Scenes From a Marriage
By ROSS DOUTHAT
NYT
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.
(More here.)
NYT
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.
(More here.)
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