Having observed what the pop culture and the media had done to Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign, it was apparent that the liberals were playing by a set of rules on a board that they now owned. For decades, conservatives were a silent majority. Never ones to get their hands dirty, they silently rejected the politics of personal destruction and shied away from the pop culture which they saw as being in conflict with the values they were trying to pass down to their children. Suddenly, conservatives found themselves in a street fight, having to resort to tactics they once disdained simply for the sake of survival.
"Truths" writes:
They attacked personally, the conservatives, by making Palin the proxy, and conservatives, for the first time, didn't roll over and die. Nor did Palin. Instead, the more they throw at her, the more she generates support for herself and the ideology attacked by proxy.Conservatives realized they could no longer bring a knife to a gunfight. Instead, they got up and spoke out. They took on the government, the media and the cocktail party circuit. Realizing that the country was still center-right and that they outnumbered liberals 2-1, they found the courage of their convictions and took on their attackers.
They also realized that they couldn't sit on the sidelines and watch the pop culture run roughshod over the values of the country. They learned from the lessons of the 1950s and 1960s that by complaining about the music and the movies that they were being the negative ones. The moral majority was stigmatized by the left as being intolerant, self righteous and judgmental. Well, the kettle calls itself black now as they have become the intolerant, self righteous and judgment ones. And in response, the conservatives became positive and engaging.
When conservatives were unwilling to play the game, the liberals won. But when it came down to do or die, conservatives rolled up their sleaves and played the ugly game only to find that they were smarter, faster and more cunning than those who had swept in from the underbelly of the infiltraton of American institutions. Now confident, conservatives take on the Left in the media, pop culture and on the cocktail circuit. Conservatives speak up now in the check out lines of supermarkets and when talking amonst their peers. The sheep are sheep no more.
And who better to lead this movement than a badass from Wasilla Alaska? Who better to show us that if you engage the opponents at their own game and beat them at it that you could take the board back and put the grown ups back in charge. If there was ever a time for conservatives to get their hands dirty underneath the hood of the American car, it's now. And because of that, the grown ups may someday emerge from the childishness of vitriol, liberal lies and an unwillingness of many to confront the fact that the Constitution is not an outdated document and conservatism is not an outmoded dogma.
What more of a lightning rod could Palin be, than to subvert media and celebrity to campaign for conservatism? You could not possibly be more "in your face" than to use the very tools and venues of progressivism to promote conservatism.
Palin's not dumb. Not ignorant. She is the child of two passionate teachers. She knows more about biology and physics and math and history and geography and the list goes on, than the vast majority. She knows her place and our place in history. And she knows where we, Americans came from. And that exceptionally bright "city upon a hill" and "beacon of liberty" to the world. That's the kind of teaching that real teachers taught. It may be "ignorance" as defined by progressives. But it's the wisdom of age, time, and history.And because of Sarah Palin, we fight. We bleed. We battle the demons in the dark. We know that the battle will be hard fought, that we will suffer the slings and arrows of vitriolic hatrid and that we will take on some of the most entrenched enemies of freedom that have ever gotten such a stronghold on the internal fabric of our institutions. But we know that we are headed toward the light and we can see that flicker from a city that shines so distant on hill. That flicker grows brighter. It grows brighter because we are coming home.
And just when they believed the battle to overcome history and wisdom was won, along came the most unlikely hockey mom from a dusty and un-sophisticated town, in the most primitive state, championing the most unprogressive ideas, and in doing so, taking that victory and flushing it down the toilet. Instead, the TEA Party showed up. It's the worst nightmare of the intellectual, the elite, the progressives. Thank God. I thought for a while the darkness would win. We had forgotten that even a hockey mom from Wasilla can beat back the darkness. We fear it no more.
