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.
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.
Left by D. Sidhe on June 15th, 2009