The unbearable stupidity of Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti
October 27, 2009 12:53 pm ET by Matt Gertz
US News & World Report's Washington Whispers blog has obtained a copy of The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star, Weekly Standard staff writer Matthew Continetti's sob-story book on how the press was so incredibly mean to Palin. If you like really dumb arguments, this is apparently the book for you. From WW's post (emphasis added):
Liberal-leaning feminists, especially comic Tina Fey, the 30 Rock star who portrayed Palin on Saturday Night Live, were jealous of Palin. "Palin's sudden global fame rankled those feminists whose own path to glory had been difficult. To them, Palin was less a female success story than she was the beneficiary of male chauvinism," writes Continetti. He holds out Fey and her TV character for special criticism. "It was telling that Fey should be the actress who impersonated Palin. The two women may look like each other, but they could not be more dissimilar. Each exemplifies a different category of feminism. Palin comes from the I-can-do-it-all school. She is professionally successful, has been married for more than 20 years, and has a large and (from all outward appearances) happy family. And while Fey is also pretty, married, and has a daughter, the characters she portrays in films like Mean Girls and Baby Mama, and in television shows like 30 Rock, are hard-pressed eggheads who give up personal fulfillment-e.g., marriage and motherhood-in the pursuit of professional success," he writes. "On 30 Rock, Fey, who is also the show's chief writer and executive producer, plays Liz Lemon, a television comedy writer modeled on herself. Liz Lemon is smart, funny, and at the top of her field. But she fails elsewhere. None of her relationships with men works out. She wants desperately to raise a child but can find neither the time nor the means to marry or adopt. Lemon makes you laugh, for sure. But you also would be hard pressed to name a more unhappy person on American TV."
If you followed that, Continetti claims that Fey and Palin "could not be more dissimilar." Why? Well, Palin "is professionally successful, has been married for more than 20 years, and has a large and (from all outward appearances) happy family." On the other hand, Fey... well... is also apparently married with a daughter, but the CHARACTERS SHE PLAYS are not. In short, his evidence that Fey and Palin "could not be more dissimilar" is that Palin and LIZ LEMON are different. And that proves that Fey is the type of feminist purportedly out to get Palin because Fey is "rankled" that her own "path to glory" was more difficult.
In other news, Barack Obama and Will Smith could not be more dissimilar because Obama has yet to blow up an alien mothership.
Correct. Fey is not a professional quitter.
End sarcasm.
The pity is that some people will eat this up. They won't see through this sham, they won't think it through and realize that the characters that Fey plays aren't the same as Tina Fey herself.
/sarcasm
Talk of the Nation back in September and suggested that the Senate pursue an "opt out" public option, as a Federalist compromise, just like the one in the current bill. Continetti said it would never fly because Senators would want the credit instead of letting states take it. It is funny that his argument against feminists (they are jealous of President starbusts) mirrors his argument against health care reform (Senators are too jealous of states to let them pick what parts of health reform they want).
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112926560
Screenwriter, Head Writer SNL, Actor, Producer, Speaks in complete sentences.
Palin
Failed Veep Candidate, Proven Liar, Quitter, Incapable of speaking in complete sentences.
You know, he's right--they're not similar at all.
By what definition? Last I checked, she resigned from her job with an "official" explanation that she couldn't stand the ethics investigations of her.
Yep, if that's what we're calling professionally succesful, then so be it.
Thing is, the media didn't demolish Sarah Palin, SHE demolished herself with her ham handed interviews, her bad performance during the debate she had with Biden, her and McCain's refusal to allow her to speak to the media for quite some time, and her constant attacks against the media.
Someone point out a media source that wrote untruthful things about her, please, do it. I am betting that you can't do it.
I mean it can't be true, since GF reads all of them newspapers she couldn't name.
I especially found this line laughable:
"She is professionally successful, has been married for more than 20 years, and has a large and (from all outward appearances) happy family."
While Governor Palin certainly achieved some professional success, her failure to be elected Vice-President and her subsequent resignation as Governor of Alaska undermine any claim to a high level of professional success. She may have been married for "more than 20 years" but her ex future son-in-law Levi suggested ("outwardly") that the marriage was anything but happy. And why does Governor Palin's "large" family somehow make her a better person than Tina Fey, who has one child? Finally, if Tina Fey's portrayal of Sarah Palin was so terrible and/or unfair, why did the Governor go on SNL and lampoon herself during the election?
How does anyone take conservatives seriously when they subscribe to this kind of stuff?
So here we are again-almost 20 years later with a similar comparison.
Last time I checked, Tina Fey was the SUCCESSFUL one professionally, not Sarah Palin. What exactly is Palins' "professional success"?
*chirp...chirp*