The unhinged panic, the barking, anaphylactic rage, that drives seculars in their all-out attack on Sarah Palin is explicable. A careful dismantling of it, for all to see, would do each of us good, and the Palins a service. First, a round up.
David Letterman, commenting on Governor Palin’s trip to New York said she, “Bought makeup from Bloomingdale’s to update her ‘slutty flight attendant’ look.” Imagine him making the same joke of Michelle Obama.
Next, the manac evil of attacking someone’s young daughter probably didn’t occur to Dave. I am guessing a script writer did this one, “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game, during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” Why did Letterman’s writer feel right to assault a Palin girl, and not Malia Obama? Todd ought to get with the lawyers and work out a motivational knuckle sandwich for Dave. Challenge him to 12 rounds of boxing for charity, and beat the writer’s name out of him on TV. (Madison Square Garden, $150 ticket, sold out show)
Froma Harrop, as far to the hatred-left as you can get, had steam spitting out of her ears when she fired this one at a teenager in trouble. Back when the Palins attended the Republican convention, Harrop scalded that there was, “Palin’s pregnant 17-year-old looking defiant and stupid as she held mom’s fifth baby.”
Do you want your underage daughters treated this way? In the international media?
This is how the “tolerant”, “open-minded”, “generous”, liberal pundit expresses engagement on a meaningful public debate. Not by assaulting an idea, or even a politician, but by repeatedly assaulting the politician’s vulnerable teenage daughters.
“Mean old Dick Cheney”, my ass.
Recovering from our own revulsion, we think: How could they?
How could people so hate Sarah Palin, that they become this unhinged?
It’s this.
Liberalism used to have principles. If you consider Winston Churchill’s early liberalism, or even the aspirations of Lyndon Baines Johnson, there was a coherent advocacy, a set of ideas. But beginning perhaps with Churchill and ending with LBJ, modern liberalism became the, “dried up drain pipe of radicalism”. No one really believes it works anymore. We have to be reminded from time to time, but the arguments have, one by one, been retired. Economics, charity, defense, welfare – other principles have been shown, through much experiment, simply to work better.
If so, what does that leave? Today there is only one thing Left: Identity politics.
Liberals congratulate themselves that only they can “deliver” a black President. Only they can “deliver” the first Latina on the Supreme Court. But policy and character are abandoned playing fields. They cannot score on those natural surfaces anymore because the policies failed, and the character wallows out of bounds in abortion, Bill Clinton, and anti-religion. So the way to feel good about themselves is for liberals to be the undisputed champions of some seemingly unelevated minor league player.
Keep in mind that a candidate like Obama or Sotomayor does not have to believe in anything, nor be capable. The rookie need only be sufficiently telegenic, sufficiently spinnable, sufficiently Danica Patrick. If an Obama is elected, or a Sotomayor is seated, liberals now go around saying to each other, “We did that.” There is exultation. The tribe is the achievement. It’s the color of the skin, not the content of the character.
And that sets up the Palin problem.
If your entire business is trading futures in identity-image, the only way you profit is by defining a caricature of the other party as a has-been: fat, tired, old, white, men who frown, look down, and snort, “Of course, of course,”. Bill Bennett has free buffet at CNN so he will come and lose, grumbling at the tables; he’s the perfect elephant for the situation room.
But Sarah Palin is ball lightning, a meteor indoors. She is everything Democrats can’t readily go up against. Young, female, not-fat, bright eyed, ravishingly pretty, she shatters the required foil profile with a tight group from an AR-15. Obama can’t contrast-win juxtaposed a stereotypical Republican if the Republican did well in the swimsuit portion of the competition. Democrats need dimpled Bill Bennett and they need him to grumble right now. Preferably amidst weight gain.
It’s more incendiary than that. Palin has obliviously lived all her convictions and managed to be stunningly successful in politics and career. She did it while also possessing what so many of these shatter-brained, Sex In the City, New York feminists have failed at – family. Sarah Palin has it all. And? She’s not a secular feminist but is, in fact, (of all appalling things) a born-again, pro-life, Christian, loyal to her husband, provincial-bachhhhhh! They clop screaming with insensate rage into the streets, panting and screeching and sobbing and falling off their designer heels and. And nothing. That’s the point. There’s nothing they can do.
She is everything. They aren’t. She did it by being normal. They didn’t.
Can’t deal with it!
Reaction?
Xenophobia.
A lot of women in New York who missed the boat secretly wish they could be Sarah Palin. But since they can’t be, for hundreds of valid reasons (!), the solution is?
Kill her.
Wipe her out.
Annihilate the visage.
And women do know how to attack women; call the mother a slut and slap the daughter twice.
Palin hatred. Explained.
