Pen a fantasy about how Sarah Palin could have been Barack Obama if only she weren’t so:
a) selfish
b) filled with anger, resentment and hate
c) greedy
d) stupid and uneducated
e) all of the above
and you tap into a deep vein of right-wing nostalgia for the Sarah-Who-Never-Was, which will prove of immense benefit to your personal brand and career.
I’m not impugning Joshua Green’s motives for writing his “Sarah-We-Hardly-Knew-Ye” paean of praise in the June issue of The Atlantic.
I’m sure he felt he had a legitimate, counter-intuitive, against the flow argument to make. He’s proven himself to be an excellent and fair-minded reporter in the past. And nobody should knock him just because his first job in “journalism” was at The Onion.
It may be that with “The Tragedy of Sarah Palin,” Green is returning to his satirical roots. Although if you read some of the comments in response to my earlier post, “If Only Sarah Weren’t Sarah, She Coulda Been a Contender,” you’ll find some strong fact-based arguments against Green’s hypothesis.
In any case, I’m sure Green was perspicacious enough to sense the likely windfall that would result from a “St. Sarah, The Fallen Star” story.
And he’s knee-deep in peaches and apples already, as the huzzahs arrive from all the obvious right-wing shills:
—John Podhoretz in Commentary
—Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post
—Ross Douthat in The New York Times
This chorus sings in only one key: the key of sorrow, for the loss of a Sarah Palin who never existed outside the realm of their collective yearning, and who ever existed only as a figment of their collective imagination.
Andrew Sullivan wrote a bracing response yesterday and today added:
Josh’s piece will serve as balm to the right. And it will allow them to believe that their choice of veep in 2008 was not an indictment of them or the media – but just an unfortunate decision by Palin to change her colors. The only problem with this argument is that it is manifestly untrue. But we know that Palin lovers, like Palin herself, must perforce be wedded to mountains of untruth.
Amen.
Right Wing Rallies Round “The Tragedy of Sarah Palin”
Pen a fantasy about how Sarah Palin could have been Barack Obama if only she weren’t so:
a) selfish
b) filled with anger, resentment and hate
c) greedy
d) stupid and uneducated
e) all of the above
and you tap into a deep vein of right-wing nostalgia for the Sarah-Who-Never-Was, which will prove of immense benefit to your personal brand and career.
I’m not impugning Joshua Green’s motives for writing his “Sarah-We-Hardly-Knew-Ye” paean of praise in the June issue of The Atlantic.
I’m sure he felt he had a legitimate, counter-intuitive, against the flow argument to make. He’s proven himself to be an excellent and fair-minded reporter in the past. And nobody should knock him just because his first job in “journalism” was at The Onion.
It may be that with “The Tragedy of Sarah Palin,” Green is returning to his satirical roots. Although if you read some of the comments in response to my earlier post, “If Only Sarah Weren’t Sarah, She Coulda Been a Contender,” you’ll find some strong fact-based arguments against Green’s hypothesis.
In any case, I’m sure Green was perspicacious enough to sense the likely windfall that would result from a “St. Sarah, The Fallen Star” story.
And he’s knee-deep in peaches and apples already, as the huzzahs arrive from all the obvious right-wing shills:
—John Podhoretz in Commentary
—Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post
—Ross Douthat in The New York Times
This chorus sings in only one key: the key of sorrow, for the loss of a Sarah Palin who never existed outside the realm of their collective yearning, and who ever existed only as a figment of their collective imagination.
Andrew Sullivan wrote a bracing response yesterday and today added:
Josh’s piece will serve as balm to the right. And it will allow them to believe that their choice of veep in 2008 was not an indictment of them or the media – but just an unfortunate decision by Palin to change her colors. The only problem with this argument is that it is manifestly untrue. But we know that Palin lovers, like Palin herself, must perforce be wedded to mountains of untruth.
Amen.