Sarah Palin supporters, in a desperate effort to avoid having their shining light tagged as a quitter have started comparing her to several famous "quitters" of the past.
At first, the comparison was to Barack Obama. He "quit" the U. S. Senate to become president. That is a laughable comparison and I did not think the Palin supporters could come up with anything worse...until I read syndicated columnist Roger Simon moments ago.
Simon, perhaps working too hard to get around the conventional wisdom that Mrs. Palin's press conference Friday was more bizarre than fried onions on an ice cream sundae, compared the half-term Alaska governor to a true hero of our nation, former GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole:
But you can see why some in the media were shocked and dismayed. Imagine abandoning your office! Imagine quitting and deserting the voters who elected you!
Though this is what Bob Dole did in 1996, didn’t he? Dole resigned his Senate seat to run for president. I remember it. I was standing right there when he did it. And I don’t recall anybody accusing him of being a quitter. Or of being pregnant.
While Simon makes some solid points about sexism in the media, the Dole comparison is insulting When Dole left the Senate late in the '96 campaign, it was after he served more than three decades in Congress. It was after he had been his party's vice presidential candidate 20 years earlier. And more than anything else, it was a half century after he lost the use of an arm while fighting for his country in the Second World War.
And Roger Simon is comparing a man who has given his entire life for his country to someone who has spent 2 1/2 years as governor of Alaska.
Sarah Palin quite because she couldn't stand the heat. That sounds more like Eliot Spitzer than Bob Dole.
3 comments:
Whether Dole resigned his Senate seat after 30 years of service or 3, he only resigned his seat after winning the Republican nomination in 1996, not out of the blue without a clue as to what he planned on doing next. His resignation speech was also quite eloquent, not the word salad that Palin offered up.
Palin's supporters just don't get the failure of Simon's comparison because they don't WANT to get it. It doesn't fit their version of reality. There seems to be an inherent conflict in their minds between the way the world actually is and the way they would like it to be. IMO, this sets them up for perpetual disillusionment and frustration because they cannot reconcile the difference between reality and fantasy.
The fact that Palin's supporters have no desire/ability to recognize and acknowledge the difference between Dole resigning his senate seat after 30 years, and Palin resigning as governor of Alaska with 18 months remaining in her first term, leads me to believe that they resemble a cult more than they do a political organization, and in spite of facts that show Palin is a bad risk politically, they will continue to blindly ignore all of her flaws. Because of this, Palin and her supporters are a danger to American democracy.
i agree. palin and her supporters are a danger to our democracy. no amount of education or reality impacts their inflexible beliefs. how do you respond to that kind of insanity? how do you keep it from spreading? i think the answer is a strong, independent public education system. let's not put the education of our young people in the hands of crazies at either end of the political spectrum.
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