The Notion

Palin as the Church Lady

By Leslie Savan

You gotta give Sarah Palin's book tour credit for one thing: It's really putting the passive-aggressive instincts of the religious right on public display.

And not just because she spends much of her 432-page book blaming campaign media flacks and hairdressers, bless their cinder-black hearts, for the McCain/Palin ticket's loss in 2008. Here's Sarahcuda talking up Going Rogue for the Christian Broadcasting Network this week, reproving her critics by saying, "These are probably some lonely people, some shallow people who want to take a shot like that, and we need to pray for these people."

The former (for half a term) governor of Alaska sounds a bit like the Saturday Night Live Church Lady, who pretended to be generous and devout but was always on the verge of boiling over with resentment, even barely contained violence, for anyone whose demeanor she considered insufficiently pious. (What would Dana Carvey's character have said about Palin's too-tight skirts and stiletto-heeled red pumps, I wonder?)

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November 20, 2009

Hannity and Bachmann Almost Apologize

By Leslie Savan

A fundamental tenet for both rightwing politicians and their media pilot fish is: Never, ever, apologize for the crazy. If you get caught exaggerating or even lying outright, simply respond by saying, "The left sees it differently" or "The mainstream media take their cues from liberals" or some such weasel-bite, even if the dispute is over widely accepted facts.

Yet in just the past couple of days, two of the loudest and most obdurate voices on the right have had to apologize, or at least feign doing so, for major bloopers concerning Rep. Michelle Bachmann's Tea Party rally held on Capitol Hill on November 5.

The most slippery mea culpa came from Fox News's Sean Hannity. On the day of the rally (a/k/a "the Super Bowl of Freedom"), he used fake footage to bolster Bachmann's absurd claim that the protest drew a crowd of 20,000 to 45,000--when reliable estimates stretch from 4,000 to 10,000, tops. Hannity's producers spliced scenes from the much larger 9/12 rally sponsored by Glenn Beck in between shots of Bachmann's much smaller turnout on 11/5, suggesting that her group had spilled out onto the Mall.

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November 13, 2009

Ft. Hood Drowns Out the Tea Party

By Leslie Savan

Don't bring your pitchforks. This is to be our "last stand" to stop health care reform, it's Alamo time. Don't let your congressmen call it a "rally" or "protest"--make sure they say "press event" or "press conference." The point is to see "the whites of their eyes," because there's nothing a congressman fears more than a "freedom-loving American." Oh, and don't dress "too nicely." We don't want the press to start calling this another "Brooks Brothers riot" like they did when Bush aides stormed Miami hallways to stop the 2000 recount.

You can feel the tension between the urge to bully and the need to seem "normal" in every hectic contradiction sent out over the past couple days by Rep. Michelle Bachmann and the Republican Study Committee to the thousands of Tea Partiers who gathered to protest at the Capitol on Thursday. And you have to sympathize. Truly, it isn't easy to be inoffensively radical, or respectably revolutionary, or even pleasantly insane.

Brought in on buses chartered by the corporate astroturf group Americans For Prosperity, they were the now de rigeur crew of white folks of a certain age, carrying signs emblazoned with Holocaust corpse pits and Obama as the Joker. Most wound up snarled before the metal detectors at the entrances to House and Senate office buildings across the street from the Capitol, trying to get inside to "scare" their congresspeople but instead spilling into the traffic outside. A handful of anti-abortion protesters were arrested at Nancy Pelosi's office in the Canon House Office Building (Pelosi wasn't there; she spent most of her day in the Capitol itself, where access is strictly limited).

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November 6, 2009

Reparations?

By Leslie Savan

Even without George W. Bush's debut in Fort Worth as a motivational speaker (see Stephen Colbert swoon over the speech here), this past week has been full of reminders of 43. On Wednesday, President Obama walked out onto the North Lawn of the White House to plant a tree where, one year earlier, Bush had tried to plant a Scarlet Oak. Bush's tree "didn't take," so Obama shoveled a few symbolic spadefuls of dirt over the roots of a Linden tree, asked assembled reporters whether it looked nice, and walked back into the Oval Office.

Sometime after midnight, 44 caught a quick helicopter ride out to the Dover Air Base to stand, wind-whipped and slender, as the bodies of 18 Americans killed in Afghanistan were off-loaded from a C-17 in their flag-draped coffins. It was the first time in eight years of war that a President has greeted our returning dead. Obama flashed a neat, palm-down right-hand salute, which cameras recorded matter-of-factly, as if images of respect for the returning dead were an everyday affair.

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October 29, 2009

Hoaxville USA

By Leslie Savan

Ah, the dog days of autumn, when the media are full of hoaxes because nothing much else is going on.

Last Thursday, the Heene family of Colorado gave us a homemade version of the movie Up!, sending their six-year-old into the wild blue yonder of the garage attic while their UFO-shaped balloon led authorities on a wild goose chase across our TV screens.

A day earlier, four House Republicans called a press conference to demand an investigation into the Council for American-Islamic Relations, a civil liberties lobby, for supposedly trying to "infiltrate" the Capitol with Muslim intern spies. This dastardly threat was uncovered by a stalwart young American who had grown a beard, read up on Islam, and passed himself off to CAIR as a Muslim convert committed to their goals. Once inside, he (the son of a co-author of the book Muslim Mafia, with a foreword written by Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC), the leader of the intern-busters) discovered that CAIR was actively involved in...lobbying.

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October 21, 2009

Limbaugh's Many Hats and Excuses

By Leslie Savan

If there's one thing the last two weeks have proved it's that it doesn't matter whether you're a politician, journalist, or a media pundit, when it comes to personal indiscretions you want to be judged as an entertainer.

Republicans have long called Rush Limbaugh "just an entertainer" whenever they wanted to distance themselves from one of his embarrassing rightwing radio rants, as if that somehow put him beyond the pale of political judgment. But as the communications industry has bulldozed the boundaries imposed on different professions, folks are trying more and more to exercise the rights of one role while they are personally judged by the standards of another.

Limbaugh, especially now that he's desperate to rehab his image as a racist in order to purchase the St. Louis Rams, is a case in point. By the Boy Scout standards we pretend to apply to politicians in this country, the thrice divorced, oxycontin-addicted Limbaugh shouldn't be able to run for dog catcher. Yet here he is, sitting for a sympathetic, two-part interview with Today Show correspondent Jamie Gangel that NBC injected into every MSNBC news show as if it were an exclusive with a head of state. Can Rush say anything good about what Obama's done? Is he the head of the Republican party? Who are his "picks" for the next GOP presidential candidate?

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October 14, 2009

Joe Tells Rush Who Wears the Rants in This Party

By Leslie Savan

The good folks on the set of Morning Joe spent Friday morning dodging prairie oysters flung by the host at rival Rush Limbaugh, who had called Joe Scarborough a "neutered, chickified moderate." Rush had simply been trying to geld another Republican who dared criticize him, but this time Scarborough gelded back and it was not a pretty sight.

It all started earlier this week, when Scarborough ripped Rush for going "off the deep end" by jiggling with glee over Obama's failure to win the 2016 Olympics for Chicago.

No forgiver of lese-majeste, Limbaugh hit back Thursday at Joe and "PMSNBC":

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October 9, 2009

Media Push False Equivalency Between Left and Right Rage

By Leslie Savan

Nearly every morning for eight years, my husband would go into the shower with the news blaring on the radio, and I could hear him over the rush of water grumbling, "I hate George Bush. I hate George Bush." And, occasionally, "Won't somebody kill George Bush?"

Don't call the Secret Service, Newsmax: My husband was, of course, simply filled with rage that Bush had seized office with fewer votes than Al Gore, invaded a country that had never attacked us, killed thousands of our soldiers and scores of thousands of Iraqis, legalized torture, allowed comprehensive government eavesdropping, shipped jobs overseas, and encouraged Wall Street to enrich the few while impoverishing the rest. You gotta yell something sometimes, and who hasn't?

The thing about liberals is they do this standing naked in a shower and come out merely wet and spluttering. The thing about rightwingers is they work themselves up into a similar rage, strap on a .45 loaded with dum-dums, and go to political meetings screaming that something must be done about Adolf Obama--or maybe write columns seriously suggesting a military coup "to resolve the 'Obama problem.'"

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October 2, 2009

Chris Wallace Goes Beck to the Future

By Leslie Savan

The headline out of Chris Wallace's tirade at President Obama for appearing on every Sunday talk show except his Fox News Sunday was that he called Obama's staff "the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington." But elsewhere in the rant, which aired on The O'Reilly Factor last week, Wallace let spill a sequence of numbers that revealed just how deranging life in the Foxhole can be for a transplanted "mainstream" reporter.

Wallace was taking the Fox line that the Obama administration condescends toward folks like the protesters at the 9/12 rally in Washington:

WALLACE: When you have David Axelrod go on Face the Nation and denigrate the million or, I don't know, 100,000--thousands and tens of thousands of people who came here into the streets of Washington to protest--

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September 25, 2009

Media Overexposes 'Obama Is Overexposed' Complaint

By Leslie Savan

To push health care reform, President Obama will appear on five Sunday talk shows (on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Univision) and on Letterman Monday; this, after last week's speech to Congress and his 60 Minutes and CNBC appearances. And, as they did in March and in May and in July, the media are in fretting that, lord love a duck, Barack Obama is "overexposed." If he keeps this up, he's going to block our view of all the tea-party folk screaming "You lie!" in their "I'm With Joe Wilson" T-shirts.

"We've never had a president with this all-consuming need to be on television 24/7," raged Rush Limbaugh. "This is like Castro!" A Kansas City Star writer was more concerned about Obama's hold on the nation's bubblegum grannies, asking, "Will Barack Obama be the next Ricky Martin?"

Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski concurred. "I'm worrying he's making a mistake," she said, while her guest, The New York Times's Mark Leibovich, proffered that maybe Obama is "showing off" and, citing the Univision appearance, asked, "How do you say 'overexposure' in Spanish?"

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September 19, 2009