Hard freeze in Hades: Chomsky defends Sarah Palin, Tea Party

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From center-left blogger D.K. Jamaal at Examiner;

Chomsky's speech went on to cite a poll showing that at least half of independent voters sympathize more with the Tea Party than with any partisan movement or political figure, to slam Obama for coziness with Wall Street and Big Corporate, and to explain why the upset disaffection of tea partiers is “understandable”:

"Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error."

[...]

"People want some answers. They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin."

According to Chomsky, this is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.” Of course, Obama critics have been pointing this out all along.

While Obama’s Big Media pals have been denigrating the disaffected as racist, ignorant, hick teabaggers who represent a meaningless minority of the country we defended the movement as legitimate civil disobedience and the inevitable reaction to Obama’s blatant hypocrisy and poor leadership.

While deranged Palin haters have used every low, cruel, misogynistic trick in the book to knock her down, we have warned that she deserves to be treated with respect even when we disagree with her policy views.

We have constantly knocked Obama for his sellouts to Big Corporate and warned that Obamacrats are turning their backs on the working classes with their odious policy of endless bailouts for their bankster friends on the back of taxpayers.

Chomsky’s public truth-telling indicates that even the most hardcore leftists are waking up to the awful truths centrists warned about for two years.

It wasn't only centrists who hoisted the warning flags, Mr. Jamaal. Those of us who are to the right of center were also predicting that moderates and independents would contract bad cases of Buyer's Remorse sometime during Obama's first term. It took even less time than we predicted for it to reach epidemic proportions.

We have had even fewer occasions than our friends who are clustered around that point just left of center on which to agree with Chomsky, but this time he seems to have awakened long enough to smell the corporatism.

- JP

Another take on Palinism

Earlier today we linked to a New York Sun editorial in which Seth Lipsky used "Palinism" to refer to Sarah Palin's world view. In a Big Hollywood opinion piece, Joseph Phillips offers a different definition of Palinism. For Phillips, Palinism is the antithesis of socialist statism. While Sarah Palin advocates the kind of American individualism that epitomizes the spirit of the Founders, Democrat Party Chairman Howard Dean speaks lovingly of socialism. His party and President Obama have embraced a corporatist strain of socialism which Sarah Palin eschews. It is very much the same notion of statism which Mark Levin warned us about in Liberty and Tyranny:

The problem for Dean and the rest of the new left is that Americans tend to have an independent streak that leads them to largely reject the idea of a centralized intelligentsia deciding how best they should live their lives. Palin represents the American individualist that says, “I know what is best for my family and what is in agreement with my faith. I would rather do things my way.” The administrative state is incompatible with such independence and can only thrive by stamping it out.

Palin and those that root for her may not have graduated from Harvard, but they are smart enough to know that Howard Dean is wrong and Ronald Reagan was correct when he said the question was one of moving “Up to man’s age-old dream-the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.” We are indeed bright enough to know that just as there was no moral good in slavery, there is nothing benevolent about socialism. The barbed wire around socialist utopias is there to keep people in – to force them (in the name of liberty) to do what the intellectuals say to do.

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“Palinism” is not a rejection of intellect; it is however, to say in no uncertain terms that some of us regular folk might just know a bit more about how to run our lives and this country than a room filled with Ivy educated czars.

Phillips' full Big Hollywood op-ed is here.

- JP