Idiotic Sentiment Of The Day From Kristol

They kill me, these people... they really do. Billy Kristol writes today from his ivory tower Op Ed column in the NYT:

And he chose as his running mate Sarah Palin, one of the least-known outsiders to be picked in modern times, and the first woman on a Republican ticket.

This in turn sent other establishments into a frenzy.

The media establishment was horrified. Its members expressed their disapproval. Palin became more popular. They got even more frustrated. And so we had the spectacle last week of ABC’s Charlie Gibson, one of the most civil of the media bigwigs, unable to help himself from condescending to Palin as if he were a senior professor forced to waste time administering a Ph.D. exam to a particularly unpromising graduate student.

Of course it fucking sent the media into a frenzy! We are facing one of the most important decisions to be made in our lifetime -- who will navigate this country through the big, dangerous SHIT PILE we've inherited from BushCo -- and who does 70 year old John McCain decide randomly, cynically, desperately, to throw on his ticket? Some heretofore unknown (to all but 670,000 Alaskans) newbie.

According to the Kristol narrative, this selection drove all kinds of very unreasonable questions from the media, like, Who is this person? What is her record? What is her world view? What are her qualifications? What is her background and how might that influence decisions she makes on behalf of this nation?

I mean, really... how dare anyone ask those kinds of questions? How DARE the media not just accept whatever they're told and regurgitate the GOP talking points without question?

If you think about it, Obama declared his presidency 20 months ago and during that time the media, the GOP, and his own party (through the primaries) have been doing a brutal vetting of his candidacy. That's exactly as long as Sarah Palin has been the governor of Alaska!

Ironically, it was an interesting kind of vetting the Fox News crowd subjected Obama to. Instead of focusing on his positions and record, they chose instead to focus on his patriotism, whether or not he wore a flag pin, whether or not he went to school in a madrassa, whether or not he exchanged a "terrorist fist bump" with his wife, whether or not he denounced his crazy preacher adequately, whether or not he's a militant black, whether or not he's Christian enough. Those are the things the Fox News crowd is interested in. So cry me a bloody river if nobody drilled his record like Palin's record is being drilled. What a bunch of losers.

Screw Bill Bennet's "Death of Outrage" mantra... I am outraged by the total demise of critical thought.