You’ve got to love the cable TV pundits, has-been political hacks and bloviators who were “analyzing” Sarah Palin’s decision to resign as Governor of Alaska.
They never saw it coming, but somehow they now know her motives. In fact, they have never bothered to get to know her or try to understand where she was coming from. They are content to talk behind her back and gossip like a bunch of Old World WASPs at a restricted country club, making fun of her because she is not one of “them” all the while vowing to do whatever it takes to keep her and her working class family out of their exclusive club.
I am sure that in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard over the 4th of July weekend our “betters” in the Establishment are all having a good laugh about the rube from Alaska and how they drove her out of politics. And that includes the establishment people in both parties, better known as the ruling class. Republican or Democrat, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them.
Is she positioning for a 2012 White House bid? Is there a scandal coming? What they are saying is pure cattle crap. They have no idea, nor do I.
But maybe it has nothing to do with her political future. Maybe she has decided that politics in America has nothing to do with solving problems and has become nothing more than another “Reality TV” program full of narcissistic politicians and cable TV talking airheads. Hell, we’ve got our first “celebrity” President. Maybe she has decided that being ridiculed by talentless middle-aged late night hosts has gotten to be too much.
And maybe she has decided that politics is a very dirty business full of backstabbers and sycophants and she wants no part of it. I wouldn’t blame her.
I hope she gets a talk show and turns the tables on her elitist tormentors. They can dish it out but I doubt their thin skins can take it. And remember that revenge is a dish best served cold.
But as I said on these pages last year during the campaign, this is more about who controls the agenda in this country and sets the standards for what a career woman should be and how she should act.
Over the years, the East Coast media have carefully crafted a narrative of the successful woman, and it sure ain’t her.
Their ideal woman?
Highly educated (bonus points if it is an Ivy League education), children later in life after building that successful career in the law, media or politics, nannies so they have time to change the world, makes reservations not dinner, an urbane urbanite, reads Vanity Fair, is pro-choice and a Democrat. Think Michelle Obama.
How dare this woman, Sarah Palin, offer a different narrative!
Educated, but it took her a long time to do it, and the horror – she went to the University of Idaho, a land grant university! She had children when she was younger and actually kept one that she knew was to be born with challenges instead of casually aborting him, raised them without nannies and elite pre-schools, cooks moose stew, country bumpkin, doesn’t read Vanity Fair, pro-life and a Republican.
The great fear of the elites and ruling class in America is that she represents an alternative narrative of a successful woman, and destroying her was priority one. Their bigger fear is that there are more like her than they care to admit. So destroying her sends a clear message to the next Sarah Palin—try to enter our world and change our narrative of female success and we will cut you off at the knees.
But it is also a prejudice against someone who has spent her life on America’s last frontier and not in the salons of Washington or New York, Harvard or Yale. It is part of the larger disdain our coastal elites have for the common man or woman in flyover country, or in this case Alaska. They have never met anyone like her and it scares them that not everybody thinks like they do.
NOW and other so-called feminists have also shown that they are not about empowering all women—just those who agree with their agenda. They should be holding her up as an example of the tough independent woman who took on the boys and won. If David Letterman had said Michelle Obama had a “slutty flight attendant” look they would have strung him up by his heels. But all we hear is their complicit silence in this vicious character assassination.
Sarah Palin will never be President given the savage media beating she has taken and would continue to take every time she opened her mouth. And I understand that there are two former McCain aides also planning a “behind the scenes” look at the 2008 campaign, no doubt to lay the blame for defeat on Palin and not their own inept management. Covering your butt in Washington is like breathing—you need to do it to survive.
These books will no doubt be more fodder for Chris Mathews, Keith Olberman, Maureen Dowd, Katie Couric, the TODAY Show, Good Morning America, The View and feminists to continue their jihad against her even though she has resigned. The authors will make money and be feted on television by the folks just mentioned. I hope they sleep well at night knowing they are trashing someone whose compelling life story makes them puny by comparison.
I would love to take the folks mentioned in the previous paragraph and dump them in the wilderness of Alaska stripped of all their blackberries, GPS locators, laptops and cell phones and see how long they would survive. My guess is about ten minutes.
And even after all they have said about her and they were shivering on the cold crying for their assistants, guess who would ride up on a snowmobile with a rifle slung over her shoulder to save them. Sarah Palin.
That’s the kind of person she is and it is something they will never understand.