbatross — Something that causes persistent deep concern or anxiety. See John McCain, health of.

palgebra — The fuzzy math used by Herself while making grandiose claims about her experience and, say, the U.S. domestic energy supply.

palienation — A withdrawing or separation of voters' affections from Herself.

palimeano — A journalist (or just Joe Six-Pack) who asks a "gotcha" question.  [Entry submitted by TWM reader JayDenver]

palimitator — Tina Fey.

palimmolation — The act of Herself sacrificing at the altar of public/media scrutiny beyond her RNC acceptance speech.

palimprovisation — Unflattering and painful stammering and generalities that occur when journalists ask questions that demand knowledge of the issues. See also deer moose in headlights.

palinability — The lack of sufficient capability to be Vice President. See also Quayle, J. Danforth.

palinanity — Lack of substance; vapid, pointless, or fatuous character.

palinauguration — Please, God, no.

palincantation — A written or recited formula of words designed to produce a particular effect. See also "I told them 'Thanks but no thanks' on that bridge to nowhere."

palinception — The commencement of human life that happens when Palins mate. Often results in names including but not limited to Bristol, Piper, Track, Willow, and Trig.

palincinerator — See Couric, Katie.

palindigestion — What Herself causes John McCain when she answers voters' questions on camera while palandering for votes.

palindrone — Empty gibberish that when spoken by a smiling, chipper Palin sounds the same backwards as it does forwards.

palinertia — A property of matter by which Herself remains in free-fall unless acted upon by some external force.

Palinese — The native language of Herself. Somewhere between English and utter horse hockey.

palinference — Faulty syllogism.  [Entry submitted by long-time TWM reader Milena]

palingenesis — 1. Political reinvention on a national level. 2. Embryonic development that reproduces the ancestral features of the Palin family (opposed to cheneygenesis). 3. Baptism in the evangelical faith.

palingual — Having the ability to speak both Palinese and English.

palinmony — The allowance the Palins attempted to levy against their former brother-in-law in the form of his forced dismissal as a state trooper. See also troopergate.

palinoscopy — A nationally televised procedure involving Katie Couric. Somewhat uncomfortable for the subject, and perversely entertaining/educational for the audience.

palinterest — Waning fast.

palinthropy — A philanthropic act or gift to one's Alaskan constituents. See also earmarks.

palintine — A feudal lord seeking sovereign power over her domains.

Palintino — A font family used for both text and display type. Its letters have a shapely enough body, but include expensive and overly-showy serifs.

palintology — "The [disturbing] study of [Herself] and how she sees the world."

palintoxication — The stupefying effect Herself has on "fair and balanced" Fox News anchors despite her palincompetence.

palintriloquism — The magical art of political ventriloquism. Boy, when they're really on their game, you can barely see McCain's mouth move when Palin speaks.  [Entry submitted by TWM reader JayDenver]

palioclimatology — The anti-science of claiming that humans are in no way responsible for climate change.

paliolithic age — 44, or roughly half that of John McCain.

pall — vb. To become pale; to lose strength or effectiveness when asked substantive questions. n. Something that covers or conceals the issues.

pallbearer — A handler who manages Herself in an attempt to keep her from speaking.

pallinative care — Medical treatment that aims to alleviate or reduce the suffering caused by Herself.

pallinator — An agent that pollinates Palins.

Paltoids™ — Something you take to freshen your breath but that ends up stinging your mouth, making you wish you could spit it out politely.  [Entry submitted by long-time TWM reader Sanjuro]

Palzheimer's disease — A degenerative disease of the central nervous system characterized esp. by the forgetfulness of inconvenient facts (or even convenient ones).

ta — Used as a function word to express motion or indicate direction toward, as in "Please, just send me back ta Wasilla."  [Entry submitted by TWM reader ItWasAFumble]

vindication — What herself claimed to feel after the Troopergate verdict, despite the findings of the court.

Wasilla — Herself's often-invoked hometown. She paints a folksy picture, but it's palinhospitable to the objective eye.

Bipartisan Bingo

This one's interactive. But don't worry, it demands only partial attention, and can be completed while drinking. Click the image below to print out your own Bipartisan Bingo cards, just in time for the debates. Then tune in this Friday night, 9:00 EST, watch closely, and mark the generalizations and platitudes as you hear them. First one to BINGO wins a Caribou Barbie Sarah Palin bobblehead!*

*Not actually true. (Alas, the expected bobblehead earmarks have since been diverted to Alaska.)

Lies! Lies! Lies!

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."  —Mark Twain

I'd love to be writing about more pressing issues of national interest right now, like the impending onset of hockey season, but our time of national division decision is upon us. And so this week I find myself unable to steer clear of this: Their views aside, John McCain's and Sarah Palin's performances at the GOP Convention won them the undisputed title of being the most egregiously full of shit candidates since- since- OK, it has only been since George W. Bush and Dick Cheney donned hip boots to wade through their own muck back in 2000 (and 2004). But still.

Whether selling us their protestations over a "bridge to nowhere," claims of an earmark-free past, or their feigned offense over "lipstick on a pig," the noxious two-stroke engine powering the McCain-Palin ticket runs on the oil of falsehood — and their only answer to criticism seems to be, "Drill baby drill!" 

Clearly, lying is nothing new — nor is it exclusive to one political party — but the unwinking, un–self-conscious level of their two-facedness is staggering and on the scale of the old Iraqi information minister, who (bless you, YouTube) in the face of glaring evidence to the contrary, continued to claim, "There are no American infidels in Baghdad." There was an absurd comedy to "Baghdad Bob's" pressers, but the act became old when, back home, Baghdad Bush started slinging the same hash. And now, McCain is giving Bush a run for his money. It's gotten so bad that the heretofore king of snake oil, Karl Rove — now a (nudge nudge) "fair and balanced" Newsweek columnist — thinks McCain has gone too far. That's saying something.

What's next? Fox news arguing some of McCain's "facts"? I'll try to tamp down my hopes....

I applaud some in the media for noticing the lying, but their arguably objective reporting still hasn't received the traction it should. And it's a pathetic state of affairs when a self-proclaimed "fake-news" show has become the de facto source to call out hypocrisy (on both sides of the aisle). But god bless Jon Stewart and what must be legions of interns for sifting through and cataloging the endless hours of C-Span and such to find our politicos' most incriminating, often empty, clips.

And shame on all of us who are unthinking enough to choke down the buckets of pig slop those candidates are serving up. The George Orwell we read back in school should have taught us better than that. (My god, the past eight years should have taught us better.) But McCain and Bush and company seem to feel that if they and their minions can just keep repeating the same information, they can will it to be true, as in 1984: "We are at war with Eastasia. We've always been at war with Eastasia."

And then there is the VP choice. Well, the Palindrone (definition: empty gibberish that when spoken by a smiling Sarah Palin sounds the same backwards as it does forwards) effect is intoxicating to those who think the country will run best on her sass and his fire, without regard to the issues.

If those two do happen to steal this election — and they will most certainly try everything in the Rovian playbook — the oath they take in January will be not the Hippocratic one of physicians, but the hypocritic one.

FactCheck.org is a truly non-partisan non-profit organization whose mission is to check the accuracy of what is said by the major players in US politics. I urge you to have a look through their archives, and those of other reliable, nonpartisan sources like PolitiFact, or The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog. Yes, you will find some misstatements and misrepresentations from the Obama camp. But you will find the soil around the McCain camp to be far more fertile (thanks to constant composting), especially since the inception of Sarah Palin — who seems to have a pathological aversion to truthiness.

She seems to grok that, in Orwell's dystopia, "Who controls the past, controls the future." And at present, McCain-Palin seem to believe they can rewrite their own past deeds and words. Perhaps if John McCain owned a computer with which to work the internets, he'd see, as we can, that the past, in fact, lives on the Googles and the YouTubes.

So work your keyboard, and call bullshit when you see it, when you hear it, when you smell it.

Lipstuck pig image from Talking Points Memo. Thanks to Rose's Lime for the tip.

Road Rage

Why is it that being even mildly affected by someone driving assholishly can cause us (OK, me) to say things I would be embarrassed to say with others in the car? To clarify, when I say "others," I don't just mean my wife and kids. I mean anyone.

Mind you, I'm not some fly-off-the-handle whack-job looking to tailgate said offenders or start a fight. But damn, I've got a filthy mouth when I'm pissed off — especially in the car.

And you know I'm not alone.

Tricky business this road rage. It is a selfish, bourgeois luxury, yes. It's about entitlement and it's about (admit it) not letting anyone else get one over on us. We beep and yell and gesticulate in an attempt not to be dissed.

So much hate, so little time. Be it people who talk on their cellphones while driving; SUVs; mufflers that amplify, rather than muffle; people who pretend to not see the upcoming merge; people who fall in line behind a responding ambulance; the list goes on. Of course, we ourselves are not blameless. I know I am sometimes that guy.

I have — in my days of youthful indiscretion, and among other things — eaten a Big Mac while driving. Alone. Meaning, no one to grab the wheel if I had spilled two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheeese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun on myself and pulled a nutty into oncoming traffic. Eating a Big Mac is a sloppy, complicated business even under ideal, stationary circumstances. In a car it can be suicide. If not vehicular homicide.

In my defense, I have never eaten a Big Mac in heavy traffic. I have however, in my near quarter century of driving, cut my nails, read maps, written (notes for this post, in fact), nearly fallen asleep, and done things an attorney might advise me to neither confirm nor deny.

Currently, I drive to work four days a week over several of the northeast's worst commuting roads. I have seen horrible accidents and been in a bad one myself (while fully alert, engaged, and unencumbered; nonetheless...). And still, during the daily rush hour, I see drivers eating full-on two-handed meals, applying makeup, changing clothes, shaving, you name it.

And as long as those folks stay away, their actions shouldn't necessarily piss me off. Oh, but they do.

I don't give anyone the finger anymore — if I have half my wits about me. I give the peace sign (OK, sometimes the backwards peace sign), or squish their heads Kids in the Hall-style, between my thumb and forefinger. For those guys who especially deserve it, I reserve my new favorite hand gesture: I take my thumb and forefinger and place them a half inch apart, as if to say, "This right here, my assholic driving friend, this is the size of your penis."

And how is it that I allow myself to get so riled up? I think what happens is that when we're in a car, we (counterintuitively, I'd argue) see ourselves as being in a safe place. And this presumed haven — in which we have climate control, our favorite music, etc. — allows all our psychic junk to flood out when some discourteous, or just unlucky, stiff infringes on our buffer zone of personal space. Because those other jerks present to us a danger. They thumb their nose at the fact that we must all share the road, and within reason obey the laws of traffic and of common decency.

What often irritates me most about them are the same character traits that when I'm being honest irritate me about myself. Realizing this, of course, does not simply dispel my flashes of seething. The only thing which accomplishes that is the sight of a hothead driver being pulled over for speeding.

Now that is even more satisfying than receiving a certain type of hands-free sex while operating a motor vehicle.

Ahem. Or so I'm told.

See you out there on the roads. Just please, please, please — I beg of you — stay in your frickin' lane!

I'm Just Saying

Sometimes the resemblance is just uncanny...

Sarah Palin Republican VP nominee	Dr. Melfi Mob Shrink
John McCain Republican Presidential Nominee	Dr. Evil Nefarious Villian

Don't Let the Vagina Fool You

Spare me the spin about "Maverick" John McCain's character. His VP choice, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, is not a bold pick by a straight-shooter. It's a spineless pick aimed directly at appeasing the evangelical fascists Republican "base."

Palin is a surprising pick, yes. But bold? Please. She is a knee-jerk conservative who breaks with the party line exactly nowhere that I can see (though her record is so astonishingly short that it's tough to know for sure). So anyone labeling her a bold or unusual pick needs to get past the GILF angle and her geographical background (oooh, Alaska!) and smell the moose droppings.

The fact is that Palin is an anti choice, pro gun, anti same-sex marriage, creationist evangelical who is for big oil, has supported Pat Buchanan, and who does not believe humans have played a role in climate change. She plays to the base in the sort of way that must make Karl Rove's naughty bits tingle, and is indicative of precisely how exclusive and narrow their party platform (more of a plank, really) has become. I can only imagine George Bush dreams about giving her his patented beach volleyball style fanny pats.

She's a committed familyist, a devout reader of only the second half of the second amendment, and though she is churchly, I presume she does not support, say, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. She's ultra-white, younger than McCain (but aren't we all?), and has model-perfect teeth. She's a slightly hotter, less experienced Mitt Romney or even Tim Pawlenty. End of story.

The time is right for a woman VP, or president for that matter. Part of me would like to have seen Obama pick Hillary as VP (but what to do with Bill?). But after the tough primaries, it would have smacked of tokenism as much as McCain's pick. Face it, he didn't pick her for her null foreign policy experience, or to deliver the Alaska vote; he picked her, apparently, to deliver the disgruntled Hillary vote.

Admittedly, McCain is shrewd to pick a woman, but this woman? He showed no love for Condi (though, frankly, I don't have any love for her either) or Kay Bailey Hutchison. They must have been too close to center on abortion. Surely, at the very least, he could have done a better job of vetting his pick.

But no, and so here she is. For all intents and purposes, Dan Quayle with breasts (as she reminds us).

In fact, Dan Quayle may even have been more qualified as VP. (Hell, Michael Palin might be more qualified.) Palin has been a governor for all of a year and a half. Before that, she was the mayor in a town of ~7,000. Before that, a pageant girl. Where I live, that sort of résumé points to a possibly successful campaign for city alderman (and where one's constituency would be much larger than 7,000). Not, mind you, a comb-over away from the US presidency.

"Country First: Reform, Prosperity, Peace" is their campaign's lofty motto.

"Reform"? In addition to the fact that Sarah Palin is already (in her brief gubernatorial term) under investigation for abuse of power, we have further evidence that a McCain-Palin White House would be every bit as controlling and galling as the Bush-Cheney White House (possibly with an equal chance of a VP shooting a hunting buddy in the face!).

"Prosperity"? Well, certainly Cindy McCain has prospered. But I just don't see hubby John raising her taxes for the good of the lower and middle class.

"Peace"? John McCain? Read his lips, as he is fine with leaving American troops in Iraq for the next 100 years (or even, he later amended, 10,000).

So, disgruntled Hillaristas will have to be blind to all but anatomy to vote for a McCain-Palin ticket. With the balance of the Supreme Court teetering, it's an awful one for women even more so than men, and McCain's VP choice must be seen as what it is: a pandering, doddering, impulsive and wreckless misstep — the sort that has typified the Bush II administration, and the first of what will be legion, if elected — by a once-likable "straight-talk[ing]" guy who has arguably lost his game, his independence, and his spine.

It is clear (as it must be, when noted confidently by John Kerry) that "maverick" McCain would utterly despise the new McCain version '08, whoring himself like this. The more centrist candidate he was in 2000 actually made me think for a few moments back then that it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for him to win the presidency. Indeed, back in 2000–01, it would not have — because as it happens, the worst thing in the world did happen. And here we are, dealing with the consequences of those eight painfully long years.

As that Ultimate Mistake-in-Chief himself has put it — in his inimitable, ineloquent, misquoted way — we won't get fooled again. So, open your eyes. And don't let the vagina fool you. Sarah Palin is a moralist neo-con in news anchor's clothing. And John McCain is the guy who hand-picked her.