The Crowbar

We all know by now the ever-classy Peggy Noonan is no fan of Sarah Palin, whom she considers to be a “dope.” And, because Palin persists, Noonan senses to the need to take another shot at her in the latest piece about Palin’s resignation,  A Farewell to Harms.

It’s obvious that Palin was woefully unprepared to be the vice-presidential candidate when John McCain tapped her last year. However, the real debate is about whether Palin has the capacity to learn and the capacity to handle a position like the presidency.

I’ll tell you, I’m not convinced Palin can handle the presidency. But, unlike Ms. Uppity Noonan, I’m also not convinced that she can’t handle it. It is difficult, at this stage, to separate out the neophyte mistakes from chronic character failures. It’s only been 8 months since the tectonic pressures of the media limelight and leftwing/elitist disgust hit her & her family in a volcanic explosion.

It’s very clear that Noonan, being a member of the amberized upper upper class, does not truly understand Palin is all about. Working AND Middle class people identify with her – for you mystified Harvard/Yale/Dartmouth/Brown/Columbia/Fairleigh Dickinson graduates, that means they see themselves in her. They see her and they see how THEY would react being in her situation. They might have an awful, embarrassing interview with Katie Couric. They might falter when pressed on their understanding of foreign policy. They might feel the need to resign as Governor if it their mere presence was causing massive logistic problems for their state.

On display is Noonan’s usually well-hidden disdain for anyone who she considers to be intellectually inferior to her, which, I suspect, includes nearly all working and middle class Americans. Being an admitted “bubblehead,” a.k.a. ‘elitist media snob,’ it’s not that surprising that Noonan fails to see the undercurrent in Palin’s persistent popularity among the Republican base AND among the the working and middle classes.

Noonan has missed that the lower and middle classes sense a poison: a growing and dangerous arrogance amongst the ruling intellectuals and power elites. Sarah Palin in all her undereducated, “not thoughtful” glory represents what elitists like Noonan fear: popular uprising against their corrupt, manipulative, power-mad ways.

Says Noonan:

Here’s why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

Amazingly, Noonan is arguing that ONLY geniuses need apply for high political office, because it’s just too “complicated” for us regular folk. What nonsense. She also fails to mention that the “burdens and assumptions of the federal government” were placed upon us by those genius elitist thinkers who can’t manage recognize their own folly, their own human frailties and weaknesses, their blind lust for power, and the precariousness of their endless manipulations.

It’s not Sarah Palin’s seeming lack of thought or “heft” the power/media elites are concerned with, it’s the fact that she persists because she’s been imbued with the anti-elitist, anti-corruption sentiments of the working and middle classes. They “made” her but they can’t unmake her because she’s bigger than them now.

The elites H-A-T-E Sarah Palin becasue she represents their greatest fear: being exposed as merely human, as unqualified as the rest of us to hold their lofty positions of power.

“Keynesian concerns” were not properly considered in the first stimulus debate, according to everyone’s favorite hard-left backwards-thinking economist Paul Krugman.

What wasn’t considered?

During the initial discussion of the stimulus, the debate was framed almost entirely as a debate between Obama and those who said the stimulus was too big; the voices of those saying it was too small were largely frozen out. And they still are…

Yes, Krugman is a member of the Keynesian School of Economic Magick With a ‘K.’ This school of thought believes that government spending is imbued with special pOWerZ to make consumers & producers suddenly realize, “Wow, if the government is spending gobs of money, then everything’s going to be A-OK.” Sadly, such economics only work in places like Pleasantville. In full-color reality, government spending only changes who gets to decide where the wealth is spent – and that would be the politicians, of course, who Always Know Better That You.

So then, here’s the kicker:

the voices calling for stronger stimulus are, may I say, sorta kinda respectable — several Nobelists in the bunch, plus a large fraction of the prominent economists who predicted the housing crash before it happened.

Having a Nobel prize doesn’t mean squat if you’re pushing asinine ideas.

< Pause briefly to consider Nobel prize winners Climate Change Preacher Al Gore and Terrorist Yasser Afarat. >

Also, it doesn’t take a “prominent economist” to know when a housing crash is coming – a rhudimentary understanding of economics can easily provide such a prediction. It was pretty obvious to me (not an economist) a housing crash was coming – the frantic pace of growth was unsustainable, especially combined with free-wheeling credit.

But somehow, the pro-stimulus people are unpersons. Who makes these decisions?

Who? Thankfully, not Waaah-Nobody-Listens-To-My-Bad-Ideas-But-They-Should-Because-I-Have-a-Nobel-Prize Krugman.

ThingProgress people like Ian Millhiser love to fan the flames when it comes to race conversation in US politics. Further, Millhiser and the TP Team would love to have false villain to distract from Sotomayor’s hard-left resume. Has Jeff Sessions made mistakes in his political career? Yes, but the TP Team would have you believe ridiculous things like Sessions is on some “lifelong crusade against civil rights.” That’s just preposterous.

Why does Millhiser think Sessions is so villainous?

Sessions has focused his attacks on Sotomayor’s past service on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF), a leading civil rights organization that Sessions calls “extreme” because it “brought several race discrimination lawsuits for minorities” while Sotomayor sat on its board.

Millhiser wishes accusations of extremism were “absurd,” but the truth is that PRLDEF has taken some pretty extremist views, one example:

In 1989, PRLDEF signed on to a Supreme Court amicus brief in Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health that argued that an Ohio law that generally required (subject to a judicial-bypass exception) that one of the parents of a minor be notified before the minor underwent abortion was unconstitutional. In its own statement of its interest in the case, PRLDEF again declared that it “opposes any efforts to overturn or in any way restrict the rights recognized in Roe v. Wade.” The two dozen or so other signatories on the brief included an abortion clinic, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, various other feminist groups, and the World Workers Party. The Supreme Court rejected PRLDEF’s position by a 6 to 3 vote, with the majority including Justice O’Connor and even Justice Stevens (who joined nearly all of the majority opinion and who concurred in the judgment).

The Supreme Court is the end of the line. Sotomayor’s connections with an extremist group are fair game. Millhiser and the TP Team would (and should) be all over a conservative nominee’s connection to an extremist group. Millhiser’s credibility is damaged by his pathetic assertions.

To most of the left, the only people who should have their civil rights protected is anyone who doesn’t have white skin. To lefties like Millhiser and the TP Team, white people don’t REALLY have civil rights, those rights were forfeited as reparations for America’s past racist sins. And, if someone who has white skin, like Sessions, investigates allegations of fraudulent voter registration (that happen to take place in a black community), then that person is automatically “crusading against civil rights.” What base thinking.

Instead, think how different the world would be if everyone were actually treated equally under the law, regardless of skin color or ethnicity. Sotomayor disgracefully opposes that world where blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos, etc. are respected as equals in society. Her judicial viewpoint would help ensure future generations are afflicted with victimhood psychology. Her nomination should be thusly opposed.

Taking a disrespectful snipe at his former Atlantic colleague, Andrew Sullivan manages to show the world what a petty, disgraceful man he is:

Douthat’s Nixonian Delusions

Some helpful factual testing of Ross’s wishful thinking that Sarah Palin is the Evita for the right, ushering in a new era of criminalized abortion, closeted gays, federally subsidized churches, and lots of subsidies for “real Americans”. Mark Blumenthal analyzes herChristianist base here; Charles Franklin shows why everyone else is slack-jawed.

He didn’t even bother to cite his subject: Douthat’s original article, Palin & Her Enemies.

Douthat never claimed “Palin is the Evita for the right,” nor does Douthat advocate “criminalized abortion, closeted gays, federally subsidized churches, and lots of subsidies for “real Americans.” This really makes no sense because Douthat is clearly not Palin’s cheerleader:

But last Friday’s bizarre, rambling resignation speech should take her off the political map for the duration of the Obama era.

I suspect Sullivan is carrying a grudge against Douthat for this little gem:

If Palin were exactly what her critics believe she is — the distillation of every right-wing pathology, from anti-intellectualism to apocalyptic Christianity — then she wouldn’t be a terribly interesting figure. But this caricature has always missed the point of the Alaska governor’s appeal — one that extends well outside the Republican Party’s shrinking base…

…Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.

Ouch. These words must have burned bouncing around Sullivan’s tiny mind.

Maybe, too, Sullivan is just jealous that Douthat got the coveted NYT columnist slot and HE didn’t.

It wouldn’t suprise me. Really, it wouldn’t.

In her “Sunday Roundup,” Arianna Huffington demonstrates just how shallow her understanding of politics is:

The GOP’s Runnin’ Off the Rails tour continued this week with Sarah Palin announcing she will resign, Mark Sanford admitting he “crossed lines” with multiple women (while providing an instant new slang term for sex: “crossing the ultimate line”), James Inhofe welcoming Al Franken to the Senate by saying, “We are going to get the clown from Minnesota,” and John Boehner spending an hour on the House floor reading aloud portions of the landmark climate-change bill he labeled “a piece of shit.” Also this week, U.S. troops in Iraq were finally cause for celebration, fireworks, and dancing in the streets of Baghdad. It turns out it was not our arrival in Iraq that was greeted with flowers and sweets but our departure. It’s an agonizing lesson learned six years, $1 trillion, and 4,321 U.S. deaths too late.

All of the items cited are supposed to prove the GOP is “running off the rails.” It’s just so tiring to see either side of the political spectrum stoop to the extra-stupid strain of populism which declares the other side defunct because of the behavior of a tiny minority of it’s members.

Arianna Huffington is not a serious political commentator, she is a hack.

The Huffington Post as a whole emulates Arianna’s superficial treatment of politics, which is partly why it’s so popular. It’s mostly leftist authors are generally well known and their agenda-driven populist rants go relatively unchallenged.