More on Sarah Palin

I keep thinking about this woman and the situation, so this may not be the last!

More on Palin:

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Berkley Gender Studies sense but the Annie Oakley/Lara Croft way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Elitist Liberal feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough (as Time magazine put it); because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.

She could become a historical political presence.

So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.

And it's going to be savage.

The liberal media is going to get into trouble with Sarah Palin. Mark my words. After all, most of the media live in places like Manhattan, Chevy Chase, Westchester, and Tarrytown. They hang out with other elitist media types and take occasionally trips into 'flyover country' to try and get the 'pulse' of America. But, they don't stay too long because their biggest, secret, fear is that they may become like us...

When they forget they are so isolated, they get in trouble, they misjudge things. For one thing, they assume evangelical Christians will be horrified and left with a bad taste in the mouth by the circumstances of Govenor Palin's daughter. But modern American evangelicals are among the last people who'd judge her harshly. It is the left that is about to go crazy with Puritan judgments; it is the right that is about to show what mellow looks like. Religious conservatives know something's wrong with us, that man's a mess. They are not left dazed by the latest applications of this fact. "This just in – there's a lot of sinning going on out there" is not a headline they'd understand to be news.

So the liberal media's going to wait for the Christian right to rise up and condemn Sarah Palin, and they're not going to do it because it's not their way, and in any case her problems are their problems. Christians lived through the second half of the 20th century, and the first years of the 21st. They weren't immune from the culture, they just eventually broke from it, or came to hold themselves in some ways apart from it. I think the media will explain the lack of condemnation as "Republican loyalty" and "talking points." But that's not what it will be.

Another Liberal media blind spot. There are a lot of liberal critics who do not buy the legitimacy of small town mayorship (Palin had two terms in Wasilla, Alaska, population 9,000 or so) and executive as opposed to legislative experience. But executives, even of small towns, run something. There are only 262 cities in this country with a population of 100,000 or more. But there are close to a hundred thousand small towns with ten thousand people or less.

We are a nation of Wasillas, not Chicagos.

Last points on the lefty media types:

The mainstream media, which has been holding endless discussions on the future of media in the 21st century, is in danger of missing a central fact of that future: If they appear, once again, as they have in the past, to be people not reporting the battle but engaged in the battle, if they allow themselves to be pegged by that old tag, which so tarnished them in the past, they will do more to jeapordize their own future than the Internet has.

This much I know is true: fact is king. Great reporting is what every honest person wants right now. But reporting that carries an agenda, that carries elitist assumptions and puts them out there as obvious truths? Sure, there is a crazy fringe of people that want that. But if I were doing a business model for newspapers and broadcast networks I'd say: Fact and data are our product, we're putting everything into reporting, that's what we're selling. Interpretation is the reader's job, and think pieces are for the editorial page where we put the blowhards and hacks.

All that to say this: Dig deep into Governor Sarah Palin, find out all you can, talk to everybody, get every vote, every quote, she may be the next vice president. But don't tell me what she's wearing, don't tell me you think she's good looking, don't tell me that she can't do her job cause she's a mother. And leave her kid alone, assholes.

Peace, Love, and GOD,
Tracy