Welcome To The Party, Mrs. Palin

posted at 12:16 am on July 27, 2009 by Doctor Zero

In her resignation speech today, Sarah Palin said, “With this decision, now, I will be able to fight even harder for you, for what is right, and for truth. And I have never felt that you need a title to do that.” Her statement echoes the blogger battle cry. Our every post is a rejection of the argument to authority – the idea that an impressive set of credentials should elevate the opinions of a politician or journalist above debate. Some bloggers have those credentials, of course, but most of us post our writing in the knowledge that it must be able to stand on its own merits. Our cross-referenced research, the quality of our writing, and the strength of our reasoning are the weapons we carry into the arena of ideas. The man who tried to push phony National Guard documents on the public during the 2004 elections had a title, a stack of journalistic credentials, and decades of experience working as an anchorman for a major network news department. The guys who took him down were ordinary people who smelled something fishy and never stopped asking questions.

Palin made a point of warning the media to leave her successor’s children alone. She has a great deal of authority to speak out against the “politics of personal destruction,” which have escalated to include the use of multiple-impact slander warheads that take out entire families. Palin can do a lot of good by highlighting the thuggish tactics of the Left, which were all on nauseating display in the campaign to destroy her. Deranged conspiracy theories, in her case about the maternity of her son? Check. Blinding hypocrisy and manufactured “crises” pushed by political operatives masquerading as “journalists?” Absolutely. Vicious misogyny, passed along with nary a raised eyebrow from “feminists?” You betcha. Invasions of privacy and abuses of government to destroy a political target? Ten-four. Nobody knows the Left’s game plan better than Sarah Palin, and it seems like she plans to use what she has learned.

The Palin saga exemplifies a brutal political and cultural battlefield, where the Left pays little price for launching smear campaigns and making ugly insinuations. Like the people who exploited Alaskan law to bury Palin under bogus ethics complaints, the Left is generally free to lob dirty bombs at its opponents, with few lasting repercussions. The story of David Letterman’s unforgivable attacks on the Palin children ended with Letterman still holding his job, having suffered nothing worse than being forced to issue a tortured apology… while Sarah Palin stopped being the governor of Alaska today. Only time will tell if Letterman learned any sort of lesson from the affair, but you only need to drop by a liberal blog to see that the Left, as a whole, drew exactly the wrong lesson.

On the Ain’t It Cool movie and TV news website, for example, a featured blogger wrote about the Palin resignation over the July 4 weekend. In reference to the Letterman controversy, the blogger said: “After her snowmobile-racer husband Todd alleged that Letterman had taken to joking about the rape of 14-year-old daughter Willow Palin, I’m not sure Sarah Palin could snag a major-party nomination for Wasilla comptroller.” Todd Palin was the bad guy, you see. The article goes on to speculate that Palin resigned so she could snag a job at Fox News while she was still youthful and attractive, because if she served out her full term, she would have been “slightly more wrinkly” and might have needed to settle for a radio job. Incredibly, the author tries to float the idea that Letterman didn’t actually make the joke about raping Willow Palin, and embeds video of an interview Letterman did with Dakota Fanning to defend him. Since Letterman got through this interview without making a joke about raping Fanning, you understand, he couldn’t possibly have made a joke about raping Willow Palin. The comments to this article are filled with people high-fiving Letterman for helping to get rid of Palin. No, I am not making any of this up – you can click the link, if you have the stomach. Yes, the person who wrote this piece is an imbecile, but there are a lot of imbeciles with high-traffic web sites. I invite you to imagine all of this being written after a top late-night host made a similar joke about Barack Obama’s daughters. I know you get that invitation a lot, but try it one more time.

The Henry Gates affair is another illustration of liberals tossing out vicious slander, with no expectation of accountability. I really hope Sgt. Crowley refuses the invitation to hop over to the White House for a friendly beer with the men who accused him of being a stupid racist, abusing the office of the President in the process. For one thing, considering his previous behavior, Obama will probably blow a few million dollars of taxpayer money flying in a team of Chicago brewmasters to hand-craft a special beer for the occasion. More importantly, it’s time someone stood up and let these people know it’s not okay to casually lob around this kind of accusation. Obama inviting Crowley over for a beer is like Bill Clinton allegedly telling Juanita Brodderick to put some ice on her eye after he assaulted her – a contemptuous, half-hearted attempt to hide an inconvenient bruise. Everything Gates said during his encounter with Crowley can be boiled down to the belligerent warning cry of the arrogant elitist: “Do you know who I am?” It’s increasingly important for America to answer the same way Sgt. Crowley did.

A nation swimming in a sea of data is being asked to accept far too much on faith. We’re supposed to give Letterman a pass for unspeakably boorish behavior because he’s a celebrity with a big audience. We’re supposed to tolerate Barack Obama’s ugly prejudices, and the abuse of his position on behalf of a friend, because of his title – which he secured by leveraging his earlier titles, none of which had any sort of actual achievement to back them up. Every major debate is supposed to be checkmated because the right people have declared the arguments over, and it’s time to move on to America’s sentencing phase. The science is settled, there can be no question that we need radical health care reform, we have to pass this monster spending bill quickly or the economy will collapse, it’s unpatriotic to oppose this program… a dreary litany of appeals to authority, with absolutely no questioning of the authority allowed.

I think the country has an appetite to hear more passionate and well-reasoned arguments that can stand on their own, without being propped up by official letterhead. I doubt Sarah Palin has any illusions about her task being easy. There was a guy at her resignation speech holding a sign that said “Quitting: The New American Value… thanks for the laughs.” He told an interviewer that he thought Palin had “turned into a vicious vixen who descended into ugly, divisive politics.” Anyone who’s ever written for a blog, and found their comments infested with trolls, knows exactly how the ex-Governor must have felt when she saw that.

To paraphrase Bruce Willis from “Die Hard:” Welcome to the party, Mrs. Palin.

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