Dissecting the Palin haters

Why critics heap scorn on John McCain's running mate

Sarah Palin is a newcomer to the national stage, said Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal, but already she's been called every name in the book—"Caribou Barbie," "Christian Stepford wife," "a national disgrace." The big complaint seems to be that she "doesn't qualify for the national political fraternity," but the only reason snobby media types have so much "downtime to take free kicks at Gov. Palin" is that they can't be bothered "to look very deeply" at real issues.

Palin has invited so much scorn, said Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic online, because she is there to make the Republican ticket more palatable to "Bush's America: a country of capitalists and Christians." By picking her as his running mate, John McCain, who otherwise had great appeal to centrists, "told the United States of America to go f*** itself."

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