Our saviour Sarah, and her St. Paul

The website American Thinker should change its name to Wasillan Enthusiast, or, simpler and more to the point, Palin Worshipper. AT’s editor Thomas Lifson sees a photo of Palin carrying Mark Levin’s book, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, and on that basis he enthuses:

Sarah Palin has already demonstrated a capacity to connect with ordinary Americans. This charisma frightens and angers many and the left, and not a few Republicans as well. [LA replies: in American Thinker’s universe all Republicans and conservatives who criticize Palin are frightened, pathologically jealous eggheads from the Northeast Corridor and not true Americans.] I fully expect Governor Palin, whose mind displays the quality of a rapid learner who knows how to use what she has learned, to begin to ground her public statements in the philosophical depth so well-presented in Liberty and Tyranny.

The phony intellectual elitists, who have little or no understanding, much less grounding, in the fundamental ideas undergirding the American republic [but Palin, Lifson assures us, does have such understanding, or she will have it as soon as she finishes reading Levin’s book] are not going to know what has hit them, once Sarah Palin returns to the public spotlight to discuss the future of our nation. The shallow conservative intellectuals, jealous of her connection to the taproot of the American spirit will also be bewildered.

LA replies:

See? People who criticize Palin do so because she’s a real person, connected with the true sources of American vitality, and they, the critics, lack her reality and her natural vitality and so they are jealous of her, with the consuming resentment that, as Nietzsche wrote, the sick have for the healthy. Maybe Lifson should change the name of his website to American Vitalist. In any case, it is clear that the flip side of Lifson’s extravagant worship of Palin is his dehumanization of her critics.

And what about his predictions of Palin’s great future? He doesn’t just express the hope that she will become a more intellectually substantive figure as a result of reading one book, which is silly enough; he states as a certainty that she will instantly acquire from a reading of Levin’s book such a grasp of the true American principles that she is going to wipe the floor with her opponents.

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Laura W. writes:

Lifson has introduced an entirely new political force: Sarah Palin’s Mind. It was hidden all along, but suddenly due to “rapid learning” and her sudden appearance with a book (A book!! And, it’s a hardback too!!!), the Palin Cerebrum comes into view before a spellbound, liberty-thirsting America. This is no apparition! We can all dispense with thinking now. Throw away your books, America! Sarah is thinking for us now.

Earlier, Laura had written:

I’m out of my depth here. I don’t have any idea what he is saying. What does he mean when he says she will be a champion of liberty? I can sympathize with the view that she is a dynamic personality, but what has she said or done that suggests such fantastic hopes, such dreams of tyranny vanquished?

At least, the mystery of Palin’s reading habits is solved. She “soaks up” political philosophy by holding it in her hands. I will give it a try.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 26, 2009 03:40 PM | Send