I just love Noonan's "It's over."
UPDATE: With a generous hat-tip to Oliver Willis it seems Peggy Noonan's opinion of Sarah Palin has changed drastically . . . in a couple short days (assuming she didn't write this column this morning):
Because [Palin] jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.
Other than the nonsensical idea that there are "real" feminists on the one hand, and "Yale Gender Studies" feminists on the other (God, what an old, tired bit of crap this is), it seems she is working awfully hard here to gild this particularly rotted lily.
To be blunt - all the evidence suggests Sarah Palin ran Wasilia, and now Alaska, as a thug, silencing critics and opponents, using state resources to carry out personal vendettas, and even trying to ban books in the public library. She is as far out on the extreme right as one can get and still have any hope of success even in as red a state as Alaska. She is no more a feminist than I am a White Supremacist. In a sane world, she would be laughed at, McCain would be laughed at, and Obama would do no campaigning because the laughter at McCain's really stupid pick would continue all the way until Election Day.
Since we don't live in a sane world, we're going to have to put up with, in Peggy's own words, "political bullshit" until then. But, we can still laugh.
5 comments:
It's an amusing attempt at backpedalling, but to coin a phrase, "It's over."
I hope I am wrong, but I think she is viable as a candidate -- that is, is electable -- because of all the negatives you outline.
And, I think if she is not torn down, we will lose.
Dad damn it, if I didn't think outside my upbringing, I'd be for her because she aqnd her effed-up family are, rreally one of us.
Obama keeps his cool, and scoffs at who she is enough to make it a joke, if not a farce -- or lets his surrogates do it -- then he can win.
ER, I think you are confusing "electable" with "appealing to the right-wing base of the Republican Party". She is, sad to say, almost a poster child of a caricature of a bad candidate. Leaving aside her "effed-up family", which I do, it is quite clear that any attempt to address her "record", either as mayor of Wasilia or Governor of Alaska, will only create more and more headaches for McCain. She is attempting, right now, to revisit the old "culture wars" divide between "small town" and big city.
This is a bad political movie written by a bad hack and starring C-list actors. The fact that she looks like Tina Fey only clinches the whole caricature thing for me. This is real life masquerading as parody masquerading as parody.
It seems to me that if a television network is paying people for their opinions, then they should state their opinions on the air. If they are just reciting the Republican or Democratic Party daily talking points, then they are worthless. I want to see Noonan and Chuck Todd say what the hell they really think about McCain, Sarah Palin, and everything else or get the hell off my TV.
The moron crowd was no doubt thrilled to see that their hockey mom could actually read a speech properly last night, but why aren't the TV pundits pointing out that the Republicans are studiously avoiding talking about the issues, their (Bush's) record on the issues, the consequences of their positions on the issues, or any damn thing else other than attacking Obama on spurious grounds?
I know why, but it still makes me puke.
Well, on one thing you have to congratulate the Republicans for lowering expectations so far that just doing a decent reading off the teleprompter means you're a "viable candidate."
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