Ultimate Nightmare: Sarah Palin and the Unhinged Left

We're just barely one week out from the presidential election and there's no better sign of the battle lines emerging for 2012 than Andrew Sullivan's utterly hysterical diatribe against Alaska Governor Sarah Palin this afternoon.

I've been observing the anti-Milky Loads delinking campaign, but for purposes of counter-mobilization I'm going to provide the link just once: "Why Palin Matters." To read Sullivan's essay is to witness a literal stream of consciousness of a chronic psychopathology whose affliction is clinically untreatable, and potentially dangerous to the larger society (borderline sociopathic).

I do not use this language freely, but there's nothing short of ghoulishishness to Sullivan's writing, a fundamental belligerence that leaves the transitive verb "demonize" stunningly impotent in explaining the enormity of Sullivan's psychological dislocation.

See for yourself, in any case:

Some readers think my continuing attempt to expose all the lies and flim-flam and bizarre behavior of Sarah Palin is now moot. She's history - they argue. Move on. I think she probably is history. Even Bill Kristol and his minions in the McCain-Palin campaign may not be able to resuscitate her political viability now. But even if she is history, she is history that matters.

Let's be real in a way the national media seems incapable of: this person should never have been placed on a national ticket in a mature democracy. She was incapable of running a town in Alaska competently. The impulsive, unvetted selection of a total unknown, with no knowledge of or interest in the wider world, as a replacement president remains one of the most disturbing events in modern American history. That the press felt required to maintain a facade of normalcy for two months - and not to declare the whole thing a farce from start to finish - is a sign of their total loss of nerve. That the Palin absurdity should follow the two-term presidency of another individual utterly out of his depth in national government is particularly troubling. 46 percent of Americans voted for the possibility of this blank slate as president because she somehow echoed their own sense of religious or cultural "identity". Until we figure out how this happened, we will not be able to prevent it from happening again. And we have to find a way to prevent this from recurring.

It happened because John McCain is an incompetent and a cynic and reckless beyond measure. To have picked someone he'd only met once before, without any serious vetting procedure, revealed McCain as an utterly unserious character, a man whose devotion to the shallowest form of political gamesmanship trumped concern for his country's or his party's interest. We need a full accounting of the vetting process: who was responsible for this act of political malpractice? How could a veep not be vetted in any serious way? Why was she not asked to withdraw as soon as the facts of her massive ignorance and delusional psyche were revealed?

The Palin nightmare also happened because a tiny faction of political professionals has far too much sway in the GOP and conservative circles. This was Bill Kristol's achievement.

It was a final product of the now-exhausted strategy of fomenting fundamentalist resentment to elect politicians dedicated to the defense of Israel and the extension of American military hegemony in every corner of the globe. Palin was the reductio ad absurdum of this mindset: a mannequin candidate, easily controlled ideologically, deployed to fool and corral the resentful and the frightened, removed from serious scrutiny and sold on propaganda networks like a food product.

This deluded and delusional woman still doesn't understand what happened to her; still has no self-awareness; and has never been forced to accept her obvious limitations. She cannot keep even the most trivial story straight; she repeats untruths with a ferocity and calm that is reserved only to the clinically unhinged; she has the educational level of a high school drop-out; and regards ignorance as some kind of achievement. It is excruciating to watch her - but more excruciating to watch those who feel obliged to defend her.

Her candidacy, in short, was indefensible. It remains indefensible. Until the mainstream media, the GOP establishment, and the conservative intelligentsia acknowledge the depth of their error, this blog will keep demanding basic accountability.

That's a longer segment than I'd like to afford old RAWMUSLGLUTES, but this is so pathetic that the post could very well end up down the memory hole if some coherent editor at the Atlantic decides eventually to intervene for goodness' sake.

In something that should be unbelievable, but isn't, top hard-left blogger Kevin Drum, at Mother Jones, recognizes the depth of Sullivan's psychopathology, and then goes ahead and appauds it!

Andrew's obsession with Palin was often hard to take, and I sometimes wished I could reach through the screen and strangle him whenever he started talking about Trig Palin again. Still, aside from the "clinically unhinged" crack, I agree with all of this.

But that's not the end of it: Sullivan's post is getting the big huzzahs all over the radical leftosphere, as if this screed - this virtual-incitement to political violence - constitutes mainstream political debate and discourse.

As I've already noted a couple of times, the election of Barack Obama is just the beginning of a new culture war for America. The best example is seen in the mobilization of street unrest by the most hardline radical groups in America in an attempt to overthrow Proposition 8, the majority ballot measure in California that preserves marriage between one man and one woman. With the final racial barrier breached in the left's electoral storming of the White House, the Democratic Party's extreme fringe factions are launching a multi-pronged campaign to purge conservatives from the institutions of power - by any means necessary - across the U.S. political landscape.

So, never forget: Sarah Palin is the left's ultimate nightmare.

Andrew Sullivan is simply the most vociferously vocal symptom of a larger implacable movement seeking to wrench any inkling of "center-right" ideology from the heights of influence in the American state. The left wants nothing more than the utter destruction of the Alaska Governor. Once that's complete, the continued ideological escalation of the culture war will branch out from there, with further attacks on "Christianists," Mormons," to the Fox News "ministry of propaganda" and beyond.

Is it any wonder why conservatives have no interest in transcending partisan divisions to join hands in an essential surrender to the nihilism of the left's progressive ideology program?