« Prev Page

When Atheists Attack

NEWSWEEK

Email To A Friend

Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.

SPONSORED BY

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."

The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

« Prev Page

Member Comments

- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: drewand @ 08/24/2009 3:47:06 PM

Yes sir Lee, you conservatives have done a bang up job running this country over the last eight years. You nearly ran us into the ground. I don't know why you think that having someone as president with the credentials Obama has is a bad thing. If McCain and Palin won the election we'd all be standing in bread lines and the unemployment rate would probably be 30%. McCain would have Sarah doing charity work and working with women's groups because obviously she could not be trusted with vital issues. Obama is actually seeking bipartisan support. Bush sent the Democrats to the corner with a box of crayons. You can talk about elitism all you want my friend but at least democrats aren't going against the constitution or the Geneva convention to have their way. The only really dangerous political group in this country are the elitist conservatives and you can take that to the bank.
- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: Lee Holmes @ 07/07/2009 4:08:39 PM

The non-partisan PEW poll displays some rather odd results that run against the grain of How Liberal America Views Sarah Palin.

In it it finds that while

44% of Americans are ''strongly'' in disapproval with Palin,

48% of Americans ''strongly'' support her.

The ''why?'' can be observed in a recent New York Times article by Ross Douthat. In it, he explains that the ''anti-Palins'' are members of meritocracy ,complete with Ivy League colleges, affirmative action, and race-gender grievance, coupled with a firm belief akin to a secular Godhead, that they and only they can fix the worlds problems. The ''lesser masses'' are too stupid to figure this out,and must be guided by urbanite brainiacs who Know Better. [ you can view the results of this arrogance in NEWSWEAKS article on the late Robert Strange McNamera elsewhere on these pages].
Not for nothing does GALLUPS brand new poll released yesterday find that more Americans are drifting ''Right''. This is due to the fact that these accurately view ''elites''[ including media] as being condescending snobs ,attitudes vindicated by their twin treatments of Palin,and Obama. Palin,and Biden, who is demonstrably the more ignorant of the two, caught red-handed meddling in Israels affairs regarding Iran to the point that he has now been muzzled by Obama. Into the mix, is the liberals religious belief in global warming [ a far from settled issue as over 700 world scientists recently admitted],healthcare, and economic socialism, all of which appear to the ''unlearned masses'' to be vehicles designed to hinder their own progress. Thus America, as divined by the mere presence of Palin pits Ivy League ''elites'' against the Rest Of Us, who BBQ, own guns, watch NASCAR, perform double-shifts and actually work for a living as opposed to grubbing on a grant or government or Tinseltown dole. The rise of unemployment will only harden these divisions.
- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: Lee Holmes @ 07/07/2009 3:48:25 PM

OMAAR, who has neatly projected Le Bons crowd theory onto the rest of us, is deserving of this repeat.

The idea of what we see with with Palin is nothing new. It forms itself into that which was recognized with the beginnings of psychoanalysis in the 1890s. Freud would become the solid leader of such theories in the 20th Century, but was not the originator of what the Frenchman Gustav Le Bon called the Herd or ''Crowd Theory''. Here, ''the mentality of men in crowds [ even ideologically] is unlike that which they possess when isolated''. Totemic symbolism as expressed by media and the nation-state which feeds into ''collective thought'' is manifested by the ''generation of illusions which have the force of truth''.[ The Wasilla Library ''book-bannings'', the refusal of these so-called ''rape kits'' to women while a mayor, the ''reduction'' of aid to the mentally challenged, Trigs baby 'as her own'', and the like which permeated the highest levels of what constitutes ''elite''media and commentary]. The prelude to destruction is not merely advanced by the targeted individual or policy. It is fed by an opposition media which uses propaganda and ridicule in a national format.[ranging from ''serious'' [yet truthfully flawed] commentary or even ''hard'' news , to comedic presentation, in order to produce a feared ''other'' the precise totemic origin of Le Bons ''herd/crowd'' theory].
Freud, writing in 1913 and 1921 views the injection of such ''elite''sources as vital to the ''coercive character of group formation''. As opposed to capturing the imagination only of the ''lower classes'', it succeeds in grabbing and holding the attention, while working its ''mystic'' influences, upon the most ''intelligent''among us [or, curmudgeon Sam Harris' ''elites'', which he defends elsewhere here on NEWSWEAK, using these as a stick with which to beat Palin,forgetting that he himself has fallen neatly into Le Bon and Freuds trap].
Such skills are not relegated to the alleged ''progressive'' [ who is just as trapped, as we saw,as the ''lower'' [or less ''intelligent'' class], alone. It was skillfully mastered by the rightist Achesons, Dulles' Nixons and McCarthys during the ''Red Scares'' of the 1950s and used media in order to further fear of ''the other''. The mastery of propaganda, is not writ large upon wartime posters [''Save Your Scrap To Bomb A Jap''] but dwells inside the pages and the newsrooms of the competing ideologies now present in America today.

''The propaganda must be presented in popular form,and it must fix its level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. It awakens imagination by appeal, and the arrest of attention. It must not investigate truth objectively and expresses itself ,as far as possible,in stereotyped formulas''

Saul Alinsky?

Nope.

Adolf Hitler. MEIN KAMPH [My Struggle] 1924.