Leftists Attack GOP as "Ugly Americans"

To follow up my previous entry on Sarah Palin's surge in public opinion, it turns out that Gallup's new tracking numbers see John McCain cutting Barack Obama's lead in the presidential horse race in half since the start of the GOP convention.

What's particulary interesting, of course, has been the left's reaction to the Palin nomination. It's not just the initial unfounded smears alleging that Palin covered-up her daughter's preganancy (that Bristol Palin was Trig's mom), but also the broader ideological challenge the Alaska Governor has presented to the postmodern left (including the radical feminists and the "P.A.N.T.H.E.R.'s):

Apparently, Governor Palin fits right into the left's program of anti-GOP demonization, which can be seen around the leftosphere of late.

Here's Chris Bowers, for example, on how "Palin Satisfies Conservative Persecution Lust:

Palin has grown popular among the conservative base primarily because she has been able to satisfy the conservative persecution lust that is at the core of the American conservative system of belief. Without an evil, stereotyped, identity group out to attack them, there is nothing holding together the conservative system of belief.

At the Huffington Post, John Seery argues that Sarah Palin's "The Face of the Ugly American":

I know, I know: Sarah Palin is receiving rosy plaudits for her speech last night....

My honest-to-goodness visceral reaction was quite otherwise. What I saw on that stage was the personification of small-minded smugness, an utter lack of humility, a kind of self-righteous entitlement based on little more than puffed-up narrowness. She struck me not as plucky but, rather, as stunningly immodest--to the point of arrogance. Some people are arrogant and maybe deserve to be. They know it, and flaunt it, while everyone else thinks they are jerks. But there's another kind of arrogance, perhaps harder to spot at first, an arrogance that apparently doesn't even recognize itself as such, a sanctified, self-satisfied presumptuousness that flows from sheer naïveté about oneself and the world and manifests itself in giddy ambition.

Palin, in other words, is a brash, white trash hick, but don't miss the rest of Seery's post.

Seery argues John McCain's an "ugly American" as well. But he's not the first: Cernig at Newshoggers attacked McCain last week as "the ugliest American":

Out of all the ugly Americans of the modern hard right, John McCain is rising as the star.

The ugly American meme surrounding the 2008 GOP ticket represents, essentially, the latest example of the left's psychiatric paranoia at the Republican Party's personalities and politics, which one might clinically diagnose as a new "McCain-Palin Derangement Syndrome" (see here and here for partial recognition of the malady).

Indications of McCain-Palin Derangement include the attacks on the Arizona Senator as representing "four more years" of the George W. Bush administration (which triggered the initial specification of this ideological psychiatric syndrome), as well as the slurs against Governor Palin as "a rightwing-Christian anti-choice extremist."

If the nation's indeed witnessing an election contest deciding final cultural supremacy over "the two Americas," the utter demonization of the McCain-Palin ticket we're now seeing will be just a preview of left's evil partisanship in the couple of months ahead.