The attacks on Sarah Palin last week by anonymous McCain staffers merely provided the opportunity for more Americans to learn that many of the people who work in Republican campaign politics are less than honorable and clearly incompetent. Anyone wondering how the political party with the better ideas keeps failing to advance those ideas needs to look no further than the quality of the GOP political personnel.
Newt Gingrich has said that the political consulting class is “just sick.”
These guys make tons of money and figure out mean nasty and ugly things to do to their opponents and there is no sense of civic spirit. There is a sense that this is some boloney game played by seventh graders for the shallowest of reasons.
To rank and file Republicans who still remain on the sidelines, let me say again – this is why we need you in the game.
In recent weeks there have been a lot of good articles written about both Sarah Palin and her critics. My favorite was Kevin Burke’s back in late October titled “The Palin Trig-ger: Looking behind the hostility.”
He opens with this:
Some of the very personal and often uncharitable criticism of vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her family may have a relationship to the collective grief, shame, and guilt from personal involvement in the abortion of an unborn child. Because abortion is usually a deeply repressed sensitive area of complicated grief, when a news story touches on abortion related issues, the common response is often one of the following:
- Avoidance.
- Reactive defensiveness, hyper sensitivity, and angry attacks to compensate for the emotional vulnerability this issue surfaces.
- Some will recognize in their troubled souls the need to reach out for healing and the hope of reconciliation and peace.
Ouch. But hey, the plain fact is (and I’ve noted as much in a series on “gay rights” here), you can’t ignore the psychological aspects of the debate over the social issues.
Burke writes that 90 percent of the approximately 133,000 pregnant mothers that “undergo routine pre-natal tests and receive” the news that “their infant is afflicted with a chromosomal abnormality or a serious defect in a vital organ” make the decision to have an abortion.
The Palin family’s decision to once again affirm the value of the unborn child, and support a decision to give life confronts the collective grief, guilt and shame of all who have participated in any way in the death of an unborn child.
You can read Burke’s article here. I highly recommend it.
In the conservative press, Joe Biden’s gaffes received a lot of attention, but we all know the conservative press is a rather small entity by comparison to the mainstream liberal press.
Victor Davis Hanson said that when Palin and Biden debated, it was Palin’s common sense versus Biden’s thirty-six years in the senate. While Biden seemed to have a more impressive recall of facts, Hanson said, when it was over, people realized he had made “a whole plethora of assertions which in retrospect, almost everything [he] said was false.”
We know how the media would’ve covered that debate had Palin suggested that the U.S. and France had chased Hezbollah out of Lebanon.
The same can be said of Barack Obama’s odd statements. What if Palin had said “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”? Click here to read a few more doozies by candidate Barack.
National Review’s Andy McCarthy put it this way:
What is sadly remarkable is how many others are prepared to draw sweeping, negative inferences about Sarah Palin because of her accent, yet, when it comes to Obama, they avert their eyes from the unmistakable evidence staring them right in the face.
Fox News’ Charles Krauthammer said it this way:
What’s remarkable about the reaction to Palin is not only the unfavorable. It’s the loathing, the absolute hatred that you hear, especially from intellectuals, feminists, sort of east coast, west coast, pointy headed…
And they look at her as sort of a backwater hick, who, for religious reasons, went ahead and had a child that they would never have.
Deep underneath it, I think it’s a self-loathing on the part of these feminists, knowing that what she did is virtuous and a generous act that they would have never have undertaken. And her having undertaken it is an affront to them, a silent rebuke.
What’s clear – from other articles like the ones found here and here – is that Sarah Palin is an incredible talent that connected with more Republicans than anyone since Ronald Reagan. Best of all, she’s still young, so she can be a force for good for many years to come.
