The Living Room Times

I missed blogging during my seven-month absence, but one reason I didn’t miss it as much as I otherwise might have is because of a sentiment perfectly summed up yesterday by an Andrew Sullivan reader:

During the months that have passed since John McCain “tapped” Sarah Palin to be his running mate, I’ve had more and more trouble reconciling the obsessive adoration of Palin by so many in the GOP, including a lot of my relatives, (some of whom are very smart and successful people) with the obvious dangers of having someone like her as president. The bizarre behavior. The vapid thinking. How do they not recoil at the smug way in which she wears her ignorance like a badge of honor? It’s just amazing to me how every word out of her mouth is taken as gospel, and when she can’t even answer a softball question without struggling to form a semblance of coherent opinion, they set off against the liberal media.

Never mind the implications of her “word salad” responses. It’s quite sad actually, especially for me to see how my own family has changed. There’s been this kind of de-evolution from a thinking, reasoned, disinterested opinion, into an irrational, crusading, narrow banded thinking process that has really made me step away from the words Republican and Conservative as labels that apply to me.

Amen. I never applied the “Republican” and “Conservative” labels to myself, but there were times when many others did (like 2002-2006), and I was certainly tiptoeing slowly in that direction, largely because I was so turned off by the Angry Left in all its irrationality and over-the-top hyperbole and intellectual laziness during that period. Then Barack Obama appeared on the scene, and things started to change. Suddenly the Left, with some exceptions of course, got its s**t together, while the Right, well, lost its.

Which brings us to today: instead of the Angry, Blame-America Left marginalizing itself into obscurity and near-oblivion, we have the Angry, Know-Nothing Right, doing the same. And this isn’t just about Sarah Palin. As I think Sullivan’s reader would agree, she is but a symptom (albeit a very prominent and important one) of a much broader trend toward disdain for knowledge and expertise; contempt for reason and logic that contradicts one’s preconceived notions; a total, willful blindness to self-contradiction, hypocrisy and deceit from one’s own side of any given debate; a belief that everything — everything — is black-and-white, and nuance simply does not exist; a deep, unrecognized cynicism masquerading as shallow patriotism; and a redefinition of the very notion of “truth” to mean “whatever is the opposite of what’s in the liberal media.”

Alas, I take little joy in blogging about this, for a number of reasons.

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Peggy Noonan has an unfortunate and well-documented history of doubletalk when it comes to Sarah Palin, but as last fall’s campaign wore on, the scales ultimately fell decisively from her eyes. Now, in her column today, she produces what I believe may be the seminal diss of Palin, explaining precisely and devastatingly why the unthoughtful, frivolous soon-to-be-ex-governor of Alaska “was bad for the Republicans—and the republic.” I won’t quote excerpts because the entire column is excellent, and absolutely correct. Read the whole thing.