The Crossed Pond

…it’d be a lot more entertaining (although it would probably rather harm any remaining reputation for serious analytic* journalism). Jonah Goldberg doesn’t like it, but I actually think this, by Cintra Wilson, is some pretty cool writing (and I don’t get the feeling that it’s meant to be taken entirely seriously):

Palin may have been a boost of political Viagra for the limp, bloodless GOP (and according to an ABC/Washington Post poll she has created a boost in McCain’s standing among white women to a 53 over Obama’s 41). But ideologically, she is their hardcore pornographic centerfold spread, revealing the ugliest underside of Republican ambitions — their insanely zealous and cynical drive to win power by any means necessary, even at the cost of actual leadership.

Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right. The throat she’s so hot to cut is that of all American women.

You don’t have to agree with a single word she’s saying to actually enjoy reading it. Not to mention:

Sarah Palin, in this light, makes so little sense that she makes perfect sense. She speciously represents a new power paradigm of the Nice Mommy: the opposite of Hillary (the Mean Mommy), the opposite of Oprah (black, and therefore foreign), the opposite of Martha Stewart (another Mean Mommy). In her support for women on women’s issues, she has done everything but volunteer for her own circumcision. She tacitly promises a roll backward into old-fashioned sexual roles — like Old Testament-style old. Her morality is fixed, predictable and inflexible. There are those who will find comfort in the fact that they will know exactly what can be expected from Palin: Free will subordinated to obedience of an airtight, evangelical interpretation of the demands of God, country and Republican men.

The choice of Palin represents what the Christian right is really saying to the women of America. The subtext: It’s a Faustian bargain, girls. To elevate your sex to power and respectability, you must first give us the keys to your chastity belt.

It is unsurprising that the morally compromised fraternity of corruption-infested Republican robber barons and war profiteers came up with this stunt, but we must regard it in the same light as the rest of their treasonous, criminal behavior. We must regard Sarah Palin as the Carmella Soprano of the GOP — an enabling wife of organized crime, who sees, hears and speaks no evil of the boys in her old-boy network for whom she does this ideological lap dance.

If only all “end of everything” pieces were written with the same verve.

*I just edited ‘analytic’ into here, because whatever you think of his direction of late, Sully is still a ’serious journalist’.