Palin Derangement Syndrome Continues

The kind of vitriol still being aimed at Sarah Palin, as I have said previously, is not because of energy policy. It is because she has become a cultural symbol that some hate so deeply they are even willing to politically harm their own candidate in what appears to be a vain effort to destroy “the other.” (Read this Peggy Noonan column about how columns such as those discussed below actually hurt Obama.) They must know this. But they are so unhinged they can’t help themselves.

To cases: Andrew Sullivan over at the Atlantic, appears to want to launch a veritable Inquisition into Sarah Palin and her family’s personal lives. And to make a subliminal point, he even republishes the old photo of the very pregnant Palin during her first pregnancy that was used as part of the fraudulent smear begun at the Daily Kos—and later pursued by the MSM—to support the lie that she is not Trig’s mother—perhaps evidence of a continuing Sullivan obsession about that particular lie. From his column:

[W]hen you agree to run for vice-president of the United States, you surrender any zone of privacy. Al Gore’s sometimes wayward son; Dick Cheney’s daughter and now granddaughter; Dan Quayle’s wife; George H. W. Bush’s extensive clan: all these families have been an “open book” to the press. In saying yes to John McCain, Palin said yes to the natural inquiries that come with it. I don’t mean utterly gratuitous stuff, like the Starr Report’s detailing of the precise positions Lewinsky and Clinton enjoyed sexually. I don’t mean by the standards of the Republican party. I mean by the standards of a robust and inquisitive and fair press.

But that isn’t even true. The Gore’s son drug use was never dug into, and properly so. Only when he was arrested was it reported. John Edwards was rightly castigated for bringing up the lesbianism of Cheney’s daughter in a debate. Chelsea Clinton was strictly off limits. Always. The press tried to embarrass Bush’s daughters over college drinking but soon backed off.

But Sullivan wants gossip, he wants embarrassing family facts, he is after figurative blood—even if it is that of Palin’s children:

It seems to me that if you are on record saying that your life is an open book, and you have a state-run web-page about your infant son, and your own children’s travel is paid for by the state, and you presented your infant son at a convention televised across the entire world, and you sent out a press release outing your own daughter’s current pregnancy, then it is not despicable, evil, vile or outrageous for the press to ask factual, answerable questions about Sarah Palin’s experiences as a pregnant and non-pregnant mother and about her marriage and about her parenting of her children. Palin herself just said so.

She most certainly did not. Palin’s statement that when you run for office your “life is an open book” was, 1) a certain statement of a certain reality, but 2) referred to her and the study of her past—such as being a beauty queen. It is not to hand the media a key to try and find family dirt.

And to think, I used to really admire Sullivan.

Meanwhile, a Palin-hater named Katha Pollitt, writes at CBS that she wants the media to sail a different tack in the urgent task of taking down Sarah Palin. (Pollitt’s bio says she is known for her sense of humor. Not in this diatribe!) In “Lipstick on a Wingnut.” (Pollitt should look in a mirror), the venom flows like a stream. From her column:

She talks incessantly about being a mother of five and uses her newborn, Trig, who has Down syndrome, as a campaign prop. If you wonder how she’ll handle all those kids and the Veep job too, you’re a super-sexist...

Indeed, Palin, who went back to work when Trig was three days old, gets nothing but praise from Phyllis Schlafly, James Dobson and the folks at National Review, who usually blame all the ills of modern America on those neurotic, harried, selfish, frustrated, child-neglecting, husband-castrating working mothers. Even stranger, her five-months-pregnant 17-year-old, Bristol, gets nothing but compassion and respect from Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and others who have spent their careers slut-shaming teens for having sex - and blaming their parents for letting it happen.

She brought Trig to the convention with all of her children. Other than that, he has not been on the campaign trail, much less used as a “prop.” Moreover, her rant merely underscores the kind of two-dimensional caricature seen so often of people deemed by the media elite to be the great unwashed.

Pollitt continues with the rant, you can read if you would like, and demands that she to be asked probing questions—some of which are falsely premised and others which are just plain insulting. You can cut the snobbery with a knife.