Michelle Goldberg on the soon-to-be-former governor of Alaska, who has "little more chance of actually becoming president than Al Sharpton":
Ever since she pranced into the limelight last summer, Sarah Palin has been making liberals like me crazy. She embodies almost everything loathsome about the modern Republican Party—its brutish anti-intellectualism, its Christianist extremism, and its smug provincialism. Her nomination was identity politics of the crudest sort, engineered by men who imagined that disappointed Hillary Clinton voters would chuck all their principles out of gender solidarity and rally to a candidate of the religious right. (The same geniuses envisioned the buffoonish Michael Steele as a right-wing answer to Barack Obama.) Palin is a beauty-queen Elmer Gantry, outdoing Stephen Colbert in cheesy, braying nationalism. She’s terrifying. And now that she’s stepping down as governor, I hope we see a lot more of her.I'm really sick of pro-Palin people on the right saying the left only hates Palin so much because they're "afraid" of her. Please- saying we're about as afraid of Palin is like accusing the Republicans of being afraid of John Edwards. Posted by Stephen Silver at July 26, 2009 12:49 AM