David Yeagley at BadEagle.com writes a pro-Sarah piece and for his trouble, gets flak from some posters.
Sarah Palin and the American Folk Tradition
Blogger Lame Cherry, in his inimitable and idiosyncratic style, offers his thoughts about Sarah.
From the Never Yet Melted blog, a post called Eliminating Palin, which includes a link to this article, describing the Democrats' attack plan.
And so the word went out, from that time and place: Eviscerate Sarah Palin like one of her field-dressed moose. Turn her life upside down. Attack her politics, her background, her educational history. Attack her family. Make fun of her husband, her children. Unleash the noted gynecologist Andrew Sullivan to prove that Palin’s fifth child was really her grandchild. Hit her with everything we have: Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, taking a beer-run break from her quixotic search for Mr. Right to drip venom on Sister Sarah; post-funny comic David Letterman, to joke about her and her daughters on national television; Katie Couric, the anchor nobody watches, to give this Alaskan interloper a taste of life in the big leagues; former New York Times hack Todd “Mr. Dee Dee Myers” Purdum, to act as an instrument of Graydon Carter’s wrath at Vanity Fair. Heck, we even burned her church down. Even after the teleological triumph of The One, the assault had to continue, each blow delivered with our Lefty SneerTM (viz.: Donny Deutsch yesterday on Morning Joe), until Sarah was finished.''
[...]
Did Sarah stand for “family values”? Flay her unwed-mother daughter. Did she represent probity in a notoriously corrupt, one-family state? Spread rumors about FBI investigations. Did she speak with an upper-Midwest twang? Mock it relentlessly on Saturday Night Live. Above all, don’t let her motivate the half of the country that doesn’t want His Serene Highness to bankrupt the nation, align with banana-republic Communist dictators, unilaterally dismantle our missile defenses, and set foot in more mosques than churches since he has become president. We’ve got a suicide cult to run here.
And that’s why Sarah had to go. Whether she understood it or not, she threatened us right down to our most fundamental, meretricious, elitist, sneering, snobbish, insecure, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders bones. She was, after all, a “normal” American, the kind of person (or so I’m told) you meet in flyover country. The kind that worries first about home and hearth and believes in things like motherhood and love of country the way it is, not the way she wants to remake it.''
I was talking with a friend today about this; I wondered aloud just why the Democrats were in all-out attack mode from the git-go with Sarah Palin. If she were just another hick from a 'red state', an ignoramus redneck female, why the need to bring out the big guns and to attack her so relentlessly? Overkill was not an inappropriate word for it.
Even more do I wonder why she was attacked almost as ferociously by the paleo right. In fact, the Democrats and the far right are singing out of the same hymnbook where Sarah Palin is concerned. Both condemn her family life and her alleged failings as a mother (the left is more hypocritical here) and the atheist curmudgeons on the right sneer at Sarah Palin's Christian faith as do the leftists. Sometimes the left and the paleo right converge and this is when I least like the paleos.
Look, I know why many on the right dislike Palin: for one thing, they, like the left, call her hypocritical for pretending to be for 'family values' and yet being a career woman. I have no defense for her on that count, but I think the right is being excessively critical of Palin when they never seemed to utter a peep about any other married-with-children female politician. As far as her maternal failure which is supposedly demonstrated by her daughter's questionable moral choices, was anyone on the right critical of Dick Cheney for his gay daughter's lifestyle choice? Or Jeb Bush for the fact that his child was in a scrape with the law? I heard very few condemnations there.
On the racial right, the dislike of Palin is justified by some on the basis of her marrying a man who is said to be 1/8 Eskimo or Alaskan Native. Others sneer at her 'judeoxtianity' and her support for Israel.
However, how many national Republican politicians are anything but supportive of Israel? Perhaps Ron Paul, but how many others? Again, I don't recall hearing any of the same critics condemn Phil Gramm who married an Asian woman, or others who've married outside their race. Why is everybody such a purist only when it comes to Sarah Palin?
I suppose some simply object to a female in high positions, and it's not out of line to object on that basis, as far as I'm concerned. But I believe that much of this was a backlash to feminism, with Sarah Palin standing in for all those pushy feminists that many men are fed up with. If so, then just state the reason up-front, and explicitly say you don't want women in political office or in high positions. There is a legitimate case that can be made for that; our Founding Fathers did not give women the franchise, after all.
During the months of last year's interminable presidential campaign, I blogged about getting into an argument with a liberal relative who, out of the blue, started shrieking that she ''hated'' Sarah Palin. The vehemence of her contempt really took me aback. I asked why she hated Palin, and got a rather incoherent response (unsurprisingly), but the gist of it was that Sarah Palin was ''stupid.''
Again, don't we have plenty of clinically, measurably stupid people in office, and in high office? Haven't we always, especially since we have a stupid segment of the electorate who vote strictly based on party labels or on personal charm and ''charisma''? Why is low intelligence (if indeed Palin is of mediocre or less intelligence) suddenly a disqualification for office? If it is, we should throw quite a few elected officials out of office, and disqualify a great many who aspire to office. Some people who have a reputation for political brilliance are not so much intelligent as glib and good with words. The two things are often associated, but verbal skill doesn't always equate to intellectual depth or wisdom. Conversely, some people who are inarticulate speakers are nonetheless highly intelligent in a practical sense. I am not claiming that Palin is; I don't know her, any more than do her loudest critics.
Maybe Palin is no genius; I haven't studied her career or her record in depth, to be honest. However, much of the opprobrium aimed at her seems gratuitous, ''just because'', and not based on any real knowledge of her, and this is what I have a problem understanding.
Why is she such a polarizing figure?
We all know the left hates anybody who is (to them) a ''fundamentalist Christian'' or indeed any kind of Christian who takes his faith seriously enough to actually believe it. We know they tend to hate conservative minorities because they believe these people to be ''inauthentic'' or ''self-hating'' if they don't embrace the victimhood line, and don't take sides against White males. So because Sarah is not a textbook feminist like Hillary or other leftist women, she is a traitor to her sex. On the other hand, many right-wing males hate Palin because to them she is the prototypical feminist.
For the left, she is too Christian, for many right-wing Christians, she is a 'rapture bunny' or a 'fundie' or a 'judeoxtian'. So she is condemned by both sides for the same things, but from different angles. Is she too much of a feminist, or not feminist enough? Is she too Christian, or is she a Zionist ''judeoxtian''?
The left condemns her choice to support her wayward daughter, and would probably prefer that she encourage abortion in that situation. Some on the right insist she is condoning her daughter's premarital sex by not hiding it from the public. I really don't know what her critics on the right would have her do, since abortion is not an option for most conservatives and Christians.
I wonder, too, if many on the right did not want to throw Palin overboard simply because they saw her as an embarrassment (not patrician nor ''refined'' enough for the country club set) or because they considered her as too vulnerable to the left's attacks. Her background, her life, her family, and her religious faith made her an attractive target for the professional haters on the left. When those on the left see a Christian, they zero in on any flaws or shortcomings, any potential skeletons in the closet, and rub their hands in glee. They know they can start the barrage of accusations of 'hypocrisy', their all-purpose weapon against any Christian or social conservative:
The NRO article again :
In Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, “the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.''
The thing is, it's impossible for any of us flawed human beings to ever live up 100 percent to any of the ideals we espouse. That does not invalidate the ideals and the standards, nor does it make us hypocrites. There are no perfect people, but just because there are not, and can never be, does not mean that we jettison all standards and decide we are all laws unto ourselves, as the left and the libertarians would wish.
Personally I am not a Palin admirer in the sense that some women are; I simply know too little about her, and I doubt she would share most of my views on the things that matter the most to me. However, what politician does? Even those gifted thinkers on our side, some whose blogs I read every day, do not share my perspectives in all things, nor is that to be expected. I am sure my blogroll partners differ with me on certain things, but I consider most of them allies in a broad sense.
Those of us who are dissenters from the existing order have little chance of finding any political figure or public person of note who will share most of our ideas and goals. At this moment, looking for a mainstream politician who reflects what we think and hope for is like looking for a unicorn. The best we can hope for at this point is to find politicians who are at least not our enemies, and who will more or less defend the historic American people, the White majority.
And it may be, as I said, that politics in the most literal sense is not the answer anyway.
But when we are so busy eating our own, tearing apart our own people, we have little hope of succeeding in any effort to counter the existing order. We have to be able to find more unity among our own people, and to stop the savage infighting if we are to succeed in even a modest way.
We can write off most of the White liberal/multicult types; they are lost and they prefer it that way. They ''do not love the truth''.
Meantime, I still wonder why the out-of-all-proportion fear and loathing toward Sarah Palin. It does not speak well of us that we savage our own this way.
