Demonic (40 page)

It’s interesting that even when driven by a penny-ante intellectual mob, behavior activated by groupthink seems to show some of the earmarks of actual possession. The famous Catholic exorcist Malachi Martin reports that those in the grip of possession always speak as if they are talking to someone else in the room. “She was speaking for the benefit of someone else’s ear,” he said of one woman before an exorcism, “repeating what somebody else was telling her.”
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(Obviously, I’m not saying Couric is possessed by the devil—even Lucifer couldn’t sit through the
CBS Evening News with Katie Couric
.)

The tone of both of their interviews with Palin was: You’re not as smart as we are. This, from people whose fame was based on showcasing winning recipes and hair care products. Thus, Gibson interviewed Marsha Brooks as she prepared a prizewinning apple pie.
(Gibson: “Now one of the things Marsha did, just as soon as she found out you’d won, you took the pies down to your local firehouse.”)
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And Couric investigated the claims of a “Twist-a-Braid” infomercial
(Couric: Well, nobody has hair
like this chick, that’s for sure.)
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Having your intelligence questioned by Katie Couric must be like having Michael Moore say to you, “Have you put on a few pounds?”

Consider Couric’s question about what Palin reads. The question wasn’t terribly interesting. It’s the sort of thing that gets posted on Facebook, not asked of vice presidential candidates. But the point wasn’t to interview Palin, it was to nurture Couric’s own self-esteem. In addition to national and political news, Palin probably read a lot of Alaska newspapers, hunting news,
Guns & Ammo
magazine, and religious publications and she correctly surmised that such literary preferences wouldn’t help her with Couric’s audience, so she avoided answering the question.

There is hardly a person in public life who wouldn’t be embarrassed by that question. Why wasn’t Obama asked what he reads? How about Joe Biden? There is no question but that Palin reads more widely than Patty Murray or Barbara Boxer—and has better reading comprehension. But a Democrat would never have been asked the question. Its only purpose was to make Palin look stupid, coming from someone who is herself barely hanging by a thread intellectually.

What Palin reads had nothing to do with any campaign issues. As the most knowledgeable governor in the country on energy, Palin had boatloads to say about the nation’s energy policy, but she was never asked about that. The last thing the media were going to do was raise an issue that would help the Republicans.

Gibson’s question to Palin about “the Bush doctrine” was similarly asinine. He chose a deliberately arcane way to ask a simple question in order to make himself look brilliant. The subject matter wasn’t obscure, but Gibson’s label was inscrutable.

No one talked about “the Bush doctrine” the way they talked about, for example, “WMDs” or “preemptive war.” It simply didn’t come up in conversation. Charles Krauthammer couldn’t have answered that question—because no one knew what “the Bush doctrine” was. Even the
Washington Post
ran an article with various foreign policy experts scratching their heads about what Gibson meant.
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If Gibson really wanted to know Palin’s position on Iraq, why didn’t he just ask, “Do you think it was legitimate to invade Iraq?” No, he
couldn’t do that: It wouldn’t have been a calculated attempt to trip her up. Both Couric’s and Gibson’s interviews had little to do with Palin. The ex–morning show hosts were aggressively pursuing their own agendas to win acceptance from their betters.

It was just like the time the no-name radio host in Boston decided to show he was a badass by giving presidential candidate George W. Bush a pop quiz on the names of various obscure world leaders during the 2000 campaign. He was a star for a week … and then was never heard from again. But for a brief shining moment this punk was part of the herd! The joy!

Sarah Palin was ideal for the middlebrow obsessions of people on the left. Professional atheist Sam Harris complained in
Newsweek
that Palin “didn’t have a passport until last year.”
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Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff—who went to a single mediocre college—sneered about “the six colleges that she attended.”
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Keith Olbermann thinks he’s gotten a great dig in at Palin when he compulsively suggests a dinner with her would involve “a nice glass of Pinot Grigio or Mountain Dew.”
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This is
Real Housewives
snobbery—white trash acting as if they’re jetsetters. Maybe it’s true that red-staters don’t travel as much as blue-staters do. At least we manage not to spoil our ballots as often as Democratic voters do. One also can’t help noticing that red-staters aren’t terrified of literacy tests, as the Democrats are.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (musical theater major, Syracuse University) cannot write a script without a moment when some character asks, “Why are people resented because they are more intelligent?” Sorkin’s
West Wing
president, Josiah Bartlet, was forced to play down his brilliance, until finally one of his advisers tells him, “I’m telling you, be the smartest kid in your class. Be the reason why your father hated you. Make this an election about smart and stupid, about engaged and not, qualified and not.”

As Sorkin explained his motive for that scintillating speech, “It was frustrating watching Gore try so hard not to appear smart in the debates—why not just say, ‘Here’s my f—ing résumé, what do you got?’ ”
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What we “got,” evidently, is better word comprehension than Sorkin.
Two years earlier, the
Washington Post
had reported that, after Gore got into Harvard, helped by his prominent senator father (unlike George W. Bush, who got into Yale when his father was an obscure congressman), he ranked in the bottom fifth of the class for his first two years. In his sophomore year, “Gore’s grades were lower than any semester recorded on Bush’s transcript from Yale.”
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Gore went on to Divinity School, where he failed five of eight classes before dropping out. As Gore was failing out of Divinity School, Bush was earning his MBA from Harvard. Maybe that’s why Gore didn’t want to bring up the subject of educational achievement by saying, “Here’s my f—ing résumé, what do you got?”

No matter what their own credentials, liberals are always dying to blurt out, “I’m smarter than you!” Normal people aren’t driven by what other people think of them. They don’t spend every waking moment thinking, “How do I get this person to acknowledge my intellectual gifts?” Normal people, thankfully, are not liberals.

The media so lost their composure with Sarah Palin that they slipped and gave away their contempt for people who live in places they would never visit and know nothing about. They simply forgot themselves. Noticeably, no Democratic politicians ever attacked Palin the way the media did. Politicians are well aware that there are a lot more people in the country like Sarah Palin than there are like Frank Rich.

Naturally, the people most ostentatiously bothered by Sarah Palin’s purported idiocy were the most aggressive social climbers. Their pinup is Keith Olbermann, who was practicing radio at age six, while other boys were learning how to throw things and prevent girls from beating them up. Keith neurotically cites his nonexistent “Ivy League education” while ridiculing others for their stupidity.

When he was still employed at MSNBC, Keith had a four-page typewritten sheet taped to the outside of his office door titled “People Who Watch This Show,” followed by a list of low-level celebrities. He is the sort of person who would write Mensa to argue that he should be admitted (and misspell “Mensa”). Now his fans are lost, adrift, unsure whom they’re supposed to hate in order to impress
Rolling Stone
magazine.

Appealing to the herd is irresistible to the alternative prom crowd on MSNBC. These are people who have been awkward throughout their
entire lives. They laugh a little too hard at jokes that aren’t funny, and get too excited at minor flubs by their enemies. Usually, the socially maladroit don’t hurt anyone and, with luck, will eventually find someone who appreciates their license plate collections.

No one enjoys picking on dorks. But the nightly smirkathons on MSNBC canceled out the usual solicitude. Things change when the lonely nerds decide they will lash out at the world from their sets at MSNBC.

As the famous psychiatrist M. Scott Peck says, “We are impressed not only by the innocence but also by the cruelty of children. An adult who delights in picking the wings off flies is correctly deemed sadistic and suspected to be evil. A child of four who does this may be admonished but is considered merely curious; the same action from a child of twelve is cause for worry.”
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Sure that someday he would be quoted like Oscar Wilde, in 2009, Olbermann manfully ripped into twenty-year-old Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean, night after night, giggling mercilessly with the
Village Voice
’s Michael Musto in their gay coffee klatch about how stupid Prejean was.

Musto:
This is the kind of girl who sits on the TV and watches the sofa. She thinks the innuendo is an Italian suppository.…

Olbermann:
The moral in this is, what, never cross a beauty pageant official who knows you’ve had implants?

Musto:
Yes, exactly, that’s it. This has escalated to a public shaving.… They also paid for Carrie to cut off her penis, and sand her Adam’s Apple, and a get head-to-toe waxing.… Now he’s a babe who needs a brain implant. Maybe they could inject some fat from her butt? Oh, they have?

Olbermann:
I didn’t like her earrings.
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That’s not Oscar Wilde: That’s what gets your face smashed in and your lunch money taken away in high school. But Keith thought he had achieved such comedy gold that he replayed that segment on four other shows.
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I guarantee that Carrie Prejean is no dumber than Cindy Crawford, Stephanie Seymour, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Claudia
Schiffer, or Naomi Campbell, who are treated like a virtual Bloomsbury group by the elites. This is not a criticism, just a suggestion to cut the crap with conservative Christians like Prejean.

Liberals are people whose entire lives are consumed with following the crowd. Otherwise, how will they get a reputation for speaking truth to power?

Ever since David Letterman has become a tired old hack, watched by people about to collect Social Security, he has specialized in cheap applause. In June 2009, Letterman told this knee-slapper about Sarah Palin going to a Yankees game with her daughter: “There was one awkward moment during the seventh-inning stretch: her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”

Except Bristol, the Palin daughter who got pregnant out of wedlock, wasn’t at the game. Fourteen-year-old Willow was. And Rodriguez hasn’t gotten anyone pregnant out of wedlock. The only way the joke works is if you’re willing to accept that being a compulsive womanizer is close enough to getting girls pregnant and Willow Palin is close enough to Bristol Palin.

But Letterman was bullying the daughter of a hated Republican, so the audience knew it was supposed to laugh at the lame joke. The
New York Times
“ethicist” couldn’t even acknowledge it lacked the basic elements of a joke, explaining that even though Willow isn’t Bristol, and dating women isn’t impregnating them, “a joke is a form of fiction, the punch line a contrivance: the bartender was not actually talking to the duck. A premise, too, can be invented: a man with a duck did not really walk into a bar.”
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Yes, but if the talking duck runs into Alex Rodriguez and Willow Palin in the bar, Willow can’t suddenly become Bristol and Rodriguez can’t become John Edwards.

How about a joke about Obama getting smashed?
Did I miss something—is he a drinker?
No, it’s just funny that he’s drunk
. But he isn’t known for being a drunk.

Wouldn’t it be hilarious if Obama were cleaning a gun and it went off and hit Michelle in the shoulder?
But that didn’t happen.

What if Harry Reid was in a hotel room with Nancy Pelosi? Then we could go to town!
Yes, the only problem is: It didn’t happen.

How about a joke about Amy Fisher being at Yankee Stadium with Palin?
But she wasn’t there. Neither was Bristol Palin.

This isn’t a question of whose ox is gored. A joke is supposed to start with actual events and then veer into fiction for the punch line. Here’s Jay Leno’s joke on Palin’s pregnant daughter: “Governor Palin announced over the weekend that her seventeen-year-old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant. And you thought John Edwards was in trouble before!”
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That makes sense because Palin’s seventeen-year-old daughter had gotten pregnant out of wedlock and Edwards, unlike A-Rod, had impregnated his mistress.

If art is going to confuse anyone, by rights it should confuse stupid people.
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But the only people who could possibly find Letterman’s Palin joke funny were idiots who don’t know Bristol Palin had a child out of wedlock and who don’t know that A-Rod hasn’t gotten any of his girlfriends pregnant. Stupid people get to laugh and smart people can’t because they’re wondering, “Wait—was Bristol at the Yankees game? Did A-Rod get someone pregnant? Did I miss a news story?”