Ouch
Tacitus on conservative Palin-bashing:
As the son of a preacher, and having once (in my teen years) been a quasi-anarchist, by-default libertarian, but now an autodidact-conservative let me just say this: I grew up grokking the practical points of conservatism long before I read WFB, Adams or Hayek. And by most accounts, so did Sarah Palin. From my perspective, that's a point in her favor.
UPDATE: Ross Douthat responds to Steyn. I'm still with Steyn and even Ace. While I, too, find it troubling that first-term governors Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal seem to be our only conservative back benchers these days, you can't deny that your Palin bashing neatly helps your future as a relevant pundit voice in the event of an Obama win, Ross. Either acknowledge that, or move on to other topics, buddy.
Quick Note to the Elite, Inside the Beltway Conservative Pundits: You’re not MartyrsMark Steyn adds:
Ok, I’ll bite. There is no reason that you (Peggy Noonan), Christopher Buckley, Kathleen Parker, David Brooks, or any other member of the self-anointed conservative intelligentsia should be surprised at the amount of anger outpouring from your readership towards you when you write articles that appear to “pile on” an already struggling conservative campaign effort.
You dutifully qualify every criticism of Palin with some snippet along the lines of “I’m not doing this to get invited to all the cool parties,” yet the first thing you do once you’ve been booed off stage by your own readership is exactly that - you show up onto some sort of liberal haven like Hardball or The Colbert Report to apologize for how stupid and ignorant your own political movement is. You claim that your articles against the McCain campaign are written out of some concern that true conservative principles are dying, yet you express your disagreement by cheering on a man [Obama] who supports out-in-the-open socialism. You all claim that you are wholly invested in traditional bread-and-butter conservatism, yet all of your actions contradict such claims.
[...]
Let’s make this clear: when you’re getting bombarded with angry emails from your subscribers, you know, the people who pay you money to write stuff that they want to read, [emphasis original] you don’t have any right to call their treatment “unfair” when you’re the one being a duplicitous asshole. Just a thought.
So, when a conservative pundit mocks Wasilla, he's mocking conservatism as it's actually lived, as opposed to conservatism as a theoretical fantasy playground for the purposes of cocktail-party banter.
As the son of a preacher, and having once (in my teen years) been a quasi-anarchist, by-default libertarian, but now an autodidact-conservative let me just say this: I grew up grokking the practical points of conservatism long before I read WFB, Adams or Hayek. And by most accounts, so did Sarah Palin. From my perspective, that's a point in her favor.
UPDATE: Ross Douthat responds to Steyn. I'm still with Steyn and even Ace. While I, too, find it troubling that first-term governors Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal seem to be our only conservative back benchers these days, you can't deny that your Palin bashing neatly helps your future as a relevant pundit voice in the event of an Obama win, Ross. Either acknowledge that, or move on to other topics, buddy.