By Dave Andrusko
When pro-life Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin announced she would be leaving office—with over a year remaining on her first term—the operative word of the moment for commentators was “shocked.” The operative word after that first hour was vituperation. And it’s gone downhill from there.
Like you, I am not privy to Gov. Palin’s plans. Like most of you, I admire Sen. McCain’s 2008 running mate for a dozen different reasons. And like all of you, I am in awe of her courage, compassion and sheer toughness.
Everybody has their pet theory why the Media Elite (and its comrades-in-arms, the pro-abortion leadership of the Democratic Party) loathe Gov. Palin so.
Some say it’s because she is the most charismatic Republican to come down the pike in a long, long time. Thus, the need to assassinate her character in order to weaken her.
Others say it’s because Palin is a mortal threat to an all-consuming orthodoxy that brooks no dissent-that is, who is allowed to be considered a genuine “female politician.” The pro-abortion matrix comprised of the aging feminist apparatus and kindred souls in the Democratic Party and the “mainstream media” have decreed the criteria a woman must meet in order to campaign for national office.
It most definitely does not include a woman who did not attend the “best schools,” whose values are closer to the average American’s than that of 99.9% of her critics, and surely not a woman who refused to abort her baby when she discovered he would have Down syndrome, let alone refused to hide her unmarried teenage daughter when she became pregnant.
The hypocrisy is so thick that even as commentators continue to sharpen their pick axes, occasionally they’ve grudgingly conceded that just maybe there had been a touch of the “politics of personal destruction.” You think?
As I mentioned to my wife this morning (for the umpteenth time), I know a lot of very, very tough people, the kind whose life experiences have been so demanding that I am overwhelmed just thinking about what they went through. But I honestly don’t know that any of them could have withstood the kind of onslaught Palin and her family have been subjected to with their sanity intact.
When it comes to how the media treated (first) candidate Barack Obama and (now) President Obama, I will not belabor the obvious discrepancy. …Okay, let me belabor it just a bit.
Bob Beckel ran Walter Mondale’s galactically unsuccessful 1984 presidential campaign and is now a commentator on Fox News. He is no fan of Palin-far from it-but admitted this morning that if comedian David Letterman had gone after a female Democratic candidate in the gutter-level manner he’d ridiculed the Palin family, he’d be looking for work.
America’s media elite deride, mock, vilify, and demean not just Palin, but her husband, her children, and her grandchild, and then if Palin says “boo,” she is “whining” and filled with “self-pity.” They verbally tear her limb from limb and then announce that her “behavior” (leaving office) reflects badly on other “female politicians.” Wouldn’t a more objective source say it more clearly reflects badly on the wretched opinion-making set than it does on Palin?
These remarks wouldn’t be complete if I did not at least mention that the word “petty” (not to mention double standard) just cannot do justice to the trivia the media uses to bash Palin. If I had a dollar for every time they made sport of Palin for not sounding verbally adroit-or for misspelling a word on Facebook-I could make a serious dent in our trillion dollar national debt. But at the time they are trouncing Palin, Obama cannot utter two coherent sentences in a row without a Teleprompter and rarely, if ever, gets called on it.
Gov. Palin has demonstrated that she is tougher than nails, and thus doesn’t need such (unsolicited) advice from the likes of me. But there it is anyway.
There are countless millions of Americans, like me, who admire you more than words can convey. In the words of the immortal Howard Cosell, your critics are firing spitballs at a battleship. You are a preeminent example of grace under fire.
Leave a Reply