Oh my. Liberal mom at Palin Rally does some introspection.

[Splashdown]

From the NEW YORK TIMES blog, no less!

Judith Warner

No Laughing Matter

“You can stand on my wagon, if you want.”
I tend, when I’m not in big crowds, to forget that I’m short. In Republican crowds, I find, I feel particularly small.
And dark. And unsmiling. And uncoiffed, unmade-up and inappropriately dressed.
For the McCain/Palin rally in Fairfax, Va., on Wednesday, the organizers had asked people to wear red. I – unthinkingly – had dressed in blue, which was somewhat isolating.

-snip- she makes friends

We talked about the moral vacuity of modern parenting. “I see extreme spoiling, self-absorption,” she said. “Constant bringing the kids up to love themselves without reflecting on how they affect others.” We talked about the disastrous lack of respect that children now show adults and institutions, and about the ways this lack of respect translates into a very ugly sort of lack of decorum and a lack of basic manners: “This 10-year-old, my daughter’s friend, she comes over and throws down a magazine with John McCain on the cover. ‘Here’s friggin John McCain,’ she says. ‘Let’s see what lies he’s going to tell now.’” She continued: “These 10-year-olds think they’re better than me. That they don’t have to say hello. That they think I’m beneath them.”
You go girl, I was thinking, in so many words, until the talk turned back to politics: “So often these kids that are so incredibly full of themselves, I find their parents are Democrats. The Democrats, they hate ‘us,’ the United States, but they love ‘me,’ that is, themselves,” she said.
I heard a lot more talk that day about the need for respect – and about arrogance and selfishness and about Democrats and liberals who think way too highly of themselves.

-snip- Palin symbolizes yearning for respect and service

For those of us who can’t tap into those yearnings, it seems the Palin faithful are blind – to the contradictions between her stated positions and the truth of the policies she espouses, to the contradictions between her ideology and their interests. But Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, “What Makes People Vote Republican?”, that it’s liberals, in fact, who are dangerously blind.
Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.

Perhaps that’s why the conservatives can so successfully get under liberals’ skin. And why liberals need to start working harder at breaking through the empathy barrier.

Read the whole thing, if you have a chance. it's worth it.

I wonder if the Great Discombobulation, as Franksolich calls it, isn't going to be a shockwave through the entire democrat party.

[DixieBelle]

No, it wasn’t funny, my morning with the hockey and the soccer moms, the homeschooling moms and the book club moms, the joyful moms who brought their children to see history in the making and spun them on the lawn, dancing, when music played. It was sobering. It was serious. It was an education.

“Palin Power” isn’t just about making hockey moms feel important. It’s not just about giving abortion rights opponents their due. It’s also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true — deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck.

Nail. Head. Liberal. Light.

She may not vote "R", but at least she saw through the smoke of the campfires they are so fond of dancing around in primitiveland. For an afternoon....

This comment on the blog sums it up nicely:

I’m glad I read your entire commentary. The tone, at first, was one of smug/slightly angry liberal with endless contempt for conservatives (especially conservative women). The fact that you eventually saw that conservative moms can actually string a few cogent thoughts together while holding a world view radically different from your own must be counted as a victory of sorts. I have long thought that since conservatives have often been a minority in America, they have been forced to see the other side’s point of view and understand it (but not like it). Liberals, on the other hand, like to insist that they make up the majority view on any given issue (even if they do not) and routinely refuse to acknowledge that alternative opinions exist, much less have merit. Sarah Palin has taken a life journey totally outside the box created by the National Organization for [liberal]Women and made a huge success (marriage, children, career)of it. As such, she is nothing but a threat to those who would like to pretend that their way of thinking provides the only path to womens’ achievement.

and then there is this one:

Color me liberal. I find the women you describe to be tragically delusional. They seem to think the Reese Witherspoon comedies-to-do-your-ironing-by are actually portrayals of high democratic ideals. Prof. Haidt is right — I DO look down my nose at women who think Sarah Palin is going to be good for women — or for men & children. Those poor ladies, who obviously have a lot on their hands, would have better spent their scant free time reading up on Sarah Palin’s antideluvian worldview than in cheerleading for her. Had they done so, the ladies would be more apt to find themselves at a Biden rally the next time Joe’s in town.

— Posted by Marie Burns

No, I color you a stupid, bitter asshat Marie.

[Splashdown]

There was one line in the article about "she's lucky she lives in a progressive state." And a few libtard commenters hit upon that.

What they don't get is that that is much more of a conservative position than they think. Moving politics out of Washington. I'll take a few "progressive states" as long as there is less power in Washington.

[dandi]

Nail. Head. Liberal. Light.

No, I think for all of her prattling she still missed it.  You can smell the contempt ooze from the words, especially when she talks about showing up looking like a bag of butt and wearing blue.

No, I think this "brilliant" typist saw everything that "feminism" was supposed to produce and had to realize that the "feminists" had nothing to do with it.  She probably wanted to eat the barrel of a .45 after seeing what a real, gorgeous, complete, self made woman looked like.

[DixieBelle]

^well I'm sure it was more a flash of light, not anything illuminating. She's probably already back to not shaving her pits and loathing conservative women.