The Times Snarks Sarah Palin

The New York Times reviews Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue, pretty much as you would expect. It’s not really worth reading, as the Times’ enmity toward Palin is so extreme: on a much smaller scale, it’s sort of like reading what Jefferson Davis thought of Abraham Lincoln. But this paragraph is worth noting:

Mr. McCain’s astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (less than two years as the governor of Alaska, and before that, two terms as mayor of Wasilla, a town with fewer than 7,000 residents) as his running mate and Ms. Palin’s own surprisingly nonchalant reaction to Mr. McCain’s initial phone call about the vice president’s slot (she writes that it felt “like a natural progression”) underscore just how alarmingly expertise is discounted — or equated with elitism — in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge.

The Times has so little self-knowledge that it apparently doesn’t understand that the “colorful personal narrative” that most “overshadow[ed] policy arguments and actual knowledge” in the 2008 campaign was that of Barack Obama, not Sarah Palin. Obama had less experience than Palin, and he was the Democrats’ Presidential candidate, unlike Palin, who was running for Vice-President with John McCain, one of the most experienced Presidential candidates of recent memory. We are now living through the debacle that results from electing a President based on a “personal narrative” rather than “policy arguments and actual knowledge,” but it will be a while before the New York Times, always a lagging indicator at best, figures this out.
PAUL adds: The Washington Post snarks Palin here, in a rather incoherent piece co-written by Jason Horowitz, who, as reporters go, makes a good third-tier lefty blogger. The Post’s snarky headline: is “Leaks launch Palin’s ‘Going Rogue’ with that ol’ campaign fervor.”
Palin continues to have a strange effect on the MSM. Has the Post ever used a non-word in a front-page headline before?

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