The Ignorance Of Sarah Palin And Ann Coulter

From Sarah Palin: Conservative of the Year by Ann Coulter :

Sarah Palin wins HUMAN EVENTS’ prestigious “Conservative of the Year” Award for 2008 for her genius at annoying all the right people. The last woman to get liberals this hot under the collar would have been … let's see now … oh, yeah: Me!

The entire presidential election year was kind of a downer for conservatives. Once the “maverick” John McCain won the nomination, the rest of the year was like watching a slow motion car crash. Except at least a slow-motion car crash is occasionally entertaining. So it was going to be a long year.

Until Palin.

It was not genius, but ignorance that annoyed “all the right people.” The right people in this case being the American voter.

Let’s hope that future “Conservative of the Year” Award winners are as successful as Palin at winning elections.

Courting The Neanderthal Vote

From Palin's Rising Star? by Josh Marshall:

As I think Noam Scheiber said a week or two ago, Palin is the first Republican presidential or vice-presidential since Richard Nixon to so genuinely appeal to the politics of resentment. Sure, the Bushes and McCain have played to it. But either economically or socially or both, these men were all to-the-manor-born -- elites who've lived their whole lives on greased rails.

To use a different analogy I think Palin (and perhaps Joe the Plumber too) appeal to the brainstem of conservatism, where the most primitive and persistent impulses are registered, even as the areas of higher reasoning and cognition (frontal lobes and all that) are flat-lining or tracking into oblivion.