Some interesting thoughts on Sarah Palin’s new book…. which I happen to have started reading myself just the other day. I’ll leave Melissa’s thoughts on the book itself to her article. [1] But she, in the process of laying the groundwork for her review, points up something that I’ve noticed myself on the state of things political in this country:
Even reading the book implies a certain fan-like behavior, a friend informed me. This notion is offensively absurd, but then, we live in absurd political times.
[2]
Melissa Couthier
Here is what I believe about Sarah Palin: She is a political force of nature. She should be taken seriously. She has a tremendous amount of political capital and would be a contender if she chooses to run in 2012.
In addition, Palin has driven the political debate since President Obama has taken office. She, more than any other Republican, has been a philosophical counter-point to Barack Obama, and really, to the establishment Republicans in Washington, D.C.
Her book deserves to be read on all these grounds. And anyone who claims to be an intellectual but refuses to engage intellectually by refusing to read her book deserves to be ignored.
[3]Read the first para of the quote again. The reaction Melissa describes here, is certainly an attitude I’ve noted quite a few times over the last two years, and seems to me one of fear. It is a fear shared by the left and by establishment Republicans, to the degree that the two groups are harder and harder to tell one from the other. Fear of what? Fear, I think, of losing power. They each view the Tea Party and ideas behind it, as a threat to their power.
As I said myself a couple years ago:
What’s needed is not Democrat Lite, but real conservatives. Republicans over the years are successful to the extent they’ve been conservative. Where they get into trouble, and lose elections, it’s to the degree they’ve gone Democrat lite, and forgotten Reagan’s maxim that government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking the Demcrats are not calculating with this factor in mind. I observe, as I have previously, that they seem to be focusing all their efforts at derision against the most conservative Republicans, not the so-called ‘moderates’. They know very well the threat a real conservative Republican party brings to the table. Look at the amount of time and spittle being expended on the topic of Sarah Palin, as an example. (How else to explain away the desperate and hateful focus on Trig Palin by a group of people… a party… a political way of thinking… that is ostensibly supposed to be fighting for the downtrodden, such as those with Downs syndrome?)
Look, too, at the amount of effort the left put into getting the conservatively weaker John McCain into the nomination, only to reject him once he got that nomination, in favor of the outright socialist.
Palin, whatever else she may be, is certainly one of the leading voices of the Tea Party Right. Given that the Tea Party types tend to be independent thinkers, one could not possibly achieve such a position without having a certain level of smarts. That’s particularly true of Palin, who apparently hasn’t gone to great lengths to court the Tea Party per se, and who has rather leaned on the strength of her arguments. Those smarts are certainly reflected in those arguments and in the book, and that’s something Melissa notes as well.