Posted on 11/29/2009 11:34:09 AM PST by Steelfish
Hate Sarah Palin? She Loves That Palin, like Richard Nixon, realizes how powerful a weapon contemptuousness toward her can be in the American political landscape.
By Neal Gabler November 29, 2009
It's week three of Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" book tour, and while she has been met with rapture from her fans, she has received a wave of hostility from the mainstream media. David Letterman devoted four minutes of his monologue on publication day to mocking her. New York Times columnist David Brooks called her a joke, and Newsweek referenced "The Sound of Music," asking on its cover "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah?" Even domestic diva Martha Stewart weighed in, calling her "boring" and "dangerous." Palin is a media punching bag.
Which is exactly the way she likes it. It's not that Palin is a masochist. It's that she realizes how powerful a weapon contemptuousness toward her can be in the political war she will likely be waging in 2012. As commentators revile her, Palin realizes they are also empowering her. Indeed, she is engaged in one of the greatest feats of rope-a-dope in political history. Laugh at her, but you laugh at your peril. She can ride that laughter right into the White House.
Of course, Palin didn't discover the politics of contempt. America was born not only as a protest against English political rule but against a larger sense of English superiority. What distinguished America more than anything else from Europe was its sense of egalitarianism.
Americans tended to bristle at all the European formulations of high culture, and they rapidly devised their own popular culture of dime novels, crime pamphlets, vulgarized theater and more, which was a backlash against "official" high-minded European prescriptions.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
"Palin is playing that same card on the gamble that anti-elitism will trump her own inexperience, incompetence and lack of knowledge. She knows that the more pundits harp on these so-called deficiencies, and the more the media cover it, the more she can claim that they are really just engaging in an old sport: expressing contempt for ordinary Americans, of which she is the self-proclaimed political exemplar."
So what's Zer0 counting on these days to trump his inexperience, incompetence and lack of knowledge? Oh yeah, compliant media whores like those found at the LA Slimes.
It will backfire. The reason so many people love Sarah is that they identify with her. She is one of them - an outsider, a family person, a working class person, a mom, a conservative, a Christian, etc. When the liberal elite mock her, they are mocking all of her supporters and that just makes us really angry and motivated.
Is the LA Slimes ever going to release that tape of Obama at Rashid Khalidi’s house..I’m still waiting for the tape
The Left is totally Sarah-noid!
maybe the elites are attacking palin to cover up their incomptance, inexperience, lack of knowledge and arrogances
“Sarah-noid!”, that is a great term! I think it should be used on the lefties by some prominent conservative voices.
.....will trump her own inexperience, incompetence and lack of knowledge.
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Oh, I thought this thread was about Obama.
That tide of hate just floats her boat.
We have a DVD of Family Guy, and on it they show clips of typical people seeing scenes. The people react with words like: yuck, vulgar, disgusting, I’ll never watch that. And in between each viewer they show the producer with this smug look on his face (smirk), just loving it. I can’t help thinking that way of Sarah...right into the White House.
They say she can’t be elected and they hope she’s the nominee so he wins in a walk. They then turn around and say she can win and the media are helping the possibility.
They say she’s stupid. Then they say she’s smart enough to figure out people don’t like elites and run on that.
Do they bother to read their own columns? Might save them embarrassment if they did.
Neal Gabler implied on FNC's "Fox News Watch" that he wanted the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol to go to Iraq and be killed so that he could attend the conservative writer's funeral.
on February 2, 2008, the show's host Eric Burns, announced Gabler had left the show to work for PBS
October 02, 2009
Neal Gabler is at work on a biography of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy
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Dec. 2005
Fox News Watch panelist Gabler: Fox News “pumping” Christmas “war”
While appearing on Fox News Watch, media writer Neal Gabler asserted Fox News hosts Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and John Gibson are “demagogues” who seek to “rally the masses” every Christmas season with their talk of a purported “war” on the holiday. Fox News contributor Jane Hall said the effort is “largely a fund-raiser for Jerry Falwell.”
“Is there a Grinch taking the holly jolly out of Christmas? Why has this holy season become a target of the liberal media?”
On the December 3 edition of Fox News Watch, Gabler said of those making such accusations: “They’ll do it every Christmas. They did it last Christmas; they’ll do it next Christmas.” Later in the segment, Gabler stated: “The media, particularly Fox media, has been pumping the hell out of this thing.”
GABLER: Eric, we are at war. There’s [the humanitarian crisis in] Darfur. There’s an AIDS crisis. And you’re worried about whether people are saying “Merry Christmas” or not?
People always hate what they don’t understand, and the left, including beltway “intellectuals” fail to understand the principles, virtues and morals that have made this nation great. Sarah gets it. Merely accusing Sarah of incompetence is not proof of incompetence. Was she incompetent as Governor of Alaska? No, just the opposite. Did she fail to read some book that Brooks has read? I hope so. ...Sarah will bring to the White House the principles that will return competence to leadership. She will bring good management back to Washington. It’s something the left can’t do, and RINOs lack the courage and vision to do it.
November 30, 2008
Neal Gabler: The GOP’s McCarthy gene
The GOP’s McCarthy gene: The real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn’t run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn’t likely to be expunged any time soon....
Anti-elitists can have Ivy League degrees, they just can’t stomach elitists who think their “credentials” make them competent.
Neal Gabler wrote on boston.com that the US is not exceptional.
“There is nothing wrong with self-satisfaction or national pride. But the incessant trumpeting of our national superiority to every other country in the world is more than just off-putting and insulting. It is infantile, like the vaunting of a schoolyard bully that his Dad is better than your Dad. It is wrong. And it might be dangerous both to ourselves and to the rest of the world.”
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One nation, under illusion
By Neal Gabler
October 13, 2009
And though Americans love to crow about the “best health care’’ in the world, the fact is that according to the World Health Organization Index, we actually rank 37th in the quality of our health care. And we are still the only industrialized country in the world without a national health care system.
None of this would make much difference if the self-congratulation was just harmless bragging. But there are consequences. A country that believes it is the greatest in the world is also less likely to be constrained by that world. One could argue that the Iraq war was a direct result of a sense of national infallibility. So was our willingness to torture, our reluctance to admit our mistakes in Afghanistan, our culpability in the global recession, and our foot-dragging on global warming. Such a nation is also less likely to introspect or to strive for true greatness because it believes its greatness has already arrived.
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