Palinoia is Bush Derangement Syndrome in a Skirt

Losing your mind over Sarah Palin has it's own cute name: Palinoia.  I won't take Taranto's argument and run with it, the way Robert McCain does, because I'm not that devoted to the vigorous thwacking of contraception. Rather, I found the key quote in Taranto's column early on:

They resent her because, in their view, she has risen above her station.

Sarah Palin is a state-college grad, and state-college grads aren't supposed to eke out Ivy-Leaguers for the top spot on the greasy pole of politics. She's the American equivalent of what Roman patricians called a homo novus, a New Man, one whos family had never had a consul before. Thus a good deal of the "she's a moron," is more or less the same as calling Gaius Marius an Italian hayseed with no Greek.

I do not mean to say that Sarah Palin is as accomplished as Gaius Marius. As I've said before, I have my doubts about her aptitude for the presidency. But snobbery is snobbery, and we've seen this before:

There are many among our political and media elite, and among those on the coasts who are in their zone of influence, who simply cannot believe that a born-again Christian from Texas can ever be right about anything, ever. Decades (centuries?) of internalized bigotry of urbanites against provincials, of secular humanists against unsophisticated believers, does not vanish overnight, not even in the face of an act of war, not when the same group has drank deep of the waters of Wilsonian collective security and refuses to believe that their enemy is their enemy because he wants to be so.

In short, George W. Bush has been despised since long before the Iraq War, because he is the living embodiment of Those People, and the habit of the American media and political establishment has for some time been to mock Those People as cruel, stupid, and dangerous.

The oldest kind of elitism in the world is the only kind that our ruling class celebrates.

UPDATE: In light of this post at Classical Values, I should point out where exactly my doubts on Palin spring from.

To start with, they aren't properly "doubts." That implies a bias toward thinking Palin is not competent to be President. Really, my problem with her is that there's been so much dust kicked up about her, that it's hard to discern the true person underneath. At the moment she was tapped to be Vice President, I liked everything I heard about her. Her speech at the convention was good (not great, but better than McCain's). After that, she entered the Media Circus and to date, hasn't come out. Almost everything about her is now part of the ongoing drama of her against her assailants. All of which I find a distraction to determining whether she really can handle the presidency.

If she steps up in the campaign, and takes the heat, and demonstrates her acumen, then I'll give her a vote. If not, there are others.