Going Rouge (18 page)

The Witch-Hunter Anoints Sarah Palin

Max Blumenthal

On September 20 and 21, 2008, I attended services at the church Sarah Palin belonged to since she was an adolescent, the Wasilla Assembly of God. Though Palin officially left the church in 2002, she is listed on its Web site as “a friend,” and spoke there as recently as June 8 of this year.

I went specifically to see a pastor visiting from Kiambu, Kenya, named Thomas Muthee. Muthee gained fame within Pentecostal circles by claiming that he defeated a local witch, Mama Jane, in a great spiritual battle, thus liberating his town from sin and opening its people to the spirit of Jesus.

Muthee’s mounting stardom took him to Wasilla Assembly of God in May 2005, where he prayed over Palin and called upon Jesus to propel her into the governor’s mansion—and beyond. Muthee also implored Jesus to protect Palin from “the spirit of witchcraft.” The video archive of that startling sermon was scrubbed from Wasilla Assembly of God’s Web site, but now it has reappeared.

Since Palin was nominated as vice president, Wasilla Assembly of God has taken a draconian line with reporters. The church now forbids members of the media from filming, taking notes, or bringing voice recorders to its services. I was able to record Muthee’s recent sermons only by deploying an array of tiny cameras and hidden microphones. Though the quality and comprehensiveness of my footage was severely compromised by the church’s closed-door policy to the press, I was not going to be deterred.

By the end of the second day of Muthee’s sermons, the church had been tipped off about me, the liberal media member in its midst. An associate pastor told me he had received an e-mail from an anonymous source warning him about me. When I tried to interview members of the congregation in the church parking lot, my questions were either met with silence or open hostility. I strongly suspect the McCain campaign has mobilized the Wasilla Assembly of God against perceived threats from the media.

But they hardly needed encouragement. On the first night of services, Muthee implored his audience to wage “spiritual warfare” against “the enemy.” As I filmed, a nervous church staffer approached from behind and told me to put my camera away. I acceded to his demand, but as Muthee urged the church to crush “the python spirit” of the unbeliever enemies by stomping on their necks, I pulled out a smaller camera and filmed from a more discreet position. Now, church members were in deep prayer, speaking in tongues and raising their hands. Muthee exclaimed, “We come against the spirit of witchcraft! We come against the python spirits!” Then, a local pastor took the mic from Muthee and added, “We stomp on the heads of the enemy!”

Behind the Christian right’s enthusiasm for Palin’s conservative credentials is a visceral sense that that she has come from them, not to them. Some right-wing evangelicals even believe she has messianic potential. As former Christian Broadcasting Network vice president Jim Bramlett wrote, “Sarah is that standard God has raised up to stop the flood. She has the anointing.”

The Christian right’s analysis is accurate to a certain degree. While Palin may not be the One, she is certainly one of them. Her social policy views, from her rejection of scientific evidence on global warming to her opposition to publicly funding emergency contraception for rape victims, are explicitly influenced by the sectarian theology she has subscribed to since she was a teenager. There is no better evidence of the depth of Palin’s radical convictions than her startling encounter with the witch-hunter, Bishop Muthee.

Sarah Palin, American

Jeff Sharlet

Religion writers listened to Sarah Palin’s convention address expecting heavy religious code, the scriptural allusions that have come to be standard fare in speeches by Republicans and Barack Obama. There wasn’t much—“a servant’s heart,” a prayer for her son sent off to war. But there was, for those with ears to hear it, a far more disturbing allusion: to Westbrook Pegler, a midcentury Rush Limbaugh and then some. At the height of his popularity, he was more powerful; as he faded, he fell back on such rank anti-Semitism that even anti-Semites considered him tacky. One conservative paper begged him to come up with fresh material and lay off “1) New Deal and Roosevelts; 2) Kennedys; 3) Jews.” He was a homophobe, too—he once described a critic who’d crossed him as “the bull butterfly of the literary teas”—but he expressed his hatred of homosexuality in such queeny terms that even those who shared his bile turned a blind eye to their man’s evident relish for a certain campy rhetorical style.

Pegler was meaner than Limbaugh, but there was also more to him than Limbaugh. Peg hated fascists, until he became one. He despised fat cats, which may be why he came to loathe himself and anyone who reminded him of his past, including his once-beloved Newspaper Guild. He was contemptuous of political platitudes, unless they were his own. His populism was real, even if his expression of it was not.

Heywood Broun, the leftist columnist with whom he shared the front page of the
New York World-Telegram
beginning in 1932, once observed of the angry man to his right, “Some day somebody should take the hide off Peg because the stuff inside is so much better than the varnished surface which blinks in the sunlight of public approval.” That’s not to say Peg was a sweetie underneath. He was an angry man through and through, born into hatred of Hearst inherited from his father, responsible for the “Hearst Style,” a populist tongue of blood and cliché, expressive of the sentiments of working people but emptied of any real political content, and forever ashamed of that invention; he’d damn it in its own terms, describing Hearst papers as resembling a “screaming whore running down the street with her throat cut.” Pegler was like that, too; he filled the coffers of his publishers, but he hated them more than he loved the money they paid him. He hated authority, simply put; and when he wrote from the “stuff inside” he channeled that hate into blistering condemnations of corruption that resulted in at least two prison sentences for the deserving.

When Sarah Palin, reading a speech by McCain speechwriter Michael Scully, declared, “A writer declared: ‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,’ ” she passed right over the stuff inside to stand blinking behind her $365 rimless Kazuo Kawasaki glasses in the sunlight of public approval.

In 1999 I spent several weeks poring over Pegler’s columns for a profile of the long-dead columnist in the
Baffler
, the now defunct journal founded by Tom Frank, author of
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Tom’s already done a better job than I could of taking apart Palin’s pander, ugly in its implication that those who don’t live in small towns—80 percent of America, according to the United Nations—are somehow morally deficient, and insulting in its disregard for the actual facts of life in the very small towns ill-served by the policies championed by Palin. [See “The GOP Loves the Heartland to Death,” in this volume.] So I’ll stick to Peg, and see if he doesn’t carry back round to Palin, by way of her curiously geographic theology.

Pegler wasn’t a small-town man himself until the end of his days. Even when he wrote of the mythical little people—no, not fairies; the common folk—he did so in terms that sounded distinctly urban. Forgive me for quoting my own work; it’s the only piece of Pegler’s work I have available to me:

Pegler carried on his campaigns in the name of one particular “little guy” known as George Spelvin, American. “Spelvin” was the stage name an actor used at the the time when, in addition to his main role, he doubled in a small part. The Spelvins of the world were servants, butlers, messengers, clerks, men-on-the-street, and passersby. Pegler’s Spelvin, though, was an early Archie Bunker. Union men, uppity women, swells, bubbleheads, and, eventually, foreigners, blacks, and Jews all gave George Spelvin a stomachache.

In 1942, Spelvin went looking for a job because “Mrs. R.” (Roosevelt) had “said she thought everyone should be ordered what to do by the government,” and her orders were to fit into the war effort anywhere you can. Turns out, though, there were no more jobs in America that didn’t require a union card, and “Bigod nobody is going to make him join anything whether it is the Elks or the Moose or the Mice or the Muskrats or whatever. It is the principle of the thing with George, and, moreover, being a native American and a veteran of the last war, he has a rather narrow prejudice against being ordered around by guys who talk like they just got off the boat.”

Spelvin’s borough of bubbleheads sounds more like Brooklyn than Mayberry. His anxieties, his bigotries—organized labor, immigrants—are those most commonly attendant to urban living. Even his name is a sly joke for working-class sophisticates, common men who’d know enough about culture to be able to whistle “Fanfare for the Common Man,” another populist delusion penned in 1942.

That doesn’t sound like Sarah Palin. Too many Obama supporters have been too quick to prove Palin right when she spoke of the snobs who look down on people like her. Palin is from a small town, and her interests are those of a small-town citizen; her churches are small-town congregations, suddenly being scrutinized by an army of blogger theologians. Like Pegler, they’re homing in on the wrong targets, angling in from the left instead of the right with aim just as shaky. There’s nothing wrong with being a moose hunter, or a snow-machine racer, or a redneck, or a holy roller. The gift of tongues is not a form of political expression. At least, not one easily intelligible.

What should be worrisome about Palin’s religion and her small-town roots is the way they seem to merge, the territorial spiritual warfare of her churches phrased in secular terms through her channeling of Pegler. “Territorial spiritual warfare” is the idea, embraced by Palin’s pastors, that entire cities can be possessed by demons. Small towns, too, theoretically, but that’s not usually how it works. The first time I encountered it was at Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, in Colorado Springs. When I asked for a restaurant recommendation, I was warned to steer clear of downtown, no matter what I did; urban areas, New Lifers told me, are rife with demons. It was no accident, one New Lifer told me this past spring, that Pastor Ted’s downfall occurred up in Denver, surely a sister city of Sodom.

That view, it should be remembered, is very much a minority perspective within conservative Christianity. Indeed, there’s just as strong a movement toward cities, as hipster evangelicals plant new churches in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles with names like The Journey, The Awakening, and Revolution. But Palin is not a hipster evangelical. She is, as she tells us over and over, a small-town girl. And she grew up in a small-town church, one with a fondness for spiritual war and a wariness of cosmopolitanism. “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” Palin didn’t put that in her speech, a professional speechwriter did. But in her mouth, the fever that filled all of Pegler’s words becomes the spirit, and an imaginary municipality, Smalltown, USA, becomes a site of rhetorical pilgrimage, an invocation of place as faith.

The only time Pegler ever lived in a small town was during his last years, when he moved to the desert outside Tucson. Much of what he wrote was no longer publishable, but he sat in his empty, pure, American landscape pounding out more and more of it, trying to get at the monster he couldn’t name. Nearly forty years after his death, Palin has dragged Pegler into the spotlight again and resurrected his blinking words. In his mind, they were hate, but in her speech, they were theology. Palin, for all her bigotries, is not a hater. She’s too holy for that. Her religion allows her the luxury of sincerity. Which is why it’s worth considering the words with which the late Oliver Pilat began his 1963 biography of Pegler,
The Angry Man of the Press
: “By his own standards, he was incorruptible, honorable, and sincere, but sincerity is only an effort to gauge reality and conform to it, and his tools for that effort were inadequate.”

Mad Dog Palin

Matt Taibbi

I’m standing outside the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination for vice president. If I hadn’t quit my two-packs-a-day habit earlier this year, I’d be chain-smoking now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.

All around me, a million cops in their absurd post-9/11 space-combat get-ups stand guard as assholes in papier-mâché puppet heads scramble around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joyously out the gates in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion Bowls and other “wild” drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the “unbelievable time” they will inevitably report to their pals back home. Only twenty-first-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they’re at a party.

The defining moment for me came shortly after Palin and her family stepped down from the stage to uproarious applause, looking happy enough to throw a whole library full of books into a sewer. In the crush to exit the stadium, a middle-aged woman wearing a cowboy hat, a red-white-and-blue shirt and an obvious eye job gushed to a male colleague—they were both wearing badges identifying them as members of the Colorado delegation—at the Xcel gates.

“She totally reminds me of my cousin!” the delegate screeched. “She’s a real woman! The real thing!”

I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of
Roseanne
as part of your presidential ticket. And if she’s a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin’ Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, twenty floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV—and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

The Palin speech was a political masterpiece, one of the most ingenious pieces of electoral theater this country has ever seen. Never before has a single televised image turned a party’s fortunes around faster.

Until the Alaska governor actually ascended to the podium that night, I was convinced that John McCain had made one of the all-time campaign-season blunders, that he had acted impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher section at Fenway Park. It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain’s decision to cave in to his party’s right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from a tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman—reportedly his real preference—by picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I’ll rally the base. Here, I’ll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy now?

But watching Palin’s speech, I had no doubt that I was witnessing a historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker—and immediately launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be the innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly-sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who, “five children later,” is “still my guy.” It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.

Within minutes, Palin had given TV audiences a character infinitely recognizable to virtually every American: the small-town girl with just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA minutes are Holy Writ, and to whom injustice means the woman next door owning a slightly nicer set of drapes or flatware. Or the governorship, as it were.

Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban-American supermom. It’s the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.

Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the “difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick,” blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.

In her speech, Palin presented herself as a raging baby-making furnace of middle-class ambition next to whom the yuppies of the Obama set—who never want anything all that badly except maybe a few afternoons with someone else’s wife, or a few kind words in the
New York Times Book Review
—seem like weak, self-doubting celibates, the kind of people who certainly cannot be trusted to believe in the right God or to defend a nation. We’re used to seeing such blatant cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is something new. She’s all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It’s just designed to sell her. The thing was as much as admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that Palin wasn’t the most qualified candidate, that the party “went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives.”

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains. Sure, there was politics in the Palin speech, but it was all either silly lies or merely incidental fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance. A classic example of what was at work here came when Palin proudly introduced her Down syndrome baby, Trig, then stared into the camera and somberly promised parents of special-needs kids that they would “have a friend and advocate in the White House.” This was about a half-hour before she raised her hands in triumph with McCain, a man who voted against increasing funding for special-needs education.

Palin’s charge that “government is too big” and that Obama “wants to grow it” was similarly preposterous. Not only did her party just preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a typical Bush-era Republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means. Her great legacy as mayor of Wasilla was the construction of a $15 million hockey arena in a city with an annual budget of $20 million; Palin OK’d a bond issue for the project before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal mess that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the original market price for property the city ended up having to seize from a private citizen using eminent domain. Better yet, Palin ended up paying for the fucking thing with a 25 percent increase in the city sales tax. But in her speech, of course, Palin presented herself as the enemy of tax increases, righteously bemoaning that “taxes are too high” and Obama “wants to raise them.”

Palin hasn’t been too worried about federal taxes as governor of a state that ranks number one in the nation in federal spending per resident ($13,950), even as it sits just eighteenth in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434). That means all us taxpaying non-Alaskans spend $8,500 a year on each and every resident of Palin’s paradise of rugged self-sufficiency. Not that this sworn enemy of taxes doesn’t collect from her own: Alaska currently collects the most taxes per resident of any state in the nation.

The rest of Palin’s speech was the same dog-whistle crap Republicans have been railing about for decades. Palin’s crack about a mayor being “like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities” testified to the Republicans’ apparent belief that they can win elections till the end of time running against the sixties. (They’re probably right.) The incessant grousing about the media was likewise par for the course, red meat for those tens of millions of patriotic flag-waving Americans whose first instinct when things get rough is to whine like bitches and blame other people—reporters, the French, those ungrateful blacks soaking up tax money eating big prison meals, whomever—for their failures.

Add to this the usual lies about Democrats wanting to “forfeit” to our enemies abroad and coddle terrorists, and you had a very run-of-the-mill, almost boring Republican speech from a substance standpoint. What made it exceptional was its utter hypocrisy, its total disregard for reality, its absolute unrelation to the facts of our current political situation. After eight years of unprecedented corruption, incompetence, waste, and greed, the party of Karl Rove understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to any of these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to beat their meat over.

Sarah Palin is that new, new thing, and in the end it won’t matter that she’s got an unmarried teenage kid with a bun in the oven. Of course, if the daughter of a black candidate like Barack Obama showed up at his convention with a five-month bump and some sideways-cap-wearing, junior-grade Curtis Jackson holding her hand, the defenders of Traditional Morality would be up in arms. But the thing about being in the reality-making business is that you don’t need to worry much about vetting; there are no facts in your candidate’s bio that cannot be ignored or overcome.

One of the most amusing things about the Palin nomination has been the reaction of horrified progressives. The Internet has been buzzing at full volume as would-be defenders of sanity and reason pore over the governor’s record in search of the Damning Facts. My own telephone began ringing off the hook with calls from ex-Alaskans and friends of Alaskans determined to help get the “truth” about Sarah Palin into the major media. Pretty much anyone with an Internet connection knows by now that Palin was originally for the “Bridge to Nowhere” before she opposed it (she actually endorsed the plan in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign), that even after the project was defeated she kept the money, that she didn’t actually sell the Alaska governor’s state luxury jet on eBay but instead sold it at a $600,000 loss to a campaign contributor (who is reportedly now seeking $50,000 in taxpayer money to pay maintenance costs).

Then there are the salacious tales of Palin’s swinging-meat-cleaver management style, many of which seem to have a common thread: In addition to being ensconced in a messy ethics investigation over her firing of the chief of the Alaska state troopers (dismissed after refusing to sack her sister’s ex-husband), Palin also fired a key campaign aide who had an affair with a friend’s wife. More ominously, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to fire the town librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, who had resisted pressure to censor books Palin found objectionable.

Then there’s the God stuff: Palin belongs to a church whose pastor, Ed Kalnins, believes that all criticisms of George Bush “come from hell,” and wondered aloud if people who voted for John Kerry could be saved. Kalnins, looming as the answer to Obama’s Jeremiah Wright, claims that Alaska is going to be a “refuge state” for Christians in the last days, last days which he sometimes speaks of in the present tense. Palin herself has been captured on video mouthing the inevitable born-again idiocies, such as the idea that a recent oil-pipeline deal was “God’s will.” She also described the Iraq War as a “task that is from God” and part of a heavenly “plan.” She supports teaching creationism and “abstinence only” in public schools, opposes abortion even for victims of rape, has denied the science behind global warming, and attends a church that seeks to convert Jews and cure homosexuals.