Rage, Whining, Paranoia, Conspiracy Theories in Wake of Palin Resignation

The Palin phenomenon continues to amaze me. There is a big article that is making the rounds on right wing blogs is proof that a large section of the conservative movement has gone bat shit crazy.

Over at the National Review Online (NRO) is an article by a one David Kahane that is ludicrous, paranoid, and chock full of conspiracy theories. I thought it was intended to be satire but not to the people reading and commenting on it. Remember, NRO was founded by William F Buckley and was once considered a very highly respected, intellectual magazine.

The premise is a fictional narrative/confessional from a left wing operative. The story is that seeing that Sarah Palin was such a strong pick for the Republicans, the operatives decided to gather all the vast left wing conspirators and ruin her.

Read the full article here: I Still Hate You, Sarah

Excerpts:

Not only were we offended at the sheer effrontery of McCain’s pick: How dare the Republicans proffer this déclassée piece of Wasilla trailer trash whose only claim to fame was that she didn’t exercise her right to choose? Where were her degrees from Smith or Barnard, her internships at PETA, the Brookings Institution, or the Young Pioneers? We were also outraged that the Stupid Party had just nominated a completely unqualified candidate nobody had ever heard of, a first-term governor of Alaska whose previous experience consisted of a small-town mayoralty. As opposed to our guy, Barry Soetoro of Mombasa, Djakarta, and Honolulu, a first-term senator nobody had ever heard of, whose previous experience had been as a state senator (D., Daley Machine) in Illinois. After eight long, illegitimate, lawless years of &*^%BUSH$#@! tyranny, how dare you contest this election?

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.

OK. Take a breath. You can see the premise.

Here's a some other nuttiness:

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but maybe now you’re beginning to understand the high-stakes game we’re playing here. This ain’t John McCain’s logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United States of America. This is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won’t be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it.
...

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.

When I first saw this article, I read it thinking: oooh boy this is crazy. NRO will end up removing it. They didn't and it's making rounds on blogs.

I noticed it on popular Canadian blog Small Dead Animals yesterday, posted as Your must read of the week.

Be sure to check out the comments over there. Sample:

Posted by EBD:

David Kahane is my new hero. The guy knows what time it is, and he's not afraid to tap his watch and clear his throat, if you catch my drift.

Bang-on piece. Great to see.

This is what happens to people who only read the same blogs, listen to the same talk radio and watch shows like Glenn Beck. They lose touch with reality.

Two simple points of contention.

1. George W. Bush was in the White House for the last eight years, and up until 2006, had majority Republicans in both the House and Senate. If these vast left wing conspirators are that powerful, how do they explain that? (Funny too, they accuse Al Franken of stealing the election. Hmmm... do they really want to go there?)

2. Sarah Palin was not destroyed by the media. She destroyed herself when she opened her mouth. Even hardcore Republicans admit that she should "read up on international politics, etc." Which is an admission that she doesn't know anything. The public could see that, and that's why she's so unpopular.

If anything, the media has been soft on her. Look at this recent puff piece in Time Magazine:

Whether that is true or not, Palin's unconventional step speaks to an ingrained frontier skepticism of authority — even one's own. Given the plunging credibility of institutions and élites, that's a mood that fits the Palin brand. Résumés ain't what they used to be; they count only with people who trust credentials — a dwindling breed. The mathematics Ph.D.s who dreamed up economy-killing derivatives have pretty impressive résumés. The leaders of congressional committees and executive agencies have decades of experience — at wallowing in red ink, mismanaging economic bubbles and botching covert intelligence.

If ever there has been a time to gamble on a flimsy résumé, ever a time for the ultimate outsider, this might be it. "We have so little trust in the character of the people we elected that most of us wouldn't invite them into our homes for dinner, let alone leave our children alone in their care," writes talk-show host Glenn Beck in his book Glenn Beck's Common Sense, a pox-on-all-their-houses fusillade at Washington. Dashed off in a fever of disillusionment with those in power, Beck's book is selling like vampire lit, with more than 1 million copies in print.

In a way I'm glad Sarah Palin came along. It has exposed an element of the American right that had been under a rock for a while. Paranoia, whining, conspiracy theories. (These are not only the dominions of the far left.)

Polls say more than two thirds of Republicans strongly approve of Sarah Palin. Instead of dreaming up conspiracies, why don't they face that she's not a winner and try to win an election with somebody who might be? If not, it'll mean four more years of Obama, and more rage from them. It's hard to believe we're only six months into his term and these people think he wants to purposefully destroy the United States. Are the nutters going to snap out of this or is it going to get worse?

Final note: This line from the article, is the most pathetic whining: Did she speak with an upper-Midwest twang? Mock it relentlessly on Saturday Night Live.

Get a life.