Crooks & Liars: With her paranoid style & politics of payback, Palin is Nixon with lipstick

[Amerigo Vespucci]

December 01, 2010 07:00 AM
Nixon with Lipstick

By Jon Perr

http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/nixon-with-lipstick



What's the difference between Richard Nixon and Sarah Palin? Lipstick. (Well, that and military service, graduate education, a keen intellect, years of national political experience and a proven grasp of policy foreign and domestic.) But as a fellow "serial collector of resentments", the half-term Alaska governor is Nixon's heir. When it comes to the paranoid style, the politics of payback, the perpetual war on the press and the championing of "real Americans" versus supposed elites, the Mama Grizzly is the second coming of Tricky Dick.

On Thanksgiving of all days, Sarah Palin was her Nixon best in attacking the president and the press. Furious about the understandable media reaction to her gaffe about "our North Korean allies," the pitbull in lipstick took to Facebook to again complain that the media did not show "some consistency on this issue" and "completely makes things up without doing even rudimentary fact-checking."

That online outburst followed her declaration on Fox News earlier in the week that:

"I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism. And I have a communications degree. I studied journalism, who, what, where, when, and why of reporting. I will speak to reporters who still understand that cornerstone of our democracy, that expectation that the public has for truth to be reported. And then we get to decide our own opinion based on the facts reported to us."

As it turns out, Sarah Palin is just reading from the Richard Nixon playbook. In 1972, just one month after defeating George McGovern in an epic landslide, Nixon summed up his press bashing Henry Kissinger. As CBS recounted:

"Never forget. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy." Almost shouting he repeated, "professors are the enemy!" He told former Harvard professor Kissinger, "Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."

And to be sure, those professors are just part of the "elite" supposedly out to get Nixon and Palin alike.

[wtmusic]

1. Heh. Palin wants to "clean" journalism.

I'm sure she would make it nice and shiny.