Intermarkets' Privacy Policy Support
Donate to Ace of Spades HQ! Recent Entries
Saturday Evening Movie Thread 09/07/2024 [TheJamesMadison]
Hobby Thread - Sept 7, 2024 [TRex] Ace of Spades Pet Thread, September 7 Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Sept. 7 The "rules-based international order" vs. free speech? The Classical Saturday Morning Coffee Break & Prayer Revival Daily Tech News 7 September 2024 The Bric, The Brac, The Craic & All, Lets Call It An ONT TGIF Cafe The Week In Woke Absent Friends
Bandersnatch 2024
GnuBreed 2024 Captain Hate 2023 moon_over_vermont 2023 westminsterdogshow 2023 Ann Wilson(Empire1) 2022 Dave In Texas 2022 Jesse in D.C. 2022 OregonMuse 2022 redc1c4 2021 Tami 2021 Chavez the Hugo 2020 Ibguy 2020 Rickl 2019 Joffen 2014 AoSHQ Writers Group
A site for members of the Horde to post their stories seeking beta readers, editing help, brainstorming, and story ideas. Also to share links to potential publishing outlets, writing help sites, and videos posting tips to get published.
Contact OrangeEnt for info:
maildrop62 at proton dot me Cutting The Cord And Email Security
Moron Meet-Ups
|
« Plane Crashes Into Austin Building Manifesto Endorses Communism: Koz Kidz Call it "Teabagger Terrorism" | Main | Tea Party Leader on Third Parties: We Must Hang Together or We Will Surely Hang Apart » February 18, 2010
Latest Lefty Meme: Sarah Palin is... an ElitistThis is a common practice of the left. Take the right's complaints about you and argue, ludicrously, that they actually apply more to the right itself. The left, for example, decided that the right's complaints that they were weak-kneed and a bit squeamish about purposeful, effective violence actually demonstrated that the right was a bunch of panty-twisted pee-stained pussyboys. It became a treasured trope on the left that they, the left, constituted "the brave" because they were courageous enough to not be troubled at all by terrorism. While those on the right called out for their mommies (their mommies being the fighting men and women of the US armed forces). And now, as Sarah Palin as been riding the anti-elitist horse for a while, it becomes the new stupid meme that it's really Sarah Palin who's the elitist. Google it! Notice they have no problem at all abandoning their previous trope (elitism is good and only an imbecile would argue differently) and sliding into the complete opposite notion (Sarah Palin is the real elistist; the lefties are in fact... I don't know, the Common Man being grinded down under her chic heel). “I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person,” [Sarah Palin] recently told Chris Wallace, which is just as well. That snide little aside, I remind you, appears in a column arguing that Sarah Palin is the real elitist here. And she added: “I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist, because for too often and for too long now, I think the elitists have tried to make people like me and people in the heartland of America feel like we just don’t get it.” At the Tea Party convention in Nashville, Palin made a similar claim for the moral superiority of ordinariness, twangily championing “real people, not politicos, not inside-the-Beltway professionals,” and “everyday Americans,” and finally “the people.” Palin is packaging herself as the perfect image of the American mean. It is an affront to the heartland. Just curious -- how so? Where's he getting that? I suppose he may mean "the people" excluded slaves, but the word "people" doesn't actually achieve that. "We the Free Men of the United States,or even "We the Citizens," would have that meaning; "We the People" simply does not. Certainly the Constitution did differentiate between free men and slaves, but it did not do so with the term "the People," which actually undermines the later distinction made in the 3/5ths compromise. But I guess we can forgive him his stupidity because he's currently posturing as a Common Man being abused by that wicked elitist Sarah Palin.
It is based upon a particular definition of “the people.” How do Palin and the partiers know who the real Americans are? The mystical certainty of her divisive intuition reminds me of what intellectual historians used to call the “epistemological privilege” of Marx’s proletariat, his reprehensible old idea that access to truth is a feature of class position. Palin, too, is idealizing the proletariat for the uniqueness of its understanding, though her economics is starkly indifferent to its tribulations. And if you throw in Palin’s views on the “social issues,” on the questions by which we measure the decency of our society, then it is clear that this is an anti-elitism that is not an egalitarianism, a common touch without genuine commonality, which is quite an accomplishment. Um, so far she seems to be saying that "common people" are deserving of respect that the elites do not grant them, and this idiot is confirming all that. Essentially this guy -- Leon Weisetilier of TNR -- is angry. He and his cronies have repeatedly insisted on the special privileges of what his buddy David Brooks proudly calls The Educated Class; Palin is refusing to extend that privilege to them, and he's whining about it, basically arguing that if he and his buddies are not given their special privilege to rule the plebians then Sarah Palin is being "elitist" by refusing to admit they are entitled to their asserted public-policy psuedo-intellectual droit de seigneur. Um, like I said, he's posturing as a poor downtrodden member of the Harvard-Yale-Princeton axis, so I guess I'll permit him his stupidity. There is also the rather immense hypocrisy of Palin and many other populists. Anyone who has run for the vice presidency, and has published a monster bestseller, and appears regularly on television, and will run for the presidency is a member in good standing of the American elite. Ummmm... no. This is like saying that a nouveau riche arriviste is a member in good standing of the upper class. No, that guy is not, as amply demonstrated by the two slurs the Old Money class has created to put him down, "nouveau riche" and "arriviste." The whole point is that while such a person would seem to have attained the key thing to afford him entry into that class and make him a "member in good standing" of that class, the old members of it resent his intrusion into it and come up with exclusionary put-downs to hedge him out. And he's sitting here telling us that Sarah Palin -- Sarah Palin!, of all people -- is supposedly a "member in good standing" of the elite class, even though he, and 98% of the other members of the self-professed elite, have done nothing but belittle and savage her for two years running now. But she's a member in good standing. Of course she is, darling. Is he really trying to pretend he doesn't know that blue-collar kids who make some money aren't routinely excluded and derided by their supposed social betters? Even lesser attainments of prominence and success confer the same loathed status. The anti-elitists in the Republican caucus in the House and the Senate, and in the conservative commentariat, and in the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute--they are anti-elitists in the elite. Um, yeah. Well, Andrew Jackson was kind of elite himself, wasn't he?, and yet he is generally considered the last of the truly great populists and anti-elitists. Look, this is very simple, Leon: Some people are class traitors, and that's what you resent. You see people like Palin and other class traitors, people who should be thanking you allowing them to breathe the same rarefied air you do, instead running you down, and it makes you angry. Obviously a great many conservative intellectuals have benefited from an elite education. But they do not share the ethos and mores of the Harvard-Yale-Princeton axis, and that's what makes people like this so angry with them. Not only do they resist the blandishments of the Smug Set, they confound the nice simple narrative the Smug Set likes to deploy -- that everyone who disagrees with them is uncultured, uneducated, and unintelligent. Scott Brown proved that nothing gets you to Washington faster than a pickup truck, but he will have a hideaway now. For years liberals used to be ridiculed for their condescension to “the people.” And rightly so. Because his expression of how in-touch with "the people" he is consists of... ” (Like every common man I adore the scene in The Deer Hunter when Robert De Niro, John Cazale, Christopher Walken, and the others in the bar sing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” along with the jukebox, but when I saw it a few weeks ago it looked to me like a bunch of guys from Tribeca slumming in a Pennsylvania steel town.) ... watching a movie about "the poeple." Now conservatives deserve the same ridicule. The comforting fact is that there is no significant ideology and no significant policy agenda that is not represented among the elite. Represented among the elite, sure. "The elite" always has its share of eccentrics. (As they say, an "eccentric" is just a lunatic who has enough money to keep the agents of the loony bin away.) But what is the dominant ethos of the self-professed elite? Is he really pretending there is not a very dominant left-liberal-progressive dominant ethos among those he terms "the elite"? (And by the way-- would this guy consider a man who'd attained the rank of Colonel at a young age "elite"? You're goddamned right he wouldn't. He means only people who fucking type for a living.) .... When a "special interest" is the around 10-33% of the electorate we generally stop calling it a "special interest." How "special" is an interest shared by 90 million people? Incidentally, this is another borrowed meme, shabbily lifted from other lefty writers with no attempt at attribution. Robert Wright was just making the stupid case that the Tea Party -- consisting of 33 million people who have actively participated in Tea Parties, and tens of millions more who consider themselves such -- was just another "special interest." Riiiiight. Why not just deem the entirety of the GOP one great big special interest? (And, to attribute this myself, Mickey Kaus already questioned Wright's curious assertion that a grassroots mass of 90 million people was a "special" interest, as opposed to, say, an "interest," period.) This does not mean that its criticisms are wrong; but when they are right, it is because their reasons are moral, not sociological. No one really argued otherwise, idiot. If the populists sound defensive and work hard to establish their wisdom, it's because people like you have denied their wisdom and even their right to speak publicly at all for 50 years; so yeah, when they speak publicly, they do feel the burden -- which you don't -- of first establishing they have the right to be heard at all. Now, having attempted to call Sarah Palin an "elitist," he resorts to the standard elitist meme... ... It is a cherished trope of the elitists and the left (but I repeat myself) that the uncouth, uneducated subhumans they lord over only act out of dark emotion such as fear and hate and rage, while the elite left of course is thoughtful and reasoned. What the hell would you call this screed? I call it 800 words of angry, defensive name-calling disguised, as it often is, in that carefully-contrived more-in-sorrow-than-anger pose of the hateful leftist elite always employs when they look down upon their rebellious slaves and shake their heads with practiced sadness. If only the slaves would realize their masters mean the very best for them, and are much better equipped to make decisions for them. But you know -- Sarah Palin is the elitist. The left likes to claim that every term the stupid morons use for Obama -- socialist, arrogant, etc. -- is a disguised racial slur. We really mean the n-word, it is always posited. You tell me -- is this not an 800 word, tarted up manner of calling Sarah Palin an ungrateful, uppity c*nt? Thanks to DanF. | Recent Comments
exdem13 FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT:
"210 I guess I collect books as well, actually took ..."
Learn More: "Really when someone doesn't know then its up to ot ..." Florida Peasant : "Not a collection but I wish it was. When I was a k ..." Skip : "WE HAVE A MOVIE MARQUETTE ..." Sharon(willow's apprentice): "So cool SiD. Take a picture so I can see in Texas. ..." Skip : "Popcorn time ..." Notsothoreau: "I see a lot of card collections at the local aucti ..." hart: "actually took 1 back to used book store yesterday ..." Reforger: "1950's construction techniques are a world away fr ..." screaming in digital : "And I gotta watch that Matchbox car vid. As a kid ..." Notsothoreau: "I am supposed to get a portion of my aunt & uncle' ..." Smell the Glove: "Thx T.Rex. I collected sports cards as a kid and I ..." Recent Entries
Saturday Evening Movie Thread 09/07/2024 [TheJamesMadison]
Hobby Thread - Sept 7, 2024 [TRex] Ace of Spades Pet Thread, September 7 Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Sept. 7 The "rules-based international order" vs. free speech? The Classical Saturday Morning Coffee Break & Prayer Revival Daily Tech News 7 September 2024 The Bric, The Brac, The Craic & All, Lets Call It An ONT TGIF Cafe The Week In Woke Search
Polls! Polls! Polls!
Frequently Asked Questions
The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick
Primary Document: The Audio
Paul Anka Haiku Contest Announcement Integrity SAT's: Entrance Exam for Paul Anka's Band AllahPundit's Paul Anka 45's Collection AnkaPundit: Paul Anka Takes Over the Site for a Weekend (Continues through to Monday's postings) George Bush Slices Don Rumsfeld Like an F*ckin' Hammer Top Top Tens
Democratic Forays into Erotica New Shows On Gore's DNC/MTV Network Nicknames for Potatoes, By People Who Really Hate Potatoes Star Wars Euphemisms for Self-Abuse Signs You're at an Iraqi "Wedding Party" Signs Your Clown Has Gone Bad Signs That You, Geroge Michael, Should Probably Just Give It Up Signs of Hip-Hop Influence on John Kerry NYT Headlines Spinning Bush's Jobs Boom Things People Are More Likely to Say Than "Did You Hear What Al Franken Said Yesterday?" Signs that Paul Krugman Has Lost His Frickin' Mind All-Time Best NBA Players, According to Senator Robert Byrd Other Bad Things About the Jews, According to the Koran Signs That David Letterman Just Doesn't Care Anymore Examples of Bob Kerrey's Insufferable Racial Jackassery Signs Andy Rooney Is Going Senile Other Judgments Dick Clarke Made About Condi Rice Based on Her Appearance Collective Names for Groups of People John Kerry's Other Vietnam Super-Pets Cool Things About the XM8 Assault Rifle Media-Approved Facts About the Democrat Spy Changes to Make Christianity More "Inclusive" Secret John Kerry Senatorial Accomplishments John Edwards Campaign Excuses John Kerry Pick-Up Lines Changes Liberal Senator George Michell Will Make at Disney Torments in Dog-Hell Greatest Hitjobs
The Ace of Spades HQ Sex-for-Money Skankathon A D&D Guide to the Democratic Candidates Margaret Cho: Just Not Funny More Margaret Cho Abuse Margaret Cho: Still Not Funny Iraqi Prisoner Claims He Was Raped... By Woman Wonkette Announces "Morning Zoo" Format John Kerry's "Plan" Causes Surrender of Moqtada al-Sadr's Militia World Muslim Leaders Apologize for Nick Berg's Beheading Michael Moore Goes on Lunchtime Manhattan Death-Spree Milestone: Oliver Willis Posts 400th "Fake News Article" Referencing Britney Spears Liberal Economists Rue a "New Decade of Greed" Artificial Insouciance: Maureen Dowd's Word Processor Revolts Against Her Numbing Imbecility Intelligence Officials Eye Blogs for Tips They Done Found Us Out, Cletus: Intrepid Internet Detective Figures Out Our Master Plan Shock: Josh Marshall Almost Mentions Sarin Discovery in Iraq Leather-Clad Biker Freaks Terrorize Australian Town When Clinton Was President, Torture Was Cool What Wonkette Means When She Explains What Tina Brown Means Wonkette's Stand-Up Act Wankette HQ Gay-Rumors Du Jour Here's What's Bugging Me: Goose and Slider My Own Micah Wright Style Confession of Dishonesty Outraged "Conservatives" React to the FMA An On-Line Impression of Dennis Miller Having Sex with a Kodiak Bear The Story the Rightwing Media Refuses to Report! Our Lunch with David "Glengarry Glen Ross" Mamet The House of Love: Paul Krugman A Michael Moore Mystery (TM) The Dowd-O-Matic! Liberal Consistency and Other Myths Kepler's Laws of Liberal Media Bias John Kerry-- The Splunge! Candidate "Divisive" Politics & "Attacks on Patriotism" (very long) The Donkey ("The Raven" parody) |