Palin: The Conservative View

Daniel Larison, "A World of Hurt There"

If there is another thing that we’re learning from her record it is that she doesn’t respond at all well to criticism, and she has made such a habit of shielding herself from it or ignoring that I suspect she has not learned how to deflect or refute it, which compels her to keep repeating whatever tried and true lines she thinks might be remotely relevant to the question. It cannot help when she is put on network television after being shielded from any and all contact with the media and asked about subjects she hasn’t practiced talking about very much, and it cannot help her that she probably was told early on that she knew nothing and she became aware that her handlers believed that she knew nothing. Still, it seems clear to me that her flubbed interviews were not accidental, but were bound to happen when a politician elevated mainly through the “gut-level connection” had to say something coherent about the pressing issues of the day. Palin’s political style is the logical extreme of the Bushian folksiness-trumps-expertise and McCainesque “authenticity”-trumps-policy approaches. She is a natural product of mass democracy’s ongoing pursuit of charismatic mediocrity, in which voters not only seek someone with whom they can identify but also actively discourage politicians’ cultivation of expertise. Expertise grates against their egalitarianism, and so they try to avoid it in their political leaders.

The Punch Line #1

Mark Steel, "Labour and a bout of mutual loathing"

Never again, the idea went, would the party go into an election with ideas that were clearly a minority view in the country. Yet every possible contender for leader still backs the Iraq war, and no one who opposed it from the start will be allowed near the contest. Or to put it another way, the 11 years of New Labour government were summed up by the cricket commentary on Test Match Special. A commentator was complaining about the rigorous security at the ground, as it had taken 45 minutes to get in.

Then suddenly up popped the voice of Geoff Boycott, saying "You've Tony Blair to thank for that." "I'm sorry," said the first commentator. "He was told," said Geoffrey, "that if he went around causing wars there'd be an increased risk of terrorism, but he took no notice, he thought he knew best." You could feel the BBC governors shrieking, "Shut him up – tell him he couldn't play fast bowling or something," but Geoffrey was adamant.

So there we are – back in 1997 none of us, not the most cynical, realised that a New Labour government would end up being chastised for being too pro-war and pro-America, on Test Match Special by Geoffrey bloody Boycott. No wonder they're shafted.