Drink Up
Yes, it is anti-Palin conservatives who have been drinking the Kool-Aid. That’s it. Let’s just pretend the last two months of pathetic excuse-making for Palin’s embarrassing failures never happened, and furthermore let’s pretend that everything we know about her does not show that she is uninterested in policy details and largely uninformed about the world beyond our shores. I could imagine people making excuses for her alleged geographical ignorance (a claim that was always likely to be false) because conservative pundits repeatedly made excuses for her demonstrations of ignorance. They seemed excited by how much she didn’t know. Can’t define the Bush Doctrine? The pundits had a ready-made answer, “Who can define it? It is a mysterious, changing thing that no one truly understands.” Can’t name a Court ruling other than Roe she disagrees with? No problem–evade the relevant issue and talk about how stupid Biden is! The rule was simple: the deeper the confusion and cluelessness, the more zealous the defense. I don’t much care for lectures about “drinking the Kool-Aid” from members of the personality cult.
On the same topic, Kathleen Parker writes in the Slate forum I mentioned below:
Palin covered her inadequacies with folksy charm and by drumming up a class war, turning her audiences not just against elites but against the party’s own educated members. The movement created by that superelite, but never elitist, William F. Buckley Jr. was handed over to Joe Six-Pack. Know-nothingness was no longer a stigma, but a badge of honor.
The Republican Party’s Baghdad Bobism with regard to Palin, a denial so pernicious that party operatives were willing to let her sit a heartbeat away from the presidency in a time of war and financial collapse, revealed what really ails the party. The “P Factor” isn’t a single person but a sickness that will have to be acknowledged and cured—Republicans will be reciting their newly tailored principles only to themselves.
Update: James Joyner has likewise been accused of mindless anti-Palinism by the same critics for having stated the blindingly obvious. Alex Knapp has more.
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