The Death of Michael Jackson and the Demise of Sarah Palin (and what it all means for America)

Few individuals are weirder than the late Michael Jackson, but Sarah Palin comes mighty close. The former Republican VP candidate shocked the political world by announcing that she is resigning her Alaska governorship. True to form, her quirky, unscripted, and incoherent news conference performance left nearly everyone scratching their heads. Palin’s surprise resignation, however, caps a great week for Democrats; Al Franken is finally declared the winner in Minnesota’s senate race, Republican governor Mark Sanford derails his presidential ambitions by admitting to infidelity, and Sarah Palin zany rationale for quitting her post reinforces the perception that the GOP is fatally unhinged. In truth, the Republican Party has even less of a pulse than Michael Jackson, who at least has the chance of making a posthumous comeback.

Sarah Palin’s rationale for leaving office is about as convincing as Dick Cheney’s defense of water boarding. In fact, Palin displayed a smorgasbord of verbal and emotional tics during her news conference that are symptomatic of the GOP’s decline. For example, the Alaska governor seemed constitutionally incapable of stringing together coherent thoughts and arguments, but she had no trouble spouting a train of mind-numbing clichés to explain her decision. She didn’t want to be a “lame duck” and “collect a paycheck” and “kind of milk it.” No, Palin isn’t one “to go with the flow” because “only dead fish go with the flow.” Sarah “Barracuda” Palin is a self-described maverick, but her thought processes seem composed from a string of lifeless banalities and worn out clichés.

There is also an eerie dissonance between the chirpy cheeriness she tries to project and the anxiety and unease betrayed by her body language. Bush displayed a similar incongruity; the exaggerated macho swagger of a bully compensating for his obvious sense of inadequacy. Incidentally, watch just about any of clip of Bush from several years back and I bet you’ll be struck by how fake he comes across. It’s not only the chasm between his words and reality that alarm, Bush’s body language, tone, and demeanor betray disingenuousness.

Palin tried to sell her departure as a selfless act done for the good of Alaskans and the Republican Party. But her strained explanation and incongruous delivery appear to be masking a truth she cannot admit. She strikes me – and apparently many others – as a quintessential narcissist. That is, she has a grandiose sense of self coupled with an inability to accept criticism, acknowledge mistakes, or empathize with others. Do these qualities remind you of another recent Republican leader? (Hint, think flight suit, bring em’ on, and the guy strumming a guitar while New Orleans drowned).

In fact, conservatives have extolled and exemplified a national form of narcissism for some time. This vanity was enshrined in the Bush Doctrine: The United States represents the culmination of human history, is utterly unique, and is charged with a messianic mission to spread liberty all across the globe. As far as the neocons were concerned, our system of democratic capitalism was supposed to the model for all peoples at all times. The rise of China and the near meltdown of America’s financial system have gone a long way to puncture that conceit.

The conservative disdain for the notion that empathy is a desirable quality in judges fits with this pattern of narcissism. Along these lines, Sarah Palin disparaged Barack Obama’s efforts as a community organizer; ridicule being the polar opposite of empathy. Think of a national Republican leader – Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter come to mind – and the last quality you will think of is empathy. Sarah Palin is merely a symptom of cultural malady that is afflicting a conservative movement that is in the process of self-destruction. There is a psychological law at work here; those with an inflated sense tend to destroy themselves and everything they touch. Tragically, this was the fate of Michael Jackson, but at least he possessed the talent to create a legacy that will survive him. George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, on the other hand, are the type that tends to leave a trail of disappointment and destruction in their wake.

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The Conservative Meltdown

The conservative movement is melting faster than the polar ice caps. Speaking of which, a seven square mile chunk of ice just broke off from an arctic glacier the other day. But global warming is hardly the only issue that conservative curmudgeons have mussed up. The Republican establishment has virtually imploded thanks to its incestuous relationships with corrupt lobbyists, rampant sexual hypocrisy among the rank and file of the supposed “values” Party, and the bankruptcy of its economic and social ideologies.

Katrina, Iraq, and the looming Bush Recession. Talk about an axis-of-evils. There’s an overwhelming consensus that when Bush finally leaves office he’ll bequeath his successor the most formidable set of foreign and domestic challenges since Herbert Hoover dropped the Great Depression on to FDR’s lap.

Republican stalwart Phil Graam, until recently McCain’s economic advisor, contends America is in a “mental recession.” But by any measure America’s economic outlook has been pretty bleak of late. After all, the economy has shed jobs seven straight months and the United States is drowning in red ink. Indeed, impending bailout of mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will effectively double the size of America’s debt obligations virtually overnight.

The fiasco at the heart of Freddie and Fannie is symptomatic of how the Bush administration mortgaged America’s future to pay for yesterday’s tax cuts, which mainly benefited those who benefited the most from rigging the system to their advantage. On the assumption that some institutions are too important to fail (i.e., institutions that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbyists) America’s taxpayers will be expected bailout foreign investors who bought bad loans (in the form of complex financial instruments) peddled by Wall Street.

Here’s the essence of the problem: the collateralized debt obligations the financial wizards packaged and sold to foreign interests have proven to be as toxic as the dog food the Chinese sell to us with the money we borrow from them. If the American taxpayer doesn’t make good on their losses, then they’ll stop lending us money and interest rates will soar.

Sure, the apple juice the Chinese sell us tastes like radiator fluid, but if foreign creditors like China stop lending us money we won’t be able to afford to buy gasoline from regimes that hate us. The whole economic order will collapse and the United States will descend into a Hobbesian nightmare where life is “short, nasty, and brutish.” Oddly enough, this brings me to Dick Cheney, architect of the Bush administration’s “enhanced” interrogation policy. Enhanced interrogation, of course, is a euphemism for the torture techniques perfected during the Dark Ages by inquisitors and witch hunters.

The civilized world has equated torture as barbarism ever since the Geneva Conventions were ratified. The United States was a signatory and the custodian of that treaty, until George W. Bush unilaterally (and unlawfully) cast them aside as “quaint” relics of a bygone era. In doing so he ignored the advice of counter terrorism officials, law enforcement experts, and human rights activists. Put simply, the experts recognized that torture yields false confessions at least as often as valuable intelligence, as detainees tell their captors what they think they want to hear in order to stop the pain. The case of Ibn al-Shaykh al Libi, for instance, is instructive; after being tortured, al-Libi told his captors that Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden. In other words, it wasn’t just the Bush administration’s tortured reasoning that brought about the strategic blunder of Iraq.

There is an insidious connection between the Bush administration’s moral bankruptcy and America’s dire economic predicament. The administration has treated laws, regulations, and oversight as impediments to the brute exercise of force. Indeed, with Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, and John Yoo (the infamous trio who crafted Bush’s torture memos) the law was parsed and twisted so finely that the barbarism associated with the Middle Ages was codified and bureaucratized for the 21st century. Simply put, they provided the veneer of legality for criminal acts. Such mediocre political hacks, of course, have been the rule rather than the exception in the Bush administration. Their legal contortions have since been rejected multiple times by the Supreme Court, but the damage to America’s reputation has been as damaging as the images the world saw in the aftermath of the Bush administration’s shameful response to Katrina.

The conservative movement has squandered America’s economic, intellectual, and moral capital at a time when environmental, financial, and military challenges are mounting exponentially. It’s not hard to see where the Bush administration went wrong. Torture and preventive war cannot serve as the basis for a sound national security policy. Rigid ideological assumptions, like the ones that treated the scientific evidence of global warming as a hoax, or the ones that insisted that less taxes and less regulation always led to economic growth, are invariably pernicious. Support for the conservative movement has evaporated, in no small measure because it has been so radically wrong.

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