Stuart Schwartz on She Who Must Be Stopped

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Stuart Schwartz opines at American Thinker on how, in the warped view of the media elites, Sarah Palin, despite helping elect 60 candidates in the midterm elections, is a "loser" because she refuses to play the game of politics by the political establishment's rules:

Immediately following the election, the nation's elites went on Sarah Palin Alert. They have worked hard to strip taxpayers of hard-earned dollars and make Washington, D.C. the center of wealth, with six of the ten wealthiest counties in the United States bordering the Beltway. And it was Karl Rove who slammed his foot down on the accelerator of government spending during the Bush presidency, handing Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama a government poised to careen out of control. And it has: now that great centralized motor vehicle bureau known as the federal government has twice as many $150,000-a-year bureaucrats as it did when Obama took office, all extravagantly paid to scowl, fill out forms, and say "no" to the hapless citizens underwriting their million-dollar homes.

Small wonder that Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, a veteran of almost two decades inside the Beltway, looked at the Tea Party-inspired Republican sweep and saw only danger...from Sarah Palin. He said of her Herculean effort in creating a Republican wave: she cost us the U.S. Senate! Stop her! he screamed. And the media answered with a barrage of articles offering advice on how to stop Palin. For example, a former Wall Street Journal editor who had bolted when the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, bought the news outlet and put an end to its leftward drift laid out a plan to "derail Palin for 2012."

The mainstream media have been only too happy to oblige, for... the media elites immediately joined the Republican political establishment to highlight the "urgent task" resulting from the midterm victory: "Stop Sarah Palin."

And over on the Upper East Side of New York City, at a favorite hangout called The Corner Bookstore ("a small treasure in a neighborhood famous for its elegant townhouses" and celebrities), Peggy Noonan takes time out from being quintessentially Manhattan and concentrates on the common enemy created by the midterm elections. Sarah Palin has again, she writes, proved herself "a nincompoop." This "empty or crazy" woman actually thinks she's capable of operating in the rarefied atmosphere of official Washington, of holding her own with the media establishment. Look at her: Palin hangs with her family and enjoys such tacky pursuits as hunting and fishing. Meanwhile, everyone who is anyone knows that a life truly worth living begins here, where Lauren Weisberger first read from The Devil Wears Prada to the applause of Peggy's friends. Prada, not Palin. There's a world of difference in those five letters beginning with "P," Noonan reminds us, as the latter has none of the cachet of the former and lacks "actual talent."

And to the west on this storied island, the width of Central Park and then some, two icons of the ruling class have gathered in the studios of CNN to reinforce the notion that Sarah Palin is now a danger to the United States. It's called "Parker Spitzer." Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker and the disgraced former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, have put together a show that is mainstream media right down to its "bomb" in the ratings. Parker lets us know that she is proud to have led the "assassination" of Palin in the days following the Alaska governor's vice presidential nomination. Rove is right to slam Palin, for she has "earned her ridicule" for her outrageously extreme positions. Palin believes that abortion is wrong, that Israel is courageous and admirable, that traditional family relationships are a strength and blessing, and that God is a part of all that is good and true -- extremist positions, Parker claims, repugnant to the real heart of America...Washington, D.C. This "dangerous" woman represents a "fresh terror" for "establishment Republicans," who, like Parker and Spitzer, are professionals. This election has now put the professionals on alert: Palin must be stopped.

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Parker, Spitzer, Noonan and Rove are the Bob, Ted, Carol and Alice of the media elites, an unholy media alliance of political prostitutes and johns. What a fitting metaphor for the Beltway political establishment: Democrats and Vichy Republicans crawling into bed together as they have done to stop what Schwartz describes as "the greatest threat to come out of the midterm Republican victories: Sarah Palin." She's a winner, but in the bassackwards world of the media elites, that makes her a "loser" in their Book of the Dead and Dying. And all for the simple reason that She Who Must Be Stopped will never compromise her first principles.

- JP