Excellent must-read piece at WSJ about the motivation behind the deranged hatred of Sarah Palin by the far left liberals.Teaser:
Whether or not she is presidential timber--and we are inclined to think that she is not--there is no denying that she is a highly accomplished person. She is also a highly accomplished woman, what in an earlier age would have been called a feminist pioneer: the first female governor of the malest state in the country, the first woman on the presidential ticket of the party on the male side of the "gender gap." Having left politics, whether temporarily or permanently, she has established herself as one of the most consequential voices in the political media.
They say she is uneducated. What they mean is that her education is not elite--not Harvard or Yale, or even Michigan or UCLA. They resent her because, in their view, she has risen above her station.
In this respect we identify fully with Palin, for we have been on the receiving end of similar disdain. Our education, like Sarah Palin's, consisted of too many years at inferior state universities, although unlike her, we never even got around to graduating. The other day Paul Reidlinger took a shot at us for featuring one of his restaurant reviews under our "Wannabe Pundits" heading last month: "I was even denounced by noted high school graduate James Taranto." (For the record, our high school diploma is a GED.)
"Denounced" is far too strong a word; "mocked" is more like it. Reidlinger writes for San Francisco Bay Guardian, whatever that is. He doesn't say, but we surmise that he possesses advanced degrees from Stanford or the University of California, both very fine institutions. He observes that "it is a writer's job to afflict the comfortable and complacent." That would be an insufferably pretentious way to describe our job as a political columnist for an elite newspaper. What is a restaurant critic going to "afflict the comfortable" with? Food poisoning?
Professional jealousy and intellectual snobbery, however, only scratch the surface of the left's bizarre attitude toward Palin. They explain the intensity of the disdain, but not the outright hatred--not why some people whose grasp of reality is sufficient to function in society made the insane inference that she was to blame for a madman's attempt to murder Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Read the entire piece, well written and excellent observations.
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