The Dean of Women at Moosylvania U

I've found that the surest way to reduce a couple of my cow-orkers into gibbering mounds of misogynistic libtard protoplasm is to say anything at all that could be interpreted as remotely favorable about Sarah Palin.

Norman Podhoretz has an interesting piece in today's Wall Street Journal on the topic:

Nothing annoys certain of my fellow conservative intellectuals more than when I remind them, as on occasion I mischievously do, that the derogatory things they say about Sarah Palin are uncannily similar to what many of their forebears once said about Ronald Reagan.

Really, the whole piece is so good, I'd post it all, but I don't know the WSJ's attitude to obscure bloggers' use of their stuff, so go read the whole thing, but...

What I am trying to say is not that Sarah Palin would necessarily make a great president but that the criteria by which she is being judged by her conservative critics—never mind the deranged hatred she inspires on the left—tell us next to nothing about the kind of president she would make.

Take, for example, foreign policy. True, she seems to know very little about international affairs, but expertise in this area is no guarantee of wise leadership. After all, her rival for the vice presidency, who in some sense knows a great deal, was wrong on almost every major issue that arose in the 30 years he spent in the Senate.

What she does know—and in this respect, she does resemble Reagan—is that the United States has been a force for good in the world, which is more than Barack Obama, whose IQ is no doubt higher than hers, has yet to learn. Jimmy Carter also has a high IQ, which did not prevent him from becoming one of the worst presidents in American history, and so does Bill Clinton, which did not prevent him from befouling the presidential nest.

Since it's become obvious that His Imperial Majesty Barack Hussein Obama knows nothing of foreign policy, or of domestic or economic policy either, the whole "I can see Russia from my house!" canard is made even more absurd--aside from the absurdity of people wanting to be taken seriously when their main criticisms of a political personage are based on lines from political satires.  (Assuming, of course, that it's still satire if it's not funny.)

Myself, I feel that much of the Conservative nomenklatura's distrust of Sarah Palin arises from the same source as it's fear and distrust of the Tea Party Movement:  Better to allow the Democrats to remain in charge, these hacks feel, than to risk losing control of Conservatism altogether.  For Sarah Palin represents the hopes and ideals of the Common Man, and while the elite may feel that he is all too "common", in the sense of rude and crude, he also represents the real America--as they most assuredly do not.

h/t to Rantburg, where I first saw the article linked.  It's also linked to from Iowahawk.