The interesting thing about Sarah Palin is how she seems to think that, for her, the rules should be different. To some extent the rules _are_ different for her: she’s clearly an idiot, her responses to any question are a combination of word salad and jingoism, and yet the only inhibitory effect this had on her was to vault her to the very top of of the GOP crush list.
But in other ways the rules are not at all different, which means that when she’s publicly and repeatedly a hypocritical imbecile she gets shit for it. Naturally, she wants the luxury of the positive response to her “maverick”-ness without the unsavoriness of the negative, reality-based response.
I think this captures my opinion nicely:
Palin doesn’t need to traffic in facts or truths; she recites her refrigerator magnet nostrums, affirms her self-esteem, (like a right-wing Stuart Smalley) and offers “feeling realities,” which resonate with the feelings of her fans: Pointing out that ethics investigations did not cost Alaska millions of dollars as she has claimed is, for example, non-responsive — irrelevant — to Palin’s emotional insistence that she has been unfairly targeted by liberal elitists and the politics as usual gang, at great cost to the state of Alaska as well as her family. From this perspective, fidelity to facts is partisan nitpicking, at best. Insensitivity to Palin’s “feeling realities” is a form of abuse. Criticism, or satire of her adolescent ramblings is “hate speech:” As a letter to the Boston Globe complained in response to an op ed: “The recent humor piece (mocking Sarah Palin) follows the worst tradition of liberal media hate speech. Just like the pieces on “Saturday Night Live,” and on Jon Stewart’s and Bill Maher’s show …”
I have some friends who like to give shit, but for whom receiving shit counts as an uncoonscionable personal attack. And, truth be told, sometimes I myself fall into this category, and when I realize this I also realize that I’m being a complete choad. So I suppose I could be an inspiration to Sarah Palin if she knew who I was.
From Wendy Kaminer‘s blog at The Atlantic.