* — Not really an irony, but it warrants mentioning that members of a site known for patting themselves on their shimmeringly white shoulders for reaching the apex of human civilization are so spectacularly uninformed that they think the viewing behavior of each and every one of them is being monitored by something. Off the top of my head, I'm going to guess that at least 10% of the members believe there's a man on the other end of the wires leading into their TV, watching what they're watching (only backward) and writing everything down.
For one, it's like members of the Central Committee assailing Pravda for insufficient orthodoxy, unreliable reporting and traitorous interests beyond The Party. For another, it's an example of the party of personal responsibility and personal accountability assigning blame for Palin's gross incompetence and baffling ignorance to any thing other than herself.
Only, in a dash of further irony, the sinister forces stabbing patriots in the back are no longer weak-kneed pinko homosexual liberals but their own most righteously incurious parroting media tool. Instead of telling the Diva Whack Job to forget the bootstraps (yet more irony: the bootstrapping party's VP candidate's family stands to earn $19,000 — roughly $2,000 per person — this year from Alaska's socialist energy revenue-sharing) and instead pull herself up by her bookshelves and actually learn something—anything, the so-called "true" republicans are adding yet two more layers of irony regarding Palin's performance:
1. Offering endless apologias for her public statements, reassuring everyone that she's really a smart kid after all and praising all the intangible qualities that make her "special." This behavior is identical to the republican's straw-man version of liberal education: where everyone is special in different ways, and everyone should be encouraged and loved, and their actual test scores are just hard-hearted statistics that make no allowance for their precious, shining individuality.2. The same republican machine that has dismissed minorities' demands for affirmative action, political correctness and greater sensitivity as the (reverse-racist) "whining" of a "culture of victimization" just declared itself the unfair victims of injustice and will now seemingly stop at nothing to find more individuals and agencies that are victimizing them.
The Freepers aren't the only group devoid of a sense of irony. The deliciously named "RedState.com" has seemingly fully embraced the spirit of party infighting, show trials and purges of the communist party with whom they share a favorite color. Yesterday's update announced the launch of OPERATION LEPER:
The ironies don't even end there. Apparently the idea for OPERATION LEPER was inspired at least in part by Michelle Malkin, whose hideous head adorns the top of this post — and would almost instantly adorn the top of a wooden one in the event of either class warfare or half of America getting a guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free card. Malkin, of course, is famous for writing republican-friendly books about U.S. history and political relations that don't meet peer review standards and are woefully factually inaccurate, discarding whole reams of evidence when they defy reality as envisioned through the lens of party orthodoxy.
We're tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others.One can only envision someone tracking down Christopher Buckley — the son of William F. Buckley and a contributor to National Review, who was famously forced to resign from the magazine his father founded, after he endorsed Barack Obama in part because of questions about Sarah Palin's qualifications. He'd be found overseas somewhere, totally unaware that the fatal blow was about to fall, maybe chewing thoughtfully on some muesli at a breakfast table in a beachside resort just a second before a True Republican's hand speared his traitorous brain with an icepick.
We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you'll see us go to war against those candidates.
It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.
They'll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie's failed ratings.
Initial list:
Nicolle Wallace
Steve Schmidt
Mark McKinnon
The ironies don't even end there. Apparently the idea for OPERATION LEPER was inspired at least in part by Michelle Malkin, whose hideous head adorns the top of this post — and would almost instantly adorn the top of a wooden one in the event of either class warfare or half of America getting a guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free card. Malkin, of course, is famous for writing republican-friendly books about U.S. history and political relations that don't meet peer review standards and are woefully factually inaccurate, discarding whole reams of evidence when they defy reality as envisioned through the lens of party orthodoxy.
This in itself doesn't make her unique or make her views particularly ironic. That she is of Asian descent and — in order to justify the immoral rounding up and indefinite detention of Arab-Americans — wrote a revolting piece of anti-historical excrement called In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror, in which she whitewashed the nightmare of Japanese-American internment while hysterically and inaccurately suggesting that far more Japanese-Americans were actual traitors than have been documented as such, that is the further irony.
That she did all this in service of the soi-disant party of liberty, morality, accountability and justice is, however, less than entertainingly ironic and mostly just depressing. Rather than engage in this sort of malicious dishonesty and historical predation, even if threatened or coerced, probably anyone of lingering moral principles, admiration for justice, empathy for the innocent and devotion to truth would have instead just killed herself.
