This bit of analysis
is worth the read. It organizes the remarkable
reaction to Sarah Palin that we have witnessed over the past two years. She may never be president, but hardly
because she may or may not be up to the job.
Particularly as the present incumbent is becoming less convincing as his
mandate grinds out.
The presidency
requires one thing and that is leadership.
Obama’s problem is that Sarah is prepared to provide just that. Men of quite common intelligence have
prospered in the role, if we accept common intelligence to mean surviving college
as both she and many others did. A
politician must have common intelligence but not much else except good
political instincts which Palin certainly has.
In the meantime, it
is obvious that she is not the right people to the country club republican
crowd who gave us George Bush and his crowd of political cronies who fumbled
many times.
In item two we
understand that many rightwing media types trash her because she is
representing a populous base that they do not comprehend and is a challenge to
their friends and contacts. Sarah Palin
is as much a challenge to republicans as she is to the democrats she must also
defeat.
The media and the
entertainment industry have also been over the top in its attacks on Sarah
Palin. It is shocking to an outsider and
must be more so to those who believed in the ideals of a civil society. The media chose to elect Barack Obama by cocooning
his back story as a Marxist professor as part of a long line of such academic
fools. How ill prepared this made him
for high office is now becoming apparent as he struggles to learn on the job.
With Sarah, they
chose to make up back story and grab every bit of jealous innuendo as a fact
and use it to write attack pieces. Their
sense of empowerment is there to be seen and can only be answered by the American
people voting for Sarah in spite of them.
They may well still prevail but their best stones are all thrown.
In the end, one of
them admitted that nothing sticks. That
is a pretty good hint that a tactical retreat is in order.
Another item came in today regarding the possibility of Sarah becoming the party National Chairman. Possibly a good idea
4 Groups Whose Hatred of Sarah Palin Should Be On Her
Resume
2010 DECEMBER 3
BY MARK MEED
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/12/03/4-groups-whose-hatred-of-sarah-palin-should-be-on-her-resume/
Whenever people catalog the perceived
shortcomings of Sarah Palin one of the most commonly used words is “divisive”,
which is just another way of saying some people like her and some people don’t.
It never seems to occur to those who apply such labels that not only is this a
perfectly normal state of affairs but the absence of it usually means the
person in question is either a cult-leader or has nothing to say.
Indeed, in order to figure out who a person
really is, it is often instructive to examine the enemies he or she
has cultivated – and Sarah has cultivated some of the best. Anyone beaming down
from the planet Twilo, knowing nothing about Palin or her politics, could
reasonably survey the Mos
Eisley Cantina collection of characters who stand in
opposition to her and conclude she was worth a second look.
- The Republican Establishment
Barbara Bush is only the latest in a long line
of GOP patricians who have damned Palin with faint praise then suggested, with
varying degrees of subtlety, that she quietly depart the stage so the
grownups can take over.
This
transcends Palin’s presidential ambitions, if in fact she has any. Although
this has become the lightning-rod of recent commentary – because her book’s
been out a while and there’s only so much you can misrepresent and fabricate –
what really exercises her critics (and their name is Legion, though
more often than not “Parker” or “Sullivan”) is her general popularity among
the hoi polloi and
her unquestionable influence in conservativepolitics. When they say “go away”
they don’t mean “don’t run for president,” they mean “go away.”
Scant mention is made of the fact these are
the same grownups who presided over the frittering and fumbling away of the
same Reagan legacy they rhapsodize about on the Sunday shows – but perhaps the
message is: “No, really, this time
the grownups have grown
up. We can take it from here.”
For those of us with reservations about this
particular line of reasoning – like anyone who understands the Zen-like wisdom
of Charlie Brown and the football – such assurances only reconfirm the
wisdom of keeping Sarah around.
2. “Friends” on the Right
Others, nominally on the Right side of the fence, aren’t
subtle at all.
Kathleen Parker, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks and David Frum –
to name just a few of the bitter old women involved – have each in their turn
made pronouncements about Palin in which terms like “fatal cancer”, “joke”,
“nincompoop”, “disastrous” and my personal favorite “a different version of Madonna” factor
prominently. Perusing these utterances it’s easy to imagine some back-channel
contest to see who can be most snide and condescending without actually leaving
spittle on the page.
It’s early days yet, but I have to believe this exercise
in amused contempt from Kathleen Parker has to be a contender:
In the
nearly two years since she became the first female Republican vice presidential
candidate, Sarah has morphed from a pit bull with lipstick to a mama grizzly.
Grrrrrrrr.
[…]
One never tires of Mom, I suppose. I’m a mom. You’re a
mom. We all had a mom. Why, even some Democratic women are moms. Don’t they love their little darlings just as much as
conservative women do?
The Mom
Movement is hardly new. Soccer moms, long ago identified as a voting bloc, are
nearly passe, iced from the zeitgeist by hockey moms
and, now, mama bears. Womanhood has become a zoo. And we thought men were the
beasts.
And don’t
tell her she can’t. If you do, she’s just gonna get feistier and cuter. Next
thing you know she’ll be a dadgum lioness givin’ heck to those media hyenas,
just the way they can’t stand it.
Look
outcha!
Unhappily these are the cleverest bits, the
money-in-the-bank zingers in what Parker imagines to be cutting-edge satire. To
paraphrase Mark
Twain, let us draw the curtain of
charity on further comment.
Like the Republican old guard they relentlessly shill
for, these scribes and pundits largely see political change in terms of
replacing elites from the Left with elites from the Right, which necessarily
includes them.
They see the Left as friendly opponents in a largely
benign game, which will be won sometimes, lost sometimes, but will always begin
and end with a handshake, and will be repeated in perpetuity with essentially
the same rules. It does not occur to them that their opponents have been playing the game only insofar as it advanced their
purpose, and are now poised to change the rules dramatically and, in the
extreme case, cancel the game altogether.
Long story short guys, no
amount of civilized sucking up to your Ivy League counterparts on the Left will
make them like or respect you. You care deeply about this, Palin doesn’t, and
that’s why you despise her.
3. The Media
So shrill and venomous has been the media’s reaction to
Palin – reminiscent of the Ringwraiths screeching over the empty beds at the
Prancing Pony – that it’s earned its own pseudo-psychiatric term “Palin
Derangement Syndrome”.
This obviously is not how they prefer to roll. The Left
traditionally operates best in an “iron fist in a velvet glove” mode. In
practical terms, this involves donning a collegial, come-let-us-reason-together
happy-mask and expressing half-baked and ultimately scary ideas through a gauzy filter of euphemisms, platitudes and specious
logic. Historically that velvet glove doesn’t tend to come off as long as
everyone nods and smiles.
It could be argued that everyone, including the
Republicans, was nodding and smiling right up to the moment John McCain slipped
away from his minders and chose Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. Within
hours it seemed, the media, which had shown a remarkable lack of curiosity
about candidate Barack Obama’s credentials, background, associations and
published utterances covered Palin’s home town like
shad flies in search of the straight skinny on who really was the mother of her youngest child.
The ferocity of the media attack, which continues to this day, gave even
apolitical bystanders pause.
It shouldn’t have, even when the Left was machine-gunning
the lifeboats after Palin returned to Alaska
Consider a recent contribution by Richard Cohen, who was
so upset by Palin’s book it triggered flashbacks:
When I
was 11, my father thought it was time to show my sister and me the nation’s
capital. … I do remember we took Route 1 through Baltimore (no I-95 yet)
and it was there that I saw my first sign with the word “colored” on it – a
rooming house, I think. This was 1952, and the United States
It is
Sarah Palin who brings back these memories.
Given the fact he actually pressed the “Publish” key on
this breathtakingly stupid juxtaposition it’s difficult not to conclude the
flashback was drug-induced.
One of Cohen’s television counterparts, Ed Schultz – who
for the uninitiated is kind of the Left’s answer to Ralph
Kramden – offers a similar analysis. Those of you wondering how often, and in
how many ways, you can string the words “race”, “racist”, “hate” and “hatred”
together in a short segment pay close attention to this
guy. He’s one of the best.
The syndrome however has probably achieved its finest flower in Andrew Sullivan, of the once
prestigiousAtlantic. When not demanding, in the words of William A. Jacobson, “a virtual inspection of Palin’s uterus to verify if Trig
really is her son,” Sullivan produces cutting-edge prose such as
that below. Presumably dictating this with a cold compress over his eyes, he explains
why he temporarily shut down his blog in the aftermath of the release of
Palin’s first book.
When
dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb
and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her
life. There are so many fabrications and
delusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it – and
comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality
she has previously provided – is a bewildering task. She is a deeply disturbed
person which makes this work of fiction and
fact all the more challenging to read.
[…]
Since the
Dish has tried to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Palin’s unhinged grip on
reality from the very beginning – specifically her fantastic story of her fifth
pregnancy - we feel it’s vital that we grapple with this new data as
fairly and as rigorously as possible.
He might have added “… and, besides, I really need to lie
down and somehow come to terms with the fact that this woman actually had the temerity to write a book,”
but then again he may have felt it beneath him to state the obvious.
Bottom line, there is no happy-mask left for these people
where Palin is concerned. With every new silly, counter-factual, hopelessly
predictable hit-piece they churn out they might as well just add the
boilerplate disclaimer: “I am a desperately unhappy, deeply neurotic
pseudo-intellectual whose only pleasure comes imagining myself superior to
Sarah Palin and every ‘ordinary’ American she represents,” because that’s what
screams across the divide.
4. The Entertainment Industry
Liberals
see themselves as part of the deployment; Hollywood celebrities are their
generals … In general, wildly overpaid narcissists are the last people who
should be commenting on subjects of any importance. But the Hollywood
~ Ann
Coulter, Treason, pp.
245-6
The entertainment industry, accurately described above,
has taken up the cudgels against Palin and her family mining comedic veins
almost exclusively limited to: “she’s so slutty”, “she’s so stupid” and “she’s
so hypocritical”.
For sheer versatility David Letterman has to be at the
top of the pack, incorporating all
of these themes into one two minute segment:
Letterman, who knows a thing or two about sexual impropriety himself as it turns out, gained most notoriety
for a joke he made about one of Palin’s daughter’s having sex with Alex
Rodriguez during a baseball game. I don’t know about you, but, having a young
daughter myself, my sides are still splitting over that one:
Further down (okay, way further down) the pantheon, but
every bit as classy, we find the likes of Joy Behar and Sarah Bernhardt,
cackling like the embittered wallflowers they are over Bristol Palin not
winning Dancing with the Stars:
BERNHARD:
She`s such a hooker. She got on a flight after losing last night.
[…]
BEHAR:
How did they deal with ABC? I think that the losers come
on the “View” and they dance. She said that her mother likes her being in the
cage.
BERNHARD:
This is what kills me –
DANA: Well, maybe that will
prevent her from having another baby.
It would be extravagant to claim that before Sarah Palin
dogpile we had no inkling how vulgar, nasty and breathtakingly obtuse our
entertainment and entertainers had become. Ann Coulter alone devotes an entire
chapter of Treason to the Post 9/11 reactions of industry members aptly
entitled “Celebrity Traitors: ‘now that I’m sober I watch a lot of news’”. We
can however assert with some confidence that
with Palin our glitteratihave
dropped the pretense that it’s only about the US government and
are now utterly transparent in their contempt for the type of American Palin
represents, which is most of us.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether or not Sarah
Palin is qualified to be president, or even if her current influence in
conservative politics is warranted, but arguably the fact
that she is none of the people described above has to count in her favor.
If she achieves nothing else in her lifetime except
having – just by virtue of who she is and what she represents – flushed some of
them out of hiding, that alone should secure her a
place in history, complete with statue, bank holiday and catchy song.
Tea Party Nation: Run, Sarah, Run — for RNC Chair
Monday, 06 Dec 2010 01:33 PM
Article Font Size
Many Republicans are urging Sarah Palin to run for president. But the
Tea Party Nation wants her to vie for chairwoman of the Republican National
Committee. The group’s founder, Judson Phillips, has sent a letter to the
former Alaska
"In order for the tea party/conservative movement to be
successful, we have to have someone conservative running the GOP," he told
the news service. "She is the perfect candidate. If she does not try, I am
afraid we will end up with just another establishment flunky running the party,
and the [Republicans in name only] will control the party again."
Phillips says, "She has a track record of cutting wasteful
spending, which has occurred under the watch of Michael Steele. Finally, she is
simply a rock star. She can raise money like no one else out there that I can
think of."
1 comment:
Great stuff! Bravo.
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