House of Eratosthenes

Prairie-doggin’ gadfly Mike R., who occasionally sticks his head out of his burrow over at Rick’s place Brutally Honest, suggests a change to the media meme about baby-boomers & younger gentlemen being smart and brilliant if they’re liberal, and dense and stupid if they’re conservative. Actually he’s trying like the dickens not to look like he’s “suggesting” anything at all…just bludgeoning and brow-beating with his opinion that Sarah Palin is a dimwit. But suggestion is the core of his offering. That’s the way trial balloons work.

[T]he pig with lipstick didn’t even know what the Bush Doctrine was.
Ready to lead?
[S]he wasn’t even ready for the interview.

I’d dare say that (and don’t let this go to your pin-head) even Rick Rice is smarter that [sic] Palin!

Someone’s already let something go to his pin-head, for I doubt like the dickens that Rick’s lying awake at nights trying to think of ways to convince Mike R. of his smartness.

Here’s the clip of which Mike R. speaks.

This is fueling a recent effort to portray Gov. Palin as a lightweight sort of chucklehead. See, you could interpret this as meaning she’s never heard of the Bush Doctrine before, and therefore she’s a complete stranger to the arguments that have been raging back and forth about the invasion of Iraq, and whether that’s proper. Where the hell’s she been living? Well the trouble with that is, that’s a little ambiguous — you could interpret it to mean she couldn’t recite the four pillars identified by Norman Podhoretz, or maybe she could but she expected to be drawn into some kind of “gotcha” over whether Podhoretz’ reinterpretation was correct. Her demeanor clearly indicates, to me anyway, that she expects this to be a line of questioning that is not only hostile, but unproductive.

For that, we have this cute little sound bite flying around to day that she’s a “moose in the headlights.”

So she doesn’t immediately identify the idea of pre-emptive military action. Huh. I wonder if Obama and Biden, between the two of them, can lay down the distinction between the nuances of pre-emptive action between the Bush Doctrine and the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Nobody’s wondering about it. They just call Palin stupid.

Interesting times. For twenty years, this has been working for our lefties whenever a hero rises on the right side of the fence, who happens to have been born sometime after Pearl Harbor. Say he’s a dimwit a few times, people will believe he’s a dimwit. Pre-Palin, however, the dumb idjit had to be a dude for this to work. Maybe that’s still the case. Maybe our young conservative ladies can, if the Big Lie technique works well enough, stop being slutty and bitchy like Ann Coulter and start being dense paste-eaters like the fellas. That’s the drawback with the Big Lie technique. The only way to tell if something works is to give ‘er a try.

Our most high-profile public officials born before Pearl, however, never were stupid (Reagan could be regarded as an exception, since he was supposedly senile and dim). Dick Cheney is Darth Vader. Strom Thurmond was a hick, but his enemies didn’t often comment on how stupid he was. He was just evil. Lauch Faircloth was evil. Jesse Helms was evil.

Don’t worry, conservative Baby Boomer men. Our moonbats won’t smear you as being evil, no matter how strong and effective you become. You’ll just be slandered as a moron. And if things go alright this year that’ll become an equal opportunity smear — it’ll work for the ladies too.

You know, the older I get, the more I see human brains as batteries; they can be used by themselves, or coupled up with other batteries. With one critical exception — batteries are designed for interachangeable use. A TV remote might take one, a flashlight might take six or eight. You may move one battery from one to the other, and back again. The battery doesn’t care.

Brains are a little different. People condition themselves their entire lives to think independently, or to think as part of a crowd. Wouldn’t this be living proof? It doesn’t make sufficient sense, to pass the high threshold of demand imposed by the individual thinker, to suppose that prominent, promising conservative women are dimwits…and are starting to be dimwits in 2008. To suppose, up until Gov. Palin came along, conservative women were God-worshipping gun-carrying hicks who were bitchy and wore short skirts and spewed racial epithets but at least had some respectable intellect…and all of a sudden, after Labor Day of this election year, they’re as stupid as the conservative men. As if an asteroid came crashing to earth and somehow made things that way. No, you need group-think to accept an idea like that.

Well, I understand. Desperate people have to do what they have to do. And it seems we have an awful lot of people running around who can do only that. The meme is how they do their thinking. All the time. About anything. There is no other kind of idea worth pondering. You could say their battery can be used only when clipped in to a common device with other batteries.

Welcome, new political meme, new “idiotic right-wing woman” meme. The first step to your surviving the exigencies of infancy, is that Gov. Palin actually has to show herself to be a dimwit. Not just once or twice, but a few times. Good luck on that. If reality confounds this, and it surely will, you can always bullshit your way through. We’ll just see if you’re still around next year. You read about it here first, folks.

Not that it’s likely to count for much in the broader picture of history. My money says by the time Sarah Palin removes her hand from the Bible in January, we’ll be back to the competing talking point of “Stepford Wife.”

Update 9/13/08: Via NewsBusters: Mark Levin got hold of a copy of the complete interview transcript, and underlined & bolded the parts that were edited out. Give it a read.

She’s not quite so much a dimbulb now, is she?

Sarah Palin has three things going for her, and they are related:

1. She is the closest thing to a non-politician we’re going to get anywhere near the national stage.

2. Because of item 1 above, the press cannot gain any traction against her. She is so like the average American, every jab strengthens her supporters, who feel jabbed by proxy.

3. The race is Palin against Obama and Biden, and she’s beating both of them. She has exposed their lack of experience with her own. The public doesn’t care that she doesn’t have foreign policy experience when they don’t value the FP experience of the Democrat ticket entirely. The voting public know it’s not a race with McCain/Palin against a perfect candidate; you only have two choices here.

The approval ratings of the current administration and of Congress prove one thing: the American people want a representative government. Nothing that flies in a corporate jet, or owns eight houses, or went to Yale/Harvard, represents them. Institutionalized politicians should take heed: we do not respect welfare queens, no matter the form.
- wch | 09/12/2008 @ 10:21

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Women Can Be Dumb, Too?Friday, September 12th, 2008

Women Can Be Dumb, Too?
Friday, September 12th, 2008