Re: Scenes From a Marriage

I disagree with some of the conclusions, but on the whole there are a lot of
good points here.
 
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Bruce Geerdes
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2011 12:12 PM
To: DADL (off topic)
Subject: [DADL-OT] Scenes From a Marriage
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/opinion/17douthat.html

Scenes From a Marriage
By ROSS DOUTHAT

In every twisted, wretched, ruinous relationship, there are moments so grim,
flare-ups so appalling, that they offer both parties a chance to step back, take
inventory, and realize that it’s time — far past time, in fact — to go their
separate ways.

For the American media and Sarah Palin, that kind of a moment arrived last week.

It began just hours after the tragedy in Tucson, with a tweet from Markos “Daily
Kos” Moulitsas, the éminence grise of the liberal blogosphere. “Mission
Accomplished, Sarah Palin,” he wrote, linking to a map that Palin’s PAC had put
up last fall, placing targets on various Democratic districts, Gabrielle
Giffords’s included. It didn’t take long for the media to seize on his attack
and run with it. Forget a nation’s grief and Giffords’s struggle to survive:
What America really needed, the nation’s pundits and TV producers decided, was a
noisy debate about the possible link between Jared Lee Loughner’s crime and
Palin’s martial campaign rhetoric.

Given how little connection Loughner seems to have to any kind of right-wing
politics, this conversation looked increasingly ridiculous by midweek, and even
a little bit obscene. But instead of letting the frenzy die away, Palin decided
that what the country really needed was for her to use the day set aside for
mourning Loughner’s victims to make a speech complaining about her own
victimization. (Or as she put it, rather more pungently, the “blood libel” being
leveled by her critics.) Which, needless to say, gave the press exactly the
excuse it needed to continue its wall-to-wall Palin coverage for another 48
hours — and beyond, perhaps, given that she’s slated to appear on Sean Hannity’s
show Monday night.

The whole business felt less like an episode in American political history than
a scene from a particularly toxic marriage — more “Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?” than “The Making of the President.” The press and Palin have been at war
with each other almost from the first, but their mutual antipathy looks
increasingly like co-dependency: they can’t get along, but they can’t live
without each other either.

For their part, the media manage to be consistently unfair to the former Alaska
governor — gossipy and hostile in their reportage, hysterical and condescending
in their commentary — even as they follow her every move with a fascination
bordering on obsession. (MSNBC, in particular, should just change its name to
“Palin 24/7” and get it over with.) When commentators aren’t denouncing her,
they’re busy building up her legend — exaggerating her political acumen,
overpraising her communications strategy, covering her every tweet as if she
were the Viceroy of Red America, and spinning out outlandish scenarios in which
she captures the White House in 2012.

Palin, meanwhile, officially despises the “lamestream” media. But press coverage
— good, bad, whatever — is clearly the oxygen she craves. She supposedly hates
having her privacy invaded, yet her family keeps showing up on reality TV. She
thinks the political class is clueless and out-of-touch, but she can’t resist
responding to its every provocation. Her public rhetoric, from “death panels” to
“blood libel,” is obviously crafted to maximize coverage and controversy, and
generate more heat than light. And her Twitter account reads like a constant
plea for the most superficial sort of media attention.

It’s a grim spectacle on both sides, and last week’s pointless controversy was a
particularly low point. So let me play the relationship counselor. To the media:
Cover Sarah Palin if you want, but stop acting as if she’s the most important
conservative politician in America. Stop pretending that she has a plausible
path to the presidency in 2012. (She doesn’t.) Stop suggesting that she’s the
front-runner for the Republican nomination. (She isn’t.) And every time you’re
tempted to parse her tweets for some secret code or crucial dog whistle, stop
and think, this woman has fewer Twitter followers than Ben Stiller, and then go
write about something else instead.

To Palin: You were an actual politician once (remember that?), but you’re
becoming the kind of caricature that your enemies have always tried to make of
you. So maybe it’s time to turn off your iPad for a while, and take a break from
Facebook and Fox News. The world won’t end if you don’t respond to every
criticism, and you might even win a few more admirers if you cultivated a
lighter touch and a more above-the-fray persona. Oh, and when that reality-TV
producer sends you a pitch for “Sarah Plus Five Plus Kate Plus Eight,” just say
no.

Breaking up is hard to do, of course. But for the majority of Americans who are
neither Palinoiacs nor Palinistas, here’s the good news: If the press (including
this columnist!) and Sarah Palin can’t quit each other, you can still quit us.

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