I’m beginning to sense that anti-Palin hysteria is building toward a collective psychological meltdown of truly epic proportions on the Democratic side of our political divide. Today, Democratic consultant Dan Conley angrily pushed us a little further to the brink of that by arguing that the selection of Palin by McCain was “cynical, undemocratic and frankly, unpatriotic.” Wow.
It is unpatriotic, according to Conley, because Palin doesn’t have a significant public record on foreign policy issues, which could or would demonstrate independence from McCain’s own views. I suppose the assumption here is that it’s either not possible that Palin is in agreement with McCain’s policies as McCain and Palin claim, or perhaps that if she is, being in agreement with McCain is in itself somehow “unpatriotic” in nature.
Now, it can be argued that there are elements of the American Left which really do not seem to know what this word “patriotism” even means. At least that is, in a strict definitional sense. For it does seem that some folks on the Left are always telling us things are unpatriotic or patriotic, which seem to have absolutely nothing to do with patriotism. How often are we told that “peace is patriotic” for instance, when the mere absence of war would tend to suggest nothing meaningful in itself about a commitment of personal fidelity to a nation-state.
But while there may seem to be a similar confusion at work in Conley, I suspect that as a veteran speechwriter he cannot possibly be unfamiliar with the word’s actual meaning, and thus should be aware of how utterly bizarre his implication is. We can only assume that he has become consumed with the aforementioned anti-Palin hysteria and is perhaps well on his way to the predicted meltdown. I’ll tell you, it’s getting uglier by the minute too, with nurses attesting on the strength of high school rumors, that a vast conspiracy is at work to conceal the “true” mother of some of Sarah Palin’s children.
It’s almost tempting to pull Palin out of the limelight just to see the lengths to which these hysterics will go in an effort to destroy her.