Monday, November 17, 2008

Sarah, Plain And Small

Vanity Fair's James Wolcott bemoans the never-ending soap opera of Bible Spice:
Que Sera, Sarah
It isn't that I loathe or fear Sarah Palin. It's that she grates. If she were any more grating, she could cut cheddar.…
Sarah Palin isn't pursuing mere transient fame but actual power, a pursuit driven by a brassy assurance shielding an apparent lack of knowledge about nearly everything and a breathtaking complacency about that voluminous lack. She doesn't seem to care about what she doesn't know, it doesn't seem to register that what she doesn't know might matter and might be worth knowing even if it didn't. Her sentences seem to be missing vital ligaments when she speaks, yielding a concrete poetry similar to Rumsfeld's musings but with nil intellectual content (Rumsfeld's known unknowns and unknown unknowns at least had an ontological coherence).
 Now we're stuck with her twangy shtick and her family soap opera, which makes the former Clinton saga look like Les Sylphides. Just as Al Gore must live with the shame of elevating Joe Lieberman to the national stage, no act of contrition John McCain can perform will be penance enough for foisting Sarah Palin on us, subjecting us to her supreme sense of entitlement.

I love Wolcott. He's an adult version of Christopher Hitchens—what Hitch could be if he'd outgrow his adolescence. Rapier wit, dry sense of humor, and none of the bilious qualities.

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