By Ralph Peters
I KNOW Sarah Palin, and so does my wife. Neither of us ever actually met the governor of Alaska, but we grew up with her - in the small-town America despised by the leftwing elite. One gal-pal classmate of my wife's has even traveled from New York's Finger Lakes to Alaska to hunt moose with her husband. (Got one, too.) And no, Ms. Streisand, she isn't a redneck missing half her teeth - she's a lawyer.
The sneering elites and their mediacrat fellow travelers just don't get it: How on earth could anyone vote for someone who didn't attend an Ivy League school? And having more than 1.7 children marks any woman as a rube. (If Palin had any taste, her teenage daughter would've had a quiet abortion in a discreet facility.)
And what kind of retro-Barbie would stay happily married to her high-school sweetheart? Ugh. She even kills animals and eats them. (The meat and fish served in the upscale bistros patronized by Obama supporters appears by magic - it didn't really come from living things. . .)
Palin has that hick accent, too. And that busy-mom beehive 'do. Double ugh! Bet she hasn't even read Ian McEwan's latest novel and can't explain Frank Gehry's vision for a new architecture. She and her blue-collar (triple ugh!) husband don't even own a McMansion, let alone an inherited family compound on the Cape. And she wants to be vice president?
The opinion-maker elites see Sarah Palin clearly every time they look up from another sneering article in The New Yorker: She's a country-bumpkin chumpette from a hick state with low latte availability. She's not one of them and never will be. That's the real disqualifier in this race.
Now let me tell you what those postmodern bigots with their multiple vacation homes and their disappointing trust-fund kids don't see: Sarah Palin's one of us. She actually represents the American people. When The New York Times, CNN, the NBC basket of basket cases and all the barking blog dogs insult Palin, they're insulting us. When they smear her, they're smearing every American who actually works for a living, who doesn't expect a handout, who doesn't have a full-time accountant to parse the family taxes, who believes in the Pledge of Allegiance and who thinks a church is more than just a tedious stop on daughter Emily's 100K wedding day.
Go ahead, faux feminists and Hollywood deep thinkers: Snicker at Sarah America's degree from the University of Idaho, but remember that most Americans didn't attend Harvard or Princeton as a legacy after daddy donated enough to buy his kid's way in. Go ahead, campaign strategists: Mock Americans who go to church and actually pray. But you might want to run the Census numbers first. And go right ahead: Dismiss all of us who remember how, on the first day of deer season, our high school classrooms were half empty (not a problem at Andover or Exeter).
That rube accent of Palin's? It's a howler. But she sounds a lot more like the rest of us than a Harvard man or a Smithie ever will. Why does Sarah Palin energize all of us who don't belong to the gilded leftwing circle? Because she's us. We sat beside her in class. We hung out after school (might've even shared a backseat combat zone on prom night). And now she lives next door, raising her kids. For the first time since Ronald Reagan, our last great president, we, the people, see a chance that one of us might have a voice in governing our country. ....
Our country can't afford another one of these clowns. Harvard isn't the answer - Harvard's the problem. So here's the message Palin is sending on behalf of the rest of us (the down-market masses Dems love at election time and ignore once the voting's done): The rule of the snobs is over. It's time to give one of us a chance to lead. Sen. John McCain's one of us, too. He raised hell at Annapolis (quadruple ugh: military!), and he'll raise the right kind of hell in Washington. McCain's so dumb he really loves his country. Sarah Palin's dumb that way, too. How terribly unfashionable.
More here
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Hating Sarah Palin
The left-liberal Webzine Salon has become something of a clearinghouse for rage against Alaska's governor. The latest contribution, from one Anne Lamott, actually uses the H word:
I sat outside a 7-Eleven and had a sacramental Dove chocolate bar. Jeez: Here we are again. A man and a woman whose values we loathe and despise--lying, rageful and incompetent, so dangerous to children and old people, to innocent people in every part of the world--are being worshiped, exalted by the media, in a position to take a swing at all that is loveliest about this earth and what's left of our precious freedoms.
When I got home from church, I drank a bunch of water to metabolize the Dove bar and called my Jesuit friend, who I know hates these people, too. I asked, "Don't you think God finds these smug egomaniacs morally repellent? Recoils from their smugness as from hot flame?" And he said, "Absolutely. They are everything He or She hates in a Christian."
I have been in a better mood ever since, and have decided not to even say this woman's name anymore, because she fills me with such existential doubt, such a sense of impending doom and disbelief, that only the Germans could possibly have words for it.
What's hilarious about this is that, except for the obligatory "or She," Lamott and her unnamed interlocutor fit exactly the stereotype people on the left typically hold of conservatives, and religious conservatives in particular: smug yet insecure, dogmatic and intolerant and filled with hate and rage. Even Lamott's descriptions of Palin more aptly describe Lamott in the act of describing Palin!
Source
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ELSEWHERE
The arty-farties again: "The art world is intrigued by a statue called "Mao Suit," a five-and-a-half-ton steel representation of the dictator's iconic jacket, currently installed on Park Avenue in Manhattan, a choice of location that should merit some kind of Nobel Prize in Irony. Critics have noted that the bottom of the jacket is rather generously cut, suggesting that the chairman was prosperous to the point of being bourgeois. "It suggests that Mao was quite plump," Melissa Chiu, director of the Asia Society's museum, told the New York Sun. She added: "Yes, his policies exacted suffering among his people: There is a common saying about Mao being 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong." Seventy percent right? St,phane Courtois's Black Book of Communism estimates that the Maoist project in China killed some 65 million people, about two-thirds of Communism's worldwide toll of 100 million dead. Somewhere, Mao's ghost is wondering, Does this genocide make me look fat?"
Party of Lawyers : "Barack Obama and Joe Biden are both lawyers. Neither John McCain nor Sarah Palin is a lawyer. Kedwards were both lawyers too, whereas neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney is one. Eugene Volokh, a lawyer, extends the pattern further: Of 12 Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominees since 1980, all but two (Jimmy Carter and Al Gore) were lawyers. Of the nine Republican nominees in the same period, all but two (Dan Quayle and Bob Dole) were nonlawyers."
For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH (2), TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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2 comments:
Götz Aly, ex-Maoist historian, created a storm in the media teacup in Germany recently when he pointed out some similarities of the 60s and the 30s youth movements. Another left-wing historian has discovered strong antisemitism in the Rote Fahne and other communist papers of the late 1920s. Very many commmunists resurfaced as stormtroopers in 1933. From 1919 on there was a large and complicated set of socialist and nationalist revolutionaries outside the NSDAP (some also inside).
Some important 68ers were right-wing before 68 and are now neonazi.
But there were and there are also important differences, between the two extremes.
I *told* you, JR, to stop becoming increasingly cynical and shrill about the USA's drift towards Leftism, on and off for the last couple of years. I live here. Upper West Side of NYC even, and I dine in cafes daily, as well as have family all over the country. A reminder is in order that even our little Island of Man orders up a Giuliani every few years. Our limit is actually when the subways and buildings start getting covered in graffiti. Lately the only graffiti is sandpaper scrawlings on subway windows, a sad fad that started going away two years ago. Your spy on the ground detects zero Bush backlash in the overall USA . That includes Manhattan because Bloomberg the Invisible (and Spitzer and the black cloud vibe of the Clintons who keep offices Harlem) are starting to allow psychotic "homeless people" harass people again. When a Speed Freak tries to start fights with taxi cabs coming towards him, and then takes military bearing on any concerned pedestrians and the police on every block do nothing about it as the 10:35PM "Jesus Freak" wakes up all the kids in the neighborhood every night, well...that's kind of like what got Guilani elected, which namely was the expectation that guys with buckets of dirty water ("Squeegee Men") at EVERY street corner would threaten to break off your rental car windshield wipers if you didn't give them a dollar for splashing mud on your car. That's the vibe I'm getting here, again, now, and that's Manhattan. In the rest of the country, it's an odd mix of very old voters (Boomers) who can't afford cancer medicines along with a very strong desire to nuke Iran.
Did you notice how American bloggers essentially shut down fascism in Canada, recently, by which I mean we shoved our First Amendment into their culture.
There is a *threshold* effect in the USA. Getting our attention tends to require great injustice, or a general breakdown of simple law and order. Afghanistan got our attention didn't it? So did Canada, thus making an exception to the old joke of what American's think about Canada (= "We don't.")
Do you know why the Libertarian Party doesn't get traction here? It's because party vs. party equates to deadlock, which *is* Libertarian, without any given leader having much power. Note how rarely we allow a Reagan, and now a Paulin to have chances at leadership. They might actually be effective, a risk we will rarely take unless things really need shaking up.
-=NYC=-
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