Patriots, Pigs and Palin

In the two days since I just pulled the ideology of "acquisitionism" from various nether regions, a number of things have happened that have served to simultaneously buttress my theories send me in search of further refinement.

As I said at the close of my last post, a key element of "acquisitionism", or at least its most salient American characteristic, is that you can't win unless someone else loses. In other words, the real final American frontier is schadenfreude.

As a Jet fan, I am experiencing this in spades right now with the season-ending injury to Patriot superstar Tom Brady. Curt Schilling was right on the money when he said that New York fans were practically salivating over this.

(It isn't so much that I was praying for Brady to get hurt (though, while watching Sunday's Jets-Miami game, I was waiting for some Jet defender to send Chad Pennington back to the operating table, and during Dan Marino's playing days, I openly rooted for someone to take him out), but since the Jets have certainly experienced more than their fair share of season-killing injuries, and since possibly the biggest such incident in recent history occurred in a game against the Pats (Vinny Testaverde in 1999), there seems to be some element of Divine payback at work here.)

I think that Americans like to see anyone doing better than they are taken down in the most publicly humiliating manner possible. This is as obvious by-product of our cleberity-driven culture, but a particularly vicious brand of schadenfreude is the current fulcrum of our political system. As I have described, this for the most part has fueled the Right's Clinton-hatred, and the Left's current Bush-hatred, more than any real policy differences.

I've also mentioned that in the current political climate, the Right adopted these attitudes as their electoral and governing strategy, and it worked for them for more than a decade, before ostensibly blowing up in their face.

Well, there seems to have been a much quicker turnaround than I had anticipated. The nomination of Sarah Palin has brought out the Left's most vicious attack-dog tactics, and they all seem to be backfiring. One can say that the Democrats have now suffered from their "acquisitionist" impulses twice in the same election cycle: first, when Hillary did not get the "coronation" she has been expecting and felt she was entitled to, and now Obama, whose anointment as the Left's messiah has been put on hold.

Not only that, but by making him fight the race-gender battle all over again, and this time truly across ideological lines, Palin has served to pull the rug out from what supposed to be his historical moment. Which is why he had to know better than to make his pig lipstick comment: even if he didn't intend it as a slap at Palin--which I believe is possible--he had to know that this was going to come back to bite him in the ass very quickly. Palin has knocked him off his pedestal, but more importantly for the Republicans, she's changed the game.

In theory, Palin should be more careful, because all this proves that payback is always imminent; if you climb on a pedestal, particularly if constructed upon religious platitudes, people are really going to enjoy watching you getting knocked down, if they can't manage to do it themselves. However, I think given that she has truly bared herself fully on a personal, if not political, level, the Left's attempts to score political points by pinning the "bridge to nowhere" on her are, well, a bridge to nowhere.

Hillary just wore pants. Palin is the real deal.