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Palin, Liberator

The following is a guest post from the future.

(Apologies to Andrew Sullivan for adapting his excellent essay on Margaret Thatcher…and sympathies to Andrew Sullivan for being so blinded by PDS to not seeing the same qualities in our own liberator and failing to see the parallels with the state of Britain ca 1980 and US today. ) 

Palin, Liberator
APR 8 2043 @ 11:01PM

I remember reading an article in the Atlantic back in late 2010 by one of the smugger  American columnists, Andrew Sullivan. It captured part of the true derangement that Sarah Palin brought out in her political foes. It’s still online.

It was a vicious attack on her having any feminist credentials. It included this magnificent lie:

Who cares if someone who may well be the GOP nominee in 2012 might have concocted a massive lie to appeal to a pro-life base and doubled down on it, knowing that the MSM would never have the balls to ask for any actual proof? Indeed, who cares?

Sullivan’s case is an instant classic of the worst American trait: resentment of others’ success. No culture I know of is more brutally unkind to its public figures, hateful toward anyone with a degree of success or money, or more willing to ascribe an individual’s achievements to something other than their own ability. The America I grew up with was, in this specific sense, profoundly leftist in the worst sense. It was cheap and greedy and yet hostile to anyone with initiative, self-esteem, and the ability to make money.
The American left would prefer to keep everyone poorer if it meant preventing a few getting richer. And the massively powerful teacher union movement worked every day to ensure that mediocrity was protected, individual achievement erased, and that all decisions were made collectively, i.e. with their veto.
To put it bluntly: The America I grew up in was insane. The government owned almost all major manufacturing, from coal to steel to automobiles. Owned. It employed almost every doctor and owned almost every hospital. Almost every university and elementary and high school was government-run. As a young American, you could not help but realize that you were living in a decaying museum – some horrifying mixture of Eastern European grimness surrounded by the sculptured bric-a-brac of statues and buildings and edifices that spoke of an empire on which the sun had once never set. Now, in contrast, we lived on the dark side of the moon and it was made up of damp, slowly degrading concrete.
I owe my entire political obsession to the one person in American politics who refused to accept this state of affairs. You can read elsewhere the weighing of her legacy – but she definitively ended a truly poisonous, envious, inert period in America’s history.

She divided the country deeply – and still does. She divided her opponents even more deeply, which was how she kept winning elections. Few doubt she altered her country permanently, re-establishing the core basics of a free society and a free economy that America had inherited from Britain and yet somehow squandered when it was lost in its own class-ridden, envy-choked socialist detour to immiseration.
I was a teenage Palinite, an uber-politics nerd who loved her for her utter lack of apology for who she was. I sensed in her, as others did, a final rebuke to the collectivist, egalitarian oppression of the individual produced by socialism and the stultifying privileges and caste identities of the class system. And part of that identity – the part no one ever truly gave her credit for – was her gender. She married a smart businessman, reared five children and forged a political career from scratch in the most male-dominated institution imaginable: the Republican party.
She relished this individualist feminism and wielded it – coining a new and very transitive verb, Refudiate, to describe her evisceration of ill-prepared politicians or partisan interviewers. Perhaps in Sullivan’s defense, Palin was not a feminist in the left-liberal sense: she never truly reflected on her pioneering role as a female leader; she was contemptuous toward identity politics; and the only tears she ever deployed (unlike Hillary Clinton) were as she departed from office, ousted by an internal coup, undefeated in any election she had ever run in as party leader.

That took vision and self-confidence of a quite extraordinary degree. It was infectious. And it made Palin and Palinism a much more complicated thing than many analyses contain.
Palin’s economic liberalization came to culturally transform America. Women were empowered by new opportunities; immigrants, became engineers of growth; millions owned homes for the first time; the media broke free from union chains and fractured and multiplied in subversive and dynamic ways. Her very draconian posture provoked a punk radicalism in the popular culture that changed a generation.

She was, in a sense, a liberator. She didn’t constantly (or even ever) argue for women’s equality; she just lived it. She didn’t just usher in greater economic freedom; she unwittingly brought with it cultural transformation – because there is nothing more culturally disruptive than individualism and capitalism. Her 1980s values never re-took: the Americans engaged in spending and borrowing binges long after she had left the scene, and what last vestiges of prudery were left in the dust.
Perhaps in future years, her legacy might be better seen as a last, sane defense of the nation-state as the least worst political unit in human civilization. Her deep suspicion of the European project was rooted in memories of the Cold War, but it was also prescient and wise. Without her, it is doubtful the America would have kept their currency and their independence. They would have Chinese financiers going over the budget in Washington by now, as they are in Greece and Portugal and Cyprus.

She did not therefore only resuscitate economic freedom in America, she kept America itself free as an independent nation. Neither achievement was inevitable; in fact, each was a function of a single woman’s will-power. To have achieved both makes her easily the greatest modern leader since Reagan.
Reagan saved America from darkness; she finally saw the lights come back on. And like Reagan, it’s hard to imagine any other figure quite having the character, the will-power and the grit to have pulled it off.

 

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Bristol Palin stood firm against a recent vicious and completely unprovoked attack by a member of the “tolerant left“.   Film crews for Palin’s upcoming reality show caught the incident on tape where a man shouted out

“Your mother’s a whore!”

“Your mother’s the fuckin’ devil, dude.”

Palin responded with a question, “What did she do wrong?”

“She lives, She breathes.”

That is Sarah Palin’s greatest crime, according to PDS sufferers.  She exists.

Skip ahead to about 1:30

Stacy McCain has the goods on the person in question. Turns out he is a semi-professional Palin hater. Hit the link for a video interview with TMZ that shows him double down on his comments. He is quite proud of his intolerance.

UPDATE: Thanks to Chris Jefferson, Brent Mohrman, and others on Twitter for pointing out that Stephen Hanks (a) appears to be a Trig Truther who (b) had a “SickOfPalin” Twitter account he’s since deleted, and is (c) like all gay liberals, a huge fan of Levi Johnston:

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Breitbart comes up with an email from Creepy Joe begging an Alaska blogger to come up with some proof, any proof, for any of the rumors about Sarah Palin’s personal life.

After a week of universally scathing pans from the reflexively anti-Palin establishment media, McGinniss now faces the fight of his literary life: the accusation that he seems to have knowingly submitted a book to his publisher, Crown/Random House, that was filled with unproved “tawdry gossip” and rumors that lacked “factual evidence.”

In the email below, sent in January of 2011, McGinniss reveals that his manuscript, then under legal review at Crown/Random House, could not prove its most headline-grabbing allegations. And yet, many of these “salacious stories” that lacked “proof” (in McGinniss’s own words) ended up in the book, and on televisions everywhere during the author’s current media tour … without proper sourcing, and without any apparent new evidence to support them

An excerpt from the email (full email at the link)

Neither from you[Jesse Griffin], the Enquirer, AlaskaWTF, palingates.com or anyone else, have I seen a credible, identified source backing any of the salacious stories about the Palin family.

Thus–as Random House lawyers are already pointing out to me–nothing I can cite other than my own reporting rises above the level of tawdry gossip. The proof is always just around the corner, but that’s a corner nobody has been able to turn. Maybe Jeff Dunn has, in which case I’ll be the first to congratulate him. But frankly, at this point, I’m tired of it, and I’ve run out of time.

No one has ever provided factual evidence that:

a) Todd had sex with a hooker, or with anyone else outside his marriage.

b) Sarah had an affair with Brad Hanson, or anyone else.

c) Track was a druggie who enlisted in the army to avoid a jail term. Or that he vandalized Wasilla school buses.

d) Willow was involved in the vandalism of the empty house in Meadow Lakes. Or that Sarah rushed back from Hawaii to put the lid on that.

e) Trig is not Sarah’s natural born child.

f) Bristol was promiscuous as a high schooler and drank and used drugs, or became pregnant again after Tripp’s birth.

Jesse, if you can put me in touch with people who are willing and able to substantiate any of the above, now is the time to do so. Otherwise, I hope you won’t complain that there are no startling new revelations in my book. My publisher and I think it’s damning enough without airing the family’s dirty laundry, but because Sarah’s hypocrisy about her family is one of the things that galls me most, I’d like to be able to publish facts in regard to a) through f) above, but I emphasize facts.

h/t Hotair.

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From Cubachi:http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/files/original/bristol-palin-dancing-with-the-stars.jpg

First the Tea Party gets blamed falsely by Time Magazine as being the root cause for hyperinflation, now the liberal media extends the blame of Bristol still being voted in to a dancing show for so many weeks. This is getting hilarious.

Nothing makes me laugh more than to see the left go into hissy fits over the most simple of things Sarah Palin and her family does. Who would have thought that the left is actually attacking not only Bristol Palin, but the Tea Party for this?

I think we have better things to worry about. However the liberal media can’t help it that Sarah Palin’s daughter is doing so well in Dancing with the Stars. Palin Derangement Syndrome knows no bounds. They even went after her for wearing a Tea Party shirt while rehearsing a dance routine. Forget the fact that previous contestants wore Obama shirts rehearsing. There was no problem with that. But the audacity to have a patriotic shirt on! How ridiculous.

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US News gives a peek at a new Sarah Palin book by the Weekly Standard’s Matthew Continetti, The Persecution of Sarah Palin

With his 226-page defense of Palin and slap-down of the media coverage she has faced since being selected by Sen. John McCain as his 2008 veep, Continetti is likely to ride the next wave of Palin frenzy that will accompany her book release set for November 17. If you like Palin, it’s a good read. If you don’t, well, check it to see what the other side thinks of the potential 2012 presidential candidate.

Palin vs the Press
Continetti writes, the press had it out for Palin because she didn’t fit the image of an Ivy League-educated national candidate, just as former President George W. Bush didn’t. “The left recoils at a certain swagger, a manner of speech, and a lack of cultural embarrassment that the two share. Neither Bush nor Palin mind the fact that they are not part of this country’s cognoscenti. But until Palin showed up, one could have written off the liberal reaction to Bush as simply anti-Texan bias. That wasn’t it, however. Palin proved that at its root the reaction to these folksy Western politicians is a form of anti-provincialism; revulsion toward people who do not aspire to adopt the norms, values, politics and attitudes of the Eastern cultural elite.”

Palin vs the McCain Campaign

Not only had the campaign not done its homework to defend Palin, but it wasn’t prepared for the media backlash.

Palin vs Feminists

Liberal-leaning feminists, especially comic Tina Fey, who portrayed Palin on Saturday Night Live, were jealous of Palin. “Palin’s sudden global fame rankled those feminists whose own path to glory had been difficult. To them, Palin was less a female success story than she was the beneficiary of male chauvinism,” writes Continetti. He holds out Fey and her TV character for special criticism.

“It was telling that Fey should be the actress who impersonated Palin. The two women may look like each other, but they could not be more dissimilar. Each exemplifies a different category of feminism. Palin comes from the I-can-do-it-all school. She is professionally successful, has been married for more than 20 years, and has a large and (from all outward appearances) happy family. And while Fey is also pretty, married, and has a daughter, the characters she portrays in films like Mean Girls and Baby Mama, and in television shows like 30 Rock, are hard-pressed eggheads who give up personal fulfillment—e.g., marriage and motherhood—in the pursuit of professional success,” he writes.

Ouch.

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Via NewsBusters.org

As NewsBusters reported a few hours ago, Oprah Winfrey has finally decided to allow former Alaska governor Sarah Palin on her highly-rated daytime talk show.

Shortly after it was announced, People magazine’s web article on the matter falsely informed readers that Palin refused Oprah’s invitation during the campaign last year (h/t NB reader Christy Ellsworth):

Oh, what a difference a multimillion-dollar book deal makes.

About a year after Sarah Palin famously turned down a campaign season appearance with talk show host – and major Barack Obama supporter – Oprah Winfrey, the former GOP vice presidential candidate has agreed to take her turn on the couch.

Actually, as ABCNews.com reported last September, it was Oprah that refused to have Palin on her show:

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“Ronald Reagan is a mental midget.”

This from the woman who thinks Ralph Nader is sexy At least S.E. Cupp is in this clip to soften the blow.

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