Sarah Palin

David Letterman, host of The Late Show, told a joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter during one of his nightly monologues. During the ensuing controversy, Letterman offered two extended statements about the joke. Approaching Letterman’s responses from the perspective of Benoit’s image repair typology reveals three primary strategies: denial, mortification, and corrective action. While Letterman’s first attempt to resolve the controversy failed, his second attempt was largely successful. Implications for public relations image repair strategies are offered.

The spread of willful ignorance seems to be spreading and is not isolated to high end specialized subjects. Uninformed opinion can become self destructive when embraced over logic and then passed around as fact. The internet and social media sites spread false information like herpes in the form of poor written memes and people bravely wear their ignorance as badges of honor on bumper stickers on their car. The average person seems to be in a rush to embrace the stupid and hell bent on an irrational and anti-science path.

In this essay, I contend that political culture and campaign journalism during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign was “pornified.” Examination of broadcast journalism, viral videos, online commentary, political pop culture, and get-out-the-vote campaigns reveals the ways in which pornographic metaphors, images, and narratives infiltrated U.S. political culture during the 2008 presidential primary and general election season. I assess the media framing of candidates Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, as well as that of female voters as a group, arguing that the emergence of the pornification frame signals a backlash against the gains women have made in the U.S. political system.

In truth, we face the sobering reality that capitalism’s latest crisis — complete with bank failures, corporate bailouts, rising unemployment, and declining wages — has aided the right, not the left. How can we explain the capacity of the right to benefit from and redirect the bitterness and discontent that derives from capitalism’s own failures?

The Tea Party is an contemporary American political movement that combines elements of mainstream Republican ideology, such as support for the War on Drugs and lowering taxes; libertarianism, such as drastically shrinking the state and opposing the unionization of workers; and anti-immigrant, pro-Medicare/Social Security populism to form a political nexus that has not been seen before in American political history. From the movement’s “birth” in 2009 to today, the Tea Party has had an active role in changing American politics, particularly in the 2010 congressional elections and the 2016 presidential election. With Tea Party backing, 44 congressional candidates won election in 2010, including 5 Senators, 4 Senators in 2012, and multiple Governors between 2010 and 2016. Despite the end of the House’s Tea Party Caucus and with only a few dozen still in Congress, the Tea Party has reshaped the Republican Party, facilitating a rapid shift in American conservatism and propelling Donald Trump to the White House.
In this paper, I will analyze the factors that led to the rise of the Tea Party, their political ideology and stances, the makeup of their voting bloc, their connection to organizations that are openly bigoted and hostile to the federal government, an analysis of several of prominent Tea Party politicians, how the bloc of Tea Party voters contributed to the popularity surge for 2016 Republican candidate Donald Trump, and how the Tea Party’s bloc of voters influenced the Trump presidency while their tactics influenced the anti-Trump Resistance.

On both sides of the Atlantic, right-wing populist parties are enjoying another moment in the sun. In Europe, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) recently doubled its vote in a state election. Fellow travellers are making headway across Europe – France’s Front National, Hungary’s Jobbik, Bulgaria’s Ataka, and the party formally known as True Finns. Many explanations for the European surge point to a xenophobic knee-jerk reaction to the refugee crisis, but that’s far too simplistic; the phenomenon is hardly confined to Europe. Look at the surprising success of Donald Trump in the US’s Republican party primary campaign. Many of his fellow candidates are struggling to keep up with his firebrand pronouncements, not least his proposal to deport millions of illegal immigrants.

So why exactly are these leaders and parties enjoying such success – and are they really all birds of a feather?

This study analyzes the correlation of rhetoric usage by members of Congress who were supported by the Tea Party political movement with changes in mainstream conservative political discourse. The rhetoric of these politicians after the Tea Party’s ascendance in the 2010 congressional elections was compared to the rhetoric used by the 2008, 2012, and 2016 Republican nominees to understand the correlation with other changes in conservative discourse. I studied this discourse shift using speech analysis to code for instances of negative discourse and establish a comparison
between these election years while also noting rhetorical shifts evident among mainstream conservative politicians.

The Tea Party is an interesting political movement in contemporary America.  Combining populist fervor with elements of the mainstream Republican establishment, such as support for the War on Drugs and opposition to immigration, and some elements of libertarian ideology such as opposition to the unionization of workers, they form a political nexus that has not been seen before in American political history. From the movement’s “birth” in 2009 to today, the Tea Party has had an active role in changing American politics, particularly in the 2010 congressional elections. In this paper, I will analyze the factors that led to their rise, their political ideology and stances, the makeup of their voting bloc, their connection to organizations that are openly bigoted and hostile to the federal government, an analysis of several of prominent Tea Party politicians, and how they are contributing to the popularity surge for 2016 Republican candidate Donald Trump.