American Thinker | Dave Smithee | Sept. 11, 2008
It’s always been true, but as the Palin mayhem demonstrates more extravagantly then ever, the left and their media allies possess a dangerous, childish ignorance of their conservative opposition. It manifests itself in their snide assessments of her as a white trash anti-woman, and in their hysterical bleating about her pregnant daughter, which was met with the sound of crickets and an indifferent ‘So?’ by the evangelicals that the news was apparently crafted to outrage. Yet that didn’t stop them from trying as they frantically waved around the lifeless non-story, making it dance like a desperate puppeteer putting on a show for an alien species it had no understanding of.
Behind closed doors at MSNBC, there might have been puzzlement as to why nobody had, as yet, tried to stone Bristol Palin. “But that’s what they do, isn’t it? When they’re not threatening gays?” Or take Sally Quinn’s recent comments on Palin. She’s fuzzy on the matter; but is pretty sure evangelicals are against women having jobs outside the home.
Extraordinary. They truly have no idea what makes us tick, and their willful misunderstanding has rendered them wholly incapable of dealing with the curveball Palin has thrown them. At the moment, it seems they’re powerless to stem the rallying effect she’s having.
At the root of this curious gulf of ignorance has always been the fact that the left is unable to understand that conservatives keenly understand them and the alleged rationales behind their policies. We know they think government needs an active role in social justice, that civic and free market mechanisms like business, church, and charity are insufficient to deal with poverty, urban decay, and the social pathologies that foster them. They think that in order to foster social progress, the state needs to assume active advocacy roles on a limitless range of issues. They think that the consolidation of wealth and influence embodied in the United States is internationally dangerous, destabilizing, corruptive, and worst, just plain unfair. We understand. We may utterly disagree and denounce it to hell, but we understand.
When conservatives see liberals, they see the proponents of bad, inefficient, and eminently corruptible state and social systems that with eye-watering predictability, corrupt those who administer them and harm their alleged beneficiaries. Often for generations.
But we also know that when liberals look at conservatives, no such courtesy or openness of mind is extended. They don’t see considered issues, critical thought, or the faintest possibility of reason. They see white trash men waving bibles at teen brides, while a gaggle of kids groom each other for lice on a cracked linoleum floor. ‘Bitter clingers’ who mindlessly adhere to second-amendment rights so they can shoot baby possum off a tin fence on slow Friday nights. The other sort of conservative invariably invokes 19th century robber barons, plutocrat industrialists swollen with loot plundered from the proletariat, abating their whipping of Dickensian child labor just long enough to polish a monocle.
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