Posted by Brian on July 7, 2009, 9:08 pm, in reply to "Why Liberals hate her" 67.150.1.28
(Cut and paste from National Review Online)
Laugh or Cry? [Victor Davis Hanson]
Much has been said about Maureen "I wanted to weave the idea into my column" Dowd's latest take-down of Sarah Palin ("Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.") Her hit-piece is a self-parody. Instead, of seriously critiquing the wisdom or folly of Palin's controversial decision to step down from the governorship, we get child-like sentences on spec like this:
On the shore of Lake Lucille, with wild fowl honking and the First Dude smiling, with Piper in the foreground and their Piper Cub in the background, the woman who took the Republican Party by storm only 10 months ago gave an incoherent, breathless and prickly stream of consciousness to a small group in her Wasilla yard.
In one shot, here is the caricatured snooty put-down of rural life ("wild fowl honking"), middle-class bourgeoisie culture and aspiration ("Piper in the foreground and their Piper Cub in the background"), and nowhereville in Middle America ("her Wasilla yard").
And, of course, we know that Palin is crazy, because Dowd has gone to fellow D.C. insider and Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum's recent 10,000-word invective. So Dowd draws on the wisdom (at least this time with quotation marks and a cited source) of Purdum to the effect that: "Several told me, independently of one another," Purdum writes, "that they had consulted the definition of 'narcissistic personality disorder' in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - 'a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy' - and thought it fit her perfectly."
Yes, Palin must be crazy, you see because "several" of those in Dowd's wild-fowl honking Alaska (who, of course, must remained unnamed) had taken out of their denim backpockets their good ol' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and, lo and behold, apparently reported on tape to Todd Purdum ("and independently of one another," no less!) that they were struck that clinical "narcissistic personality disorder" "fit her perfectly."
The problem with all this nonsense is that it tells us far more about Purdum and Dowd than about Palin. And whether Palin is wise or silly, down-to-earth or naïve, an aberration or with a future career, seasoned or immature, etc. is lost because she excites a certain irrational impulse, an uncontrolled hysteria really, in the liberal and self-described sophisticated that precludes them from empirical analysis. I am sure that syndrome is in the Manual as well. Just ask those in Georgetown to whip out their handy copy.