Friends Like These

A scathing analysis of the venomous, unhinged attacks on Sarah Palin and her family by the American left and the American media (yeah, I know that’s redundant), appears in The Guardian today. Nick Cohen neatly dissects the response of the left to the choice of Palin by John McCain. The result is well worth reading in its entirety. Here’s just one small excerpt:

But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor’s office.

On the other, liberal journalists turned her family into an object of sexual disgust: inbred rednecks who had stumbled out of Deliverance. Palin was meant to be pretending that a handicapped baby girl was her child when really it was her wanton teenage daughter’s. When that turned out to be a lie, the media replaced it with prurient coverage of her teenage daughter, who was, after all, pregnant, even though her mother was not going to do a quick handover at the maternity ward and act as if the child was hers.

Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right.

As Cohen puts it, the public relations facade cracked and the venom poured forth. A veritable tidal wave of venom, in fact. Vicious attacks on minor children, smears, lies, complete fabrications – the works.

There are going to be a lot of voters who recoil in disgust at the tactics of those who Barack Obama chose as allies. Perhaps it will be, indeed, the candidate’s friends who cost him the election.

Do read the rest.