The Tattered Mosaic

Say what you will of ridiculous awards and dubious honors, Sarah Palin deserves her award for, as Ann Coulter puts it, "her genius at annoying all the right people." But it's not really Sarah Palin I want to talk about... it's Ann Coulter talking about Sarah Palin. I had some thoughts reading her article, the first of which is that it's clear she thinks too much about herself and suffers from a very tragic case of the victim mentality. But there's more. There's always more.

Click through to keep reading...

The entire presidential election year was kind of a downer for conservatives. Once the “maverick” John McCain won the nomination, the rest of the year was like watching a slow motion car crash. Except at least a slow-motion car crash is occasionally entertaining. So it was going to be a long year.

Until Palin.

True enough! I suppose if you weren't paying attention or if you don't give a shit about starving children and protecting the ability of people just like yourself to access higher education and a living wage so that they can make something of themselves without a trust fund, you must have been very depressed watching Obama's meteoric rise to the forefront of the national consciousness. It must have been sad sitting up in her office watching the celebration and sense of brotherhood breaking out like hives on the streets, all the while seething like the kid no one wants on their baseball team.

When McCain chose our beauteous Sarah as his running mate, the maverick was finally acting like a real maverick -- as opposed to the media’s definition of a “maverick” which is: “agreeing with the editorial positions of the New York Times.”

I wasn't aware that he did, although I don't know what her problem with the NYT editorial board is. I mean, they endorsed Hillary Clinton, someone Coulter herself preferred over John McCain for the white house.

Pre-Palin it had been one race -- boring old “You kids get off my lawn!” John McCain versus the exciting, new politician Barack Obama, who threw caution to the wind and bravely ran as the Pro-Hope candidate. And then our heroic Sarah bounded out of the Alaska tundra and it became a completely different race. This left the press completely discombobulated and upset. They didn't know whether to attack Sarah for not having an abortion or go after her husband for not being a sissy.

I don't know whether Coulter is crazy, deluded, or lying, but it doesn't really matter. The media had a heart attack over Sarah Palin because she was good fucking material. They were mean, many of them, but the issue of whether she should have aborted her son was like a preemptive strike by conservatives and talking heads, always attributed to "some people" and "feminists" who never existed. Frankly, all the feminist blogs I read (you can see them clearly over there in my blogroll) were aghast at the idea that anyone would pass judgment on Palin's choice. After all, being pro-choice means respecting whatever that choice happens to be. Feminists were just as angry at these "people" who were criticising her for having a baby with Down's syndrome. Also, Coulter is the only one who gives a shit about the relative machismo of dudes in the public eye, and only in her fevered imagination does she think the rest of us give a shit if a man has someone with a degree in cosmetology cut his hair.

I assume Palin was chosen because McCain had heard that she was a real conservative and he had always wanted to meet one -- no, actually because he needed a conservative on the ticket, but that he had no idea that picking her would send the left into a tailspin of wanton despair.

I know plenty of conservatives who would be ashamed if they had to consider Sarah Palin a "real conservative."

And it wasn't despair we felt, it was glee. We knew she would drag him down, and she did.

True, Palin made some embarrassing gaffes.

She complained that we didn’t have enough “Arabic translators” in Afghanistan -- not realizing the natives don’t speak Arabic in Afghanistan, but rather a variety of regional dialects, the most common of which is Pashtun.

Speaking to military veterans one time, Palin said, “Our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today.”

She bragged about passing a law regulating the nuclear industry that it turned out never became a law at all.

Some days Palin said Venezuela's dictator Hugo Chavez should suffer "regional isolation" -- but then on others she’d say she supported the president’s meeting with Chavez.

She told one audience about recent tornados in Kansas that had killed 10,000 people. In fact, a dozen people were killed in the tornados.

She referred to the “57 states” that make up the U.S.

Speaking of her eldest daughter’s pregnancy, she said Bristol was being “punished” with a baby.

As you probably know -- or guessed by now -- none of these gaffes were uttered by Palin. They are all Obama gaffes. Luckily, he made them to a star-struck press that managed not to ask him a difficult question for two years.

I'm surprised Coulter knows what they speak in Afghanistan, since I'm sure she thinks they should all be speaking English anyway. While many of these gaffes are embarrassing, like the second, fifth, and sixth, they mostly represent honest mistakes. McCain and Palin have made similar gaffes I'm sure they'd rather forget and aren't worth dwelling on. They don't represent policy. It's the last one that really bothers me because Obama never said a child was punishment for anything; he said that he wouldn't want his daughters "punished with a baby" if they had premarital sex, which is another way of saying that a baby should not be punishment, which it would be if you were forced to have one against your will. Put another way, he's saying babies should always be wanted. This is blatant misrepresentation. Again, crazy, deluded, or lying? Does it matter?

I don’t remember, for example, zealous inquiries into the supposedly peculiar religious practices of any candidates in past elections. No one in the press touched on Sen. Joe Lieberman’s religious beliefs when he was Kerry’s running mate. (Nor, while we’re on the subject, was the media particularly interested in the beliefs of the religion that inspired the 9/11 attacks on America.)

Oh, don't be coy. You think Islam is evil. Refer back to my assertion that she probably doesn't actually care what language Afghanis speak. This is as reasonable as saying that all Jews are imperfect and women shouldn't be trusted to vote.

But the press snapped right back into their anti-religious hysteria for a candidate who was a Pentecostal! The same media that couldn’t be bothered to investigate Obama’s ties to former Weathermen or Syrian Nationalist Tony Rezko was soon hot on the trail of a rumor that Palin’s church had a speaker 30 years ago who spoke in tongues!

Let me think now: Were there ever any unusual or otherwise noteworthy speeches or sermons given in churches where Obama worshipped? Hmmm … it's on the tip of my tongue.

The media investigated and talked about Obama's association with Bill Ayers; the reason it didn't prevent his election was because there was nothing there. Palin's minister speaking in tongues was hardly anything anyone held against her (and if they did, that's a personal problem). We here on the left, and a few in the media, were all scared of the prospect of having someone in the white house who sought the counsel of a man who believed in witches. Obama's minister, on the other hand, demanded better of the American people. The way conservatives complain about things, it really makes you wonder why they react to criticism of the country like it's treason. They don't think we can be a better country? Better people?

"The media" reports things and, yeah, what they choose to say can do a lot to frame an issue, but there is no big liberal conspiracy to brainwash people into embracing love, peace, hope, and baby killing. It's fair to criticise reporting that is actively misleading, untrue or devoid of context, but it's people, ultimately, that are left to make up their minds. Coulter apparently thinks that only she and a select few others are in command of their senses and a google search engine.

Liberals also suddenly decided that a woman with children could not handle the stress of higher office. Until Palin reared her beautiful head, this is precisely the sort of thinking liberals would have denounced as the Neanderthal, backwards, good old boy network attitude that had created a “glass ceiling.”

Let’s consider the facts: Palin’s oldest son was about to be under the tender care of Gen. David Petraeus after being shipped off to Iraq. Her next oldest child was about to be married and probably would prefer that her parents butt out. That left three children under the age of 15, which was almost the same as Obama had.

So Palin had one more child -- and a lot more executive experience -- than the guy at the top of the Democrats’ ticket. (I suspect what liberals were really mad about was that if Palin became Vice President, she probably would have hired a nanny who was a U.S. citizen.)

"Liberals" didn't decide that. This is just more misdirection. Coulter is erecting straw-liberals just to blow them down. It's absolutely fair to denounce the suggestion that Palin's children would in any way interfere with her duties, but who actually thought that? Was it really the Rachel Maddows and Alan Colmeses? A few bloggers? That Coulter provides no specifics is telling. She takes for granted that we'll simply accept these implications as fact. She knows her audience won't question what she considers common knowledge.

Like most Democrats, both Obama and Biden boasted of their humble beginnings, while having fully adopted the attitudes, pomposity and style of the elites.

Meanwhile, Palin is the sort of genuine American that brings out the worst, most egregious pomposity of liberals. For weeks, Carl Bernstein was showing up on TV to announce: “We still don’t have the date of first issuance of her passport.” Members of the establishment would be astonished to learn that more Americans have guns than passports.

I'll be brief: the difference between the humble beginnings of Obama and Palin was that Obama was able to get into Harvard without having any relatives who went there or a trust fund to pay his way. He got into the most prestigious university in this country, one of the most difficult law programs, one of the most prestigious positions (the law review), all on hard work and merit. Palin went to several unremarkable schools, got a degree in journalism, and never even tried to go to grad school. The relative popularity of guns and passports is beside the point. Palin suggested she had more experience than Barack Obama because she had a modicum of experience governing a small, homogenous population, lying through her teeth when she implied all Barack had to his credit was his time as a community organiser. She never had to work as hard as he did. Never. We weren't electing Joe-sixpack-in-chief, we were electing the fucking leader of the free world.

Palin blows a kiss to fans during a rally in Kissimmee, Fla., on October 26. (Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT) Liberals were angry at Palin because they thought she should look and act like Kay Bailey Hutchinson: Upper crust, prissy and stiff.

Palin had a husband in the Steelworkers Union, a sister and brother-in-law who owned a gas station, and five attractive children -- one headed for Iraq, one a Down’s syndrome baby and one the cutest little girl anyone had ever seen.

In a nutshell, Palin was everything Democrats are always pretending to be, but never are.

If the sheer demographic makeup of this nation is any proof, Coulter is full of shit. The liberals she's talking about exist primarily in her mind, like the vast liberal media conspiracy and Sarah Palin's experience.

Despite their phony championing of “women’s issues” (i.e. abortion) there was not one Democrat woman who could win a head-to-head contest with Palin. Especially not if we got to see their faces. Democrats may have a fleet of women politicians, but they don’t have a deep bench of attractive ones. You don’t even think of most Democratic woman as women: Rosa Delauro, Nita Lowey, Patty Murray, Janet Napolitano -- and the list goes on. Oh, sure, there are the odd female Democrat sex kittens -- your Janet Renos, your Donna Shalalas -- but they're the exception to the rule.

This is just a blatantly idiotic ad hominem. It's evidence of nothing and fails to make a point. Being pretty has shit all to do with governing. However, I'll remember these words when Coulter stops being a "sex kitten." I'm sure she'll do her part for her party by going quietly into that good night.

Mind you, I won't care that men are no longer drooling over her legs (and frankly, I wish we lived in a world where that didn't matter), but I won't be sad to see her go.

Indeed, the first words out of every Palin critic's mouth were: "Good speech, but she didn't write it." So I guess all liberals were reading the same talking points written for them by the Obama campaign. At least Palin pays her speechwriters. Neil Kinnock is still waiting for his check.

I wasn't aware of this controversy (and I sincerely apologise for not researching it more), but that's probably because it would be fair to say criticising a politician for using a speech writer is ludicrous. Yeah, they all do. Obama's speech writer, for instance, has been in the public eye lately. I really just wanted to take this opportunity to point out that Coulter think we all get our talking points from some central source, which is funny, because I was pretty sure she and hers all stuck to the same talking points laid out by their party leaders. I guess not. I guess every word that leaves her fingertips is wholly original. 100% Ann Coulter. She'd never lower herself to subscribing to a political ideology. She's much better than that.

Trendy dinner party opinion soon demanded that all liberals take up the cry that Palin must let the press have a whack at her. Almost immediately after she was introduced to the nation, the cry went up: “When are we going to be allowed to ask Palin questions?”

Palin’s refusal to meet with the press for one week after being chosen as McCain’s running mate was evidently more maddening than Obama's refusal to appear on Fox News for almost the entirety of his campaign.

We wanted Palin to talk to the media because we had no idea who she was and she wanted to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. I'm going to dispense with the snark and just tell you that, honestly, that's really the least anyone could have asked of Palin.

And Obama did appear on Fox News twice during the campaign, including an interview granted to Bill O'Reilly, much to the dismay of democrats for reasons that could easily fill a blog just as long.

Everyone acted as if Obama’s feat of running for President for two years constituted a complete and thorough vetting.

He wrote two books about himself, we've known of him since his speech at the DNC in 2004, and he granted interviews left and right. We were saturated with Obama for two years before we met Palin a scant two and a half months before we were supposed to decide whether we trusted her to lead the country and she was being sequestered. Spare me pity party.

It might have been, except that the entire media had apparently agreed: “OK, none of us will ask Obama about Tony Rezko, William Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright.”

No, they looked into the first two and found nothing compelling, and the third actually did dominate the airwaves for quite a long time. Have you forgotten?

Who cares if Palin was qualified to be President? She was running with John McCain! There was no chance that ticket was going to place her anywhere near the presidency. In fact, I can’t think of a better place to put someone you wanted to keep away from the White House than on a ticket with McCain.

Fortunately true.

Perhaps Palin’s year is 2012, but I would recommend that she take a little more time to become older and wiser. She ought to spend the next decade being a good governor, tending to her children so none of them turn out like Ron Reagan Jr., and reading everything Phyllis Schlafly, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan and “Publius” have ever written. (She also might keep in mind that HUMAN EVENTS was Ronald Reagan’s favorite newspaper!)

And for God's sake, keep her miles away from the New Testament! That's full of liberal propaganda.

In time, HUMAN EVENTS’ 2008 Conservative of the Year will be ready to be our President and someday can sweep into office and dismantle all the heinous government programs Obama and the Democrats are about to foist on the nation. Who knows? She might even be able to run as the candidate of "hope" and "change."

Yes. While I hope she would take away your right to even vote for her first, a right you don't think you should have, I also hope that we'll be around to stop her, because tired as I am of your self righteous, disingenous, whining, my feminism is for you. It's for Palin. It's for all women. So are my progressive values, whether you want them or not. I use my voice to protect yours.

Is this all you can do with it?

Encore

One of the things I've never understood is why anyone needs myths to make life interesting. Gnomes and fairies are cool, but I don't need to believe that they're waiting to be found just beyond the next patch of grass to think the world we live in is amazing and wonderful. Why do the pyramids need to be inspired by extra terrestrials? Why is it not amazing that people built them?

Believing in the world as it is and evaluating everything with an open, skeptical mind (not mutually exclusive) often yields more wonder than believing in spirits or complicated myths.

Gobekli Tepe

I first heard about this site in Art History. Gobekli Tepe was originally overlooked, mistaken for a graveyard. What it is is far more fascinating and it subverts everything we know about early modern humans. In every archeology and anthropology class I've had, I've learned that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculturally based communities was indicated by the development of permanent architecture, particularly areas of designated worship. This makes sense, of course, because once you settle down and start producing more food than you or your family needs, some of you can start specialising in things like art and architecture and your community will need a gathering place to make decisions, talk, and worship. Hunter gatherers naturally need to keep their lifestyle portable, because they move around within their territory. Gobekli Tepe, however, was a temple built by hunter gatherers. When you think about it, if hunter gatherers only move around in a given territory, why not get together and build a temple that you can return to seasonally? There's nothing unrealistic about it, but it is a huge discovery.

Homo Floresiensis

Another thing that I've always learned was that our last living human cousins were Homo sapiens neanderthalensis who died out more than 30,000 years ago. The discovery of H. Floresiensis, the little people of Flores, is nothing new, but their designation as a unique species of hominid means that fully modern man was not yet alone in the world until a mere 13,000 years ago, only until about two thousand years after the first humans crossed the bering land bridge and discovered the New World. Floresiensis most likely evolved from Homo erectus on the islands of Indonesia, but also shares many traits with fully modern humans.

These are both fascinating finds that simultaneously change and flesh out our understanding of our history on this earth. That we still know so little is no cause for fear. The world is endlessly wonderful, and endlessly surprising.

. Encore

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27 March 2009

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06 March 2009

I Downloaded a New Thing

22 December 2008

Sarah Palin; Conservative of the Year

21 November 2008

Discriminating Against the Unqualified

17 November 2008

Science is Awesome

15 November 2008

Prop 8 Protest

14 November 2008

Hugging the Panda

I've Always Been a Geek

13 November 2008

There's One in Every Party

17 October 2008

Election Hiatus

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