Sarah Palin wins HUMAN EVENTS’ prestigious “Conservative of the Year” Award for 2008 for her genius at annoying all the right people.
Seriously? If by all the right people she means, "independent voters," then she's nailed it. Is this really the best they can do? This sort of thing is why I stopped identifying as a Republican.
I could see a possibility defending this if Palin had annoyed liberals by her brilliant, outside the box conservative thinking. I'll be honest when I say that some of the press she got was excessively bad, and that the media reported a few stories that turned out to be rumors in the end. But the fact remains that she couldn't answer basic questions about public policy. Basic questions. That conservatives excused her lack of knowledge of any SCOTUS decisions, or the Bush Doctrine, or of any periodicals while arguing that Obama was a lightweight tells you everything you need to know about the bullshit machine that calls itself movement conservatism.
Palin isn't the beginning of a new era of conservative thought, she is the end of conservative thought. She does nothing but spew bile at the 85% of us that don't live in rural small towns. Her pick was sexist and cynical, an attempt to win over hypothetical Hillary holdouts. She spent the past few months removing all doubt that she was a compelling national figure. All she did was attack, attack, attack, and that's why conservatives love her.
This is a cardinal difference between the right and the left. I can't remember the last left liberal that rose to fame solely because he/she annoyed conservatives. Michael Moore is the closest, but that was due more to liberals hating Bush than hating conservatives in general. I've never seen any prominent liberal pundit bestow any sort of notoriety on anyone else solely because that person annoys conservatives. The converse is not true: conservatives like Coulter and Palin rise to the top by saying nasty things about liberals and tout that as some sort of intellectual qualification to garner attention.
Sometimes, I wonder where the hate comes from. I guess I don't understand why a more egalitarian economic policy, a realist foreign policy and moderate social liberalism engenders so much hate from some quarters of the right. One can only conclude that many pundits on the right have some sort of derangement syndrome going on, and that the conservatives that patronize them share in that affliction. I can't even imagine a left-wing version of Ann Coulter--it certainly wouldn't be Moore, who has nearly zero footprint and influence these days, and who was always more interested in taking George Bush down a peg rather than merely angering conservatives. Indeed, Moore often went out of his way to say that there are plenty of decent conservatives and Republicans out there, such as on his Daily Show appearance right after Fahrenheit 9/11 came out. I highly doubt you will find anything similar in Coulter's canon.
