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Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Who doesn't love the USA?

Keeping up fragmentarily with the election from over here in beautiful Paris, something has occurred to me.
Since one moment late last winter, Michelle Obama has taken a lot of press heat for her statement that after her husband's primary victories, she felt proud of America for the first time in her adult life. That was not such a remarkable statement to make; millions of Democrats born in the early 1960s, I suspect, could easily say the same. But it has been cited again and again by the right-wing media to suggest that she, a candidate's spouse, is not patriotic.
Meanwhile, it turns out that Sarah Palin's husband Todd has been (during his adult life) a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, which wants a vote on whether Alaska should remain a member of the union! This is a rather farcical as well as a quixotic quest; Alaska, as Michael Kinsley just pointed out in Time, is rather like a member of OPEC, with the additional advantage of receiving more net funds from the federal government in most years than any other state in the Union. Nonetheless, Todd Palin was apparently among those who thought Alaska might get a better deal on its own.
That strikes me as prima facie evidence that this candidate's spouse has not loved the United States very much--but I haven't seen anyone point that out.
Meanwhile, as I write this post, Palin is preparing for her first interview with the press, with Charlie Gibson of ABC. Let me predict, on the record, that she will give a standard Karl Rove answer if she is asked about her attempts to get her brother-in-law fired from the State Troopers and the removal of the Commissioner who refused to go along: that she can't comment because the matter is under investigation.
Now back to enjoying myself. . .

2 comments:

Nur-al-Cubicle said...

Paris? Quelle vie fortunée! Have a wonderful time!

The closest I'm getting this year to France is watching Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques with Dépardieu (the guy born to play Cyrano de Bergerac and Obélix) on DVD. :)

Todd Palin is an Eskimo and I suppose there is some dream of an independent Eskimo state out there. Vive le Nunavut Libre :)

Ali Abdelatif said...

I was drawn to this page after hearing your interview on Radio Open Source, and I am not disappointed. In the thirst for election comment, I do appreciate the broadsweep of knowledge and the debunking of prejudice masquarading as revealing insight.

However, my ear was pricked-up when you mentioned in the ROS interview that you used a Excel-based bespoke programme to log your research data on the Dallas book. Is it possible to know more about it? As I am doing historical reseach which require diarizing a long eventful period in Sudanese history, I thought it may be useful. I would be grateful for any steer you care to offer.