Replies

Although I think that most of what you've said is either correct or reasonably defensible, I'm puzzled by this:

I’m willing to live with the obvious moral hazards of having our Veep nominee possibly embody the utmost in GOP hypocrisy and feministic decay of the hearth

Do you believe the Palins' children are neglected and poorly reared, simply by the fact of her holding a political position? That everything, both good and bad, in that family is a reflection of parental abandonment? Do you believe their father is chopped liver and not a significant member of his family?

Or did the use of "possibly" in your sentence back you off that position, held by at least one poster?

I haven’t really considered very deeply the idea that Palin family problems are related to her career. My point has more to do with the willingness to accept that possibility in the name of getting an ace of our own—her, namely—into a position where she might do the most damage to the very dystopia that has created such a culture.

But it’s very risky running such clandestine cultural warfare.

Put more simply, it’s like accepting the fact that a deep undercover police officer may have to repeatedly smoke and very likely become addicted to crack in order to play the role of drug denizen believeably, and not get his ass killed by the real dealers. Or, the idea of former sixties radicals who pretend to “go straight,” put on suits and ties, and get jobs on Wall Street or become tenured University of Chicago department chairs, etc., in order to continue the revolution by stealth, as relative “squares,” and bring the whole system down from within—yes, the William Ayers’ & Bernadine Dohrns often become much like the very same millionaire bourgoise swine that they set out to slaughter, but look at the situation we are in now and tell me they aren’t succeeding with their original mission!

Want another example? The U.S. Special Forces member deployed deep in the Afghan mountains who’s ordered to grow a full, flowing beard and wear a towel on his head and ride around horseback in a dirty nightshirt with a Kalashnikov and scimitar so as to blend in with the locals, putting brown contact lenses in to camouflage his blue eyes...after a few too many months in the bush, he “goes native”—falls for an Afghan girl, converts to Islam for real, marries into the local warlord’s tribe, parttakes of the opium trade and disappears from his unit’s radar, never to be debriefed or discharged or court-martialed...he’s Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, if you will.

The point is that Palin may have a dysfunctional family typical of our mixed-up times, but running her as our Veep and the vanguard of our conservative movement isn’t merely the height of hypocrisy; it’s more likely the height of high intrigue to risk that she defects or is damaged from the mission, and we along with her.

But it’s a risk we must take if we are to fight the war, rather than simply abandon the field to the enemy forever.