(Cover Photo) The UK Liberal Press: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid Of Sarah Palin
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
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The British liberal media is also very very afraid of Sarah Palin but are fully aware Obama is completely incompetent. Andrew Stephen & Sarah Churhwell, of the far left British New Statesman, had this to say: The danger of Sarah Palin
Changing tides:
And Obama himself? I'll resist the temptation to say, "I told you so." But countless election-winning promises - such as his undertaking to shut down Guantanamo by the end of this month - have evaporated into thin air during what, predictably, turned out to be a lackluster and conventionally right-wing first presidential year. True, he won the Nobel Peace Prize (for not being George W Bush, I suspect), but then he also despatched 47,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan. I'll say no more.
The beneficiaries of the post-Obamania lassitude, amazingly, are turning out to be the Republicans. […]
Palin's progress:
The result, encouraged by ever-willing far-right agitators such as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, has been the creation of the so-called Tea-Party movement - named after the quintessentially American, anti-British, anti-taxes and anti-big government Boston Tea Party revolt of 1773. Early next month, none other than the 45-year-old Palin - an ambitious lady whom you dismiss lightly at your peril - will reportedly earn a six-figure sum as the keynote speaker at the first conference of a new political entity called the "Tea Party Nation" (TPN), at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville.
“We believe in limited government, free speech, the Second Amendment [the right of Americans to carry guns], our military, secure borders and our country," is TPN's one-sentence manifesto. These words are well-chosen triggers to capture the 57.4 per cent of discontented Americans who think that their country is on the "wrong track" (as opposed to only 35.5 per cent who think it's on the right one).
If this sounds like a joke, it isn't. Palin, usually mindful of what she perceives as her need to cultivate the Republican establishment if she is to achieve the unthinkable and become the party's presidential candidate in 2012, turned down an invitation to speak at the more conventional Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington.
The fledgling TPN is run by two rather dodgy Republican lobbyists. (One of them is Howard Kaloogian, who tried to pass off a photograph of Istanbul as being an image of peaceful Baghdad streets when he was running for the House in 2006.) Should the TPN continue to gain traction, expect more Republican heavyweights, such as Marco Rubio of Florida and Gary Johnson of New Mexico, to move in and take over its leadership.
For Palin, highlighting the TPN and snubbing the CPAC was a politically logical calculation: an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 41 per cent of Americans now support the TPN, compared with 35 per cent who prefer the Democrats and 28 per cent the traditional Republicans epitomized by the CPAC. She has also decided to speak at the 2010 Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans in April. […]
The closest the Republicans have to a leader is Michael Steele, the eccentric chairman of the Republican National Committee. "I'm the guy they're afraid of," he boasts. "I'm a Tea Partier, I'm a grass-roots-er." He predicts that the Republicans will regain complete control of Congress in November, especially if voters read his new book, Right Now: a 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda. "I'm the chairman. Deal with it," is how he brushes off his many critics.
The blurb on the inside flap of Steele's book (now competing for hearts and minds with Sarah Palin's Going Rogue) urges Republicans to rise up against the Obama administration's "attempts to resurrect a discredited brand of extreme liberalism". The publishers succinctly sum up Steele's agenda even further: "The American people don't want socialized health-care 'reform', invasive 'green' initiatives and burdensome new taxes, and Republicans in Washington have to start listening."
They probably will, too, what with all the plotting Tea Partiers, unemployment at 10 per cent and rising, and the potentially incendiary anger that is sweeping across the country and making America's discontented masses ripe targets for the far right this year. And this is happening even though their party is more of a shambles than it has ever been and has done nothing to earn a single vote.
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