Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Palin vs. the elitists

A year after the presidential election and David Letterman is still attacking Sarah Palin every night. She’s neither a candidate nor an elected official. He isn’t the only one attacking her; every elitist with access to the public ear is doing the same thing. Not all the attackers are Democrats; there are a number of elitist Republicans are equally guilty, though perhaps less vociferously.

This latest outpouring of interest in Gov. Palin is in reaction to the release of her new book, Going Rogue: An American Life, which came out last week. As one might expect, the Associated Press sent a gaggle reporters to “Fact check” the book. According to Fox Nation: “The Associated Press is struggling to defend its decision to assign a fleet of 11 reporters to pore over the facts in Sarah Palin's best-selling memoir "Going Rogue: An American Life." The news agency was thrown on the defensive after critics -- including Palin herself -- charged she was being singled out for investigation when the AP savaged her book as inaccurate. They noted that President Obama, whose two best-selling memoirs helped propel him to national fame, didn't receive any fact-checking. Last week, the AP sent news organizations a story headlined "Fact check: Palin's book goes wrong on some facts," citing several discrepancies in accounts of her tenure as governor of Alaska and other matters. It carried one byline and listed 10 other writers who contributed to it.”

For Democrats and their supporters in the media, the reason behind the attacks is simple; Palin connects with ordinary people all across the country. Her popularity makes her a political threat and therefore must be destroyed. Their tactic is to keep up their ridicule and derision day after day until she is no longer taken seriously by anyone. This is more or less the same tactic that they used on Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes and Newt Gingrich.

For elitist Republicans, Palin isn’t from the right social and economic class. Her family doesn’t have money, she didn’t attend the right college, doesn’t speak with the proper east or west coast accent, she hunts moose and goes to the wrong church.

You may remember when George W. Bush nominated Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. Democrats and elitist Republics both went into frenzy. While I think she would have made an adequate justice, the elitists went berserk because she didn’t go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton. She went to SMU! Conservative columnist Dr. Charles Krauthammer, a man whose opinion I usually respect, contended that the Supreme Court is an elite institution, and thereby requires a education from an elite university. Krauthammer’s nose tends to point upward on a number of matters.

While America is supposed to be a country without classes, castes or royalty, there has always been those who presume themselves to be on a higher plain than everyone else due to wealth, education, and special abilities--or for no particular reason at all other than their egos. They are elitists and they believe it is their destiny to tell everyone else what to do. They are the snobs who think that Sarah Palin is unworthy of high office for no other reason than she isn’t one of them. That, to me, is a problem.

For too long the elitists have been calling the shots. They are deciding what is proper, who should be running things and who should not. They, with their wealth and pseudo-superior educations are out of touch with the ordinary every day folks who make up the vast majority of this country. I’m all for letting Sarah Palin and those like her to run the government--people who aren’t career politicians and who perpetuate thems
elves in office by taking from the productive and give to the idle in exchange for votes.