KJ , Hanna , I share your amusement over Todd Palin’s e-mail to Joe Miller, though I do wish that he’d included at least one all-caps sentence. As it stands, he only gets a B- in the art of writing semi-literate wingnutty e-mails. Of course, all of this is why Meghan McCain is playing the role of Cassandra to the Republicans, mounting a one-woman campaign to stop the invading army of Palin acolytes and return control of the Republican Party to people who know well enough to install spell check on their Web browsers. I suspect that McCain will follow Cassandra’s footsteps to utter failure on this front. Getting people to stop paying attention to Sarah Palin is like getting people to stop staring at a dude riding a recumbent bike around the park wearing nothing but a clown hat and a pair of thong underwear. Look at this very blog post that you are reading at this very moment. Even as I sympathize with McCain, the urge to metaphorically point at the Palin circus with my keyboard has got the better of me.
It’s all about the liberal fascist elitism that has got the Tea Party hopped up on inchoate anger. Sarah Palin and her crew feed both parties in this cultural tug-of-war. We the bloggers and journalists get to play the role of the elitists with our fancy spell checking doohickeys written no doubt in computer languages that sound like French, and Tea Partiers get to play the defenders of the salt of the earth Real Americans, who are too busy caring about God and country to busy themselves with girly-man occupations like learning proper capitalization. Everyone benefits, particularly Sarah Palin, to the tune of $12 million and counting .
Oh, except the traditional leadership of the Republican Party. Of course, it’s hard to weep for them, since they brought this on themselves, and there’s also the little matter of the two wars and ruined economy they saddled us with. Then there’s the chance that all this is undermining American democracy, which traditionally relied on some semblance of rationality in decision-making in order to function. I guess on that latter point, we’ll find out more in November.
