Why the Media won't leave Sarah Palin alone

I've been increasingly dismayed over the last month or so my the number of times I hear people say "we're not voting ourselves out of this".  It's dismaying, because it's a vote of no confidence in the Republic's future, and that particular future leads to no place but ugly.

But I think I understand where they're coming from.  They see politics as the "Hamster Wheel of Pain".

The HWOP is a concept popularized by Andy Jacquith, in a highly recommended (for security geeks) book, Security Metrics.  In it, he describes security product vendors with a doughnut-shaped "security process" that goes something like:

Assess -> Prioritize -> Fix -> Verify 

 ... and back to the beginning.  It's a wheel, and Andy's point is that IT Security guys are trapped on the HWOP.  Only to them it's more like:

Didj00 get pwn3d -> DO SOMETHING!!1! -> Anyone still looking? -> Hope it goes away

I say this not to poke fun at the IT security guys; after all, I've been one of those security product vendors who's actually created this sort of thing.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it hasn't been terribly effective.

And so to the Political Hamster Wheel Of Pain:

Country on wrong track? -> Vote bums out -> Get new bums -> Lather, rinse, repeat

I think that the problem is that politics is a game played on the 50 yard line.  American politics has always been notable for having less of an ideological difference between the parties than most other places.  Heck, for a lot of the 20th Century, France had both the Communist and Socialist parties and explicitly Royalist and Catholic parties.  Our politics, by comparison, does indeed look like a pig pile on the 50 yard line.

Except as the Elites have taken over the Media and the Academy, the apparent location of the 50 yard line has shifted to the left.  This has coincided with the collapse of public trust in the elite institutions, but they have been admittedly effective in creating a Potemkin consensus pushing a Potemkin "Middle Ground".

And since the Stupid Republican Party has let them do this, most Republicans are well to the left of where the American public was thirty years ago, or even today.  Because most of the Republican candidates are too stupid or scared to call things the way they see them, they go along to get along [*cough*Mitt Romney*cough*].

And this is why Sarah Palin is so important, and why the Press can't leave her alone.  She calls things the way she sees them, for better or worse.  And disastrously for the MSM, she's just about bang on the American public's "Moderate" ground:

Does this picture add up to a frothing theocrat or hot-eyed right-wing culture warrior? Um…no. Not at all. On issue after issue (with the single exception of the rape-and-incest exception), what I discover about Palin seems to put her right smack in the broad middle. Far closer to it than me, usually, even with respect to issues we’re on opposite sides of.

Furthermore, the sense I get from her speech and presentation is that she really is like that; she doesn’t display the kinds of equivocation you see in a politician who is constantly trimming sail to the electoral wind and delays making a in issue commitment until he’s backed into a corner...

And a note to all you anti-Palin left-liberals: on every major issue I’ve discussed, I hold what you’d consider the left or extreme-left position and have described Palin as closer to center despite the fact that this tends to legitimize a position further right than you (or I) would prefer.

The recent case of the Alaska emails is instructive.  The MSM, convinced that she must be some sort of extremist, engaged in a preemptive feeding frenzy of speculation about what might be found in the emails released under a Freedom Of Information Act request.  What was actually found, of course, was what the average American would describe as entirely normal.

Entirely normal.

In other words, she's only "off the center" when you look at the elite's Potemkin center.  She looks to me to be pretty bang-on the actual center.

And this is why she's so important.  She is, so far at least, the only major politician (other than R0n P4U1!!!) to expose the Potemkin village for what it is.  The others - with the possible exception of Michelle Bachman, Chris Christie, and Rick Perry - are all "centrists", which means that they're leftists.

And this is a good time for me to say that there's actually nothing wrong with being a leftist, if you're honest about it.  But what's been going on for decades is a battlefield preparation that intentionally and surreptitiously seeks to de-legitimitize beliefs that are held by the majority of Americans.

And so far, Palin is the only one who's willing to call them on it.  That's why they can't get over the 2 minutes of hate.  And that's why she's so important.

As Tam likes to say, it's the kicked dog that yelps.

I'll be rethinking my "Vote Them Out/All Of Them" stance.  It's imprecise, and not diagnostic of the problem.  Reading back through it, I kind of feel stupid for issuing that particular fatwa.  Be sure of your target, and what's behind it ...

But the Press and, sadly the Public Education System have got to go.  They are caustic to the Res Publica, and the best that we can likely hope for is to nuke them from orbit and recolonize.  That is pretty painful to write, beneficiary as I am of the Higher Education system, but the last 30 years have seen a rewriting of the social contract.  It used to be an educated public was good for the Republic.  Now it's a public educated in the Academy won't see where the real 50 yard line is.

As institutions become politicized, the institutions should expect political problems.

So I'm still not entirely in agreement with the feeling that we won't vote ourselves out of this.  That will be a post for another day, after doing an inventory of our assets.  I can't (yet) demonstrate what they are, but we have some that are non-trivial.  For example, the Press can be destroyed - indeed, they must be.  The Academy, too.  A greater hive of scum and villainy you will never see, at least in its current form.

That's for another day.  But for now, you'll see no more of the "Vote Them Out/All Of Them" nonsense from me.  Maybe we won't vote our way out of this, but I for one do not intend to go quietly into that Dark, Statist Night.