Krauthammer: Damn Feminists and Elites Insist on Taking Substance Seriously by KTK

Charles Krauthammer makes, uncharacteristically, a modicum of sense in today’s column, in which he offers a post-mortem on the McCain campaign. He is convinced the whole thing is an accident of the financial crisis, which is a bit of denial on his part, but he also throws this in:

The choice of Sarah Palin was also a mistake. I’m talking here about its political effects, not the sideshow psychodrama of feminist rage and elite loathing that had little to do with politics and everything to do with cultural prejudices, resentments and affectations.

Palin was a mistake (” near suicidal,” I wrote on the day of her selection) because she completely undercut McCain’s principal case against Obama: his inexperience and unreadiness to lead. And her nomination not only intellectually undermined the readiness argument. It also changed the election dynamic by shifting attention, for days on end, to Palin’s preparedness, fitness and experience . . . .

And here of course he goes off the rails, as, being Charles Krauthammer, he was fated to do.

Apparently, for the K-man, a candidate’s “inexperience and unreadiness to lead” is a barely-relevant issue (it’s not relevant because she’s unfit; it’s relevant because it changes public reactions to the two parties, thus affecting their relative likelihood of election). But what he sweepingly dismisses as “feminist rage and elite loathing” are mere “affectations” or worse.

What exactly triggered those affectations? That the Republicans cynically nominated a hopelessly unqualified woman in the expectation that women would flock to her after being disappointed over Hillary? (Though Obama barely out-polled McCain among men – the first Democrat to do that in easy memory – he also enjoyed a female gender gap of 7% in his favor – smaller than, but comparable to, Democratic gender gaps of the past. The Republicans still understand women just as much as they ever did.) That the Republicans nominated an anti-choice woman who styles herself a “Feminist for Life” while actively fighting to take control of their own bodies away from every other woman in the country, and coyly hinting that she supports “choice” (when the choice is specifically the one she approves)? That she knows virtually nothing about any issue of importance, while aggrandizing herself in the most stupidly embarrassing ways even as she displays her ignorance? That she endorses insanely counterfactual stances, grounded on the most oblivious selfishness or religious dunderheadedness, on issues from creationism to global warming to environmental protection to virtually everything else? Or that she constantly, blatantly, obviously and shamelessly lies about everything she does, continues to lie after being caught lying, and consistently abuses her official powers (then lies about that, too)?

For Krauthammer, apparently, these facts play no part in being “unready to lead”. Gasping ignorance, religious whacko-ism, verbal stupidity and cognitive clumsiness amounting nearly to retardation, utterly amoral power-madness, and theocratic invasions of privacy are not a factor in the question whether Palin should be elevated to one (or, not unlikely, both) of the highest offices in the land. Objecting to such qualities in one’s leaders – or the grossly offensive way they are fobbed off on a population that wanted real substance – is “elitism”. It’s “prejudice” to be against having religious whackos and morons as leaders of the most powerful nation in history.

This is the reason nothing conservatives say should ever, ever be taken seriously. (Certainly never on feminism, but equally so on every other issue.) Not only do they not take ideas seriously, they don’t even take words seriously. Nothing they say means anything, none of it is intended to convey actual thoughts, let alone true or defensible ones. Like K-man’s worry that Palin’s being unready to lead was important because it altered the PR war (not, you know, because she was in fact unready to lead), the rest of his nonsense was likewise important for equally superficial and transient reasons. His words literally have no substance – that is, they do not truck in substance, fact, and meaning even when addressing substantive issues. And he’s one of the “smart” conservatives.

We stand poised on the ridge of a watershed moment. It’s too easy to conclude that Obama has already led us over to the other side; that remains still to be seen. To make it real, we have to consolidate the decisive shift the country has taken. We have to make sure we start calling conservatives on their bullshit – continuously, relentlessly. The country demanded – in a way I have never seen before – real substance, and those who wanted and got it responded for the most part maturely and with insight. They rejected the insulting diversionary tactics of the right wing; they saw through the lies and the stupidity. But we have to make it clear, now that the scales have fallen from so many eyes, that what they are seeing, seemingly for the first time, has always been there, and always will be until we decisively render it impotent. We have got to ratchet up our intolerance for stupidity, lies, and distortion; we have got to demand substance, truth, and mature deliberation in every aspect of law and policy. And we have got to laugh the idiots, liars, whackos, and shameless toadies out of town, once and for all, before we allow ourselves to forget, and get used to them again.

UPDATE: Added badly-needed post header, reformatted quote, and removed reference to Krauthammer making sense, which no longer suggests to me any reason even for being there.