Posted on 09/12/2008 11:54:07 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
For left-leaning elites outside the United States, the nomination of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential candidate is a case of “only in America”—a sneering phrase foreigners use to explain a weird or distasteful American phenomenon. For them, the emergence of a small-town conservative Christian woman with a large family and a beehive hairdo, who talks about the small-town American values of faith, family and love of country, is the equivalent of crass American television. Mrs. Palin, with “her churchgoer’s smile” and her hillbilly family with their hillbilly names, was a “soap opera . . . too implausible even for day-time television” wrote Anne Davies in the Sydney Morning Herald. “A race that began as the ‘West Wing’ now looks alarmingly like ‘Desperate Housewives,’” said Jonathan Freedland in Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
If one needed a primer on why a certain class of elites outside the US will always detest the political, cultural and social undercurrents flowing through the heart of middle America, the emergence of the gun-toting, pro-life Mrs. Palin has provided it. With tedious predictability, a steady undercurrent of anti-Americanism explains why foreign liberals detest Mrs. Palin. Her rising popularity across America has rudely confirmed that not all Americans care about the preferred presidential pick of the international left-liberal community. Barack Obama is their anti-American dream candidate, a man who is part of their project to bring America, the great Satan, to heel. After all, he never spoke about the possibility of victory in Iraq. Only American withdrawal and defeat. And thus America’s humiliation. Both Mrs. Palin’s beliefs and her evident popularity cast doubts on whether Americans are really on board with this overseas vision for America’s future.
All along, this international strain of anti-Americanism evident in Australia and beyond has been driven by a determined refusal to comprehend that peculiarly American curiosity: those who wear their God-fearing, love-of-America conservative values on their sleeves. In other words, people such as Sarah Palin who mean it when they say “God Bless America.” Respectable politicians in places like Australia don’t speak about the love of country. And certainly not in secular Europe or multicultural Britain.
The selection of Mrs. Palin and her role in Republican electoral math this year are also highlighting issues in American politics that surprise and confuse foreign left-wing intellectuals. Commentators in Australia, such as the Sydney Morning Herald’s political editor, Peter Hartcher, have lately sniped about Mrs. Palin’s deeply pro-life beliefs and at those Americans for whom abortion is an election issue. The tendency is to crow about the less divisive politics of abortion in Australia without explaining, or necessarily even understanding, why the issue is heated in the US. No mention that in Australia, unlike the US, abortion has not been fuelled by an activist, social-engineering judiciary. No mention that a cadre of unelected judges stole the issue from the American people in the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade. As US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in his 1992 dissent in another abortion case, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, by hijacking the issue and telling Americans they could not decide abortion laws for themselves, “Roe fanned into life an issue that has inflamed our national politics.” Such explanations are diligently ignored by progressives outside the US who prefer to portray abortion politics as driven by a creepy and peculiarly American religious Right.
One sees the same studied ignorance of the US when foreign left-leaning folk talk about guns and the death penalty. Australian elites regard those provisions of the US Constitution guaranteeing the right to bear arms and permitting the death penalty as signs of a venal, backward society. It’s another case of “only in America.” Deriding Mrs. Palin for her hunting habits is a neat way for them to ridicule small-town Americans who cherish those constitutional rights.
To be sure, much of the hysteria from the left wing in Australia mirrors the leftist frenzy within the US Mrs. Palin was always going to upset the global sisterhood for not being the right kind of careerist woman. She is a happy feminist who doesn’t moan about female victimhood. She loves to shoot moose but is not a fan of aborting babies. That you should be opposed to hunting animals but in favor of abortion on demand is an international article of the feminist faith.
Similarly, left-wing media pundits outside the US were always going to parrot the class-driven condescension of her attackers at home. A self-declared “hockey mom” educated at a no-name university, a former beauty queen who used to broadcast the local sports news surely cannot aspire to be vice president. The provincial Mrs. Palin is the perfect proxy-without-borders for the universal disdain metropolitan elites harbor toward those allegedly less sophisticated than themselves.
Blinded by their anti-American prejudices, progressives outside the U.S. mistakenly treat Mrs. Palin as a country hick who has simply roused evangelicals and gun-loving and hunting Republicans. They miss the significance of her nomination. The Governor from Alaska is attracting so much positive attention outside the beltway of American politics—and indeed 10,000 miles away, where ordinary Australians are cheering her on even as their elites pour scorn on her—because she is the real thing. She is a sassy, happy, straight-talking mother of five who has succeeded, not through affirmative action programs or family connections, but through sheer dint of hard work and conviction politics. If Australia’s left-wing elites don’t understand Mrs. Palin’s attraction to middle America it’s because they don’t or won’t ever understand middle America.
BTTT
Most excellent read.
Bravo! And let me be among the first to suggest that the election of Sarah Palin as vice president will actually bring us closer to our real friends, especially in Asia and the Pacific Rim.
I also heard that foreign leaders (such as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown) have been endorsing Obama and have been pushing for America to elect Obama. Since when did they have the right to tell America who to vote for?
Sarah Palin is a hope for a better America. She’s got what it takes! She and John McCain have a heart, a passion and a love for our great country! God bless them! We’re gonna win in November and the international community is just going to have to get over it!
Their racist jealousy and failure to produce anything of value or provide any quantifiable input into the advancement of humankind fuels their rage. We should have let the Japanese have them and then they would never have received the hundreds of billions of dollars of direct and indirect help we have given them over many decades. Lowlives all.
This is her true appeal. My wife didn't get to her position in her company because she knew somebody. She got it because she knows her job well and worked hard to get there.
Most political women get where they are because either their husbands were politicians or their husbands were rich businessmen who encouraged them to go into politics.
BUMP
The left detests women and minorities who succeed without their patronization.
That’s who the Nominee John McCain picked for his VP. She was obviously the best person for the job.
America’s pick for POTUS and VP!! The rest of the world well you can be interested but this is our choice and our ELECTION SYSTEM.
Just because the unweildly god awful monstrocity you call the EU tries to run everyone in Europe’s lives. Your imput is not wanted in our elections.
A wastefull, centralized Government made up of peple who can tax and spend without ansering to the average person, spending freely on themselves of COURSE.
This is abbhorant to me as a form of governance. I don’t know if you got confused because John F’in Kerry was over there before our elections in 04.
Obamba mad a tour this year, but you have absolutly no say in our ELECTIONS. Despite the lefts attempts to have a world test and be a citizen of the world we are AMERICA Not your rotting cesspool.
Nice catch. Thank you. I agree that it hits many good points.
In truth, our open society and the freedom that exists in America has always made us the envy of the entire world.
Indeed, much of what she writes of foreign leftists could equally be applied to domestic ones. Good read.
Biden attended the University of Delaware in Newark,[11] where by his own later description he was a lazy student.[12] He graduated with a double major in history and political science in 1965,[3] ranked 506th of 688 in his class.[13] He went on to receive his J.D. from Syracuse University College of Law in 1968,[11] where by his own description he again underperformed and ranked 76th of 85 students.[12][14]
So, did you even know where Slow Joe went to school? Seems he managed to underperform Bush and Kerry's C averages, but at less rigorous schools. You'll never hear it from the MSM, though.
Trust me....Track, Bristol, Piper, and Trig are NOT hillbilly names.
Democracy is indispensable to socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. -V.I. Lenin
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism .-Karl Marx
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