Or something like that.
You can call this reason #8,966 why in spite of living in NYC I have more affinity for a woman who shoots her own dinner, has worked on a commercial fishing boat, played basketball, has a husband who is a steelworker and Iron Dog champion, sent her first born to Iraq, runs a state and still cleans up pretty fucking good.
Hardy people them Alaskans. Then again when you spend a good part of the year in darkness, experience unimaginably frigid weather and wolves and bears are constant reminders that a trigger shy human ain't at the top of the food chain, the idea of a turkey meeting its maker is not something you bat an eye over.
But if you're a fey, insular, neurotic liberal pussy like MSNBC's David Shuster, well, processing food is apparently something on the order of clubbing baby seals or squeezing Jews into a cattle car headed for Auschwitz. And this is most especially true if you have a visceral, over-the-top, obsessive contempt for the woman at issue. With any luck some of them will choke on their Thanksgiving tofurkey.
I'd love to say that I'm surprised by the indignation the left has expressed, but I'm not. I live among these people. I work with them. Socialize with them. I even fornicate with some of them. And the truth of the matter is that, much to my personal shame, I have one foot firmly planted in the pussy camp myself. Among other things I shop at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. I listen to indie music and have occasionally whined about a band I like selling out to a major label. I suffer through horribly self-indulgent art films. I hang out at hipster bars. I even have an ironic tee shirt or two.
This blog ain't called Cultural Schizophrenia for nothing.
But in spite of my many acoutrements of pussydom there are lines that I simply won't cross. I still refuse to separate my garbage - except to make sure nothing that would identify me goes in - because, well, fuck you eco-freaks. And even though I rarely have the opportunity these days, fishing, shooting and other outdoorsy pursuits were a huge part of my life growing up, and my apartment's decor is reflective of that.
The offensive fish in my living room.
I only wish I also had a pic of the deer antlers and steer skull in my bedroom and assorted other things to provide the full effect, but anyone who lives outside of precious liberal environs like mine would die laughing over the comments these items have elicited over the years from people - girls usually - ranging from indignation to one chick who made me remove the deer antlers - the dead animal staring at her - before we could get jiggy.
I wish I was joking.
The irony is that I'm perceived to be one of them, so to the best of their knowledge I am only nominally heretical. But to watch the obsession with Sarah Palin is to see the left's contempt for "otherness" in full flower. To your average liberal you are either one of them, a member of a pet victim class or you are some shade of enemy. And as they've made rather obvious, Palin represents about the darkest shade there is.
Tim Blair of the London Telegraph assembled a hilarious compilation of reactions on the left.
My personal favorite, the New York Times ediitorial writers' blog:
We’ve differed with Sarah Palin a great deal on substance. We don’t agree with her hardline approach to the Iraq War, her harsh anti-government rhetoric, and her style of negative campaigning.
But we also worry a bit about, how should we put it, the persona she has brought with her to national politics. We did not care at all for the swipe she took against community organizers at the Republican National Convention.
And then there’s this. You don’t have to be a huge animal lover to question why Governor Palin chose to be interviewed — while issuing a traditional seasonal pardon of a turkey — while turkeys were being executed in the background.
Governor Palin reportedly declined an invitation to hold the interview at a different spot, though some are arguing that she was unaware of the turkey carnage going on behind her.
Take a look for yourself, here: [referring to the above video]
It isn't easy for the Times to make me laugh my ass off because I simply don't take the paper seriously enough. But this did the trick.
Translation of their commentary:
Cheeseball hack-lawyer-style setup about how their dislike of her has been high-minded and substantive.
Criticism of a few of her "radical" positions in spite of having invested a few months into the notion that she is mindless and has essentially read the scripts the McCain camp put in front of her.
Then they transition to the real purpose, attacking her personally. They use as an example a line in her convention speech which playfully mocked community organizing, Obama's rather ambiguous early career choice, as a response to his camp's dismissive cracks about her being a small-town mayor.
Then, of course, they contrive a way to wrap the turkey incident as the ultimate manifestation of why the infinitely serious Times was troubled by her all along.
The Times falls deeper into self-parody while their ownership goes ever deeper into the red. Too bad their unintentional comedy is lost on the bulk of their declining readership.
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