Anne Applebaum’s slapdown of John McCain, which I heartily praised here, is causing some heartburn on the Right. “There have been a number of absurd reasons given recently by self-described conservatives who are endorsing the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate in his bid for the presidency, but none are quite as unconvincing as Anne Applebaum’s,” harumphed the frequently harumphing and eminently harumphable Max Boot, whose name probably sets him up for it. Over at the National Review, Kevin D. Williamson goes totally apeshit, describing evil Anne as a “DC-born/Sidwell Friends-and-Yale-alumnus/Europe-dwelling member of the Washington Post editorial board”! Hey! Stone her now!
Even Ramesh Ponnuru and David Frum get into the act, though the latter more in sorrow than in anger. It’s “interesting,” and, quite likely, “no accident,” as the commies used to say, that none of them quite comes to grips with one of Anne’s major gripes—the selection of Sarah Palin. Nothing shows the intellectual bankruptcy on the Right so clearly as the embrace of this airhead as the savior of the Republican Party. Sarah Palin is an amateur in the Ross Perot/Jesse Ventura tradition, the wild and crazy kid who just might be crazy enough to change things, the wild and crazy, too good to be true straight-talker who always ends up falling on her face, because she is too good to be true. Palin is an inkblot for all those on the Right who wish all their troubles would just go away and who have, of course, no idea of how to make this happen.
In her two years as governor, Palin has already established a massive record of petty self-dealing—collecting per diem while living in her own home (because she doesn’t like living in Juneau, the state capital) and taking her daughters on “official business” at state expense, to mention only a few. The centerpiece of her appeal in Alaska is a massive tax on the oil companies that allows the state to send a fat check to every Alaskan, socialism beyond the wildest dreams of anyone on Obama’s staff. The Republican Party platform, by the way, calls for a corporate tax of exactly zero. Perhaps someday someone will notice that Sarah’s bounty is paid for by the rest of us. There’s no such as a free lunch, right? Or have the Republicans forgotten that, along with everything else?
Afterwords
The most bizarre take on Anne’s apostasy, as one might guess, comes from Mickey Kaus, strangely, and permanently, obsessed with illegal immigrants. One of Anne’s gripes against McCain is that he’s abandoned his “sensible” position on legalization. Mickey’s sure that McCain is lying when he says he now hates illegal immigration, and he’s also sure that Anne’s lying when she says she thinks McCain isn’t lying! Of course, Anne also says that’s she’s “repulsed” by McCain’s supporters, but Mickey doesn’t believe that either. “It’s hard to believe that this repulsion isn’t a convenient cover for some unstated, perhaps unconscious, pro-Obama imperative (or maybe simply for the imperative to come to a decision).” It’s also hard to believe that Mickey’s propensity to piss on everyone doesn’t come from some “unstated, perhaps unconscious” imperative to behave like a total asshole (or maybe simply for the imperative to run his mouth on every possible occasion).*
*And don’t get me started on Mickey’s obsession with the new BMW! Don’t even get me started!
