Who are the rednecks?

posted at 10:50 am on September 3, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Gawker looks at the blue-staters rushing to define Sarah Palin as a drooling hick with a gun, living in a double-wide Governor’s Trailer in Juneau, and wonders why they believe conservatives to be the xenophobes.  For people who supposedly support a woman’s right to succeed on her own terms and express opposition to prejudice, the building meme in the Leftosphere regarding Palin suggests that their ideals seem highly mutable:

How will the chattering classes of the blue states respond to the family saga of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin? Why, with the same flinty-eyed suspicion and close-mindedness that we profess to hate in the “God, gays, and guns” country of rural Americans. The Palin family background gives otherwise intelligent people the chance to indulge in the basest and most cartoonish of regional and rural stereotypes. …

And so the precious blue-state liberals reveal themselves to be the small-minded yokels suspicious of anything and everyone that’s different.

We’ve already seen this, and it comes from the very top of the Democratic ticket.  In an unguarded moment among hard-Left elites in San Francisco, Barack Obama himself dismissed middle America as people bitterly clinging to their guns and their God only because they hadn’t yet learned to love Big Government.  The crowd laughed at this sneering comment, and now the entire Democratic Party appears to have joined in the laughter over a Governor who grew up in just that kind of community.

That was a defining moment for Barack Obama; this is a defining moment for the entire party and the media.  They claim to represent and/or champion blue-collar America, and yet the moment someone outside the elite enters the highest levels of political contest, what do they do?  They sneer at her humble beginnings, they sneer at her community, and they sneer at her values — all of which embody the middle-America, suburban identity.  And not only does she come from that heart of middle America, she has been tremendously popular among her fellow Alaskans, meaning that the sneering jibes hit at all of middle America, too.

It might work, at least for a short period of time.  Ridicule can be a powerful weapon — but only when one believes they are in on the joke, and not the butt of it.  Once people understand that Democrats and the media are laughing not at Sarah Palin herself but the entire idea of Sarah Palin, then Democrats may find that they’re the only ones laughing.

Update: Q&O links to a less humorous take from another liberal dismayed by the bloodthirstiness of the media and Democrats:

We surrendered all hope. We surrendered our shared dreams that our daughters would inherit a better world, a world of promise, equality, justice, fairness and honor.

We had dreamed of a world where our 17 years old daughters wouldn’t be striped naked and raped on the front page of the New York Times, above the fold.

We dreamed of a world where a candidate, man or woman, could run for the highest office in the land and not be “swiftboated” with sexual lies and slander so vicious, so cruel, so gross and destructive that they actually wither our very soul. …

So I thought the extremely bizarre story, so obvious a blatant lie, that somehow appeared in The Daily Kos, claiming Governor Sarah Palin had somehow faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her wayward teenage daughter would be laughed off and quickly vanish form the Kos pages like the trash it was. It was a joke, A sad, sick joke.

But instead of the aborted fetus it should have been, it was born full grown into the waiting arms of liberal bloggers and journalists, who quickly passed out cigars and congratulated themselves as proud mamas and papas. All this in spite of the fact that absolutely everyone knew the story was an absolute lie.

The only thing we aborted was the truth.

Read the whole post. Some integrity remains on the Left, but precious little.

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