Last updated on February 9th, 2013 at 12:25 pm
Sarah Palin's Bitter Rage and Contempt
For the last, oh my Gosh, almost TWO years since Palin hit the national scene, conservatives have been salivating over the Democrats’ alleged fear of Sarah Palin. Striking “fear” into their “enemies” is part of the entire worldview of these folks. Everything is seen as a war, a power structure of over and under, best exemplified by Palin’s selling herself as a hunter and someone who just got things done in Alaska (contrary to her actual record and her quitting of her job). While I reject this worldview, it’s important to note that their largest strategic failure is not their worldview, but their misinterpretation of the Left’s outrage over Palin.
We don’t fear her. We fear for our country if she were to be anywhere near in charge of it.
The worldview of the Left is based on more egalitarian and inclusive ideals; The Left wants to negotiate with other countries, use diplomacy and strategy before force, but not INSTEAD of force, and this is nuance is so often misunderstood by the black and white world view of the Right, the Left values intelligence (and this need not come from books, but from a curiosity about the world and other cultures) and a gathering of information before making decisions.
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Sarah Palin is clearly a knee-jerk responder; someone who doesn’t value listening or learning, but instead goes in guns a blazin’. Sarah also brings with her a history of anger, bitterness, and misplaced and abused power.
Sarah Palin a dictator who is too willfully ignorant to understand that her tactics are dangerous to the national security of this country. A perfect example of this was during Palin’s time as mayor of Wasilla. Palin was confronted by Wasilla City Council member Nick Carney, a now estranged former mentor of Palin’s who actually picked her to run for Mayor of Wasilla, regarding her despotic style of management. Carney, recounting Palin’s illegal and lavish expenditures on redecorating her office, recalled, “I told her it was against the law to make such a large expenditure without the council taking a vote. She (Sarah Palin) said, ‘I’m the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can’t.'”
As is typical among the incompetent, Palin is a rabid back-seat driver who can’t seem to let a day go by without desperately inserting herself into the national dialogue, in a transparent attempt to both equate herself with the President and get his attention. President Obama had Palin’s number from day one, and he’s never given her the attention she so craves. He’s dismissed her with a respectful nod, rising above Palin’s crude tactics.
Palin uses drama and conflict to gin up support for herself. She isn’t actually running on ideas and can’t run on her history of governing, so she has to run on feelings. She stirs up the Tea Bagging base by getting them angry. They read her anger and rage and contempt as strength, but it really comes from weakness. It’s all Palin has.
Palin uses her contempt to mask her fear of the Press. She uses her anger to mask her envy of the President. She uses her rage to mask her disgust that a black man beat her (this is how she sees it, never mind that she was not running against Obama).
If you watch Sarah Palin’s face in any speech or TV interview, she gives herself away with a thousand micro-expressions of rage, contempt and disgust. Micro expressions such as:
Envy: Eyes staring; mouth corners turned down; nose turned in sneer; chin jutting.
Disgust: Eyes and head turned away; nostrils flared; nose twisted in sneer; mouth closed, possibly with tongue protruding; chin jutting.
Anger: Eyes wide and staring; eyebrows pulled down (especially in middle); wrinkled forehead; flared nostrils; mouth flattened or clenched teeth bared; jutting chin, red face.
Contempt: Curled lips and wrinkled nose.
Palin often manages to plaster a fake smile over her predominantly negative emotions, but this only makes her less trustworthy to the astute viewer who senses the disconnect between her emotions and her smile. When her expressions aren’t giving her away, her pointed fingers jabbing outward do. And if that fails, there are always her words.
Palin consistently uses negative emotion words, which are all indicators of a guilty conscience. Sarah invented the Death Panel lie (which was actually a confession of the very real Death Panels in Alaska wherein over 250 people died under Palin’s Medicare program waiting for care — the only state Medicare program to ever be shut down by the feds for incompetence). Sarah came out with “pallin’ around with terrorists” when in fact she was sleeping with a secessionist.
Palin uses words to incite fear, anger and rage in her followers. They connect with Sarah because of her anger, not in spite of it. In a very real sense, many of the accusations against Obama and the Democrats that we hear from Republicans right now are confessions of their own reckless crusade of deregulation. And their accusations are more often than not couched in negative emotional words like “rape” and “Hitler”.
Democrats and frankly, Independents as well as thinking Republicans, worry about Sarah Palin coming anywhere near our White House. Not only is Sarah Palin incompetent and lazy, but she’s also a demagogue so full of negative emotions she would endanger this country every time she opened her mouth. As much as George W Bush was a cause for concern given his emotional make up, I have to say that Sarah Palin makes Bush seem sane, reasonable and smart. She has the temperament of a jealous, angry Junior High “mean girl” and she is clearly incapable of rising above her own emotions.
And that’s not OK in any adult, let alone a political leader. It’s irresponsible of the Right to champion this person who has been called a “sociopathic narcissist” by her own mentors and supporters as well as being referred to as “Frightening, Dangerous, Mentally Limited” by the McCain staff, as a possible leader for this country.
So what the Right senses as fear of Palin is actually fear for our country and fear that the Conservatives will once again endanger this country by electing another Fascist-styled dictator who just so happens to also, too be a war hawk and a religious extremist. We’re not afraid of her because she’s a powerful Conservative leader or a good Christian. She is neither and the Right will not be taken seriously until they come clean about what exactly they stand for.
We’re afraid of what she does to this country because she allows her bitter, jealous contempt of our President to come before the good of this nation.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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