Welcome to High School

This bit of Sarah Palin worship in a dead-tree outlet (and also this one) leaves me speechless.  Yeah, I know, it’s the New York Sun.  But still.  What I find absolutely staggering is this little bit, though:

Mrs. Palin, in her Facebook posting, did not criticize, or even mention, the First Lady, who is entitled to a vacation. She did speak of how the president’s lecture to the AFL-CIO “must have been tough for our good union brothers and sisters to sit through, though it may have resonated with some union bosses who desire their members to adopt a herd mentality, too, so as to not dare speak up against what Washington is doing to us.” What struck us about this is that it’s hard to think of a Republican reaching out so pointedly to union members since the man who invented Big Tent Republicanism, Ronald Reagan.

Mrs. Palin’s demarche is one to keep an eye on.

ZOMG! A politician used a nice phrase to describe a group of voters!

How do I put this?  Hrm, let’s try this: IT’S ONE GODDAMN PHRASE IN ONE GODDAMN POST ON A FUCKING FACEBOOK PAGE 18 MONTHS BEFORE THE FIRST FUCKING PRIMARY AND SUDDENLY SHE’S REINVENTING BIG TENT REPUBLICANISM?  SERIOUSLY? 

Ok, I feel better now. 

I just don’t get this brand of Palin-worship, especially coming as it often does from people who like to bitch and moan about Obama being treated as a Messiah.  It absolutely boggles my mind.  She writes something on Facebook and it becomes earth-shattering news demonstrating that she is as grand and invincible a person as Dr. Kevin Pezzi.  It’s a Facebook post, not a policy speech, and definitely not a press conference.  In that post, she took the earth-shattering step of saying a nice thing about union members (whose votes count the same as the next person) while simultaneously trashing the unions themselves.  She issued no policy proposal, no explanation of how she thinks government should act (or not act, as the case may be) so as best to assist those union members. 

This counts as not only meaningful outreach, but as an outright strategy of trying to reinvent “Big Tent Republicanism.”  Because, y’know, no Republican politician in the last 30 years has had a single good thing to say about individual union members.  And definitely not a single Republican politician has tried to sponsor a single bill or piece of legislation or to push for a regulatory reform that would benefit union members during that time span.  And we certainly can’t expect the folks at the New York Sun to be familiar with Peter King, who has a long history of close ties to labor and even has been known to get endorsed by the Teamsters – he’s from that faraway land of Long Island, after all.  It’s not as if George W. Bush ever made a desperate attempt to reach out to union members.  Oh, wait – all those things actually happened?  And since Reagan?

That doesn’t matter – Palin’s Facebook postings trump all, don’t cha know?  Those postings must be treated as serious news, accepted uncritically and then inflated so that each is an integral piece of evidence of the beauty queen’s brilliance and splendor. 

What the fuck kind of world is this where the use of a single phrase in a single Facebook posting by a half-term governor of a small state counts as news at all, much less as grounds for an entire piece of hagiography by an editorial board at a newspaper in our largest city?  Where there is actually a constituency that believes “she’s popular on Facebook” is a synonym for “she’s intellectually serious, smart, and competent.”

As Whiskeyfire writes:

“… while the Reagan veneration has always been more than a little absurd, next to the Palin veneration, it makes some sort of sense. “She is popular on Facebook” is not exactly a triumph of statecraft, unless we’re now electing Kardashians.”

This is not politics.  This is the popular girl in high school saying that she thinks the dorky kid is “kinda sweet,” and everyone praising her for her kindness and suddenly pretending to like the dorky kid.  I’d say that this is the equivalent of a cheesy 80s movie, but that’s not fair to the cheesy 80s movie.