The news is raining down so thick and fast these days that it is hard to keep up. This is a story I’ve meant to get to for a day or two: Aaron Sorkin, who apparently was the brains behind “The West Wing,” went off on a bizarre tirade against Sarah Palin. Sorkin didn’t like last week’s episode of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” in which Palin shot a caribou:
[L]ike absolutely everybody I know, I don’t relish the idea of torturing animals. I don’t enjoy the fact that they’re dead and I certainly don’t want to volunteer to be the one to kill them and if I were picked to be the one to kill them in some kind of Lottery-from-Hell, I wouldn’t do a little dance of joy while I was slicing the animal apart.
I’m able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don’t watch snuff films and you make them. You weren’t killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals. I can make the distinction between the two of us but I’ve tried and tried and for the life of me, I can’t make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing. I’m able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though I get happy every time one of you faux-macho shitheads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face.
There is lots more bile if you follow the link. But what Sorkin objected to was simply the fact that Governor Palin went hunting. That’s it. No “torture,” no “dance of joy,” no “snuff films,” certainly no dog-fighting for money. What Sorkin wrote would apply to any of the tens of millions of Americans who hunt. It would apply to John Kerry when he memorably hunted geese during the 2004 campaign, as it would to countless other Democratic Party candidates who proudly proclaim themselves to be hunters, NRA members, and so on.
I can’t explain why Sarah Palin causes liberals to make fools of themselves. Whether that is a good quality or a bad one, we can all judge. But there is no doubt that Palin, more than any conservative politician of recent times, including Ronald Reagan, brings out the craziness in the Left.
It is also interesting to see the mask lifted from the individual behind one of the more popular television programs of recent years. I’ve never seen The West Wing, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t advertise itself as left-wing, pro-Democratic Party propaganda. Yet with this news story, it is obvious to everyone what that program was trying to achieve. Apart from anything else, clarity is a good thing.
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