House of Eratosthenes

James Taranto, this weekend, officially went on the record hypothesizing that when Sarah Palin dishes out the traditional “I’m resigning to go home and spend time with my family” cliche now commonly associated with the scandal-plagued set…she actually means it.

“Go ahead and laugh, we can wait,” he says.

Knowing there is a heavily-populated and exceptionally loud chattering class of ankle-biters desperate to prove such a theory wrong, he set up a Facebook discussion page to do exactly that. The very first response reflected in a high-quality way, I thought, on exactly what is bollywonkers about all the shenanigans going down this year just in general, with things Palin-related as well as not-Palin-related:

I won’t even try to prove you wrong. The only thing I know for certain about Sarah Palin’s decision, is that it has proven to me that she has all the right enemies, while Barack Obama has all the wrong friends.

Zing! That’s gonna leave mark — on us all. In generations past this was how you figured out if a fellow was going to do right by you, or not: The company he keeps. “You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses.”

We done got away from that pebble of wisdom, or allowed it to get away from us. The results seem to indicate our grandparents were a little bit smarter on this issue than we are. And let us think, not just of Sarah Palin’s enemies, but her friends. She entrusted some close inner circle, for some time it would seem, with this secret that she was going to step down. Quite the bombshell. We all proved trustworthy, as tough as it was for us not to let you in on it, at times.

No, seriously. Whoever was on the ins with this, was given trust and they repaid it. This speaks well of them, and of her. For a Caribou Barbie dimbulb, she seems to know and understand people quite well, and in a way that really counts for something. One wonders how many politicians still serving don’t have such a talent, although one is inclined to believe that one will not have to wait long to find out. Leaks? In Washington? They’re like bottle caps in a beer factory. They happen all the time. Brought in by the truckload, stacked by the palette. Because people don’t know who to trust.

Cassy thinks there was a contest here between Palin and the media, and the media won. The commenter familiar to us here at The Blog That Nobody Reads, Larry Sheldon, goes on record to say…

They won to the extent that they denied to the sate of Alaska what the voters there have a right to,

But they didn’t beat Palin.

Not b[y] a long shot.

All of your “she’s beaten” evidence is from the least credible sources in the history of language. [emphasis mine]

He’s right. Take another reading of the Palin-related sound bites, and keep track of who’s saying what. Everyone who says “stick a fork in her” possesses a Paul-Krugman-esque record of correctness, which is to say a non-existent one.

They shouldn’t be correct about anything, anyway; as we pointed out yesterday, the logic they employ is hideously unsound. We are, this week, consumed in discussing the future of a retiring politician who has none. Their logic says she’s too stupid to ever have had a shot at national office, she sure as hell doesn’t have one now, and yet a profound metamorphosis has taken place in American politics this last Friday. They want it both ways, in other words. The notion that Republicans are just a bunch of losers, because they lost their last, best hope — applies. But they are also to keep their stigma of trying to saddle us with a tundra yokel who can see Russia from her house. That they fail to take note of the obviously dazzling depth of her incompetence, speaks to their political myopia.

Well…you can’t have both of those. You have to choose one: Palin is a promising and effective champion — or she isn’t. I would expect any child claiming the logical grasp needed to graduate from seventh grade, to pick up on this in record time.

Update: Blogsister Daphne has the balls to state a truth avoided by the craven types of lesser substance, in a post called “Hate Is Fun.” She brings to mind a few things I already know:

Thing I Know #34. We are a tribal species, although we’re loathe to admit it, and it comes much more easily to us to bear silly grudges against entire cultures, than legitimate grudges against individual persons.

Thing I Know #40. We are a tribal species, although we’re loathe to admit it, and when people extoll the virtues of “diversity” they tend to talk about skin color and nothing else.

Thing I Know #53. We are a tribal species, although we’re loathe to admit it, and we have very little to say to our neighbors who enjoy a different set of luxuries or who labor under a different set of burdens.

Thing I Know #269. We have a strong tendency to confuse pulling your weight with fitting in. We’re therefore easily confused in the presence of people who pull their own weight but don’t fit in…as well as people who fit in but don’t pull their own weight.

That’s your substandard writing that’ll put you to sleep; now wake up, we’re returning to the subject at hand. Get ready for some far superior written stuff. Daphne’s comments:

Sarah Palin is not of their tribe, culturally or ideologically. She hasn’t played by their rules or bought into their code of narrowly defined group conduct. She’s a renegade anomaly, wielding all the power and benefit of every last feminist tenet without ever stepping foot on that particular reservation. She proves the current batch of young feminists wrong and obsolete, pulling the curtain back to reveal their lack of substance and relevance in the current game of sexual politics. Women have immense power. All the power they want is sitting in the palm of their hand, Sarah knows this fact and lives her life accordingly. She’s no victim of the patriarchy, she’s her own glorious force of life, putting to lie the vaunted despised vagina status many feminists preach all women are cursed with at birth as some delusional high truth of basic female existence.

Tribes get off on viral hate fests against the others, it’s massively fun stuff. Tapping into that primal vein creates unity, crafts a little momentum and fans the flames to chase down and roast rogue elements threatening the group’s comfortable mindset and debatable version of truth. The hate fueled hunt is a bacchanal most humans never pass up given the right conditions – we like a little slaughter with our communal feasts, women particularly enjoy delivering the verbal coup de grace over wine and cheese. We’re well skilled in that form of pack warfare, ripping an objectionable bitch to pieces is one of our ancient talents. Palin’s found herself on the wrong side of some fierce bitches and they’re having a damn fine time flaying the skin off her hide one strip at a time. I see no mystery to these hypocritical feminist attacks, the young ladies are just hewing to their basic natures and having themselves some good old fashioned, primal fun.

I do find it a damn shame that these women will probably never see the irony between their committed dogma and how they’ve treated a woman who’s achieved everything they glorify as the epitome of female success.

Don’t forget Morgan: the feminist movement became institutionalized and powerful when you could profit from it. What Palin embodies is something that can’t be marketed. It simply doesn’t fit the “just give us money and you’ll have respect” mold that comes from Gender Studies degrees, feminist law firms, Title IX lawsuits, and so on. Since Palin exposes those tribes as illegitimate, she was attacked accordingly. Follow the money.
- wch | 07/09/2009 @ 13:43
Please, you’re never substandard Morgan.

Funny thing, as I was driving back this morning with a sick kid, I was musing on a few of your numbered items and I hadn’t even seen them yet. My basic thoughts boiled down to: Why is it horribly wrong for me not to like a particular “group”, say gangbanger cholos or militant lesbians or white trash meth heads? Why do I have to be tolerant of groups that I find, in the main, to be disgusting or abhorrent?

Sorry, I know that’s off topic, but your numbers kind of fit where I was going today thought-wise.
- Daphne | 07/09/2009 @ 15:42
Hmmm, yes I see where you’re going. “I don’t trust people with tattoos on their faces” — we tend to treat that the way we would treat “I don’t trust people with dark faces,” although the latter is an issue involving genetics and birth whereas the former is a decision deliberately made to showcase something present or absent in the person’s character.

I think it’s got something to do with the indoctrination that took place in the 1970’s. You attend public school for all of the fourth grade, and if at the end of the year you don’t know jack shit about times tables, but you’re just as inclined to bum the answers off your black classmate as off your other white classmate, then your academic year has been a huge success. But then if you actually learned the material, who cares?

The point was that all stereotyping is bad. It was a good point, taken perhaps a little bit too far.

I remember the routine. Go to school, spend an hour and a half pretending boys and girls are exactly the same, go play at recess where you hit back if a boy punches you, but don’t you dare think about it if it’s a girl. Then go back to class, pretend boys and girls are exactly the same for another couple hours…repeat. Good preparation for the silliness and non-logic of the adult world.
- mkfreeberg | 07/09/2009 @ 16:01
I’m tired of being called a bigot, racist, xenophobe, etc., when I make a negative judgement about XYZ group of people based on my discernment of facts, data and personal observations. There may be members of that group that I would find personally charming, smart, kind, insert a superlative, but because they identify with a group I find societally degenerative, I don’t want to have anything to do with them and I would consider that nice person of XYZ group self destructively stupid for participating in that community.

That these groups happen to be black, hispanic, lesbian or redneck blond is beside the point, it’s fricking incidental to their overall behavior, it’s just a signifier because people are tribal and tend to hang with others who offer a comfortable mirror image of themselves and their choices. We’re constantly told that race, color, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference are not signifiers, they hold no importance when judging ability, success or positive societal contributions. But these are the exact criteria used by critics to crucify any honest argument debating the merits of how to fix non-white male groups who are behaving in a destructive or violent manner. It’s used as a red herring in these discussions of problem groups; everyone wants to focus on those surface attributes to kill legitimate complaints of detrimental behavior inside specific groups they believe should be sacrosanct or excused because of surface attributes. It’s a clusterfuck of epic proportions when you’d really like to remedy high school drop out rates, teen pregnancy, high prison populations, etc. and that requires some honest discussion without all the pc crap and ugly name calling by the powerful, but sensitive crew running our social sciences and services.

**My only caveat (or achilles heel) would be Islamists, I have no tolerance for those sharia loving people period and I couldn’t give a rat’s if any one calls me a bigoted islamophobe for despising the people who practice this brutal religion.
- Daphne | 07/09/2009 @ 17:19
It would be a shame if someone had never read Mr. Whittle’s Tribes essay:

http://pajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject/2005/09/05/tribes/

Seems appropriate to this thread.
- wch | 07/10/2009 @ 07:44

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