Fascinating. She really is what Bush pretends to be -- she 's a true anti-intellectual. She's has this very Pentecostal view of the world. We don't need to study the Bible, we don't need ministers, we can just feel the spirit and let the spirit speak through us. It's this classically Alaskan value system that places experience over all other values. I know what mothers need because I am a mother. We don't need to read or even learn because that just fills our heads with confusing ideas and facts and figures. We feel. Bush plays at this anti-elite stuff but he's Harvard/Yale/Andover, all of that. She is really a celebration of a glorious know-nothingness that is truly dangerous.... She's terrifying and represents a streak of the Republican party that is a permanent minority. She will not play well with suburban women in Montgomery County [OH]. They want their kids to go to good schools and college. Palin basically says that isn't necessary. You can just speak plainly from the heart and that's good enough. But that's how you end up a fish picker from Alaska. It's not that she is an idiot that bothers me. It's that she celebrates non-learning and anti-knowledge. She celebrates ignorance. Terrifying.
She really is what Bush pretends to be -- she 's a true anti-intellectual. She's has this very Pentecostal view of the world. We don't need to study the Bible, we don't need ministers, we can just feel the spirit and let the spirit speak through us. It's this classically Alaskan value system that places experience over all other values. I know what mothers need because I am a mother.
We don't need to read or even learn because that just fills our heads with confusing ideas and facts and figures. We feel.
Bush plays at this anti-elite stuff but he's Harvard/Yale/Andover, all of that. She is really a celebration of a glorious know-nothingness that is truly dangerous....
She's terrifying and represents a streak of the Republican party that is a permanent minority. She will not play well with suburban women in Montgomery County [OH]. They want their kids to go to good schools and college. Palin basically says that isn't necessary. You can just speak plainly from the heart and that's good enough. But that's how you end up a fish picker from Alaska.
It's not that she is an idiot that bothers me. It's that she celebrates non-learning and anti-knowledge. She celebrates ignorance.
Terrifying.
David Brooks, the NYT's Very SeriousTM Conservative, also sez:
[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.
Worse than the educated morons that has been running the US for the last eight years? How can she be?
I have to agree with Helen on this. It's all about class. The insiders are horrified at the possibility some house wife from Alaska will stink up their cocktail parties.
I think it's more that she reminds them of the core of the Republican party. While 'Republican ideas' hide the racism, militarism and all-round vapid stupidity under a thin intellectual veneer - which is exactly what think tanks are paid to do - Palin dispenses with the veneer, and you get the true beating heart of Republicanism neat, with no fine wrapping.
And it's a loathesome thing. I don't think they hate her for being what she is, because in the end she is what they are. What they can't forgive her is not having the good political sense to put PR and marketing before personal ambition.
She's destroying the Reagan illusion and replacing it with directness and honesty.
Ironically we should be grateful to her for that, at least for now - because she's making it much more difficult for Republicanism to be taken seriously by anyone who isn't a racist kook.
