Sandy Hook

Sandy Hook

Saturday, July 04, 2009

Palin and her followers: one woman's retrospective

Sarah Palin
Since the brutal 2008 presidential campaign and the overwhelming win by the Democrats, members of both parties glibly blame the whole debacle on GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. I don’t think that this analogy is valid. It gives her way too much credit. If she had any brains at all, she would have rejected John McCain’s offer to share his ticket.

McCain is 100 percent responsible for his party’s embarrassingly shoddy showing. To this day I don’t know what he was thinking, or if he was. Was he so transparently hell-bent on being a maverick? By selecting Palin, after only meeting her once in passing at a conference and talking with her briefly down at his ranch in Arizona, McCain insulted my intelligence and that of every thinking woman in America. He destroyed what was left of an almost non-existent respect for a man of many moods, decisions and temperaments. Will the real John McCain please stand up?

Palin is an interesting study. So are her followers. Palin has been able to charm her way into the hearts and minds of the righteous right. They are against a woman’s right to choose. They are staunch supporters of family values, God, country and apple pie. They are, quite simply, hypocrites. Palin, a spoiled whiney ego-maniac, massager of the truth and an amazingly ignorant – as opposed to stupid – woman has been able to convince her followers that she is one of them, to turn their heads at her “misquotes” and to rally around the soccer mom with lipstick. As for the men who go gaa-gaa over her, it is obvious they are thinking with a part of their anatomy that doesn’t include the brain, although that requires a certain amount of acumen as well.

The majority of women who follow her have no class. Money maybe, but no class. They lack experience of any kind because they’ve never had to work to support themselves. They are totally devoid of any knowledge and appreciable understanding of national and international affairs. Their whole world is built around clichés, tunnel vision and shallowness. Are they racist? You bet-cha.

If their husbands tell them to jump, they reach for the moon. Their reading consists of authors on the level of Danielle Steele as opposed to substantially informative publications. They follow Palin because, like her, they are angry and mean spirited. If they could think for themselves, at least some of them would have worn pantsuits at the GOP national convention. This caliber of woman is used to and has the money to dress to hide their flaws, so why not pantsuits to hide their rumps that have grown wide and soft over the years?

It should have been obvious to anyone watching Palin’s embarrassing interviews that she is totally unaware of national and world affairs, she has no substance and she is unbelievably ignorant in all things important for a person who might fall by default into becoming president of this country. I cannot picture her at a meeting with international leaders.You bet’cha.
The woman is an expert at using the media to get out her message but spews invectives against the fourth estate when she is questioned – and found lacking – on serious issues. She is one of these petty women who goes on the attack and then snivels that everyone is picking on her.

Whether to stay home with children or work is a matter of choice but when a woman keeps manufacturing kids every whipstitch, I question the wisdom of having an ambitious career requiring long absences from home. Maybe if she’d been around more, Bristol wouldn’t have sought affection and approval in other quarters. Children are similar to pets. When you bring them home you have a responsibility to love them and to nurture them – not to exploit them before a national audience. Not only is this classless, it is tasteless, cruel and insensitive. I know women who are perfectly capable of juggling husbands, children and careers without a hitch but obviously the Palins don’t have that ability.

I wish her well but seriously doubt that she will ever ask herself what she did wrong, becoming even angrier and bitter over time. I firmly believe that, like so many who are intellectualy challenged, she is as tenacious as a Pit Bull wearing lipstick, going for the jugular and never letting go.

11 comments:

  1. I think the description of Palin is very apt. I think the description of her supporters is mostly apt.

    That said, there is another segment of her female supporters that must be mentioned. So called 'Tammy Bruce Republicans' who are somehow convinced that up is down, black is white, and right is left on issues of race, gender, and orientation discrimination. Such people will gleefully tell you that the Democrats are a racist, homophobic, misogynist party and that they joined the Republicans out of disgust at all of the Democratic sleaze.

    Such people always claim to be feminists, keep their lip service to most women's issues, claim to be pro-choice, and claim to be supportive of gay rights... and then vote consistently for candidates who believe women's rights, abortion, and homosexuality are the Devil's works.

    Most of these women are very intelligent and appear very rational, but are suffering from a significant disconnect in their ability to separate propaganda from truth and have little to no understanding of the real attitudes of the candidates for whom they vote and stump.

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  2. Eclectic:

    I'm not sure that I totally agree with the last part of your comment.

    I can't remember ever meeting a righteous right female type who was at all shy at telling you up front and in your face that ". . . the Democrats are a racist, homophobic, misogynist party and that they joined the Republicans out of disgust at all of the Democratic sleaze." And don't forget that if we not only don't go to church but don't go to their church, we're going straight to hell.

    How can a person be intelligent and not be able to discern propaganda/fantasy from truth?
    Being a researcher I simply have a hard time believing that people don't "check it out" or that they blindly accept whatever is handed out to them. That's why you'll often see me refer to them as the "Hitler women."

    I'm very sorry it took me so long to respond. I'm an obvious novice with this blogging business and have more to learn than when I was studying international affairs in college. Darn, those affairs just keep popping up.

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  3. "I can't remember ever meeting a righteous right female type who was at all shy at telling you up front and in your face that ". . . the Democrats are a racist, homophobic, misogynist party and that they joined the Republicans out of disgust at all of the Democratic sleaze." And don't forget that if we not only don't go to church but don't go to their church, we're going straight to hell."

    Some of the women in this category, despite saying exactly what you quoted above, are NOT good little church going housewives, though. Despite the obvious evidence that they view the world through a very different and strange set of blinders, some of them (though I believe this number is shrinking and will continue to shrink) are Hillary Clinton Democrats. Others are 'Tammy Bruce Republicans', many of whom used to be Hillary Clinton Democrats, and who have a completely bizarre world-view that I don't pretend to understand. Such people claim to be pro-choice (sometimes with reservations but sometimes very aggressively so) and pro-gay-marriage, but rail against the nanny state and claim to genuinely believe that the Religious Right as hated by liberals is a propaganda invention and such people are in the minority even in the Republican Party.

    Some of this is the fact that they are nice people who can't believe anyone they like could not be a nice person too. This is not unique to either women or Republicans. Another factor is human nature... if propaganda matches what we believe we have observed, we often want to believe the propaganda and believe it because we want to believe it.

    I don't understand how anyone advocating any sort of civil libertarian agenda in opposition to the nanny state could possibly support the corporate-police state. Yet people do.

    While, in some cases, such people are clearly NOT intelligent, such as Sarah Palin herself, in others the case seems very different and it becomes difficult to tell exactly what the issue is. Intelligent people can be very blind, such as the genuinely brilliant men who so horribly miscalculated the Vietnam War because they could not change their thinking patterns into the form needed to evaluate the problem.

    I think, at the risk of sounding 'misogynistic' myself, there is a militant element within the feminist movement guilty of some of the same 'us against them' thinking that makes Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson stand up for people who are obviously in the wrong JUST because they are 'brothers.' I think we have a small, hard core knot of feminists fighting for the 'sisters' because they are 'sisters' and nothing else matters.

    That certainly characterizes Geraldine Ferraro's conduct, I think, during the general election, as she tried to make a feminist icon out of Palin and a hero out of McCain on Fox News.

    I think the Hillary Democrats will fall away from Palin as time causes the real Palin to sink in, and the 'Tammy Bruce Republicans' will eventually realize just how wrong their basic premises about the GOP are. Only time will tell.

    And no need to apologize. I have been doing this for a bit now and I only discovered the other day that my boxing blog never got any comments because the settings disallowed anyone without a Google account. :)

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  4. I think a lot of women who started out supporting Hillary either made the switch to Obama early on, or when they got to the voting machine intending to vote for Palin, they just couldn’t bring themselves to do it. A lot of these women did indeed support Hillary only because she is a woman but I think that for that very reason alone they couldn’t vote for Palin, as convoluted as that may sound.

    I tried to link to one of your blogs and couldn’t connect. Right now I’m so mad I could spit.
    I had put in some email addresses so folks could receive my newest posts. Dummy here didn’t realize that when I corrected a living post, the edited version went out as well. And since I can get hung up on editing . . . . I’m losing friends right and left. I’ve deleted the addresses but they’re still getting them. Forget online help.

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  5. Hrrrrm. I may have to see if there's another problem with any of my blogs. There shouldn't be, unless there's a broken link somewhere. Something I should probably find out about.

    I've just gotten over about two months of near complete burnout, after a particularly frenetic April, so I don't know what is what anymore. Probably doesn't help that I am one of those 'creative types' about as organized as a blizzard.

    I did catch your comments on my political/philosophical blog. That's the one I mostly actually do anything with. Everything else just sort of takes up bandwidth. I'll check the links, though.

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  6. Oh!

    As an amusing coincidence, I live in TN too. Goodly way from Nashville, though. I'm on the VA border almost exactly between Kingsport and Bristol.

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  7. The link is fixed, though that particular blog is the most dead of the bunch and has not been updated in some time... and it's pretty dorky to boot.

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  8. You through me a curve there - not recognizing your name and all. I was all ready to show my female fangs. : )

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  9. LOL

    Clearly, I forgot which blog I was commenting on. On my own blog, I use my name with my linked blogger profile. On other blogs I use the name of my blog and its link.

    Apparently, I had a moment.

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  10. I can make mistakes sometimes but through as in threw the ball? Geez.

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  11. Chris:

    I have a question. When you went from being Eclectic Rebel to E Liberal, or vice versa, did the old layout and content show up in the new one? I want to change the name of my blog because Parsley's Pics can sound too much like Parsley Spics and I don't like that. In general it's just hard to wrap your tongue around it. I'm thinking of some sort of Parsley variation but also of something like thisnthat because I don't want to always focus just on politics. TIA

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