My partner has worked for many years doing public relations for various singer/songwriters, both well-known and unknown. One of the fantastic talents she has become acquainted with over those years is the incomparable Janis Ian. This is a woman who was breaking barriers and making social waves before she was in high school. “Society’s Child”. “At 17″. Today she lives in the Nashville area with her wife, Patricia Snyder.
This afternoon we received an email from Janis regarding “Joe the Bigot.”
It was a nice, big sign.
When we got up this morning, it was gone. Worse yet, last night someone or someones had gone up and down the street next to ours, tearing down Obama signs and writing “nigger-lover” and other obscenities on people’s homes and cars. Admittedly, they defaced one McCain sign, but the rest were Obama. My assumption is that these hooligans are so stupid they actually thought “Hey let’s tear down a McCain sign - they’ll think it’s just vandalism then!”
Not surprising that it comes from the Bible Belt area. I was born to and raised by Eastern Kentuckians, and I lived for 20 years in South Central Kentucky, just a few hours from Nashville. The staggering beauty of the mountains and valleys would almost make one forget the dark underbelly of the past. Then you pick up the faint whiff of something old and moldy… the musty smell of something that’s been around too long without enough exposure to the sunlight. It sometimes makes it hard to breathe. This history making election year is exposing some of that mold and mildew to the daylight. And it isn’t a pretty thing. But it requires the dark. It can’t live long once it has been laid bare in the light.
Over the last couple of years I have become a big fan of Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. Although he is a conservative and I’m not, I find him to be fair in his treatment of almost all of the issues I care about. Right now he is very much in Obama’s camp. He is also very vexed (as are the rest of us thinking people) with the Sarah Palin situation. We know nothing about her. And to that end, Sullivan has requested (several times) that Palin produce her personal records, especially her medical records. Of course, they have not been produced.
With that as an intro, this little number is very interesting. Make what you will of it. But here it is.
Here they are listed on the hospital’s website. Trig Palin, who was born there, Sarah Palin tells us, on April 18 at 6.30 am, is nowhere to be found. If you can find any public record of Trig Palin’s birth anywhere, please let me know. I will gladly publish it as soon as I find it. So far, none exists that I have been able to track down.
In the Washington Post today is a chilling column by Dana Milbank. Although astute followers of this election season are already aware of the covert racism and hatred that is encoded in the speeches of John McCain and Sarah Palin, in Clearwater, I’m sorry to say, the true bigotry of the McCain/Palin campaign and its supporters reared its ugly head. From the Milbank column:
… Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”
and
The reception had been better in Clearwater, where Palin, speaking to a sea of “Palin Power” and “Sarahcuda” T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. “One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” she said. (”Boooo!” said the crowd.) “And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,’ ” she continued. (”Boooo!” the crowd repeated.)
“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.
Palin is no real hockey mom anymore. But she is a pit bull. One who was not raised well to work with others. The cocktail waitress winks and the coy, suggestive head tilting from someone who seeks the second highest office in our nation has been embarassing to me as a woman. But the cold, calculating attacks and innuendoed affirmation for bigotry and hatred that she is spilling forth is purely chilling.
When one reporter asked an escort, who would not give her name, why the press wasn’t allowed to mingle, she said that in the past, negative things had been written. The campaign wanted to avoid that possibility Monday.
Palin is having some difficulty giving policy answers on foreign policy. She is obviously out of her league. I am impressed with her ability to run back to a refuted point again and again, saying “I’m sorry but I have to just point out again that you…”
But she does know how to wink… I find that rather irritating. In fact I find it downright “cutesy”. If she was any sweeter, we couldn’t see her for the bees.
…less so with the straight answer to the question. She refuses to address the point brought up by Biden that McCain voted across the board to deregulate the financial industry. In fact she simply stated that she may not answer the way Biden or the moderator wanted but she was going to “talk straight” to the American people. I tend to find the “homey” talk rather condescending. I don’t need to know any more about hockey moms and joe-six-pack. I don’t need to know any more about where she and Todd live. And watching the rating line from the Ohio uncommitted voters at the bottom of the screen, they aren’t so hot on her down-home verbage, either.
This press restriction, from day one, is absurd — and today it took another very scary turn. The press was limited to less than 30 seconds for the Palin/Karzai meeting, after initially being barred altogether! Who the hell do they think this woman is?
So, will he ask any of the hardball questions? Will we hear anything about her views on Iraq, Chinese/American relations? How about the economy, the mortgage crisis, educational needs?
