Thursday, November 20, 2008

Shut up and go away already, Kathleen...

Ok, this whole martyr woe-is-me act from Kathleen Parker has gone way the hell beyond any useful shelf life it might have had. As if all the crap she's been spewing before wasn't bad enough, now she's gone right up to outright bigotry:

...the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.

I think it's safe to say Kathleen Parker's more or less jumped the shark. It's bad enough she was ridiculing Sarah Palin and by association the base Palin energized when she was campaigning with John McCain, but this is just beyond the pale. There was absolutely no need for this. If Mike Huckabee had been the GOP standard-bearer in the election Parker might have had a point, considering Huckabee seemed to have few if any qualms about turning the country into a borderline theocracy. But since we had arguably the most middle-of-the-road candidate in the race, Parker's just showing her true colors...and as we can see, they turn out to be pretty damn ugly. And I wouldn't be a bit surprised if we see some sort of backlash here, in the support going up for the more overtly religious candidates like Huckabee. More likely though, most conservatives are by this time tuning Kathleen Parker and her fellow pundits out, or, in the case of Jonah Goldberg, calling them out for the bullshit they're spewing:
I don't know what's more grating, the quasi-bigotry that has you calling religious Christians low brows, gorillas and oogedy-boogedy types or the bravery-on-the-cheap as you salute — in that winsome way — your own courage for saying what (according to you) needs to be said. Please stop bragging about how courageous you are for weathering a storm of nasty email you invite on yourself by dancing to a liberal tune. You aren't special for getting nasty email, from the right or the left. You aren't a martyr smoking your last cigarette. You're just another columnist, talented and charming to be sure, but just another columnist. You are not Joan of the Op-Ed Page. Perhaps the typical Washington Post reader (or editor) doesn't understand that. But you should, and most conservatives familiar with these issues can see through what you're doing.

A-yep. It looks really bad for us to be calling out people like George Clooney and the Dixie Chicks for their faux-martyr bullshit when we have people ostensibly on our side doing it too...although it's been said that people like Kathleen Parker are angling for a new audience. I believe it too, but that doesn't make their drama-queen hysterics any less infuriating.