The Media, Sarah Palin, and "Evil" and/or "Stupid" Republicans

Borepatch has a (yet another) thought-provoking piece on Sarah Palin. I started to leave a comment, and it grew far beyond a simple comment, so I figured I'd stand on my own particular soapbox...

The simple fact is that, thanks to the mainstream media, Sarah "I can see Russia from my house" Palin is lumped in with Dan "If I'd known I was going to Latin America, I'd have studied Latin in High School" Quayle. Neither of them actually said either statement, of course; Palin's was her doppleganger Tina Fey on SNL; Quayle's quote was from a staffer with tongue firmly in cheek. But the media storyline is that they were stupid, so they had to be portrayed as such. Republicans are either evil or stupid; George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were two examples where the media tried to portray them as both.

Hell, I jokingly referred to Bush as "President Gumby" because of the way the media would alternate between the drooling moron persona (stupid) who mangled "nuclear" and didn't read newspapers and the evil megalomaniac who planned 9/11 and got us involved in two wars to enrich his oil buddies. He was either a drooling moron that had to have Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney pulling the puppetmaster strings, or he was the modern day incarnation of Adolf Hitler - either the dopey figurehead or sinister Skull&Crossbones illuminati bent on world domination.

Palin doesn't fit neatly into the narrative. The media seized upon those e-mails because they were certain - CERTAIN - they were going to find tons of evidence of either a vapidly stupid cheerleader bimbo or a barely-suppressed theocrat hell-bent on closing and mining the borders, making abortion illegal, and rounding up dissident leftists for re-education. You know, everything the left likes to pretend the right wants to do - and using the methods they themselves would use if they thought they could get away with it.

What they found, though, was supremely uninteresting - the simple fact that the story just vanished after the release of the e-mails is proof enough of that. You know as well as I that the first hit of theocracy or stupidity would have been front-page news for weeks - as well as never-ending fodder for SNL, Jon Stewart, et al. If the media had paid half as much attention to "Operation Fast and Loose with the Truth", we might be seeing some real changes at the ATF right now (not really, but it would be nice to see them display some interest in the government deliberately arming Mexican gangs to drum up support for gun control... Wait... Nevermind).

Borepatch is onto something with the media's perception of Palin - and the political "center" and how it relates to Republicans. The media's been on the far left for decades - Joe McCarthy remains one of the most hated men in modern US history, often with good cause, but also overlooked was that, by and large, he was right - the communists had infiltrated large chunks of the media, politics, and popular culture. That McCarthy was a loudmouth drunkard who liked to bully people was the only saving grace for the Fifth column.

Conservatives, at least for the past, oh, eighty or so years (I'm being charitable), have not been as their name suggests. A true conservative would stand in front of the American people and remind them that freedom is not safe; it is messy, nasty business that requires input and hard work. The Second Amendment should be as sacrosanct as the First, for without the right to keep and bear arms on a par with the standing army, we run the risk of turning into a police state like pretty much every other country around the world that bans civilian ownership of arms. A true conservative candidate would approach the national budget with a katana, not a scalpel; the deficit would be a matter of personal and nation pride to reduce to zero.

A true social conservative would oppose, vehemently, issues like abortion and deviations from the nuclear family - but they wouldn't dream of suggesting government intervention is the solution. They might support prayer in school, but never as a mandatory routine. Following the guidelines set forth by our Founding Fathers - the very principles this country was built upon - would be of utmost importance. The Constitution is not a living document, but an ironclad framework of what the government can - and cannot - do; this is the true mark of a conservative, that they understand and abide by the simple elegance contained in those four pages.

Palin isn't all that conservative comparatively, but given the current field, she stands out like Attila the Hun - and that scares the hell out of the leftists and the media (but I repeat myself...)

That is all.