Master Chief Obama

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/10/09

That we are treated this morning by a leading banner photo on Yahoo with pithy comments and observations on why Sarah Palin resigned by a teenage boy who got her daughter pregnant shows how close we have come in this past year to a commissar society. It was Master Chief Obama who first took the initiative, making the despicable comment about putting lipstick on a pig after Sarah Palin made a joke about hockey moms and pitt bulls in her vice presidential debate. Master Chief Obama then defended his comment guess where? The Letterman Show. This is mnemonic slander; suggest and deny, suggest and vehemently deny. It is an insidious form of propaganda that is feeling and sensory rather than language and logic based which the fellow travelers in the press instinctively sense, intuit and advance.

The Master Chief cued the press and the press opened the floodgates. The commissars in the press, from Tina Fey to Katie Couric and on to the second rate subcontractors on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and the Washington Post – much of it coming from the women’s guild - followed the Master Chief’s cue and the horde in the blogs were like a breaking river.

Master Chief’s nod to the horde from Letterman’s perch suggested those studies in which a man in a white coat with pens in the pocket that may or may not be a scientist orders test subjects to do things they would normally find abhorrent if anyone else asked. But they dutifully, gleefully do what a man in the white coat says. It shows us to have the potential to be a society of Renfields, willing, even anxious, to follow Master Chief’s cue and execute his will because we are the Master Chief too. It reveals a totalitarian inner life rising from dormancy here in the Land of the Free.

The Master Chief’s recent trip to Russia brought to my mind anti-war events in the ‘60s and ‘70s when Russian commissars from the Soviet Union were actually in the room helping things along. “Friends”, you see, come to help. And that this bothered the participants little. Indeed, the presence of a foreign authority encouraged and authenticated their naivety. They seemed glad to the help. In the Soviet Union, the commissars ordered the press to say what they did, but they didn’t need to. That you were a member of the Party was commitment enough to indicate that you would do what the Party expected of you. Somewhere in the process a mystic transubstantiation took place as it has here now with Obama. You and the Party were the same and you were the Master Chief too. And that, in those days, was what was identified as totalitarian.

In an opinion piece in the New York Daily News, yesterday, Mike Murphy, and advisor to Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jeb Bush, writes that to go forward, the GOP must snap out of its Sarah Palin spell. To the contrary. Today the GOP has to stand up on her behalf and these three have not. They have remained passive holding the coats while the commissars have tried to destroy her. Rudy Giuliani has spoken up, Rick Perry has spoken up, John McCain has spoken up. Let something begin again with these three in opposition to the passive expedients in the GOP and the coat holders.

Why is there still so much Republican love for Sarah Palin, Murphy asks?

Red state Republicans see the snarky, elite attacks on Palin as an attack on them, he writes. And in some ways, they are.

This is absolutely the answer. The agrarian states naturally responded to a woman who worked with her hands with her husband to make her way in the world and who raised the family as they do. That is why they liked her and identified with her at first. When the commissars went after her they began to love her, because they understood, as Murphy implies, that the viral and instinctive hatred of her by the corporation t shirts was a hatred of them as well. The commissars have created and institutionalized Sarah Palin now in the heartland. She will not go away from the country people now but is bound to them by love and purpose. And like Rick Perry in Texas, she doesn’t care what they think of her in New York.