This time of year, I expect Fox News' Bill O'Reilly to be going on about the "War on Christmas," a fiction coined (or at least heavily discussed) by the conservative pundit where the evil "secularists" are out to take away your decorations, holiday music, and ability to have those terrible white elephant gift exchanges and "Secret Santa" at the office.
But now a new cause has found Bill: Sarah Palin.
Yes, if you listen to Bill O'Reilly (and I try not to), he'd have you believe St. Sarah is somehow the victim of an organized campaign and hate mob consisting of the "mainstream media" (for which O'Reilly works, I must point out), "liberals," and God-hating atheists and Christmas-banning secularists.
And let's not even get started on conservative windbags Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and their opinions of the gubernatorial quitter ("El Drugbo" described her rambling book the most substantive political work he's read, if that tells you anything).
The right-ring punditry of hacks like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glen Beck seem to have made Sarah Palin their cause celebre, building the short-serving former Alaska Governor into a Christ figure being persecuted by the rest of the terrible, cheese eating, wine sipping, socialist world.
Or maybe a big blow up sex doll.
You'd never get them to admit to that, but much like the most stringently homophobic evangelists and Republican moral police in Congress, you know what's really on their minds. Yes, it's my thought that the blowhards at Fox News and the hypocritical drug-addled windbags of Boca Raton, FL, secretly all all harbor their professed admiration of "Saint Sarah" not for her confusingly-stated populist beliefs or core neoconservative principles but rather out of some almost-Freudian fantasies.
It's not just that she's a pretty face, but that somehow these hacks feel that if she were in power, they as "manly men" would in fact be in charge, for all good ultra-conservatives know that a woman's place is to speak only when spoken to and to be subservient to men in all things. The Bible says so, dontcha know? (I'm serious. Look it up. 1Corinthians 14:34-35, 1 Timothy 2:11-12, among others and along with all the misogyny of the Old Testament, like stoning women who were raped inside the city limits since they "could have called for help" etc.)
It's almost amusing, if in a pitiful sort of way, to see how Fox News' Bill O'Reilly leaps to defend the gubernatorial quitter from imagined slights. Darwin had his bulldog (in T. H. Huxley) and even his rottweiler in modern-day biologist and writer Richard Dawkins; perhaps O'Reilly should be called "Palin's chihuahua" the way he virtually foams at the mouth anytime someone calls Palin on a misstatement, fabrication, exaggeration, demagoguery, and the like.
Not, mind you, that screaming at the top of his lungs about each completely imaginary foes to a straw man "American way of life" is anything new to Bill O'Reilly. As I said in opening this entry, prior to John McCain's great blunder (let's talk strategy vs. tactics, Senator!) in picking Palin as his running mate, Bill's one true bugaboo in life was the "secular war on America," whereby those massive hoards of atheists secretly plotted to take away your right to put up a Christmas tree or hold Easter egg hunts. (If I exaggerate, it is but by the slimmest degree--there's a reason I lost all respect for O'Reilly several years ago.)
I just don't see how the Republican punditry can have such an utter fascination with the woman outside of her sex appeal (and mind you, attendees to otherwise-staid Republican rallies have been sighted wearing pins proclaiming "GILF" about the grandmother and former governor--I'll let you figure out what they mean by that). There are far stronger candidates who have just as strong of conservative principles and who actually stand a chance of winning the moderate vote in the United States. (I'd have put Mike Huckabee on that list previously--as much as I despise what he stands for, he's a likable guy otherwise--but then he went off and pulled a Mike Dukakis with the Seattle copkiller.)
Maybe they just delight in how she gets so under the skin of Democrats (all while fantasizing about how they can get into her... er, I'll leave it at that). But I'm betting on a more carnal attraction being what drives the conservatives to leap to Sarah's every defense, when they should in fact be running as far from her as they can and trying to salvage a party that as an independent I voted for several times. And except as a pin-up, Sarah Palin is not the answer they need.
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