About the Firestorm I Touched Off ...

The other day, on Bill O’Reilly’s  show, I tried to explain why elite liberals go nuts at the mere mention of the name – Sarah Palin.  And in the process, I touched off a firestorm I never envisioned, or intended.

Here’s what happened:  While I have never supported Sarah Palin, publicly or privately, I have long thought that too many of the attacks on her were mean, vicious and irrational.  I thought they went way beyond anything she had ever done in the political arena to deserve them.  And I figured, this can’t simply because she’s a conservative.

So on Bill’s show, I said I thought liberals (I should have said “many liberals” or “elite liberals”) dislike her so much because she didn’t go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton and instead bounced around a bunch of schools before landing at the University of Idaho – a crime against humanity to many of those elites. Then I said I don’t think they’re too happy with her either because she had five kids … and gave them names like Trig and Track and Bristol, Willow and Piper.  Then, I uttered the words that touched off the accusations that I was a “nasty” human being.  I said I thought that because she made a choice … to knowingly and willingly have a baby with Down Syndrome ... that some liberals detested her for that too.

To put my observations into some kind of context, let’s take a brief trip down Memory Lane to when Sarah Palin was put on the GOP ticket in the summer of 2008.

A female professor at the University of Chicago, a first-rate school, wrote on the Washington Post Web site that Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”  You see, to many supposedly open-minded liberals, a conservative woman isn’t a woman at all.  She’s just a conservative; just as a conservative black person isn’t really black to a lot of liberals -- only conservative.

Another woman wrote this in Salon, the liberal online magazine, about Sarah Palin’s sudden prominence: “I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.”  In other words, the rise of Sarah Palin is akin to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

And a college professor in Canada wrote on the CBC’s Web site that Palin “added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn’t already have sewn up – the white trash vote.”

This hatred amounts to what I called Palin Derangement Syndrome.  It’s just plain nuts!  And to think female liberals wrote these vicious things about Sarah Palin just because she’s a conservative is also nuts.  There are lots of conservative women out there who don’t come in for this kind of trashing.  So I figured it must be something else.

It must be, I figured, that they hate her because she’s not like so many liberal feminists.  She appears to be happily married, for example.  And she’s not neurotic – like so many of them are.  And yes, I think her decision to have so many kids (with those names) makes liberals (not all, of course, but many) think she’s hopelessly Middle American.

As for Palin’s decision not to abort her baby with Down Syndrome: Women and their husbands should do whatever they think is best in those circumstances.  I have no say in those matters and I would never try to influence someone’s decision in that area.  It’s simply, and obviously, none of my business.   But I am asking this:  Who is more likely to have the baby with Down Sydrome, a pro-choice woman or a pro-life woman?  A woman who isn’t religious or one who is?  A woman who believes a life – even a life of a fetus – is sacred, or one who doesn’t?  I know there are many who will disagree, but I think it’s a safe bet that the pro-life, religious woman who believes in the sanctity of life is more likely to go continue her pregnancy (even as many who fit that description will abort a fetus with Down Syndrome).

That’s all I was trying to say.  I never thought I was “politicizing” anyone’s children or anyone’s pain.  If I did that, my sincere apologies to one and all.  But I still believe many elite liberals hate Sarah Palin for a whole bunch of reasons that have little to do with how she would vote on this issue or that -- or even, as they often claim, because they don't think she's that smart, There are lots of lbierals who aren't "that smart" -- and they don't seem to trouble their fellow libs all that much.