Tina Dupuy

This is cross posted at Huffington Post.

The left-wing has to stop being upset about the right-wing using Barack Obama’s full name. Last Monday, there was a Lee County sheriff in Florida introducing Sarah Palin at rally. The event itself was a like pep rally for a losing lineup, chanting about team spirit as the gym crumbles to the ground.

Anyway, the sheriff’s name is Michael Scott. On the video he is a big, effeminate, bald man in uniform, presumably carrying a gun as he says, “On November fourth, let’s leave Barack Hussein Obama wondering what happened.” I watched it wondering when the rest of the Village People were going to chime in.

So cue outrage: Keith Olbermann and Campbell Brown among others have noted that this is not okay to do. Not okay to use that middle name. Brown called it ‘race baiting‘. People at these now infamously raucous and shockingly ignorant rallies are being ignited by the mentioning of Obama’s full name. His middle name is similar to a dictator that the US toppled recently. You may have heard about it a couple years ago. We’ve collectively stopped following the story in recent years. Too much of a bummer. Anyway, it makes news when a viable – ahead in most polls candidate gets called by his full name? That’s political discourse?! News? Notable?

I mean, seriously? His middle name is on his Wikipedia page. How is it an insult? It’s not race baiting. Saying he’s palling around with terrorists is race baiting. And that sound bite gets repeated ad nauseum. The William Ayers – errors more like it – ’story’ is picked up as an actual item instead of the absurdly desperate claim that it is. What doesn’t get noted is that it’s coming from the same people that say Obama is not fit to lead because he lives in the same neighborhood as Louis Farrakhan. Which is like casually mentioning that Obama has been in an airplane just like the one that flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11. Brutal stupidity.

But when it gets discussed by the media – it gets legitimized then it gets further warped in the collective minds of those that don’t get paid to sit around all day and read blogs and newspapers like I do. There’s a YouTube clip of a woman saying Obama has the blood line to be a terrorist. That’s the next step in the blinding rhetoric from the right-wing: Darkies want to kill whiteys. That’s what Jesus said in the bible.

That’s race baiting!

Making fun of Barack Hussein Obama for having a funny name is like making fun of John Sydney McCain for not being able to touch the top of his head. It’s cheap and near sighted. But when air time is given – attention and outrage handed to those that go there it validates it. It makes it look like there is something to the name calling.

Who cares if Obama’s middle name is like a former dictator that we preemptively invaded because our leader wanted to show up his daddy? If anyone should want to forget about Saddam Hussain – it’s the right-wing. They should be the ones embarrassed by what Obama’s middle name conjures up – not the other way around.

This is what the party of Lincoln has been reduced to – name calling? This is what the media has been reduced to – re-acting to name calling? The answer to both is – YES.

Sarah Palin said that she wants to talk directly to the American people without the media filter. Good, let her. Let her talk directly to the American people and let the media actually filter her.

Cats out of the bag: Obama has a funny name. Republicans are becoming parodies of themselves. And the stock market just closed under 9000.

Digg it.

This is also posted at Huffington Post.

In the post-debate, post-partisan, postpartum, postmortem by those that think about stuff, those vilified media types, it was a pretty clear consensus of what happened on that stage in St. Louis last week: Sarah Palin did well because we all know she’s not too bright. It’s like she won a gold medal in the Special Olympics. Yay! She’s a winner! The problem is that she’s been recruited to play in the majors. But she won the gold, doggone it! Somehow she gets extra credit for knowing less than Joe.

It’s disheartening to come out of a two term George Bush era and watch the standards get lowered even further for our political leaders. The Republican Party has been crying sexism since Palin was nominated. But sexism goes both ways. Instead of being held to a higher standard, like Hillary Clinton was, Sarah Palin is applauded for basic motor skills. Yay! She’s a winner! Somehow she also gets extra credit for knowing less than Hillary.

I’ve been describing Sarah Palin as scary stupid. Scary stupid is the kind of stupid where you don’t know enough to know – you don’t know enough.  If you don’t read anything – you have no idea what else you haven’t read. If you don’t spend any time thinking – you never worry about how you’re not spending enough time thinking. Charles Bukowski once said that the worst writers have the least self-doubt. Well, the same can be said for the dumbest politicians.

Great ambition with little intellectual ability: Scary stupid.

Coupled with a bright smile, those Tinkerbell winks and some memorized jabs and you’ve got yourself a farce to be reckoned with.

That’s how she should be treated by the media that annoys her so much: as a lukewarm premise with an even lamer punch line. You know, how we treat all ventriloquist acts. “Oh how cute! She wants more constitutionally granted power than Dick Cheney. You have to read the constitution, finish your verbal moose stew then we’ll see – ‘K peaches?” Yay! She’s a winner!

Why is she being treated as a legitimate candidate? Because she is a right-winger. And right-wingers believe she’s a team player. They say ‘maverick’ with tongue in cheek. They don’t actually want someone that will ‘shake things up’. They want someone that will shake liberals up. Shake up the people they don’t like, appease the one’s they do. They call her a maverick because the words ‘conservative’, ‘republican’ and ‘warhawk’ have been tarnished by conservatives, republicans and warhawks.

True mavericks are not hyped by Republicans. Just ask Ron Paul.

Scary stupid: certain, decisive and dense.

Scary stupid never worries about nuances or facts. They just get in the way of the action. Palin has been going around the country saying that Barack Obama is ‘palling around with terrorists’. This would be a good dig A) if it were true, and B) if she herself were not schtuping a secessionist. Her husband joined a group of Alaskans that wished to secede from the Union, yet she is happy to repeat,” Our opponent … is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” She is sleeping with a dude that wanted to take half the land mass away from the US! Serious.

But scary stupid doesn’t care. Hypocrisy doesn’t bother scary stupid. Contradiction doesn’t bother scary stupid. Like Palin’s oft repeated global warming stance: “I’m not one to attribute every man — activity of man to the changes in the climate.” She said at the debate, “There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet. But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don’t want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?”

I don’t want to argue about the causes, I just want to argue about how to positively affect the impacts? ”I don’t want to talk about evidence. I just want to say words without saying anything.” Scary stupid doesn’t actually like to argue anyway. Scary stupid just likes to be right and take down dissenters…and in Sarah Palin’s case – laughers.

Scary stupid: uninformed but armed.

Okay, okay, we’ve had our fun with the shiny new thing. Now we can see that it can recite lines and wink. That’s great. Legitimate candidates can have press conferences without imploding their running mate’s campaign. Legitimate candidates can be in spin rooms all by themselves. Legitimate candidates can take follow-up questions.

How much lower can we go?

It’s scary stupid to think about.

Spread the word…Digg?

This is cross posted at Huffington Post.

There has been a slow trickle of online clips from Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin. Like water torture they’ve come out night after night. Drip. Drip. Drip. Each progressively more ridiculous than the last. It’s like CBS didn’t want to release the entire interview all at once because we would have thrown up. We needed the time to digest each clip and come to the same realization that Couric must have: Wow. This woman is dim. She’s scary stupid.

Scary stupid is the kind of stupid that beats us up for not being stupid too.

It’s a deadly combo of vehemence and ignorance that we’ve had to endure during the Bush years. Gems like, “That’s George Washington, the first president, of course. The interesting thing about him is that I read three — three or four books about him last year. Isn’t that interesting?” That’s from the leader of the free world: George W. Bush.

Palin, as it turns out – is also a fan of the Founding Fathers. The clip where Couric asks her about how Thomas Jefferson said we needed to build a wall to separate church and state, Palin says, “Thomas  Jefferson also said never underestimate the wisdom of the people.” Of course, put those words into Google and it’s the quote to nowhere. Jefferson never said that. Didn’t believe that.

Jefferson, a brilliant intellectual, statesman and inventor actually said, “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”  Which is polar opposite of whatever drivel Palin was trying to articulate.

Jefferson talked about the separation of church and state but that didn’t make it into law. It doesn’t say that phrase in the Constitution, but it’s implied in the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” I know this because A) I keep a copy of the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence in my purse, hoping that when it inevitably gets searched, the government official riffling through my bag sans a warrant will get the irony. And B) because there has been a huge debate about this aspect of the Constitution and the role of religion in public life for the past eight years. You know, since ‘God was in the White House’. You know, since McCreary County, Ky., v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky split the Supreme Court in 2005. You know since the lines of church and state were crossed and lit on fire. Ring any bells?!

How could she have missed that reading all of those newspapers that are put in front of her all these years?!

Of course when Couric asked about cases other than Roe v. Wade that Palin disagreed with, she replied after some hemming and hawing, “There would be others…” But couldn’t recall any specifically.

Scary stupid.

Scary stupid is the kind of stupid where mindless recitation is being ‘at your best’.

She’s like a ventriloquist act – the puppet half. The one’s throwing their voices are her ‘handlers’ like Steve Schmidt. I’ve actually heard people blame ‘her handlers‘ for cramming too much information down her throat and making her choke in interviews. What kind of horrible double standard is that? If a man didn’t know anything about the law or foreign policy and mangled sound bites- he’d be off the ticket – he would have never been considered. But scary stupid has evolved. Just when the public no longer has a tolerance for scary stupid Bush and his not believing science – scary stupid developed auburn highlights and yes, lipstick.

So why is scary stupid bad? Isn’t it time for a ‘Joe six-pack’ to be represented in the vice presidency? Am I such a liberal media elite that I can’t accept someone from outside Washington coming in to ’shake things up’? Am I bias against a ‘team of mavericks’? Am I just being mean to poor little right-wing, public school educated, had to work for a living, power hungry Sarah Palin?

Isn’t it time for someone that doesn’t know a lot about the world or anything really but is a ‘quick study’ to be given world reaching power and influence?

That’s the scary stupid question, isn’t it?