You only noticed I'm white because you're a racist.

In the comments to a long, inaccurate attack on those who consider Palin evidence that the conservative movement is trending stupid, Darleen Click claims that those who point out the extreme whiteness of Palin supporters "reveal a great more about [themselves] than Palin." Because such people notice race at all, they're insufficiently colorblind and therefore more racist than Click, who merely advocates creating and maintaining structural inequalities that disproportionately affect people who just happen to not be white.

Set aside for a moment the fact that Click labors under the delusion that noticing people of color is more racist than harming them and remember that 1) the figure she defends, Sarah Palin, is using her publicity tour as a prelude to a 2012 presidential bid launch, and 2) candidate Palin is posting photographs of the people she meets on her Facebook page, meaning that these are not images produced by a liberal media elite out to make her look like her appeal is limited to white people but images she and her people have decided should represent her mass-appeal on a mock-presidential bid launch. Time to play "Count the Non-White People"!

1. Image #1: 0
2. Image #2: 0
3. Image #3: 0
4. Image #4: 0
5. Image #5: 0
6. Image #6: 0
7. Image #7: 0
8. Image #8: 1 (a mall security guard)
9. Image #9: 0
10. Image #10: 0
11. Image #11: 0
12. Image #12: 2 (but only one identifiably of her own volition)

In all those photographs, there is one non-white person who can be positively identified as having come of their own accord. To Click, pointing out that Palin's own handlers consider her appeal limited to white people makes me a racist. Over in the increasingly diverse place known as the United States, this is why people like Click should hunker down for a long run of political disappointment.

Update. Over at my place, one of Darleen's flock attempts to prove me wrong by being racist.

Update 2. Someone should tell them to quit digging.

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I'd have compared her to Edward Gibbon, but then again I'm prone to wild and ignorant exaggeration...

Americaneoclown is seeing starbursts through the pages of his book:

I should add that I'm reading the book now, and I'm finding it as an extremely satisfying account of the everywoman's tale of American exceptionalism. That is, Sarah Palin is our 21st century Frederick Jackson Turner, who was the author of the seminal account of the American political culture, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." With Palin we have our modern-day political scribe of the frontier existence, the rugged pioneer of traditionalism who rejoices in the Alaskan harvest of the great remaining bounty of the nation's magnificent destiny.

Wow. That's a mighty chain of prepositions there. But has Donald even read the Turner essays? I have no idea what a phrase like "the pioneer of traditionalism" is supposed to mean, but Turner's argument -- which historians and political scientists have pretty much rejected for the past half century -- is that "the frontier" destroyed tradition, particularly the cultural inheritances that European settlers brought with them to the perimeter of settlement (e.g., western Massachusetts, the Ohio Valley, the Mississippi Valley, etc.)

In any event, Turner's argument is that the social life of the frontier produces a laboratory of sorts in which democratic ideals can be rejuvenated and then retained as the frontier becomes progressively more "civilized." For the frontier thesis to work, in other words, the frontier in question needs to produce democratic modes of life that are actually worth emulating. Given that Alaska's entire political and social order depends upon gobbling up more federal resources than the state can deliver in tax revenues, I doubt there are altogether that many Americans who would find this an agreeable model. Palin's notion that the state can wean itself from the federal teat by drilling from now until the End of Days is also a decidedly non-Turnerian fantasy, unless I missed the parts in which he celebrated the massive transfer of real estate and political power into the hands of corporate speculators.

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It's like a book elegantly bound, but in a language that you can't read just yet

(...having missed Scott's post on this...)

Matthew Continetti's piece in today's WSJ is completely insane, but I'd hate to discourage him from believing that Sarah Palin can somehow turn herself into something other than a toxic joke on the Republican Party. The longer people like Continetti chase after Palin -- frantically shouting along the way, "It's just a little dirty! It's still good, it's still good! It's just a little slimy! It's still good! It's still good" -- the more satisfying life will be for the rest of us when GOP primary season begins.

That said, Continetti's reasons for optimism are bizarre. Citing Palin's abysmal (and worsening) public opinion data, he argues -- in all seriousness -- that she will somehow be able to reverse her low standing among independent voters by turning her book tour into a prolonged disquisition on the economic liabilities of the current administration. Given that Palin is a virtual lock to make absolutely no sense when trying explain economics (or much else for that matter) I eagerly hope Palin takes Continetti's advice. For some reason, Pro-Palin wingnuts appear convinced that her abdication of the governor's office -- a decision by which they seem strangely unperturbed -- has afforded her the time she needs to learn her alphabet and multiplication tables. They forget that her political and intellectual instincts are so poorly evolved that she's far more likely to continue her practice of making hilarious Bachmannite arguments about atheist coins, piled on top of her usual dystopian predictions about President Blacula's heath care policy.

And when she inevitably makes a fool of herself, she'll soon enough blame the media. In which case, she'll have to write a new book complaining about the mistreatment she received from the people who interviewed her about the book written in part to complain about the mistreatment she received from the people who interviewed her during the 2008 campaign. Which is just another way of noting that Sarah Palin's aggrieved ego represents an exemplary case of fractal geometry.

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