"So let me get this straight. You're saying Sarah and Cindy are bringing
elegance back to the White house, and Barack and I are not? Bummer.
Posted on 09/12/2008 11:54:07 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
For left-leaning elites outside the United States, the nomination of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential candidate is a case of “only in America”—a sneering phrase foreigners use to explain a weird or distasteful American phenomenon. For them, the emergence of a small-town conservative Christian woman with a large family and a beehive hairdo, who talks about the small-town American values of faith, family and love of country, is the equivalent of crass American television. Mrs. Palin, with “her churchgoer’s smile” and her hillbilly family with their hillbilly names, was a “soap opera . . . too implausible even for day-time television” wrote Anne Davies in the Sydney Morning Herald. “A race that began as the ‘West Wing’ now looks alarmingly like ‘Desperate Housewives,’” said Jonathan Freedland in Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
If one needed a primer on why a certain class of elites outside the US will always detest the political, cultural and social undercurrents flowing through the heart of middle America, the emergence of the gun-toting, pro-life Mrs. Palin has provided it. With tedious predictability, a steady undercurrent of anti-Americanism explains why foreign liberals detest Mrs. Palin. Her rising popularity across America has rudely confirmed that not all Americans care about the preferred presidential pick of the international left-liberal community. Barack Obama is their anti-American dream candidate, a man who is part of their project to bring America, the great Satan, to heel. After all, he never spoke about the possibility of victory in Iraq. Only American withdrawal and defeat. And thus America’s humiliation. Both Mrs. Palin’s beliefs and her evident popularity cast doubts on whether Americans are really on board with this overseas vision for America’s future.
All along, this international strain of anti-Americanism evident in Australia and beyond has been driven by a determined refusal to comprehend that peculiarly American curiosity: those who wear their God-fearing, love-of-America conservative values on their sleeves. In other words, people such as Sarah Palin who mean it when they say “God Bless America.” Respectable politicians in places like Australia don’t speak about the love of country. And certainly not in secular Europe or multicultural Britain.
The selection of Mrs. Palin and her role in Republican electoral math this year are also highlighting issues in American politics that surprise and confuse foreign left-wing intellectuals. Commentators in Australia, such as the Sydney Morning Herald’s political editor, Peter Hartcher, have lately sniped about Mrs. Palin’s deeply pro-life beliefs and at those Americans for whom abortion is an election issue. The tendency is to crow about the less divisive politics of abortion in Australia without explaining, or necessarily even understanding, why the issue is heated in the US. No mention that in Australia, unlike the US, abortion has not been fuelled by an activist, social-engineering judiciary. No mention that a cadre of unelected judges stole the issue from the American people in the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade. As US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in his 1992 dissent in another abortion case, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, by hijacking the issue and telling Americans they could not decide abortion laws for themselves, “Roe fanned into life an issue that has inflamed our national politics.” Such explanations are diligently ignored by progressives outside the US who prefer to portray abortion politics as driven by a creepy and peculiarly American religious Right.
One sees the same studied ignorance of the US when foreign left-leaning folk talk about guns and the death penalty. Australian elites regard those provisions of the US Constitution guaranteeing the right to bear arms and permitting the death penalty as signs of a venal, backward society. It’s another case of “only in America.” Deriding Mrs. Palin for her hunting habits is a neat way for them to ridicule small-town Americans who cherish those constitutional rights.
To be sure, much of the hysteria from the left wing in Australia mirrors the leftist frenzy within the US Mrs. Palin was always going to upset the global sisterhood for not being the right kind of careerist woman. She is a happy feminist who doesn’t moan about female victimhood. She loves to shoot moose but is not a fan of aborting babies. That you should be opposed to hunting animals but in favor of abortion on demand is an international article of the feminist faith.
Similarly, left-wing media pundits outside the US were always going to parrot the class-driven condescension of her attackers at home. A self-declared “hockey mom” educated at a no-name university, a former beauty queen who used to broadcast the local sports news surely cannot aspire to be vice president. The provincial Mrs. Palin is the perfect proxy-without-borders for the universal disdain metropolitan elites harbor toward those allegedly less sophisticated than themselves.
Blinded by their anti-American prejudices, progressives outside the U.S. mistakenly treat Mrs. Palin as a country hick who has simply roused evangelicals and gun-loving and hunting Republicans. They miss the significance of her nomination. The Governor from Alaska is attracting so much positive attention outside the beltway of American politics—and indeed 10,000 miles away, where ordinary Australians are cheering her on even as their elites pour scorn on her—because she is the real thing. She is a sassy, happy, straight-talking mother of five who has succeeded, not through affirmative action programs or family connections, but through sheer dint of hard work and conviction politics. If Australia’s left-wing elites don’t understand Mrs. Palin’s attraction to middle America it’s because they don’t or won’t ever understand middle America.
You talking about the 'Aussies'? Let the Japs have Australia during WW II? Thank God that no one as stupid as that was doing strategic planning then. Racist jealousy? Pathetic.
> The left detests women and minorities who succeed without
> their patronization.
They despise even more women and minorities who not only succeed without their patronization, but who espouse an opposing ideology.
works for me.
Those of us who grew up locally frequently asked the non-local students "Why did you choose to come here?"
While it was an obvious choice for locals, we honestly couldn't understand why anyone would pick SU if they didn't grow up nearby (much less those who made an intercontinental trip to do so).
"So let me get this straight. You're saying Sarah and Cindy are bringing
elegance back to the White house, and Barack and I are not? Bummer.
They killed the real Crocodile Dundee, when he refused to give up his guns.
This article is definitely getting a cut and paste in my out going e-mails tonight.
“We got to pray for Sarah and John and their families.”...
Yes, oh yes I have been, and will continue to do so. Wolves ARE out there whose determined intent is to destroy Sarah Palin utterly, as well as wrecking the chances of a McCain presidency.
But I also pray for those people out ‘there’ whose minds haven’t been totally closed off.....that they will SEE that there is only ONE choice for us in this election.....and they aren’t deceived into believing the garbage they see and hear from the polluted media.
The media dogs will keep hammering and hammering, and if folks aren’t vigilant they might buy into the ‘lie’....after hearing so many different versions and angles, portrayed so ‘convincingly’ by such serious and respectable looking people, like Charlie Gibson. (barf!, you know, I am so disappointed in him, well, myself really. In my younger, more naive days, I used to think he was soooo nice, soooo charming. Unaware people, as I was then, are so easy to fool),
Anyway, no fears about THIS FReeper. I pray, and will continue on.... staying alert.
“Pray without ceasing”
cheers, pattyjo
Taking a break from pipeline negotiations with the Canadians, Alaskan governor Sarah Palin waits for an aide to return with her diet Mountain Dew...
Great post! Says it all!
bookmark
Is Hollywood planning a new sitcom?
A dislike of Gov. Palin = a dislike for brave Americans.
More generally, an envious dislike for valor.Still more generally, an envious and arrogant contempt for those in all fields who work to a bottom line and get things done.
Theodore RooseveltThere is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . .
Great read! Thanks for posting it.
As a Republican, I find John McCain seriously lacking in just as many Republican ideals as I found in both the President's Bush. And also President Reagan.
As an individual voter, I am left to vote for one of two candidates for POTUS.
Yet again, it is a choice of the lessor of two evils.
With the addition of Sarah Palin to the Republican ballot, I can force myself to not take a shooter before I cast a vote for McCain.
There is no amount of alcohol that would induce me to vote for Barack Hussein Obama for POTUS.
Talk is cheap, which is something that lefties can’t manage to get their minds around. They seem to think that talk, like “good intentions” are the same or even better than accomplishment.
> Talk is cheap, which is something that lefties can’t manage to get their minds around.
Truth.
> They seem to think that talk, like “good intentions” are the same or even better than accomplishment.
Interestingly, the NZ Herald does not allow us to post their stuff to the FRee Republic. I guess they are so accurate in a contrarian sense that they are afraid of giving aid and comfort to the Left’s enemies.
Or maybe they are just afraid of ridicule!
Funny! I had my own bellwether, my mom. From 1956 until 1992, she voted for the candidate that lost.
Or maybe they are just afraid of ridicule!
Yeah, cuz it's well known that all of us on the right of the political spectrum are mean & scary.
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