Why They Hate Sarah

by Donald W. Miller Jr., MD

As Dr. Arthur Robinson, writer of the "Pro-Science, Pro-Technology, Pro-Free Enterprise Monthly Newsletter" Access to Energy describes it, the American national railroad train is heading toward a fatal intersection. He writes, "There is a switch at that intersection. One direction leads to a wonderful valley of lower taxation, lower regulation, lower litigation, and less government – a valley labelled ‘freedom’ and ‘technology prosperity.’ The other direction leads to a destroyed bridge over a very deep canyon. The rocks at the bottom of the canyon are littered with the remains of many earlier civilizations. They are labelled ‘statism,’ ‘totalitarianism,’ ‘Marxism,’ ‘fascism,’ and ‘the tyranny of democratic socialism.’"

Now operating as a free agent in the Lower 48 (states), Sarah Palin is likely to play a critical role in helping to turn the switch that turns America’s train in the direction towards less government.

When she came on the national stage as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, LRC’s Walter Block wrote: "Here is a rifle toting, moose killing, basketball playing, beauty contest winning, charismatic and eloquent long happily married conservative hockey mom who has made something of herself in a very competitive field, who has not gone to finishing school at Harvard, Yale or Princeton... She is a breath of fresh air blowing in from our northernmost state."

This is how Lew Rockwell viewed her arrival on the national scene:

"The frenzied reaction of the middle class all over the country toward Sarah Palin has no real precedent that I can remember. Indeed, the reaction especially among women is completely understandable. She provides a much welcome cultural break from the chip-on-the-shoulder, grudge-against-the-world model of public women that have been held up to us for years, embodied in the belligerent and insufferable person of Hillary Clinton.

"Sarah, on the other hand, is both beautiful and professionally accomplished, a wife and mother and a natural politician, both religious and secular, both feminine and fears no tasks such as hunting that are usually associated with men. She offers a different model of a woman who has excelled not through intimidation and aggressive demands for reparation, but through her own efforts, charms, and intelligence."

Jack Wheeler points out (in his To The Point News) this special quality that Palin has: "A lower-middle-class woman who speaks the language of the country’s ordinary voters and has a profound personal understanding of the hopes and worries of a vast swath of the public."

Feminists, intellectuals, academics, the Beltway (Washington, D.C.) culture and its media acolytes hold a different view of her. Sarah Palin provokes a visceral hostility in these special people, which compels them to make statements about her like these: "Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy" (Maureen Dowd); a "religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus" (Christopher Hitchens); "anti-abortion, a member of the NRA and thinks creationism should be taught alongside evolution" (Susan Reimer); "it’s her extreme narcissism that gets to me" (Pepper Schwartz, a professor at the University of Washington [yes, I know her]); and "her greatest hypocrisy is her pretense that she is a woman" (Wendy Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago).

While the intellectual elite (liberal and conservative) and feminists loathe Sarah Palin, a substantial proportion of the U.S. population quite likes and admires her. This is particularly true with people who live in... Read more>>>>