Conservatives Can’t Just Pretend Palin Never Mattered

January 25, 2011 | Posted in Miscellany | | 12 Comments ↓

Time for Palin Apologists to Let Go | FrumForum

 

Like Jennifer Rubin, only a year ago the author of “Why Jews Hate Palin,” these second-degree Palin maniacs no longer defend Palin. Instead, they try to solve the baffling mystery: how could anybody possibly object to the half-term governor?

Is it because they look down upon those who lack fancy college degrees? Because they hate babies? (Those were Taranto’s theories.) Or perhaps because they despise military moms? Or are they just jealous that Palin is so damn sexy?

I’d be willing to join Ross in pretending that the whole shameful Palin episode never happened if I could assure myself that the second-degree Palin defenders really had learned the lesson of this experience. I see no sign of it.

So as a contribution to the debate, let me try to explain why the Palin phenomenon cannot be left behind quite so fast.

In 2008, the Republican party nominated for the office of vice-president a person who is now pretty universally agreed to be unfit for the presidency. (Even Taranto agrees with that.) Concededly: it’s not the first time in the history of the republic that this has happened. But here’s the difference between Palin and, say, Spiro Agnew or Henry Wallace. The Palin nomination elicited a huge outpouring of argument from Republicans and conservatives denying that competence mattered at all in a potential president.

Admittedly, much of this defense was insincere. But unfortunately – not all. Palin we could quietly consign to the attic of Republican embarrassments. The apparatus of excuse and justification that surrounded and protected Palin until the day before yesterday – that still chugs away over at the Wall Street Journal – that apparatus remains an overwhelming impediment to any hope of a more responsible conservatism of the future.

 

12 comments on “Conservatives Can’t Just Pretend Palin Never Mattered”

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  1. In 2008, the Republican party nominated for the office of vice-president a person who is now pretty universally agreed to be unfit for the presidency.

    Just by considering whether Palin is fit to be president, people are buying into this whole elitist notion about qualifications and betraying the vision of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.

    If you’re old enough and born in the right place, you should be just good enough to run the country. That’s what the Constitution says and that’s what it means.

    And if the leftists don’t like that they should go back to Poland.

    Reply

  2. @ fuster:
    In a way you’re right – because focusing on Palin’s qualifications or personal baggage, or on the “apparatus” defending her, can easily turn into an excuse for not confronting her politics.

    Reply

  3. Frum hasn’t learned the profound mistake of supporting Obama (as per his ridiculous faux S0TU, in Esquire) egging on the silencing of Rush,
    and other foolish moves, then again he knows it’s not the “New Majority’ anymore.

    Reply

  4. miguel cervantes wrote:

    egging on the silencing of Rush,

    ever since Rush threw in with the folks demanding the slaughter of all black and Hispanic people in the USA so that they stop draining the Treasury and the blood supply, it’s been iffy as to whether he’s actually funding the Aryan Brotherhood’s spread into Europe or just buying enough crystal from them to maintain them in their northwestern bases.

    Reply

  5. This painful episode, as the Frumster, calls it, is defending oneself against the implication that one is responsible for the death of a nine
    year old girl, a judge, and several others, as well as the injury of 14 others including a congressman. Now that claptrap of a speech, has
    actually enabled Obama to profit politically from that atrocity, there
    aren’t words to describe the indecency of that. I’ll leave out the very pointed signed incitements to assasination, that developed because
    of that campaign of hate, of ‘blood libel’

    Reply

  6. miguel cervantes wrote:

    This painful episode, as the Frumster, calls it, is defending oneself against the implication that one is responsible for the death of a nine
    year old girl, a judge, and several others, as well as the injury of 14 others including a congressman.

    No, silly Don – the shameful episode to which Frum refers is the one that began in late August of 2008. The only reference to Tucson was made in passing in the Taranto piece that Frum excerpted.

    Now that claptrap of a speech, has
    actually enabled Obama to profit politically from that atrocity, there
    aren’t words to describe the indecency of that.

    You believe that, when called upon to speak on the events, Obama should have striven to divide a seething resentful, defensive, and self-absorbed minority from a disgusted majority, just like your dreamboat does every time she’s called upon – or calls upon herself?

    There are three things about Palin that the country reacts to negatively, both personally and politically: Palin herself, her supporters, and her pandering to her supporters.

    Reply

  7. From your favorite gal, Herr Grosch:

    There was more — too much, in fact. The speech was both undisciplined and boring. But it did remind us that, at heart, Obama is a liberal who wishes to expand, seemingly without limitation, the reach of the federal government. His lack of energy and failure to connect with his audience belied the notion that the old, charismatic orator is back. If the officials in the White House thought this was a helpful speech, they are more isolated from reality than I feared”

    Reply
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