LOL!
Posted on 01/20/2016 7:16:26 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Where there are open flames, there will always be curious moths. Tonight, at a little after six o'clock, Sarah Palin will succumb at last to overwhelming temptation and sign up for Donald Trump's ever-glistering light show. And in that remarkable moment, the mask will fall off completely.
If you are surprised by this development, you shouldn't be. Ours is an age in which politics and entertainment are melted together without opposition or disfavor; a silly, self-indulgent, shallow age in which Kanye West thinks he can be the president of the United States and the president of the United States thinks he can be Kanye West. That Palin and Trump are together at last is no accident of ideology or timing; rather, it is the inevitable and rational confluence of two ghastly cults of personality -- a fat-cutting, cash-saving merger that will serve to increase overall market share. Under their own steam, both figures have convinced a significant portion of the American population that their personal advancement is the key to the country's success. Together, just think how great America can be!
Talk to a Palin fan and you will be told in a matter of moments that to oppose her is to oppose "real America." Talk to a Trump fan, and you will be told that to knock him is to knock "We the people" -- of which, it is made abundantly clear, you are no longer a valued part. All told, this symmetry makes sense, for the pair have of late become mirror images. Sarah Palin started in politics and moved seamlessly into television and entrepreneurship; Donald Trump started in business and, after a quick foray onto the small screen, readied himself for the ballot box. Now their most effective cudgels can be wielded as one: You're not so effete that you're against the both of them, are you?
They will pretend otherwise, of course -- and their screaming acolytes will mewl their way into acquiescence -- but, by uniting, the pair has shown the way toward a new sort of conservative establishment. Last year, long before Trump made his ambitions clear, I submitted that if one "wanted to find a figure to which Palin can be reasonably compared . . . it's not Ronald Reagan. . . . It's Donald Trump." And so it has come to pass. Like Palin, Trump has mastered the art of the interminable ramble, the purpose of which is not to convey meaning or to advance a useful argument but to stun the audience into dumb submission. Like Palin, Trump has embraced his ignorance and wielded it as a sign of strength and normality against the ever-protean "elite." And, like Palin, Trump has betrayed his desire to fix the political system not by mastering or replacing it, but by becoming it. This isn't an insurgency, it's a shakedown. And the conmen are moving in packs.
Alas, there is no grand principle on display here. There is nothing but opportunism and ego. For a long time now, Sarah Palin has been apt to say anything and everything to keep the cameras buzzing around her hive. This rotten endorsement completes the decline. What, we might ask, has become of Palin's beloved Tea Party? What, too, of her purported admiration for limited government, and of her ostensible hatred of heretics and fakers? The prospect of a mass movement that was earnestly committed to libertarianism was always a little too good to be true, but even I didn't imagine it ending like this. All that talk of the Constitution and the Declaration; all that energy expended against the cronies and the rent-seekers; all those purifying voter drives -- and for what? So that Sarah Palin could add a few zeroes to her bank balance and Donald Trump could go from the purchaser to the bought? Today was the day that Rick Santelli's famous yelp finally melted into populism and avarice. Today, at about ten minutes past six, P. T. Barnum beat out Hayek for the soul of the insurgent Right. Today, the rebels became the charlatans they had set out to depose. What comes next will be anybody's guess.
-- Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.
But it only took a few weeks for me to see the truth. She didn't have much to say, and when she spoke she sounded like she was spewing slogans from t-shirts she bought on Sean Hannity's website. I found it irritating.
Then, after riding McCain's coat tails into prominence, she promptly abandoned her governorship to become a Fox pundit. Over the ensuing years, she did what she could to remain in the headlines, published a few books ghostwritten by someone else, all while the tabloids ate up the various soap operas involving her family. Then her daughter suddenly became a conservative spokesman for reasons that have always escaped me.
I suspected all along that she was in it more for the attention and the money than the principles. Today my suspicions are confirmed. She betrayed the grassroots and stuck a dagger in the back of Ted Cruz. Before endorsing Trump tonight, both her and her daughter viciously attacked him. There is not one conceivable legitimate reason for her to endorse Donald Trump while there are actual grassroots conservatives still in the race. This is a betrayal, plain and simple. But it's not a surprising one.
The Palins are hoping to ride Trump back into the headlines at the expense of the conservative movement, like they did with McCain. It's looks like they've succeeded.
It disgusts me, frankly, and I am damned sick and tired of alleged "conservative" champions throwing principle and values overboard all for the sake of staying in the limelight.
I'm done with these frauds, and I've held my tongue about many of them until now. That's over. Sarah Palin has stabbed you in the back, and she knows it. And she's not the only one.
You could see it coming in 2014, when Palin supported establishment candidates over Tea Party candidates. It was a little shocking then, but I’d have to say that some of her comments over the past couple years has given me a lot of pause. Then this last spring, asked by some reporter, she stated she’d taken up Yoga. This is a totally different world view than Christianity. Right then I felt that she was now totally in decline.
She has tried a little of everything since 2008, and I felt she was still conservative through 2012. Then she started to come undone personally. It has shown on the “world stage”. She is coming undone and probably doesn’t even understand it.
Reductio ad absurdum.
Are you being intentionally obtuse or are you actually intellectually challenged?
You are free to think that, but my problem with you is that the only contribution to this site that you give is insults. I haven’t seem you give any positive information at all. I mean it makes you look shallow and uninformed. You are again free to present yourself that way but I would want to be seen as at least trying to give some reasons for why you don’t agree with something. But if insults is your kick, go for it. It doesn’t hurt my feelings a bit. Perhaps if I knew you in real life, I might give it pause, but since you are some anonymous nobody, what do I care?
No, but it is clear you are just looking to be an ass over this Palin endorsement, and are incapable of remotely understanding what I was saying.
? Did you mean he couldn't say it to his mom without being prompted?
I'd like to see that video. Maybe I'd ask him about it when I (along with a hundred others) have lunch with him next week.
LOL!
She might even have served half her term.
Yeah, like Ted.
Touche!
FWIW - I’ve only given money to one candidate - Cruz.
I never give any of them my money. Big donors have money to lose. I do not. LOL
Politicians get plenty for selling us out. I don’t want to pay them to screw me.
Hey brainiac: I haven’t been talking about the Palin endorsement at all. I merely posted a sharp comment from an article, neither endorsing nor rejecting the conclusions. Try to keep up.
You spout some drivel that Kanye West is just as eligible as Ronald Reagan to run for President. And you’re calling me an ass and saying I can’t understand you! Oh, I understood you all right. Your the perfect Trumpbot: an anal retentive moron. The desperate question of the hour for you is: did you understand you?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.