January 27, 2011
By James Lewis
The biggest drama in politics today is Sarah Palin and how she is constantly assaulted by the left. Every week, we can watch how her rise in the national headlines causes the cultural elites to act like Snidely Whiplash -- evil curling mustache, big nasty smile, the works. Just watch 'em showing off their bloodthirsty rage. As soon as they see Sarah on TV, they spout like a Yellowstone geyser. It's a wonder to behold, if you can stand the sight.
What's her secret? That's what all the feminists must be wondering. Sarah Palin looks like the star of their teenage dreams, before they ever heard about Karl Marx or Germaine Greer. Sarah looks like a normal woman who is loved by a normal man. But her smile looks so genuine and wholesome that she's practically Doris Day running for president. Palin didn't make her career on the back of an Arkansas lowlife, like Hillary. She didn't marry into political power. Her last name isn't even hyphenated. Alaska politics is as nasty as D.C., and she still made it to the governorship. Sarah 'Cuda indeed.
Palin is all the things feminists ever wanted to be. She's Mom in "Father Knows Best," surrounded by smiling, mischievous kids. She reminds them of the things they have been told to erase from their own lives by the Commissars of PC, and therefore all the things they keep screwing up in their own lives.
The left is busting its gut, and not so much because of Palin's political résumé (which is far better than Obama's). This is all about the culture war -- the assault on American values for the last forty years. It's about Hollyweirdness and the malign perversity of the freaks who run the media. It's about Whoopi Goldberg explaining the sexual abuse of a child as "not really rape-rape." It's about power hungry, envious, mean, self-centered, narcissistic people, who instinctively resent and hate wholesome normality. Sarah is mythic.
Look at the difference. Barack H. Obama has worked his whole life to be worshiped by the Angry Left as a communist organizer in the Saul Alinsky mold of radical culture war. (Yes, "communist organizer" is what Alinsky was, and proud of it. That label "community organizer" is just another twisted lie. They don't organize; they make war on the most productive people, and they are proud of it.)
In stark contrast to Obama, Palin has lived the life of a ordinary American who has achieved extraordinary things. She is not an instinctive member of the power class. If she gets elected, she will get there on her own virtues and hard work.
Obama is all about the Chicago Machine going for nationwide power and control, placing the UAW on the Board of GM. Obama is descended from Saul Alinsky's infamous alliance between the left and the Chicago mob.
Governor Palin is about America taking back its culture of decency. Even without her political career, Sarah's celebrity is a huge threat to feminism, because in looking at her, the left keeps tearing off its smiley face, showing the angry, creepy face underneath. That is why WaPo's Dana Milbank actually tried to start a Twitter mob to force Sarah Palin out of the limelight. I don't know if Milbank is now actually tearing his diminishing hairs out, but he did so symbolically when he tried to censor Palin out of the limelight.
Censorship is something our media bosses do every day, but they don't usually make it this obvious to the public.
Senator Joseph McCarthy was exposed by the phrase "Have you no decency, Sir?" as if the American people suddenly realized that McCarthy was a demagogue. But the left has no decency; it has smeared and slandered decency over and over again, until whole generations of young people can no longer recognize decency as a basic human virtue. The left will never hold itself to that standard. It desires power and control too much. Everyday decency is just bourgeois morality, and the left holds such concepts in contempt. That is why an appeal to their conscience never works.
Then Sarah Palin comes along, and by gum, they tear their own masks off, over and over again. It's a kick to watch. If you can stand the tension.
The American people are watching. If the people rally to Sarah, instinctively, they will be going for wholesomeness and decency. If the people don't even recognize all this Snidely Whiplash rage from the left, you can kiss the culture goodbye. The left will have triumphed at last.
Sarah Palin is therefore a last-chance test of our cultural health. If the people don't get what's right in front of their eyes, if we allow Palin to be scapegoated like Clarence Thomas and Newt Gingrich were scapegoated by a "high tech lynch mob," as Justice Thomas called it, we've lost the culture.
That's how important this is.
How Governor Palin is treated in public is therefore is even more important than the presidency. If the left manages to whip up a mob assault on her, that will tell us all we need to know about ourselves -- and whether the American experiment in constitutional government has come to an end.
