...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Palin pile-on: Have you noticed that the reaction in certain quarters to Sarah Palin’s Veep nomination is a tad, er, overheated? Not to mention splenetic, frenetic and apoplectic? Not to mention completely over-the-top verging on the bonkers?  Melanie Phillips has, and accounts for the furor as follows:

The more savage the left are about someone, the more you can be sure that they feel profoundly threatened by that person. Their vicious reaction to John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate is deeply revealing -- but about themselves rather than her. They have hurled smears, contempt, condescension, ridicule and every other rhetorical missile her way. You can get a sense of the stuff being spread about her from this rebuttal by the McCain camp to this story in the New York Times, which appears to have plucked rumours circulating about Mrs Palin and published them without a qualm. (How anyone continues to take the NYT seriously beats me.)

Why do the left feel so threatened by Sarah Palin? Clearly, they see her place on the McCain ticket as a major threat to Obama and thus know they have to destroy her. The more venomous their onslaught, therefore, the greater the compliment they are paying her. But just why does she present such a danger to the Obama campaign?

On one level it’s obvious enough: she presses many of Obama’s own buttons, being young, fresh, attractive, embodying active opposition to machine politics (you surely can’t get much further away from the Beltway than Alaska) and with a compelling and poignant personal history; and she is also a woman and a mother and a successful politician, thus potentially exciting and attracting female voters. She therefore embodies youth, dynamism, change, excitement and hope – the very qualities identified with Obama and which the Democrats assumed would present such a cruel comparison with McCain.

As for her most obvious drawback -- her lack of political experience -- the Obama camp cannot use that against her without it boomeranging straight back. Their instant jibe that the neophyte Mrs Palin would be ‘merely a heartbeat away from the presidency’ loses its bite somewhat given that Obama, with even less experience than her, will not be a heartbeat away from becoming the President: he will be the President.

But there’s a deeper reason for the foaming vituperation of the left at Mrs Palin’s candidacy. It is the same reason that they lash out at all those who are not on the left: their profound lack of confidence in their own belief system. At some subterranean level, they know they are wrong and that they cannot defend their own position. Which they simply cannot bear. This is because the left is always correct, everyone else is a conservative and therefore if they are wrong about anything they will also be -- a conservative! They'd rather pull out all their fingernails. Which is why they are so vicious: instead of reasoned argument with their opponents they resort to demonisation, intimidating and browbeating any opposition or dissent to shut them up altogether.

Central to this aggressive defensiveness is their feverish characterisation of all dissent as conservatism, of conservatism as evil, fossilised, stupid and selfish, and all conservatives as hateful, decaying, cretinous and corrupt. The idea that a conservative may be an attractive, youthful, smart and principled, funky grizzly bear-hunting beauty queen doubling up as Elliot Ness doesn’t just rip apart the Democrats’ electoral strategy but the core belief of the left that they are uniquely good and everyone else is universally bad…

The Jihadists have the same “core belief”—that they are uniquely good and everyone else is universally bad. No wonder the two groups get on so well.  

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:10 | link | comments

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