She Ain't Comin' Either

Hearken back a few days to where Freeman Hunt visited us for a discussion on her post called "He Isn't Coming", where she discussed how our culture wasn't producing the sort of great men needed to rescue us from the disaster currently being visited upon us.

My argument is that you don't need very many great men like that, and that societies never do create very many in that mold. Though we're not producing the sort of people who appreciate greatness, either, and that's a more severe problem.

However, the treatment of Sarah Palin from September to her current resignation shows something else: should someone relatively honest, authentic and reform-minded appear, she will be destroyed.

I don't believe there's any scandal, as some are salivating at the prospect of. The entire brunt of the mainstream media was brought to bear in trying to bring her down after she resuscitated the moribund McCain campaign--and then insisting, despite all evidence, that she had somehow hurt McCain--and nothing was found. Then there were trumped up ethics charge after trumped up ethics charge was brought against her, all of them defeated, but costing her over $400,000 in legal fees.

Palin doesn't even qualify, in terms of what Freeman was specifying: She didn't know Latin or Greek, for example. And I suspected she might have a bit of a populist streak. ("Populism" always seems to be another way of saying "big government", perversely.) But before the media tore her apart, it was fairly uncontroversial that she had rejected the business-as-usual politics, and actually done some housecleaning.

She seems to have the essential character, in other words, that puts Freem's education and moral ideas to proper use. Note that I reject strongly the media projections of her as stupid. This is just SOP for the handling of Republican Presidential material: They're either stupid (GW Bush, Reagan, Ford, Eisenhower, Palin) or evil madmen (Cheney, GHW Bush, Nixon, Agnew, Goldwater). Oh, and "out of touch" (McCain, GHW Bush, Reagan, Eisenhower, and, well, pretty much all of them). Actually, I give the media some credit for spicing it up last election by allowing that McCain might simply be a well-meaning madman as opposed to an evil one. (Though there were plenty of implications that he was evil, too.)

But even that modicum of ability is not to be tolerated.

What's more, I suspect a person of greater ability would be even more excoriated. So, if you're keeping score at home, not only does "our hero" have to be a great intellect, charismatic, come from all the "right places", perfect in behvaior, have no family members who have ever fallen short of any ideals, have a ton of money to fight up the frivolous lawsuits--and then give a damn about the country--and the people in it--that allows this to happen.

I'm less sanguine than I was yesterday.