The Leper Colony
Posted on November 6th, 2008
by Daniel Koffler |
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If your reading habits are anything like mine, the video of Carl Cameron telling Shepard Smith that Sarah Palin doesn’t know which countries are signatories to NAFTA, thinks Africa is a country, obstinately refused to prepare herself for her interview with Katie Couric (because who among us could name the periodicals we read without at least a cram session?), and threw “temper tantrums” over critical press, probably popped into your RSS feed a comfortable 150 times in the last couple of hours. As Daniel Larison observes, this is not the most auspicious day for anti-anti-Palin conservatives.
Never fear, though; Erick Erickson and the RedState Team sprang into immediate action:
RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.
We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.
We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.
It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.
They’ll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie’s failed ratings.
P.S. - Did I ever tell you how RedState was able to stock Gov. Palin’s campaign plane with twenty of these?. We were glad to. And we were glad not to mention it at the time. We are rooting for Sarah Palin. Don’t make us add you to our list. Do you really want to be next to Kathleen Parker in the leper colony?
Frankly, I’m confused. The whole point of calling the exile you intend for your enemies a “leper colony,” one would think, is to create the impression that it’s an unpleasant place to be. But the informed, rational worldview of Erick and our other intrepid heroes rests on the premise that the rewards of pulling a Brutus, Cassius, or Judas on the infantile Imperatrix of the North are simply irresistible to those of weak-will and debauched virtue. I thought we had established beyond a shadow of a doubt that Kathleen Parker, David Frum, Christopher Buckley, Ken Duberstein, Kenneth Adelman, Colin Powell, Peggy Noonan (possibly), David Brooks, Jeffrey Hart, Ross Douthat, anyone who has written for Culture 11, et al., could only have criticized Sarah Palin in order to secure invations to exclusive cocktail parties in tawny neighborhoods of Manhattan and Washington, D.C. (though granted, in the case of the ladies on this list, they clearly criticized Mrs. Palin in part because they were jealous of her looks).
In any event, Erick did stumble onto a very solid bit of inferential reasoning. One can only “make” someone a leper, short of bio-weaponization techniques a bit beyond even RedState’s competence, by contracting the infection and then transmitting it. Now of course, leprosy is a particularly nasty bug, and it’d be asking a lot of RedStaters to get themselves sick with it. But this isn’t just any political cause; we’re talking about the long-term viability of the woman who is guaranteed to lead the GOP to crushing victories in at least half the states that border Appalachia, and crushing defeats absolutely everywhere else. No burden is too heavy to bear to see to it that Barack Obama breezes to a second term effectively unopposed.
There is a Catch-22, however. What with all their limbs falling off from the leprosy, it’s going to be awfully hard to “track down” able-bodied traitors to the project of running candidates for office whose sole qualification and entire platform consists in seething, ugly, and all-around pitiable resentment of an increasingly large majority of the country.
UPDATE: If you’ve even been a mild fan of Palin, you especially need to read Mark Kleiman right now.
Filed under: Conservatism
yes - beating the mccain people while they are down is a good idea. for so much talk about ronald reagan, they seem to have little qualms violating his 11th commandment (Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.). very little political instinct, very much ideological purity, these people.
Hey, Brutus was right, don’t lump him in with the others. Brutus was not a traitor to the Imperial cause, he was a patriot to the Republic. So was Aaron Burr.
These are the same people that wanted to turn McCain into a leper over amnesty. How’d that work out?
Hey, good post. It kind of surprised me to hear Pat Buchanan sticking up for that dope on tv, given that he’s a paleocon. Why is he for Palin?
Don’t Malkin and RedState realize that the reason these stories are coming out is because the GOP wants to slash and burn Palin now to keep her from running in 2012 and not some disgruntled staffers?
Speaking of resentments, the author seems to harbor a few.
While I can understand being duped by the neocons and the ‘over-there’ platform at least initially, you would think the light would start to dawn on these people that, at best, it was not worth the cost politically, not to mention the threat was never real.
But, they just don’t seem to get it.
And for that I am starting to wonder if they don’t deserve the long winter they are about to endure or if they are worth saving at all.
Thing is, Obama is probably better for them as not many of them make more than 50K/year, let alone 250K.
It seems the RedState Team are determined to embody Talleyrand’s famous quip about the Bourbons. ‘They learned nothing and forgot nothing.’
All of this brings new meaning to the phrase “party infighting”
I am genuinely torn by all of this because I defended Palin from the smears of the McCainiacs looking to CYA and save their sorry careers. However, knowing that Africa is a continent and not a country, isn’t that something you have to nail at the beauty pagent? Not knowing which countires are in NAFTA? Oh yuck!
I have also said, as I live in a small rural county in Wisconsin, that while I know a lot of fine people here, most of them are not presidential or vice-presidential material, including myself. Not just anybody can do this job and the right has to be very careful not to descend to the level of identity politics practice by the left, which is the selection and support of candidates no matter how unqualified they are by the basis of racial solidarity. Do we really want to reach Al Sharpton-level politics?
Palin deserves credit for basically saving the GOP ticket from an electoral tsunami on Tuesday. Had Lieberman or Romney been on the ticket, Obama would have probably carried Montana, Alaska, both Dakotas, Arizona, Missouri, maybe even Georiga too and the Dems would have had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. Yet if Palin was the on on top of the ticket, she wouldn’t have done much better than McCain did.
She may very well be the favorite of the GOP but so was Vice President Dan Quayle in 1992 as he was portrayed as martyr persecuted by the “liberal media.” However, after he left office, the word began to trickle down from his former staffers (Bill Kristol being one of them) and other Bush I officials that yes, he really was a stupid rich kid. The word came down from them and spread to GOP party hacks and then to rank and file voters so that by the time Quayle did run for president he couldn’t make it to the year 2000 because he had such a miserable finish in the 1999 Iowa GOP Straw Poll. Only John Sununu supported him and that’s not saying much.
Palin may be popular with the base right now but that doesn’t guaratee anything and a lot of her popularity is based in large part on who her enemies are. The bottom line is she can’t win a general election right now. McCain-Palin was clobbered in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the two states that was thought her presence could help the ticket. Unless there’s a great reclamation project over the next four years that restores her credibility on issues like foreign affairs, she will not win the GOP nomination in 2012 because it won’t be just the left or the media criticizing her, it will be her fellow Republicans. And if she can’t match-up with them then rank and file GOP primary voters are not going to vote for her no matter how much they like her or her background.
Leprosy may be an imperfect analogy, but I got it, unlike many of the folks here. I heard discussion about this on Glenn Beck this morning, and it was pretty interesting.
A number of the folks working on the McCain campaign disliked Palin because she was a maverick. Strangely, McCain named her as his VP for this very reason, and he stuck by her (for good reason since she energized the base of the party) until the end.
Could it be that the folks insulting Palin simply wanted to blame someone for McCain? Could it be that their true allegiances lie with other GOP primary candidates who failed to get the nod, and they don’t want Palin reappearing on the scene in two or three years to get in their way? I agree that these folks have been working for themselves rather than the GOP or what it stands for, and they deserve to be treated as lepers by candidates in 2012.
I never liked the Palin pick because of her inexperience and because her selection smacked of the sort of identity politics the GOP should stay away from, but I’m really disgusted with this backstabbing. As much as I dislike a lot about them, the redstaters are on to something here. The kind of person who trashes their candidate so quickly and so nastily is a disgusting weasel who ought to be shunned. That’s assuming these leaks are true, which I highly doubt.
That said, if Palin still wants to run for President after the past two months’ performance, she is as stupid as everyone says. She needs to go back to Alaska and do the job she was elected to do.
‘The kind of person who trashes their candidate so quickly and so nastily is a disgusting weasel who ought to be shunned. ‘
It wasn’t their candidate. McCain’s VP choice was thrust on them and they were told to make her over. Pointing out there wasn’t enough substance there for them to work with isn’t sour grapes and it’s not excuse making.
Stop being dismissive, it’s what got you guys into this mess to begin with.
t wasn’t their candidate. McCain’s VP choice was thrust on them and they were told to make her over. Pointing out there wasn’t enough substance there for them to work with isn’t sour grapes and it’s not excuse making.
Then they should have resigned, but no, they rode it out, waiting to see what would happen. So, if things were as bad as they say, they were willing to hide it so that she could become VP. Now that things went bad, they want to use Palin as a human shield to cover for their own incompetence.
No matter how you slice it, they’re disgusting backstabbing weasels. The one thing worse than McCain’s picking Palin is his having picked them.
And since I’ve long favored Obama over McCain and criticized Palin since her selection, I don’t see how I’m being “dismissive.”
Then they should have resigned, but no, they rode it out, waiting to see what would happen. So, if things were as bad as they say, they were willing to hide it so that she could become VP. Now that things went bad, they want to use Palin as a human shield to cover for their own incompetence.
You can’t make chicken salad from chicken sh*t.
Unless you count us voters, Palin is the only tragic figure of this election.
McCain got what he deserved, but Palin is being scapegoated and made to look much stupider than she otherwise would.
Both things can be true. The McCain people trashing Palin are trying to save their own hides, for sure, and can perhaps be classified as backstabbing weasels. The one excuse for them is the same as many of us might have when we’re in a job and the boss does something really stupid that we vehemently disagree with — we hang in there until we can find something else.
Simultaneously, Palin can be a moronic opportunist. It doesn’t necessarily exonerate the people calling her out, but certainly it is hard to find much merit in her candidacy.
Palin is the type that we all know from high school — if she was your lab partner or somehow on your team for a group project, she would add no value and take all the credit. You would cringe when the teacher put her on your team.
Positive things to say? Anyone? Anyone?
http://rightklik.blogspot.com/
“Both things can be true. The McCain people trashing Palin are trying to save their own hides, for sure, and can perhaps be classified as backstabbing weasels. The one excuse for them is the same as many of us might have when we’re in a job and the boss does something really stupid that we vehemently disagree with — we hang in there until we can find something else.”
But picking Gov. Sarah Palin was not stupid:
Her common sense position on offshore drilling (a position she actually believes in, in probable contrast to Sen. John McCain) was favored by 68% of the voters, as compared to only 19% who opposed it.
Even after so much effort was put forth by certain forces to reduce the cost of gas, and thus make that issue less relevent to the voters, they (the strong majority of voters) STILL agreed with Gov. Sarah Palin.
Also, among voters who said McCain’s selection of Gov. Sarah Palin mattered to them, McCain won by 3 points.
Whereas among voters who said the selection did not matter, McCain lost by 8 points.
Picking Sarah Palin was one of the few smart things John McCain has done in his life (thus far).
And the people working for McCain who decided to stab Sarah Palin in the back by spreading lies about her are smart enough to know this, or at least smart enough that they figured it out after looking over the exit polls.
Therefore they simply could not have anything but an evil motive for their slander, and they deserve to be punished, to a reasonable extent.
That is not to say they need be purged, just that they should be utterly deprived of any responsibility in the field of politics until the end of time.
Or perhaps you Democrats want them?
I doubt very much that you do.
Put them in the same wilderness as Lieberman (I), where the weeping and the gnashing of their teeth shall be.
What Malkin is talking about is nothing, and 100% reasonable, compared to what the hard left did to the neoconn.
“But this isn’t just any political cause; we’re talking about the long-term viability of the woman who is guaranteed to lead the GOP to crushing victories in at least half the states that border Appalachia, and crushing defeats absolutely everywhere else”
Now you can see into the future?
You don’t even know what the great lady actually believes on foreign policy (as distinct from the McCain Campaign line she was decent, caring, and in some ways naive enough to think she had to put forward out of loyalty to a war hero who gave her a chance on the national stage), much less how successfully she’ll govern Alaska over the next 4 years, and the conditions that we’ll have in 2012.
Sounds just a little like Obama saying he looks forward to dealing with the Iraqi government over the next 8 to 10 years.
He already knew he would be elected, that he will be reelected, and that the constitution will be “corrected” to give him an “oppurtunity” to run for a third term, and finally that he’ll have to step down for yet undetermined reasons less than more than halfway through his first term.
The hubris of both you and him deeply troubles me.
It almost makes Bush look humble, if such a thing were possible.
And perhaps even more importantly, the model you put forth for the 2012 election could never occur as long as 2012 sees an American National Election, for it is politically impossible to be crushed in most states and and yet crush your opponent in “half of Appalachia”.
And as for Goldberg, I have a feeling his eyes were recently opened to something the half-Jewish fellow was just too blind to see before.
Vis a vis the FBI.
[...] will attempt to destroy anyone who doesn’t support Sarah, and The American Conservative mocks them for [...]
its just to bad Aaron Burr didn’t kill Hamilton before the creation of the Federal Reserve.
“I heard discussion about this on Glenn Beck this morning, and it was pretty interesting.”
Glenn Beck….Interesting? ya, only if the oxygen to your brain has been cut off for 5 minutes.