skip to main |
skip to sidebar
A Michael Steele/RNC/Voyeur West Hollywood roundup:
The Washington Post reports on the RNC S&M controversy, "FEC report details lavish Republican spending, including nearly $2,000 at Voyeur West Hollywood." And at Huffington Post, "Michael Steele Called Tone Deaf By GOP Brass, Urged to Resign." 
But what really caught my attention was this passage, from HuffPo, on the "understated elegance" of Voyeur West Hollywood, where RNC insiders and staff visited (although Michael Steele is said not to have attended the club): The girl at the door sent us in right away and told us to go to a table by the bar and get some free Champagne. Seriously. This club is amazing. There are topless "dancers" acting out S&M scenes throughout the night on one of the side stages, there's a half-naked girl hanging from a net across the ceiling and at one point I walked to the bathroom and pretty much just stopped dead in my tracks to watch two girls simulating oral sex in a glass case.
Really understated elegance here.
Also, Lindsay Lohan was at our table at one point.
Plus, Michelle posts screencaps of Erik Brown's now-defunct Twitter page: 
Via Memeorandum.
It turns out that Erik Brown's set to pay back the RNC, "GOP consultant who charged 2K to RNC at risque nightclub to return $."
See also the Daily Caller, "Just a Peek: RNC-funded trip to 'Voyeur' club was an after-party for up-and-coming GOP donors."
Some time back I published, at RealClearPolitics, "Sarah Palin, Neoconservative." As noted there, Palin represents the best of Reaganite neoconservatism.
Thus I'm really excited to see that theme echoed by Norman Podhoretz, at WSJ, "In Defense of Sarah Palin: She understands that the U.S. has been a force for good in the world—which is more than can be said of our president." 
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.
Unlike her enemies on the left, the conservative opponents of Mrs. Palin are a little puzzling. After all, except for its greater intensity, the response to her on the left is of a piece with the liberal hatred of Richard Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush. It was a hatred that had less to do with differences over policy than with the conviction that these men were usurpers who, by mobilizing all the most retrograde elements of American society, had stolen the country from its rightful (liberal) rulers. But to a much greater extent than Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, Sarah Palin is in her very being the embodiment of those retrograde forces and therefore potentially even more dangerous.
I think that this is what, conversely, also accounts for the tremendous enthusiasm she has aroused among ordinary conservatives. They rightly see her as one of them, only better able and better positioned to stand up against the contempt and condescension of the liberal elites that were so perfectly exemplified by Mr. Obama's notorious remark in 2008 about people like them: "And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Be sure to read it all.
It's not just leftists who reject Palin, but the "conservative intellectuals" as well.
Photo Credit: El Marco, "Showdown in Searchlight: Sarah Palin Pals around with Patriots in the Nevada Desert."
