By Andrew Klavan,Big Hollywood
The liberal media wants to destroy Governor Sarah Palin
This is by way of a friendly response to the estimable Jay Nordlinger,Senior Editor at the likewise estimable National Review. Jay wrote a strong column yesterday openly saying what I’ve been hearing many conservatives express tacitly ever since the election. Reflecting on the media’s disgraceful distortion of the characters of George W. Bush,Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin,he wrote:
“It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively. What I mean is,the Saturday Night Live,Jon Stewart,Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person’s image is,and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney’s a monster,W.’s stupid,and Palin’s a bimbo. And the country,apparently,follows.”
I’ve been hearing and reading prominent conservatives and Republicans say nearly as much on television,in print and in private conversation ever since the election. They say Sarah Palin can never make a comeback. They say the fight for small government has been lost. They say we can’t have immigration reform that protects our borders. They say we have to distance ourselves from “embarrassing” commentators like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.
No,no,no,no. What the right is experiencing at the moment is a phenomenon called “cultural para-stimuli.” You can read all about it in Tom Wolfe’s wonderful novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. It’s sort of like peer pressure on steroids. It was discovered by Nobel Laureate Victor Ransome Starling,who found that when he surrounded normal cats with cats whose behavior had been bizarrely altered by brain surgery,the normal cats began acting like the crazy cats all around them.