This bit of analysisis worth the read. It organizes the remarkablereaction to Sarah Palin that we have witnessed over the past two years. She may never be president, but hardlybecause she may or may not be up to the job. Particularly as the present incumbent is becoming less convincing as hismandate grinds out.
The presidencyrequires one thing and that is leadership. Obama’s problem is that Sarah is prepared to provide just that. Men of quite common intelligence haveprospered in the role, if we accept common intelligence to mean surviving collegeas both she and many others did. Apolitician must have common intelligence but not much else except goodpolitical instincts which Palin certainly has.
In the meantime, itis obvious that she is not the right people to the country club republicancrowd who gave us George Bush and his crowd of political cronies who fumbledmany times.
In item two weunderstand that many rightwing media types trash her because she isrepresenting a populous base that they do not comprehend and is a challenge totheir friends and contacts. Sarah Palinis as much a challenge to republicans as she is to the democrats she must alsodefeat.
The media and theentertainment industry have also been over the top in its attacks on SarahPalin. It is shocking to an outsider andmust be more so to those who believed in the ideals of a civil society. The media chose to elect Barack Obama by cocooninghis back story as a Marxist professor as part of a long line of such academicfools. How ill prepared this made himfor high office is now becoming apparent as he struggles to learn on the job.
With Sarah, theychose to make up back story and grab every bit of jealous innuendo as a factand use it to write attack pieces. Theirsense of empowerment is there to be seen and can only be answered by the Americanpeople voting for Sarah in spite of them. They may well still prevail but their best stones are all thrown.
In the end, one ofthem admitted that nothing sticks. Thatis 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 HerResume
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 perceivedshortcomings 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 aperfectly normal state of affairs but the absence of it usually means theperson in question is either a cult-leader or has nothing to say.
Indeed, in order to figure out who a personreally is, it is often instructive to examine the enemies he or shehas cultivated – and Sarah has cultivated some of the best. Anyone beaming downfrom the planet Twilo, knowing nothing about Palin or her politics, couldreasonably survey the MosEisley Cantina collection of characters who stand inopposition to her and conclude she was worth a second look.
- The Republican Establishment
Barbara Bush is only the latest in a long lineof GOP patricians who have damned Palin with faint praise then suggested, withvarying degrees of subtlety, that she quietly depart the stage so thegrownups can take over.
Thistranscends Palin’s presidential ambitions, if in fact she has any. Althoughthis has become the lightning-rod of recent commentary – because her book’sbeen out a while and there’s only so much you can misrepresent and fabricate –what really exercises her critics (and their name is Legion, thoughmore often than not “Parker” or “Sullivan”) is her general popularity amongthe hoi polloi andher 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 arethe same grownups who presided over the frittering and fumbling away of thesame Reagan legacy they rhapsodize about on the Sunday shows – but perhaps themessage is: “No, really, this timethe grownups have grownup. We can take it from here.”
For those of us with reservations about thisparticular line of reasoning – like anyone who understands the Zen-like wisdomof Charlie Brown and the football – such assurances only reconfirm thewisdom of keeping Sarah around.
2. “Friends” on the Right
Others, nominally on the Right side of the fence, aren’tsubtle 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 turnmade pronouncements about Palin in which terms like “fatal cancer”, “joke”,“nincompoop”, “disastrous” and my personal favorite “a different version of Madonna” factorprominently. Perusing these utterances it’s easy to imagine some back-channelcontest to see who can be most snide and condescending without actually leavingspittle on the page.
It’s early days yet, but I have to believe this exercisein amused contempt from Kathleen Parker has to be a contender:
In thenearly two years since she became the first female Republican vice presidentialcandidate, 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 amom. We all had a mom. Why, even some Democratic women are moms. Don’t they love their little darlings just as much asconservative women do?
The MomMovement is hardly new. Soccer moms, long ago identified as a voting bloc, arenearly passe, iced from the zeitgeist by hockey momsand, now, mama bears. Womanhood has become a zoo. And we thought men were thebeasts.
And don’ttell her she can’t. If you do, she’s just gonna get feistier and cuter. Nextthing you know she’ll be a dadgum lioness givin’ heck to those media hyenas,just the way they can’t stand it.
Lookoutcha!
Unhappily these are the cleverest bits, themoney-in-the-bank zingers in what Parker imagines to be cutting-edge satire. Toparaphrase MarkTwain, let us draw the curtain ofcharity on further comment.
Like the Republican old guard they relentlessly shillfor, these scribes and pundits largely see political change in terms ofreplacing elites from the Left with elites from the Right, which necessarilyincludes them.
They see the Left as friendly opponents in a largelybenign game, which will be won sometimes, lost sometimes, but will always beginand end with a handshake, and will be repeated in perpetuity with essentiallythe same rules. It does not occur to them that their opponents have been playing the game only insofar as it advanced theirpurpose, and are now poised to change the rules dramatically and, in theextreme case, cancel the game altogether.
Long story short guys, noamount of civilized sucking up to your Ivy League counterparts on the Left willmake them like or respect you. You care deeply about this, Palin doesn’t, andthat’s why you despise her.
3. The Media
So shrill and venomous has been the media’s reaction toPalin – reminiscent of the Ringwraiths screeching over the empty beds at thePrancing Pony – that it’s earned its own pseudo-psychiatric term “PalinDerangement Syndrome”.
This obviously is not how they prefer to roll. The Lefttraditionally operates best in an “iron fist in a velvet glove” mode. Inpractical terms, this involves donning a collegial, come-let-us-reason-togetherhappy-mask and expressing half-baked and ultimately scary ideas through a gauzy filter of euphemisms, platitudes and speciouslogic. Historically that velvet glove doesn’t tend to come off as long aseveryone nods and smiles.
It could be argued that everyone, including theRepublicans, was nodding and smiling right up to the moment John McCain slippedaway from his minders and chose Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. Withinhours it seemed, the media, which had shown a remarkable lack of curiosityabout candidate Barack Obama’s credentials, background, associations andpublished utterances covered Palin’s home town likeshad 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 evenapolitical bystanders pause.
It shouldn’t have, even when the Left was machine-gunningthe lifeboats after Palin returned to Alaska
Consider a recent contribution by Richard Cohen, who wasso upset by Palin’s book it triggered flashbacks:
When Iwas 11, my father thought it was time to show my sister and me the nation’scapital. … 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 – arooming house, I think. This was 1952, and the United States
It isSarah Palin who brings back these memories.
Given the fact he actually pressed the “Publish” key onthis breathtakingly stupid juxtaposition it’s difficult not to conclude theflashback was drug-induced.
One of Cohen’s television counterparts, Ed Schultz – whofor the uninitiated is kind of the Left’s answer to RalphKramden – offers a similar analysis. Those of you wondering how often, and inhow many ways, you can string the words “race”, “racist”, “hate” and “hatred”together in a short segment pay close attention to thisguy. He’s one of the best.
The syndrome however has probably achieved its finest flower in Andrew Sullivan, of the onceprestigiousAtlantic. When not demanding, in the words of William A. Jacobson, “a virtual inspection of Palin’s uterus to verify if Trigreally is her son,” Sullivan produces cutting-edge prose such asthat below. Presumably dictating this with a cold compress over his eyes, he explainswhy he temporarily shut down his blog in the aftermath of the release ofPalin’s first book.
Whendealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorband make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about herlife. There are so many fabrications anddelusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it – andcomparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective realityshe has previously provided – is a bewildering task. She is a deeply disturbedperson which makes this work of fiction andfact all the more challenging to read.
[…]
Since theDish has tried to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Palin’s unhinged grip onreality from the very beginning – specifically her fantastic story of her fifthpregnancy - we feel it’s vital that we grapple with this new data asfairly and as rigorously as possible.
He might have added “… and, besides, I really need to liedown 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 peoplewhere Palin is concerned. With every new silly, counter-factual, hopelesslypredictable hit-piece they churn out they might as well just add theboilerplate disclaimer: “I am a desperately unhappy, deeply neuroticpseudo-intellectual whose only pleasure comes imagining myself superior toSarah Palin and every ‘ordinary’ American she represents,” because that’s whatscreams across the divide.
4. The Entertainment Industry
Liberalssee themselves as part of the deployment; Hollywood celebrities are theirgenerals … In general, wildly overpaid narcissists are the last people whoshould be commenting on subjects of any importance. But the Hollywood
~ AnnCoulter, Treason, pp.245-6
The entertainment industry, accurately described above,has taken up the cudgels against Palin and her family mining comedic veinsalmost exclusively limited to: “she’s so slutty”, “she’s so stupid” and “she’sso hypocritical”.
For sheer versatility David Letterman has to be at thetop of the pack, incorporating allof these themes into one two minute segment:
Letterman, who knows a thing or two about sexual impropriety himself as it turns out, gained most notorietyfor a joke he made about one of Palin’s daughter’s having sex with AlexRodriguez during a baseball game. I don’t know about you, but, having a youngdaughter myself, my sides are still splitting over that one:
Further down (okay, way further down) the pantheon, butevery bit as classy, we find the likes of Joy Behar and Sarah Bernhardt,cackling like the embittered wallflowers they are over Bristol Palin notwinning 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 comeon the “View” and they dance. She said that her mother likes her being in thecage.
BERNHARD:This is what kills me –
DANA: Well, maybe that willprevent her from having another baby.
It would be extravagant to claim that before Sarah Palindogpile we had no inkling how vulgar, nasty and breathtakingly obtuse ourentertainment and entertainers had become. Ann Coulter alone devotes an entirechapter of Treason to the Post 9/11 reactions of industry members aptlyentitled “Celebrity Traitors: ‘now that I’m sober I watch a lot of news’”. Wecan however assert with some confidence thatwith Palin our glitteratihavedropped the pretense that it’s only about the US government andare now utterly transparent in their contempt for the type of American Palinrepresents, which is most of us.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether or not SarahPalin is qualified to be president, or even if her current influence inconservative politics is warranted, but arguably the factthat she is none of the people described above has to count in her favor.
If she achieves nothing else in her lifetime excepthaving – just by virtue of who she is and what she represents – flushed some ofthem out of hiding, that alone should secure her aplace 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
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Many Republicans are urging Sarah Palin to run for president. But theTea Party Nation wants her to vie for chairwoman of the Republican NationalCommittee. The group’s founder, Judson Phillips, has sent a letter to theformer Alaska
"In order for the tea party/conservative movement to besuccessful, we have to have someone conservative running the GOP," he toldthe news service. "She is the perfect candidate. If she does not try, I amafraid 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 wastefulspending, which has occurred under the watch of Michael Steele. Finally, she issimply a rock star. She can raise money like no one else out there that I canthink of."
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