As readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi. No one, save for Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, comes close to his ability to hone in on the very essence of a political issue and then lacerate the guilty parties with the flick knife of his prose. What an amazing writer. It’s all A game with Taibbi, but he’s especially on point when he writes about Sarah Palin. Sample some of the goods from his most recent column at True/Slant:
Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s sake generation. The people who dismiss her book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk completely miss the book?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s significance, because in some ways it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s really a revolutionary and innovative piece of literature.
Palin ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù and there?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s just no way to deny this ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust.
On the small matter of Palin’s aptitude for the presidency:
Most of the rest of the book just catalogs her Gump-esque rise to national stardom (not having enough self-awareness to detect the monstrous narcissistic ambition that in reality was impelling her forward all along, she labors in the book to describe her various career leaps as lucky accidents or mystical acts of Providence) and the seemingly endless parade of meanies bent on tripping her up along the way. The book is really about her battles with these people, how much they did and do suck, and how difficult and inherently unfair life is for a decent hardworking American gal who just wants to live life, serve God, and try to be president without being bothered all the time.
Viewed through the prism of this particular brand of insanity (Palinsanity? does that work?), Katie Couric?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s notorious Palin interview last year really was a cheap shot. After all, Katie was trying to nail Palin ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù which is mean! Who among us can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t sympathize with the experience of being sandbagged by some slick professional rival who catches you in a moment of weakness and, instead of lending a helping hand, drives a fireplace poker through your eye?
You?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢d have to be thinking about the broader picture, about the fact that the president of the United States ought not to be a drooling yahoo whose two favorite Supreme Court cases are Roe v. Wade and Roe v. Wade and who thinks living near Canada counts as foreign policy experience, to not see what an asshole Katie Couric was being. And that other reality, the reality where one worries about a national political candidate having the brains of an innertube, is less immediate than the five-foot airspace radius around the Palin bobblehead. It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s harder for the average person to connect with, I guess.