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Reading Too Much Into Sarah Palin's Speech Style
Tweet Share on Facebook April 8, 2010 Comment (12)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Via Andrew Sullivan, I see the linguist John McWhorter, blogging at The New Republic, has tried gamely to deconstruct the speech patterns of Sarah Palin:
What truly distinguishes Palin's speech is its utter subjectivity: that is, she speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance. The there fetish, for instance—Palin frequently displaces statements with an appended "there," as in "We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there..." But where? Why the distancing gesture? At another time, she referred to Condoleezza Rice trying to "forge that peace." That peace? You mean that peace way over there—as opposed to the peace that you as Vice-President would have been responsible for forging? She's far, far away from that peace.
Oh, come off it. I'm no fan of Sarah Palin; I wouldn't want her running my son's preschool, let alone the country. But this is a bit much. I've heard her employ the "there" fetish when she was talking about her years as a college student. "There" and "that" are her filler words, no different than the "um" and "like" of teenagers or the plaintive "just" of extemporaneous Protestant prayer (as in, "Father, if you would just heal his sickness...")
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Obama's Angry Critics Have a Point
Tweet Share on Facebook April 5, 2010 Comment (12)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
One says "anger."
The other says "righteously indignant."
Crispin Sartwell cries foul at New York Times columnist Charles Blow for copping a superior attitude here:
The Apostles of Anger in their echo chamber of fallacies have branded [Obama] the enemy. This has now become an article of faith. Obama isn't just the enemy of small government and national solvency. He's the enemy of liberty.
This underscores the current fight for the soul of this country. It's not just a tug of war between left and right. It's a struggle between the mind and the heart, between evidence and emotions, between reason and anger, between what we know and what we believe.
"This is a fine crystallization of where today's left is at," writes Sartwell. "There is no argument at all, just continual, insufferable self-congratulation."
Sartwell, for the uninitiated, is no conservative. Though I initially discovered him via a shared irrational pro-Rolling Stones exuberance, I kept up with his writing because of its bracing defense of elemental liberty. Take the title of the late Robert Nozick's famous philosophical treatise Anarchy, State, and Utopia—Sartwell argues that it's a heavy lift to justify the transition to the second stage.
He is, in short, an anarchist. For him, Obamacare is a monstrosity—but so is Dick Cheney.
Now: I get where he's coming from regarding Blow.
There's nothing worse than a smarmy, self-satisfied liberal.
But here's what I take Blow to mean: not that liberals have a monopoly on reason, but that the core of Obama's conservative opposition isn't making reasonable arguments.
I wonder if Sartwell would agree there's a qualitative difference between the following statements:
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Republicans’ Reliance on Populist Anger Is Not a Long-Term Strategy
Tweet Share on Facebook March 31, 2010 Comment (9)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
If you have a thing for recapitulations of news and punditry that reflects with maximal negativity on the Obama administration, Commentary blogger Jennifer Rubin is like a daily vitamin.
Vitamins make me queasy.
Recently, she wrote:
The successful GOP candidates of late—Chris Christie, Bob McDonnell, and Scott Brown—have embraced, not ridiculed, the activist base. They have wholly rejected the Obama agenda. They have looked at the larger picture, the big themes, and grasped that there is a Center-Right coalition to be forged in opposition to the liberal-statist agenda that has unnerved even some liberals.
Dear Lord.
I was born and raised in New Jersey. I was ecstatic to see Christie elected there. But I seriously doubt his election had much to do with a "center-right coalition forged in opposition to the liberal-statist agenda." Jersey Republicans, notoriously RINO-ish, would not recognize such a thing if it did exist, and they certainly wouldn't use such florid language to describe it.
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Sean Hannity’s ‘Victory’ Is No Republican Roadmap for 2010
Tweet Share on Facebook March 30, 2010 Comment (25)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Republicans think—cautiously anticipate—that this year's midterm elections will resemble 1994, in kind if not degree.
The more interesting question, to my lights, is whether next year will resemble 1995, when Bill Clinton called the electorate's bluff and more or less saved his presidency. Minus 9/11, Republicans may have met 2006 several years earlier.
This was in the back of my mind as I read Erick Erickson's post at RedState.com touting Sean Hannity's new book Conservative Victory.
I have not read, and don't plan to read, the book. I'd frankly rather watch Access Hollywood with my eyes pried open, Clockwork Orange-style.
But I care about what it says (or at least what Erickson says it says), for this reason: It gives a glimpse of what follows Republican electoral victories.
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Podhoretz Praise for Palin, Tea Party Shows Dumbing Down of Neocons
Tweet Share on Facebook March 29, 2010 Comment (36)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Against the better angel of my household (namely, my wife), who tells me I should stop paying so much attention to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and all the other vandals who I believe are pulling conservatives over the lip and into the maw of a black hole of know-nothingism, paranoia, and class resentment, I'm going to take the Wall Street Journal's bait here.
I can't resist.
Because I'm kind of astonished.
Maybe I shouldn't be.
After conceding that she knows "very little about international affairs," Norman Podhoretz writes that Sarah Palin nonetheless holds the all-important opinion that "the United States has been a force for good in the world." Aside from the lunatic fringe of the left, who'd deny that? It doesn't necessarily rule out its obverse—that America has been a force for bad—in all cases.
Anyway, on to Podhoretz's conclusion: that he'd "rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama."
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The Healthcare Mandate’s Shaky Constitutional Ground
Tweet Share on Facebook March 25, 2010 Comment (108)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
National Review Online's Stephen Spruiell has a compelling rebuttal to the Washington Post's defense of the healthcare reform law's requirement that individuals purchase a health plan. The Post wisely avoids the faulty car-insurance analogy. In its place is an expansive notion of the federal government's interest in an efficient healthcare market—a "legitimate public purpose."
Spruiell:
For most of our nation's history, Congress has been very concerned with propping up the prices of agricultural commodities. This is a legitimate public purpose, by the Post's broad definition ... But if the individual mandate is allowed, Congress would theoretically have the power to implement the following plan: Each citizen each year must buy a basket of U.S. farm commodities—perhaps he could choose among the gold, silver, or bronze baskets—and he would receive subsidies if his income fell below a certain level.
To see how this plays out in the courts is going to be interesting, to say the least.
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Don’t Stop With the Constitution, Read History Too
Tweet Share on Facebook March 24, 2010 Comment (4)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
One of the most memorable images, for me, of the Tea Party protest at the Capitol last weekend in anticipation of the climactic House vote was taken by NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez. (See here and scroll way down.) It's of a middle-aged guy reading a pocket-size edition of the Constitution. For all I know, he's a lawyer or legal scholar and was thinking specifically about the constitutionality, or lack thereof, of the individual mandate (a legitimately open question, as even many supporters of the new law will concede). More likely is that, like a lot of Tea Partiers, this whole business of Obama had him meditating on questions of the country's founding principles.
I think this is generally a good thing. While some conservatives have a tendency to view the Constitution as a sort of sacred urtext, revealed by God to hybrids of Milton Friedman and Moses dressed in breeches, waistcoats, and periwigs, the left all too easily sees it as a discardable vestige from a distant, slavery-stained past.
Reality, as always, is a great deal more complicated.
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Why Democrats Could Pass a Healthcare Bill With Bad Poll Numbers
Tweet Share on Facebook March 23, 2010 Comment (8)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
A reader brings up a good point. What does it say about the state of our democracy if one party can impose its will on the public in the face of such unmistakable and intense opposition?
"You can argue we are free, but can you argue we are a republic in the spirit of the founding fathers?" the reader asks. (The Atlantic's Megan McArdle has similar worries here.)
Well, yeah, I do.
The short answer is, as President Obama put it shortly after he was inaugurated: "I won."
It goes deeper than that, though.
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Settle Down, Republicans, Healthcare Reform Won’t Destroy Liberty
Tweet Share on Facebook March 23, 2010 Comment (59)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Healthcare reform is about to become the law of the land, and here's what I'm thinking: If America ever did become a totalitarian state under the radical despot Barack II, would Glenn Beck have run out of chalk or swastika logos or tennis shoes before it happened?
We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism author John Derbyshire shared these characteristic thoughts on the (shall we say) morning after House passage:
"I once tried to compute the sheer quantity, in man-years, of lives lived under the despotic order--Egyptians and Assyrians, Persians and Chinese, Romans and post-Alexander Greeks, Incas and Aztecs, Umayyads and Abbasids, Ottomans and Zulus, Tsars and General Secretaries ... as against humans in liberty, ruled by common consent. It came out at around a hundred to one."
Uh, thanks, Derb, I guess.
Scott Galupo
Scott Galupo is a Washington-based freelance writer. He formerly worked for House Republican Leader John Boehner, and was a staff writer for The Washington Times.
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