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Over at the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan drew a parallel between voter suppression tactics pushed by Karl Rove, and the apparent electoral fraud perpetrated by the Ahmadinejad administration.

Ahmadinejad’s bag of tricks is eerily like that of Karl Rove – the constant use of fear, the exploitation of religion, the demonization of liberals, the deployment of Potemkin symbolism like Sarah Palin

Meanwhile, Confederate apologist Robert Stacy McCain has gotten his antebellum bloomers in a twist over this affont to the honor of Mrs. Todd Palin by a notorious sodomite:

I went outside, smoked a cigarette, then took a shower and ate a pizza and now, an hour later, I’m still agog at the wretchedness of Sully’s phrase, “Potemkin symbolism like Sarah Palin.” Sully attributes this to Rove — as if the governor of Alaska were self-evidently a signature “Rovian” tactic — and then says it is part of a “bag of tricks is eerily like that” of Ahmadinejad. Or vice-versa, actually, but the idea of moral equivalence is there.

How? Why? I’m scratching my head. Given that hyperbolic extremity of ad hominem is sort of a speciality of mine, and that I am a three-time nominee for Sully’s “Malkin Award,” you might think I’d have the kind of insight necessary to reverse-engineer a thing like this.

I’ve been irked by things I’ve read on the internet, sure, but I’ve never had to frantically pace the breezeway, sucking on a Salem, then scrub myself pink with a loofah and wolf down a Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine Three Meat Pizza before I could compose myself and sit back down at the computer.

WTF? I look at phrase, and try to figure out exactly what Sully means by it. “Potemkin villages” were the cruel propaganda hoax by which the Soviets sought to convince naive foreign visitors that everything was hunky-dory in the worker’s socialist paradise.

Zing!  Ouch!  Damn, McCain, your superior grasp of history has totally nailed Sully…give or take a century.  The “Potemkin village” was a (probably apocryphal) ruse attributed to Grigory Potemkin, who allegedly tried to deceive his girlfriend, Catherine the Great, about the value of her conquered real estate in the Crimea during the campaign of 1787.  Inconveniently, Potemkin died in 1791, about 130 years before the Soviet Union was created, but I’m sure the Prince was a total Commie.

14 Responses to “Robert Stacy McCain: Catherine The Great Was Actually Stalin In A Dress!”

Well, he’s got a point. I mean, “Potemkin Village”, that’s actually a better description of Bush’s New Orleans press conference in which they hauled in lights so they could pretend the neighborhood was being aided, and then yanked the generators out just as soon as the photo-op was over.

And Scott, you’re probably not bookmarking the same sites I am. Which is probably good.

the constant use of fear, the exploitation of religion, the demonization of liberals, the deployment of Potemkin symbolism like Sarah Palin
And an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.

How, exactly, did we wind up with Sullivan? Did we flip a coin, and Canada won? Did TNR advertise for a bad drag-show Lady Thatcher? Did he just hit land and start walking until an American who thinks anyone with an English accent is smart gave him a job?

It’s bad enough when the Evil Cheney/Rove Empire gets slagged by someone who wasn’t simply hoodwinked by it when it counted, but who was actively stomping on anyone who disagreed. But poorly paired with these warmed-over Cold War fantasies they tie into like comfort food? Nuclear threat! Stolen elections! And they know nothing whatsoever about it, but that doesn’t stop them from swallowing it whole. Or insisting that we have to meet the threat represented by their steady tub-thumping with a dozen or so of the aircraft carriers we have lying around.

Y’know, the time to sound the alarm about Cheney, Rove, et. al. was back when the multiple disasters they were perpetrating could still be reversed. Back when Sullivan was agreeing with them, in other words. Doing so now amounts to arguing over the clothes the corpse of the GOP was found in.

I realize that Sullivan writes above the level of a third grader, so I’m assuming that Stacy (and now Althouse) are just missing the nuance.

He didn’t compare Sarah Palin to the Potemkin villages. He basically said Palin is emulating Rove with her down-home folksianisms, which resonate with Ahmadinejad’s “man of the people” image, while both take handouts and bribes from the very big businesses they are supposedly shunning.

The “Potemkin Village” meme is probably an overplay here. What he really needed to do was to connect Ahmadinejad and Palin, not to Rove, but to Ronald “Rancher” Reagan, the ultimate fraudulent “man of the people”.

Doghouse,

In fairness to Sully, he did turn his back on Bush/Cheney while they were still in office. I wouldn’t count him as anything more than a fair weather friend, but he’s not recently come-to-God.

In all fairness, I believe it was not a mere coin flip, but rather a vigorously performed rock-paper-scissors contest that doomed us to Life with Sully.

Well, IIRC, Sullivan felt “betrayed” when George W.–whose codpiece he had helped stuff, up to that time–came out in favor of a Constitutional Defense of Marriage amendment. Now, as far as I’m concerned, anyone who ever believed, or pretended to believe, that George W. Bush and his party would do anything else is a first-class fool, but for this to be the breaking point for a man who had been the worst sort of tenth-row-of-the-mob brick tossing Iraq war supporter is simply inexcusable. It’s like supporting the Confederacy until 1864, when JEB Stuart’s cavalry trampled your petunia bed.

I come here for the excellent humor, the verbal tour jetes, and often enough there’s as much in the comments as in the post.

Thank you, all. I’ve been a martyr to tree pollen, molds and spores for 48 hours, but now I feel better.

Sorry, I can’t see the Norma Desmond of Provincetown as a particularly reliable ally no matter what part of the political spectrum one inhabits.

I, too was stumped by the Palin=Ptomkin comparison. I don’t smoke, but after a couple of “fake lattes” (hot milk with Taster’s Choice added) I realized it was just a *typo*, and Sully really meant Palin=Pumpkin!

The clue: “Ahmadinejad’s *bag of tricks* is eerily like that of Karl Rove”

The plot thins. Consider, if you will:

“…the constant use of fear…”= Trick or Treat!

“…the exploitation of religion”: Glowing crosses on plastic grave stones. Palin’s being given protection from witches by a…witch doctor.

“…the demonization of liberals…”: well, *that* needs no explanation!

“…the deployment of Pumpkin symbolism like Sarah Palin”: The many blasphemous people carved Sarah’s face into many a jock-a-lantern.

Let’s give Sullivan credit for one thing: He is the only MSM journalist who has stayed skeptical, in print, about Sarah Palin’s increasingly ridiculous argument that she gave birth to Trig. THAT is the biggest Potemkin-village-like tale still following Palin around. Mainly because she threw her daughter Bristol under the bus, declaring her “five months pregnant” last August as a way of PROVING that Trig had to be Sarah’s baby. SP’s never released the baby’s birth certificate. Anyone who shows the merest hint of interest in this subject over to the site conservatives4palin is dubbed a “Trig Troother”–their spelling–and banned at once.

Given that Sully’s, uh, not altogether familiar first-hand with human reproduction, he actually did some legwork and interviewed a slew of ob/gyns. All of them were aghast that SP ever got the press to swallow the “Wild Ride” theory. This is the one in which she “announced” her pregnancy at seven months (to the astonishment of her staff) around March 5, 2008, the day after McCain officially entered the campaign. Six weeks later, Palin alleges that her water started breaking at the National Governors Assn. meeting in Texas, and that she flew back to Alaska, bypassed the hi-tech hospitals in Anchorage, and allegedly gave birth at a Band-Aid station in Palmer that doesn’t even allow twin births, on April 18, 2008, some 24 hours after her alleged amniotic fluid allegedly began to leak.

Really, if you have any interest in this subject–you can tell that I do–head on over to http://www.palindeception.com/blog and http://www.theimmoralminority.blogspot.com, and http://www.palingates.blogspot.com.

Look! There goes Halley’s Comet! David Letterman made my water break!

I don’t know. The whole “Trig-is-Bristol’s-baby” seems like the birth certificate scandal of the left. There is too much attention on her family already. Who cares how many babies she’s had, she’s was a crappy mayor, she’s a crappy governor, and she has no interest or even knowledge of politics beyond her pet issues.

The fake pregnancy is only one of many, many issues. If SP will lie about that, what won’t she lie about? The list grows…

Come to think of it, “Potemkin Village” would have been the perfect name for Dubya’s ranch. Although Rancho Estupido always worked for me.

Something to say?