Deep Stupid #12

It almost seems cruel to do a DEEP STUPID entry on the pant-load who foisted LIBERAL FASCISM on the world.  But, since he won't shut the hell up, I'm not going to let that stop me.  In a REAL CLEAR POLITICS entry dated Nov. 20, 2009, the illustrious Jonah Goldberg* excreted this masterpiece on vicious librull criticism of Sarah Palin's new book, GOING ROGUE.

Palinophobes Hate First, Ask Questions Later

Copyright 2009, Tribune Media Services Inc.

This will probably be less painful than actually reading Palin's vapid reality show cum venge-quest of a memoir, so let's have at it.

Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus' Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin.

Actually, he's off to a pretty good start, having at least accurately portrayed Palin as "that demonic succubus."

In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor's writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:

Now hold on a minute, Jonah.  Couldn't you have found some example among the "countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus' Dance" slightly more representative, or perhaps relevant, than the reader's forum at Slate?  Here are a couple in blogs I link to, G and T (not for the faint-hearted.  You have been warned.).  And LGM, handling it one chapter at a time. And of course, there was Steven Colbert calling her book a "Steaming pile of bleep."  (Which I heard with my own ears.) How did Jonah miss them?

"The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn't work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle."

Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, "That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate."

Somehow, Jonah neglected to provide a link to the this Doberman-pouncing hate-fest.  A simple oversight, no doubt.  I mean, I can't imagine that he would be indulging in cherry-picking, or anything vaguely dishonest like that. Would he?  Fortunately, with 30 seconds spare time, and the help of The Google, I was able to track it down.

But soon, the original contributor confessed: "I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It's taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,' written by Barack Obama."

The ruse should have been allowed to fester longer, but the point was made nonetheless: Some people hate Palin first and ask questions later.

Wow.  That is some serious hate, isn't it?  But wait.  Jonah forgot - and I'm sure this is another innocent oversight -  to print the rest of the original post by the original contributor, one KevClark64.  Here, Jonah's oversight is corrected.

Wow! That wouldn't make it through freshman English class, and I mean high school, not college. What's the sentence about anyway? The apartment? The gas station? The Doberman? How about sticking with one complete thought before going on to three more? Just goes to show that some people should stick with politics and give up any presumptions of being a writer.

This paragraph, obviously done in good clean fun by the clever Mr. KevClark64 to punk the liberal fascist Slate crowd, is reasonable critiquing, while saying the sentence in question deserves honorable mention in a bad writing contest is a manifestation of - what was it?  Oh, yeah: "hate first ask questions later."

You see, to a right-wing pant-load, even a jesting (or, guffawing, if you so prefer) critique of some admitedly over-wrought prose percieved to have come from a poor, oppressed, down-trodden, Splinter-sect Christian radical right-wing tool is hate.  Never mind that most everyone in the country has long known about as much as they want to about the Divine Miss S, and formed their opinions no later than August, 2008.

And, of course, Jonah is far above issuing such un-genteel criticism, or even engaging in over-wrought rhetoric.  This gem was only a slip of the pen.

It's difficult for mere mortals like us to fully grasp the enormousness of the Democrats' hypocrisy. Put aside all that talk of dissent being the highest form of patriotism. Overlook that Democrats would have upended jerry cans of gasoline and immolated themselves in protest if the Bush administration had asked people to inform on their neighbors. You can even forget that the DNC's claims are untrue.

But I digress.  Back to business.

My all-time favorite response to John McCain's selection of Palin as his running mate was from Wendy Doniger, a feminist professor of religion at the University of Chicago. Professor Doniger wrote of the exceedingly feminine "hockey mom" with five children: "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

Oh, my - where to start.  Doniger is a feminist.  Well, to Jonah's loyal readership, that in itself might be damning. Next, Palin is "exceedingly feminine." For me to conclude that this is merely code for Ex-Gov-hockey-MILF would be rank speculation, though I do believe I'm on to something.  But let's start here:

The best part about that sentence: Doniger uses the pronoun "her" - twice.

In Jonah-land the feminist professor is so blind to her own rhetoric, that she misses the irony of using the female pronoun to refer to the pretend woman. Well, this is more than I can figure out on my own.  Maybe we should go to the source.

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.

Leaving nothing to chance here, I'll first point out that Doniger is using the word "woman" as the female equivalent of "mensch" - you know, a REAL person, rather than a contrived phony; then add definition 7 of pretense:  "The quality or state of being pretentious; ostentation."  This nuance of meaning is clearly too subtle for Jonah's little pea-brain.

And, gee.  It almost seems that Jonah's ridicule of an off-topic (remember this is ostensibly about rabid criticism of Palin's book), 14-month-old, cherry-picked quote out of context (again, no link provided) might be the slightest bit disingenuous.  Could it be our boy is hating first, and not even bothering with questions?

Just this week, a liberal blogger at The Atlantic who has dedicated an unhealthy amount of his life to proving a one-man birther conspiracy theory about Palin's youngest child (it's both too slanderous and too deranged to detail here) shut down his blog to cope with the epochal, existential crisis that Palin's book presents to all humankind. The un-self-consciously parodic announcement seemed more appropriate for a BBC warning that the German blitz was about to begin, God Help Us All.

OK.  I'm getting tired of trackng down Jonah's damned unlinked, uncited references. Well, another 30 seconds with The Google, revealed this LIBERAL as non-other than Andrew Sullivan.  Unfortunately, I had to wade through the fetid dung-mire that is Michelle Malkin to get there, and my brain is still reeling from our last encounter. And Sullivan's blog was shut down for all of 17 HOURS.

But, Jonah - come here lad - I have to explain something to you.  Your "liberal blogger" Andrew Sullivan is A FREAQUING CONSERVATIVE!   If you had provided a link, or at least identified who you were talking about, the transparency of this lie would have been manifest.  So here we see Jonah revealed.  Not merely content to cherry-pick, distort, and grasp wildly at straws in a vain attempt to make his contrived point, he has to resort - as conservatives always do - to making shit up.

Indeed, some of us will always be sympathetic to Mrs. Palin if for nothing else than her enemies.

Uh, Jonah - that sort of sympathy is supposed to be directed at underdogs and the down-trodden, not priveleged members of a political elite with hundred and fifty-thousand dollar wardrobes and million dollar book deals.  Glad to help you there, son.

The bile she extracts from her critics is almost like a dye marker, illuminating deep pockets of asininity that heretofore were either unnoticed or underappreciated.

Time for a do-over.

The bile she spews is almost like a dye marker, illuminating deep pockets of asininity that heretofore were either unnoticed or underappreciated.

There.  Corrected that for you.

In fairness, just as there are people who hate Palin for the effrontery she shows in daring to draw breath at all,

That's colorful Jonah, and almost imaginative, but - sorry - FAIL!  She has worked hard to earn our contempt.

there are those who love her with a devotion better suited for a religious icon.

When Jonah, in a rare moment of lucid candor, hits on a heretofore either unnoticed or underappreciated truth, it can actually be quite terrifying.

I hear from both camps, often. And while I don't think both sides are equally wrong (after all, the acolytes of the Doniger school openly reject reality more than any so-called creationist),

Can somebody please tell me what the hell a "so-called creationist" is, or what this sentence is supposed to mean?  Or is Jonah still simply hung up on not understanding definition 7 of pretense?  Really - What the . . . ?!?

I don't think either position is laudable or sufficient.

Au contraire, Jonah: extremism in defense of Palin's chicanery is no virtue, but revealing Palin as a dupliticous, grubbing right-wing tool is no vice.

Sarah Palin is neither savior

I am so relieved!

(that job has been taken by the current president, or didn't you know?)

Careful Jonah.  That is almost hateful.

nor is she satanic. She is a politician, a species of human like the rest of us.

A species of human?  Let that cogent phrase sink into your cerebellum and oscillate for a moment or two.  But, meanwhile, I'm withholdng judgement until the DNA testing is in.

I'm fairly certain that if you read many of her public-policy positions but concealed her byline, many of her worst enemies would say "that sounds about right," and some of her biggest fans would say "that sounds crazy." But most people would say that her views are perfectly within the mainstream of American politics. She may be more religious than coastal elites in the lower 48, but that is something some bigots need to get over, anyway.

I'm fairly certain that Jonah's relationship with reality is, at best, casual.

I'm happy about the books she's selling thanks to the controversy over her, but that doesn't mean I think these controversies are justified. Palin holds no public office and, as of yet, is not running for one.

And the last time she did, she walked out in a snit, unable to take the pressure.  Or have you forgotten?

But the Associated Press assigned eleven reporters to "fact-check" her book, while doing nothing like that to fact-check then-candidate Obama's or current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's no doubt riveting book.

Say what you like about Obama and Reid - but they aren't famous for making statements that are blatently lies or delusional fantasies, like Palin is.  And I have to believe that the AP is a business orginization that wouldn't devote those resources unless they were pretty confident they'd strike gold.

As it stands, my sense is that Palin is good for the Republican party but not necessarily great.

If you had any sense, you would realize that the genuinely awful Sarah Palin is the worst thing to happen to the Republican party since Watergate.

She generates enthusiasm among, and donations from, the base. But she also turns off many of the people the GOP needs to persuade and attract.

Once again a moment of lucid candor.  That's two in one article!

That could change with this book tour, and I hope it does.

Not too likely if she continues to stand up her rain-soaked supporters.

Whether she's ready or qualified for the presidency is another matter. But the presidency is a long way off,

Not long enough to teach the unteachable.

and besides, that's what primaries are for.

And that's how we got GWB.  God help us all.

Here's the bottom line.  With a little bit of quasi-clear thinking, The Google, and a dash of snark, I was able to reveal Jonah's poorly thought-out article as nothing more than a steaming pile of horse manure, and damned mean-spirited, to boot.  There is no valid conservatism in this country.  All they have is right-wing DEEP STUPIDITY, and it's pathetic.

The stupid - it festers!
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*  Photo from here
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