Palin’s Corollary to the Kerrigan Principle

The Nancy Kerrigan Principle states: “Just because you are a victim, doesn’t mean you can’t be a jerk too.” Palin’s Corollary states: Just because the MSM hates you and your child with visceral pre-rational hatred, doesn’t mean you are qualified to be President of the United States of America.

I respect her care for Trig. I enjoy the schadenfreude that any normal person feels when the Freakish Enemies of the Normal twist themselves into knots over her eloquent personal witness to the value and dignity of his life. I’m sure she’s a very nice person.

But nothing I’ve seen in Sarah Palin’s chase after the Cult of Celebrity persuades me that she is fit to be President of the US. Her abandonment of her post as governor, Her tendency to lie even when it is not particularly necessary and expedient (which reminds me of nothing so much as Bill Clinton and sets off all sorts of warning bells), her reliance on cheesecake photos as vote-getting devices (and her silly protests when those cheesecake photos are used by her political enemies to make her look like an insubstantial twerp), her manifest inability to get up to speed on, you know, issues and stuff, her weird incoherence that doesn’t even require parody, just quotation:

http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/4b0425f3bec446fd/4741e3c5156499a7/a3a0db25/-cpid/9fdf6401f90fb353

And, of course, I feel obliged to note that, so far from “going rogue” Palin is, in many ways, an almost perfect reflection of the chaos and craziness of the Thing that Used to be Conservatism. She’s fine with torture and war crimes. She’s totally there on the Construct the Great Society in the Mideast at the Point of a Gun Fantasy that animates Bush’s mystical vision of Redemption Through Democratic Capitalism. She vaguely intuits empathy for the little guy, but is so confused by FoxNews talking points that she also uncritically mouths platitudes about how what’s good for GinormoCorp is good for America. There is, in short, no There there.

And she is, tragically, what many Christians consider the Last Best Hope of the GOP. She will, God willing, never get the nomination. But when she fails, I cannot help but suspect that, as ever, the Thing That Used to Be Conservatism will manage, in its so-far-impenitent hubris to learn all the wrong lessons from that. Blame will be laid on the MSM, on the obsessive and crazed Sullivan, on various enemies, but not on the fact that just because they hate her does not mean she is qualified to be President of the United States. She’s not. And there seem to be bloody few candidates in our idea-bereft Thing that Used to Be Conservatism sector of American polity who are.