Sarah Palin is Absolutely Right

I don't care about Sarah Palin. I saw very little of her in the 2008 campaign that really impressed me. By the same token, it doesn't take much subtelty to see that the response to her from the Left is preposterously out of proportion to her actual deeds. Like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, she seems to evoke a particular deranged fury from those who consider themselves our credentialed elite.

For both of these reasons, I hope she doesn't win the 2012 GOP nomination, and don't plan on voting for her to get it. To my mind, better candidates can be found, and if she does win, then the election will become a referendum on her media image, rather than anything about the issues or her ability to grapple with them.

That said, her response to the Gifford hysteria is absolutely dead on:

There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols? In an ideal world all discourse would be civil and all disagreements cordial. But our Founding Fathers knew they weren’t designing a system for perfect men and women. If men and women were angels, there would be no need for government. Our Founders’ genius was to design a system that helped settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So, we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure.

One of the mushy middle's more tedious fallacies constantly refrains that our politics are so loud and obnoxious now, and getting worse. The demonstrable falseness of this belief doesn't stop them from holding it. So-called "moderates" and "centrists" believe it because they don't know anything about politics or history, and they don't know anything about politics or history because they find it distasteful.

Politics has never been nice. History has never been nice. Lament this if you will, take pains to curtail it if you must. But don't pretend that we're seeing anything new. Humanity makes innovations on this front but rarely.