Going Rouge (21 page)

Drill, Drill, Drill

By Eve Ensler

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for polar bears. Maybe it’s their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the Arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don’t like raging at women. I am a feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women, and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to feminism, which for me is part of one story—connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the Arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God’s plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin’s view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraq War, “It was a task from God.”

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist’s baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence, and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, and has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill forty caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God’s name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the United States, but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move toward dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining, and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, and coal burning, or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and health care or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free, open, tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism, and aggression.

If the polar bears don’t move you to do everything in your power to get Obama elected, then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the Republican National Convention, “Drill, baby, drill.” I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity, or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Sarah Palin, Meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Juan Cole

Is Sarah Palin America’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The two differ in many key respects, of course, but it is remarkable how similar they are. There are uncanny parallels in their biographies, their domestic politics, and the way they present themselves—even in their rocky relationships with party elders.

Both are former governors of a northwest frontier state with great natural beauty (in Ahmadinejad’s case, Ardabil). Both are known for saying things that produce a classic
Scooby-Doo
double take in their audiences. Both appeal to a sort of wounded nationalism, speaking of the sacrifice of dedicated troops for an often feckless public, and identifying themselves with the common soldier. They are vigilant against foreign designs on their countries and insist on energy and other independence.

But above all, both are populists who claim to represent the little people against wily and unscrupulous elites, and against pampered upper-middle-class yuppies pretending to be the voice of democracy. Together, they tell us something about dangerous competing populisms in an age of globalization.

Both politicians glory in being mavericks, as a way of underlining their credentials as representatives of the ordinary person. Former beauty queen Palin calls herself a hockey mom and plays up her avocation of wolf and moose hunting, to rally her rural supporters and, perhaps, to disconcert squeamish urbanites. Ahmadinejad, who earned a Ph.D. in civil engineering with top grades, is said to have once dressed up as a janitor and swept the streets when campaigning for mayor of Tehran. Most recently, his supporters have dismissed the Iranian protesters as pampered young people from the wealthy neighborhoods of North Tehran. In fact, both figures are themselves quite comfortable.

Palin portrays herself as the small-town outsider. “I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment,” she proclaimed last fall. She blamed her bad press on not being in the “Washington elite,” when, in fact, self-inflicted debacles such as her deer-in-the-headlights interview with Katie Couric, in which she demonstrated a shaky grasp of world politics, are a better explanation for media questions about her qualifications. In his debates with rivals for the presidency this spring, Ahmadinejad apparently damaged his standing with voters by attacking the wife of his electoral rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, and tarring previous presidents of the Islamic Republic from the centrist and reform factions as having been corrupt. On June 5, 2009 he said on Iranian radio that since he was not a part of that closed “power circle,” he had been targeted for both a domestic and an international media “smear campaign.” Actually, Ahmadinejad was raked over the coals during the campaign by Mousavi for his ignorant and bigoted statements about Israel, which, Mousavi pointed out, had damaged Iran’s standing in the international community.

Both so-called mavericks have had tense relations with their party elders at times. Many Republicans have made withering statements about Palin and consider her a “train wreck,” and her conflicts with the camp of her former running mate, Senator John McCain, are legend. Ahmadinejad got into hot water with his patron, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, for appointing an overly liberal relative as his first vice president. Ahmadinejad dragged his feet on firing the man, but in the end bowed to pressure from his fellow hard-liners. On Friday, the president was forced to deny that there was any rift between him and Khamenei. For a maverick populist, such conflicts with the party elders are useful in emphasizing their independence from the establishment even as they remain largely within it.

Both leaders see press criticisms as coordinated attempts to discredit them not from the media’s duty to examine a political figure’s policies or public statements, but from an elite conspiracy. In her farewell address as governor, Palin fell into a Shakespearean soliloquy directed at the media, saying, “Democracy depends on you, and that is why, that’s why our troops are willing to die for you. So, how ’bout in honor of the American soldier, ya quit makin’ things up.” Palin did not say what exactly she thought the media was making up about the American soldier. On June 16, in his first news conference after his officially announced victory in Iran’s June 12 presidential election, Ahmadinejad complained, “During these elections, our nation was faced with a widespread psychological war and propaganda by some of mass media which have not learned from the past.” The people, he boasted, followed not the media but the path of “the martyrs [in war].…”

An armed citizenry is important to Palin’s conception of the republic, and she warned in her farewell address, “You’re going to see anti-hunting, anti–Second Amendment circuses from Hollywood.…” She continued, “Stand strong, and remind them patriots will protect our guaranteed, individual right to bear arms.…” By talking about “patriots” “protecting” the individual right to bear arms, Palin skated awfully close to the militia or “patriot” movement on the right-wing American fringe (and not for the first time). Ahmadinejad is not similarly in favor of all citizens having guns, but he comes out of a popular militia, the Basij, which consists of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizen patriots, armed and pledged to defend the Constitution of the Islamic Republic.

Right-wing populism, rooted in the religion, culture, and aspirations of the lower middle class, is often caricatured as insane by its critics. That judgment is unfair. But it is true that such movements often encourage a political style of exhibitionism, disregard for the facts as understood by the mainstream media, and exaltation of the values of people who feel themselves marginalized by the political system. Not all forms of protest, however, are healthy, even if the protesters have legitimate grievances. Right-wing populism is centered on a theory of media conspiracy, a “my country right or wrong” chauvinism, a fascination with an armed citizenry, an intolerance of dissent, and a willingness to declare political opponents mere terrorists. It is cavalier in its disregard of elementary facts and arrogant about the self-evident rightness of its religious and political doctrines. It therefore holds dangers both for the country in which it grows up and for the international community. Palin is polling well at the moment against other Republican front-runners such as Mitt Romney, and so, astonishingly, is a plausible future president. At least Iranians only got Ahmadinejad because of rigged elections, and they had the decency to mount massive protests against the result.

Sarah Palin’s Nine Most Disturbing Beliefs

AlterNet Staff

Let’s forget for a moment that Sarah Palin likes to kill moose, has lots of children, and was once voted the second-prettiest lady in Alaska; that’s all part of the gusher of sensationalist, but not particularly substantive, news that has dominated coverage of the Alaska governor’s addition to the Republican ticket.

Before the next news cycle brings the shocking information that Palin was actually impregnated by Bigfoot, we need to shift the discussion to what really matters about her in the context of the White House: her dangerous views.

AlterNet has compiled a list of Palin’s most shocking beliefs, ranging from her positions on the economy to her views on reproductive rights. This list has nothing to do with her personal life, her looks, or her gender. It’s the stuff that voters need to know: what Sarah Palin really believes.

1. Despite problems at home, Sarah Palin does notbelieve in giving teenagers information about sex.

The McCain campaign is spinning Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a neat, shiny example of the unbreakable bonds of family. But while Bristol’s actions and choices should not be attacked, teen pregnancy is no cause for celebration, either. To state the very obvious, it is not a good thing when teenagers have unprotected sex. And U.S. teens appear to have unprotected sex a lot: The United States has some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world, and one in four American teen girls has a sexually transmitted infection.

Like John McCain’s, Palin’s approach to the problems of teen pregnancy and STI transmission is abstinence-only education. In a 2006 questionnaire by the conservative group Eagle Forum, Palin stated: “Explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.” Presumably the programs that do find Palin’s support are ones that focus on abstinence and only mention contraceptives to talk about their supposed shortcomings.

But someone already tried that. For eight years the Bush administration has thrown its heft behind Title V, a federal program that provides states with funding for abstinence-based sex education. In 2007 an expansive study proved abstinence-until-marriage education does not delay teen sexual activity.

If Palin is elected, she will continue to throw money at a policy that does little besides ensure that a larger number of sexually active teens lack information about how to avoid pregnancy and STIs.

2. Sarah Palin believes the United States Army is on a mission from God.

In June, Palin gave a speech at the Wasilla Assembly of God, her former church, in which she exhorted ministry students to pray for American soldiers in Iraq. “Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God,” she told them. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.”

Palin talked about her son, Track, an infantryman in the U.S. Army: “When he turned eighteen, right before he enlisted, he had to get his first tattoo. And I’m like—I don’t think that’s real cool, son. Until he showed me what it was and I thought, Oh he did something right, ’cause on his calf, he has a big ol’ Jesus fish!”

Holy war, holy warriors.

3. Sarah Palin believes in punishing rape victims.

Palin thinks that rape victims should be forced to bear the child of their rapist. She believes this so strongly that she would oppose abortion even if her own daughter were raped.

The Huffington Post reports: “Granting exceptions only if the mother’s life was in danger, Palin said that when it came to her daughter, ‘I would choose life.’ ”

At the time, her daughter was fourteen years old. Moreover, Alaska’s rape rate was an abysmal 2.2 times the national average, and 25 percent of all rapes resulted in unwanted pregnancies.

If Palin’s own daughter was only fourteen when she made that statement, does she think any girl of reproductive age is old enough to have a child? Girls are hitting puberty earlier and earlier. What if the rape victim were only ten? Nine? Eight?

Palin also opposes abortion in cases of incest and would grant an exception only if childbirth would result in the mother’s death. She has not made any statements yet about whether she believes a ten-year-old who was raped by her father would be able to actually raise the child once it was born. Perhaps Palin doesn’t care.

4. Who’s really not in favor of clean water? Sarah Palin.

As
The Hill
reports, “Governor Palin has... opposed a crucial clean water initiative.”

Alaska’s KTUU explains: “It is against the law for the governor to officially advocate for or against a ballot measure; however, Palin took what she calls ‘personal privilege’ to discuss one of this year’s most contentious initiatives.”

Palin said, “Let me take my governor’s hat off just for a minute here and tell you, personally, Prop 4—I vote no on that.” And what is that? A state initiative that would have banned metal mines from discharging pollution into salmon streams.

She also approved legislation that let oil and gas companies nearly triple the amount of toxic waste they can dump into Cook Inlet, an important fishery. It looks like being an avid outdoorsperson doesn’t mean Palin really has the health of watersheds, natural resources, or our environment at heart.

5. Sarah Palin calls herself a reformer, but on earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere, she is a hypocrite.

Palin says she’s a “conservative Republican” who is “a firm believer in free-market capitalism.” She’s running as an anti-tax crusader, and she did make deep cuts to Alaska’s budget.

So, one would assume she is no borrow-and-spend conservative like George W., right?

Well, there was the time when she served as the mayor of the tiny town of Wasilla, Alaska. According to the Associated Press, “Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million.” You’d think that $27 mil in taxpayers’ funds would be enough scratch for a town with a population of 8,000, but you’d be wrong. According to
Politico
, Palin then “racked up nearly $20 million in long-term debt as mayor of the tiny town of Wasilla—that amounts to $3,000 per resident.”

Then there’s her current stint as Alaska governor, during which her appetite for federal pork spending has been on clear display. The Associated Press reported, “In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per capita request in the nation.” While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with fifty residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a Bridge to Nowhere.

6. Sarah Palin believes creationism should be taught in schools.

Until somebody digs up the remnants of a
T. rex
with an ill-fated caveman dangling from its jaws, the scientific community, along with most of the American public, will be at peace with the theory of evolution. But this isn’t true of everyone. More than eighty years after the Scopes “monkey” trial, there are people—and politicians—who do not believe in evolution and lobby for creationism to be taught in schools.

Palin is one of those politicians. When Palin ran for governor, part of her platform called for teaching schoolchildren creationism alongside evolution. Although she did not push hard for this position after she was elected governor, Palin has let her views on evolution be known on many occasions. According to the
Anchorage Daily News
, Palin stated, “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

Palin further argued, “It’s OK to let kids know that there are theories out there. They gain information just by being in a discussion.”

Not when those “theories” are being presented as valid alternatives to a set of principles that most scientists have ascribed to for more than a century.

7. Sarah Palin supports offshore drilling everywhere, even if it doesn’t solve our energy problems.

If McCain was hoping to salvage any part of his credibility with environmentalists, he threw that chance out the window by adding Palin to his ticket. Palin is in favor of offshore drilling and drilling in the ecologically sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The
Miami Herald
reported: “The Alaska governor has said that she has tried to persuade McCain to agree with her on drilling in the wildlife refuge. She also has said that she was happy that he changed his position over the summer and now supports offshore oil drilling.”

As if that weren’t bad enough, in her speech at the Republican National Convention, she said, “Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of America‘s energy problems—as if we all didn’t know that already.” Huh. I guess drilling even when it won’t help is better than working on renewable energy sources, as Palin also vetoed money for a wind-energy project.

8. Sarah Palin loves oil and nuclear power.

Aside from her “drill here, drill there, drill everywhere” approach to our energy crisis, the only other things we know about Palin’s energy policy, especially given her Bush-like love of avoiding the press, comes from her acceptance speech: “Starting in January, in a McCain/Palin administration, we’re going to lay more pipelines, build more nuclear plants, create jobs with clean coal, and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources.”

Nuclear power plants. Interesting. As folks look for alternative fuel sources (and again, Palin loves oil first and foremost, so her commitment to any alternative energy source is suspect at best), nuclear power is enjoying a return to vogue. But here’s the problem: Even the U.S. government’s own nuclear agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, thinks an atomic renaissance is a bad idea.

Delivered by one of America’s most notoriously docile agencies, the NRC’s warning essentially says that all cost estimates for new nuclear reactors—and all licensing and construction schedules—are completely up for grabs and have no reliable basis in fact. Thus any comparisons between future atomic reactors and renewable technologies are moot at best.

Not to mention all the other problems with nuclear energy, such as how to dispose of nuclear waste and the possibility of a catastrophic meltdown, to name a couple. Palin has no background with nuclear energy and shows no evidence of having looked into the science behind it or the dangers that come with it.

Also, it’s time for Palin to drop another Bush-like tendency: Governor, the word is pronounced “new-clear.”

9. Sarah Palin doesn’t think much of community activism; she’d much rather play insider political games.

In her Republican convention speech, Palin slammed Barack Obama’s early political work, saying, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except you have actual responsibilities.” Palin’s put-down of grassroots workers, often unpaid or low-paid, demeaned an American tradition of neighbors helping neighbors, according to Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change. But more revealing is Palin’s apparent lack of experience in community change and local volunteer efforts, during her years in Alaska before becoming governor.

Scores of press accounts of her early years as mayor of Wasilla omit any mention of such work. Instead, they note, as mayor and in the intervening years before running for governor, Palin gravitated to those with power, money, or influence. She worked to enlarge Wasilla’s Wal-Mart and build a sports center (that went over budget in an eminent domain dispute), and she hired a Washington lobbyist, directed a political fundraising committee for the state’s senior U.S. senator, Republican Ted Stevens who was subsequently prosecuted for corruption, and steered $22 million in federal aid to her town. While some of her early community work was undoubtedly centered on her church, perhaps this comment by a blog reader best sums up Palin’s political opportunism: “So community organizers [aren’t] responsible? Or caring? Or doing anything important[?] What a terrible insult to the greatest community organizer of all time, Jesus Christ.”