Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has decided to resign. Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will take over on July 26, according to the Anchorage Daily News. “Once I decided not to run for re-election, I also felt that to embrace the conventional ‘lame duck’ status in this particular climate would just be another dose of ‘politics as usual,’ something I campaigned against and will always oppose,” Palin said at a news conference in Wasilla. “It is my duty to always protect our great state. With that in mind, my family and I determined that it is best to make a difference this summer, and I am willing to change things, so that this administration, with its positive agenda, its accomplishments, and its successful road to an incredible future, can continue without interruption and with great administrative and legislative success.”
What’s next? “I look forward to helping others — to fight for our state and our country, and campaign for those who believe in smaller government, free enterprise, strong national security, support for our troops and energy independence.”
If this is her way of building up her executive experience and reform record toward a 2012 presidential run, it’s a funny way to do it. “We’ve seen a lot of nutty behavior from governors and Republican leaders in the last three months, but this one is at the top of that,” GOP strategist John Weaver said. Then again, there is nothing conventional about Palin.
Pressure is mounting on South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to resign after he admitted this week that he “crossed the lines” with several other women, though he said he never had sex with them. “A lot of us are talking to him behind the scenes in hopes that he’ll make the right decision about what needs to be done,” Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said today. Sanford says he is trying to reconcile with his wife, but that could be difficult given that he told Associated Press he still loves Maria Belen Chapur, the Argentine woman Sanford called his “soul mate.”
The uproar over David Letterman’s unfunny joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter demonstrated that even a deft comedian gets his timing wrong. According to the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs, the late-night tally of jokes about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy included, as of mid-March: Conan O’Brien, 20; Jay Leno, 15; Letterman, eight; Jon Stewart, four. Some were twofers, joking about the sexual activity of John Edwards and pro hockey players. “Saturday Night Live” even did a joke about incest — just a few weeks before Sarah Palin was a guest on the show. Letterman didn’t help himself by getting his teenage Palins confused in the latest joke. But “why did this one draw such a reaction?” asked Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Michael Smerconish. “Letterman’s timing was waaaay off.”
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s extramarital affair has 60 percent of South Carolinians ready for his resignation, according to a SurveyUSA poll. Larger majorities thought he had no right to disappear without informing the public (63 percent) or his staff (77 percent) of his whereabouts. The Charlotte Observer editorialized: “If you’re a governor, you do not go off without staying in touch with your office — whether you’re backpacking on the trail or bawling in Buenos Aires.” The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., stopped short of calling for Sanford’s resignation but called it “inexcusable” that he left the state vulnerable by refusing to “take the simple step of turning his authority temporarily over to the lieutenant governor while he was out of the country.”
At least South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford doesn’t have to wonder whether anyone would miss him if he disappeared. But doesn’t his six-day AWOL episode — and the confusing revelation that he wasn’t really hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff initially said, but in Argentina “to do something exotic” — damage his GOP star power and chances to be the 2012 presidential nominee? UPDATE: The governor admitted he was in Argentina having an affair. Definitely not a good career move.
David Letterman apologized for his joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter, but that didn’t stop him from poking fun at his protesters. His top 10 list Tuesday was on “things overheard at the ‘Fire David Letterman’ rally.” It included:
“Isn’t there always a crowd demanding Letterman be fired?”
“Can we also get CBS to bring back ‘Gunsmoke’?”
“When does Cheney get here with the waterboarding gear?”
“He should apologize for that hairpiece.”
David Letterman apologized Monday for a sex-related joke he made June 8 about Sarah Palin’s daughter. Last week he tried to clarify that he meant to refer to Palin’s 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, and not her 14-year-old daughter, Willow. But he directly apologized Monday to “the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke.”
Some had called for some sort of censorship of Letterman, but columnist Kathleen Parker wrote how that would be “far more dangerous to the land of the free than any inappropriate one-liner.” Parker argued that “the best defense against rude comics is not ‘some kind of protection,’ but the rallying cry of people who demand more from their society and themselves.”
“Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment,” columnist Paul Krugman asserts. “Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the RNC haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that ‘some’ called Dr. Tiller ‘Tiller the Baby Killer,’ that he had ‘blood on his hands,’ and that he was a ‘guy operating a death mill.’ But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House. And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.”
The biggest challenge facing the GOP is not that Rush Limbaugh is the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today,” according to a new Gallup poll. Rather, it’s that 47 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents surveyed couldn’t name a main GOP spokesman. Within that leadership vacuum, Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich were picked by 10 percent of those surveyed, and former Vice President Dick Cheney was next with 9 percent.
Newt Gingrich gave a meaty defense of conservative principles during his keynote address at the GOP congressional fundraiser Monday, but he was upstaged by the circus over whether Sarah Palin was or wasn’t coming to the dinner, reported Dan Balz of the Washington Post. Gingrich tried to “bridge the differences between those Republicans who prefer a smaller, purer, more conservative party and those who say the party’s only hope is to expand its appeal and attract moderates and independents,” Balz wrote. “Gingrich called (for) both an adherence to conservative values and for the party to be inclusive, saying that any party that aspires to be a majority party should expect vigorous debate and disagreement.” But rather than getting this strong message out, Balz wrote, “the GOP allowed lowbrow chatter about Palin’s attendance rather than something more substantive to dominate the day.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was unimpressed by NBC’s “Inside the Obama White House” specials: “I haven’t seen something that staged since that half-naked Austrian fell onto the face of Eminem at the MTV (movie) awards,” Pawlenty told a gathering of college Republicans, going on to suggest that Republicans, “just like Eminem getting dumped on, we’ve got to kind of regroup. We’ve got to continue to fight. And we’ve got some things worth fighting for.”
“There’s something about conservatives’ ferocious ‘No’ that precisely fits the temper of the times,” Thomas Frank wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “For all the past year’s Democratic victories, the GOP still owns outrage, still has an enormous capacity to summon up offense, to elevate every perceived slight into an unprecedented imposition upon both the hardworking citizen and freedom itself. What really dazzles the observer, though, is conservatives’ fury over things for which they are themselves responsible.” For example, Frank cited how Newt Gingrich is railing about the influence of lobbyists yet helped oversee the GOP’s “K Street Strategy” that empowered lobbyists. Frank also noted how Dick Cheney praised tea parties that protested, among other things, the financial bailout program that his administration created.
Two Kansans were among the “top five political daughters with the most influence” on the Stimulist Web site. Second on the list was former Kansas Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker (in photo), whose dad was former Kansas governor and 1936 GOP presidential nominee Alf Landon. “The second-longest serving woman senator in U.S. history, Kassebaum should be remembered by every female politician to come,” blogged Carlos Watson. Third place went to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, whose father was Ohio’s governor before she was Kansas’ governor. Watson wrote: “Could she challenge Hillary in 2016 to become the first female president? That probably depends on her success with health care reform. If, after 60 years of failure, Sebelius can . . . lead the change that gets this health care thing to work, she might just get a shot at the big desk.” The rest of the top five? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (first), the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (fourth) and Kennedy clan member and California first lady Maria Shriver (fifth).
“If you want to tell whether someone is conservative or liberal, what are a couple of completely nonpolitical questions that will give a good clue?” Nicholas Kristof wrote. “How’s this: Would you be willing to slap your father in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit? And, second: Does it disgust you to touch the faucet in a public restroom? Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission. Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust.”
According to Kristof, “the upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently.”
“I think both of them are Republicans,” Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, said when asked by The Eagle editorial board who better represents the GOP, former Secretary of State Colin Powell or talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. Tiahrt said both men have roles in the party and that the internal debate about the future of the GOP is healthy. “I think it is a good debate to have,” he said.
Maybe Dick Cheney is everywhere because he wants to be president after all. As a GOP leader, wrote Roger Simon of Politico, the 68-year-old former vice president “has many pluses. He is very, very good on TV. (People who don’t like what he says overlook how good he is at saying it.) He is calm, articulate and often courageous.” And, Simon added, “the Republicans need a person who knows how to attack. John McCain never seemed comfortable in that role.” He concluded: “Dick Cheney is the voice, the face, the spirit and the guts of the Republican Party today. He’s tanned, he’s rested and his approval ratings can only go up. The Republicans could do worse in 2012. And probably will.”
The battle between former Secretary of State Colin Powell and reigning GOP king Rush Limbaugh escalated last week. Two quotes:
“Rush Limbaugh says, ‘Get out of the Republican Party.’ Dick Cheney says, ‘He’s already out.’ I may be out of their version of the Republican Party, but there’s another version of the Republican Party waiting to emerge once again.” — Powell, in a Boston speech
“He’s for more spending. He’s for higher taxes. He’s against raising the social issues. He’s for affirmative action. He’s for amnesty for illegals. He endorsed Obama. And now there’s an agenda — an emerging agenda — that he’s waiting for for the Republican Party? The only thing emerging here is Colin Powell’s ego. Colin Powell represents the stale, the old, the worn-out GOP that never won anything. The party of Gerald Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Bill Scranton, Arnold Schwarzenegger and those types of people.” — Limbaugh, on his radio show
From a Wall Street Journal column by “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” author Thomas Frank (in photo) about how it can be difficult for some conservatives to govern when they are anti-government:
“So this is how it works with conservatives at the helm: We starve government agencies of resources, we keep their employees’ pay well below their private-sector counterparts, we make sure they know what we think of them as they wait their turn at the photocopier. Then we demand they protect us when there’s a problem with extremely complex financial instruments, whose designers are defended by some of the best-paid lawyers in the world. And when the regulators inevitably fail? We declare indignantly that the problem begins and ends with them.”
Sarah Palin, who just signed a book deal, has jumped into the Carrie Prejean debate, decrying the “liberal onslaught of malicious attacks.”
Borowitz Report responded with a news spoof headlined: “Palin-Prejean Alliance Predicted in Book of Revelations; Beauty Queens Prefigure End of Days.” The spoof also reported that “in 1555 Nostradamus predicted the alliance between the two right-wing beauties when he wrote, ‘The slayer of beasts shall meet the barer of breasts.’”
Meanwhile, Fox commentator Greg Gutfeld joked that Prejean’s seminude photos “offer undeniable proof that God is a dude and He totally exists. Seriously, I am so going to church on Sunday.”
Calling former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney the “single most influential person” within the GOP at the moment, because “he is still the Republican that is the closest the party has to the complete package,” Washington Post blogger Chris Cillizza filled out the party’s top 10 this way: Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
At the latest stop along former Vice President Dick Cheney’s legacy tour, CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, he sided with radio talker Rush Limbaugh as a GOP standard-bearer over former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh,” Cheney said. “My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican.” Limbaugh and Powell have been aiming at each other recently.
Powell said of Limbaugh: “I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without.”
Limbaugh’s response: “Colin Powell is just another liberal. What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat.” Powell is “just mad at me because I’m the one person in the country that had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama. It was purely and solely based on race.”
“In the understandable nostalgia for Ronald Reagan, who restored Republicans to the White House and led the final, successful stages of the Cold War, it’s been too easy to forget that for much of the 1970s and into the 1980s, it was the young Jack Kemp who fired up the grass roots on his weekend speaking forays and who gave a thoroughly beaten minority party the ammunition for its comeback — even as he built cherished friendships across the aisle,” wrote David Broder. Kemp also believed that if conservative principles were valid, “they must be tested and applied, not only in gated suburbia but in the inner cities,” Broder said, noting how he drove the Bush I White House crazy lobbying for programs to revive blighted areas. Broder also recalled this anecdote that showed Kemp’s empathy:
“He and Bob Dole had quarreled bitterly about economic policy; Dole was never a supply-sider. But when Dole invited Kemp onto his ticket and made him his traveling companion, Kemp was moved by the simple courage Dole showed every day in coping with his grievous war wounds. When I saw him in his hotel room at the San Diego convention, Kemp asked me, ‘What’s the first thing I do when I make a speech?’ ‘You take off your jacket and roll up your sleeves,’ I said, having seen the ritual a hundred times. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘Dole’s wounds — he can’t even do that for himself.’ And Jack Kemp wept.”
“History does teach us that party fortunes fluctuate over time, so I assume the GOP will somehow find its way back,” wrote columnist Dick Polman. “But for now, it reminds me of the college marching band that went astray during the climactic movie scene in ‘Animal House.’ Strutting blindly down a dead-end alley, the musicians ran into a brick wall, and even as they crumpled against one another, they kept on playing the same old music.”
“There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it’s not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture.” — Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, in a Wall Street Journal commentary
Now that Democrats could soon have a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate, will conservative fears be realized? Here are two funny suggestions by Washington Post readers of how liberal Democrats might run amok:
Everyone will now have to buy a GM car and run it solely from the solar collector on the roof.
Same-sex marriage is now mandatory, and through a revision of NAFTA, gay Mounties are authorized to confiscate all the firearms in private U.S. hands and give them to Mexico.
You bloggers have other ideas?
