I've written about this many times in the past but one of the more off putting features of American liberals is their smugness. If you disagree with them it is only because you are either ignorant or evil. This tends to result in them losing elections. Often.
This conceit of liberals -- which sometimes I think is all that sustains them, and all that keeps them liberals in the first place -- that liberals have some sort of a monopoly on brains, wit, taste, and, yes, even basic humanity will be their undoing. It always is. They keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again, and we're the dumb ones.
They, the ones who have made the same ten mistakes every single election since 1968, are the smart ones. Right?
Let's check the list: Demean an opponent who you really ought to suspect might be rather intelligent as an ignorant boob, bordering on a genuine diagnosable moron, to such a degree that when the candidate speaks and reveals himself as reasonably intelligent, he actually seems to be nearly a genius.
Demean those who don't live in "cosmopolitan" cities as bumpkins who have nothing to contribute to politics or culture -- not their own ideas, their own aspirations, their own fears, their own traditions -- except for the votes they're expected to cast for the Democratic elites who scorn them.
And all the rest of it.
Now, after the fact, the left is convulsing and gnashing their teeth. How could we have allowed ourselves to so demean Sarah Palin as to turn her home-run speech into a genuine star-making speech by lowering expectations so much through our derision!?!
How could you have done that, you ask. That's not the right question. The right question is Is it even possible for you to avoid doing that?, because you do every. Single. God. Damn. Election. Cycle.
It works in my favor, and yet I'm still horrified to see you doing it every time.
Have you ever done anything else? Are you capable of doing anything differently? Even as conservatives snicker at you and tell you to your smug fat faces that you're making a gross strategic error, you continue doing so just the same!
We don't even bother to hide our snickering at you any longer. We don't bother to conceal this basic error from you -- we simply declare it. We don't have to hide this, we don't have to try to avoid tipping you off that you're making this mistake for the thirtieth time, because we know you won't listen anyway!
That's the truly delightful thing about this. We don't have to scheme with each other and say, "Quiet down, don't give the game away," when a fellow conservative points the error out. It doesn't matter! We can scream this from the rooftops for all the good it does you.
It's like we're fighting a war and we don't even have to bother coding our messages to the troops because we know there's no chance at all you'll even bother to pause to read our communications. "Don't bother us with your silly orders and tactics and strategies," you tell us, "We can figure out how to beat you silly people well enough on our own without any of your stupid-brained help."
You can? You sure about that? Well, whatever, buddy. If you think so. Seems to me you guys are 3-4 since 1994 -- a losing record -- but if you guys want to keep following the same game plan, be my guest.
Ultimately the liberals' sin is their smugness. Not even so much because most people recoil from the assumption of superiority, both intellectual and moral, by those who have accomplished nothing exceptional in life except for reliably voting and "thinking" liberal, as if casting a vote the "correct" way slaps 30 points on to your IQs and counts for 100 hours of community service and child mentoring.
No, the main problem with that smugness, that belief that you're sooo very fucking clever, is that you're actually not particularly clever at all, and the great gap between your personal estimation of your intelligence and the actual real-world measure of it is wide enough to stumble into and take a painful fall. Perhaps if you weren't so very convinced of your own innate entitlement to rule, you'd spend less time seething at a public unwilling to concede that rule to you, and less time trying to trick the public into voting for you by concealing your true beliefs, and more time trying to figure out what the public actually wants in its government, and how to provide with them with that.
You know the big difference between conservatives and liberals in terms of political acumen? You guys never see this stuff coming, because you're so convinced of your innate right to control other people's lives. You convince ourselves you're always the smartest guys in the room, and anyone who disagrees with you must either be so stupid or so luminescently evil they could never prevail in a campaign.
The Ronald Reagans and Sarah Palins surprise you, because you just can't even conceive of them. Your entire sense of self-worth depends on the proposition Liberal = Smart, Good, Conservatives = Stupid, Bad, so you can't imagine clever, good people opposing you.
You go into every election thinking the score is already 24-0 in your favor -- after all, you have nothing but vicious, racist, gay-bashing hobo-killing morons in your way. How can you, the Moral and Intellectual Elect of the Earth, possibly fail?
And yet you do. More frequently than you win.
Eh. I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you this. As you've demonstrated in every past election, you're not going to listen anyhow.
Ya fuckin' dunces.
Oh, and... Good job so demeaning her you half-convinced the public she was a drooling imbecile and yee-haw hollerin' bumpkin who'd embarrass herself on stage.
Sure, sure. Smart move.
A former beauty queen -- who could have imagined she might be comfortable in front of a large, critical crowd, and might in fact even thrive in the spotlight?
A former television sportscaster -- who would have predicted she'd have some poise and savvy playing to a camera?
Amen. I have run into this in discussions with family and friends when politics come up. I try to avoid talking politics because, like many of you reading this, I keep up with it very closely, I'm pretty knowledgeable on the topic.
Most people, left or right, aren't that up on the issues. Yet, despite their lack of relative knowledge on the issues, they will presume to be more enlightened or educated simply because they hold left wing views.