Friday, October 10, 2008

Jebus Cripes on a Cracker, People

I have been reading Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert's investigative piece in Salon, Sarah Palin's Radical Right-Wing Pals.

Back in the early '90s, when Sarah Palin was elected to the Wasilla City Council, she was mistrusted by local secessionists, led by Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll, who thought she'd been hand-picked by Democrats to rubber stamp the city's tax hike proposals.

Apparently, she learned to trust their judgment, because

he accurately predicted what life on the City Council would be like. “We were telling her, ‘This is probably what’s going to happen,’” he said. “‘The city is going to give this many people raises, they’re going to pave everybody’s roads, and they’re going to pave the City Council members’ roads.’ We couldn’t have scripted it better because everything we predicted came true.”

Oh, boy, real prognosticators, here.

All right. I hereby predict that in the coming four years, in this next president's term, whoever that may be, the following things will happen:
  • The federal government will try to collect taxes through the IRS;
  • Someone, somewhere will be shot in suspicious circumstances; and
  • A (male) Republican congressional leader will get caught trying to have sex with something he really shouldn't
If these three things come true, you can thereafter trust my political judgment implicitly.

These predictions that Mr. Chryson made are so broad and so general that they hardly seem noteworthy. Some people got raises? Good for them! Was it certain people who got raises, while others didn't? That might indicate cronyism. Did certain peoples' roads get paved, while others didn't? That might indicate corruption. But if you mean to say these things, you ought to be well-enough versed in your talking points to get those across in an interview.

In this case, Mark Chryson seems merely to be suggesting that because he told Sarah Palin that the city government would attempt to fulfill the functions of government, she initially doubted him but soon came to see the wisdom of his words. In other words, Mark Chryson makes it look like Sarah Palin is dumb or gullible, and while I'm certain that's not the case, it still makes for bad publicity.

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