Forces of Darkness: What Europeans are Saying about Sarah Palin
Europeans have greeted the news of Sarah Palin’s nomination for Vice President of the United States with a predictable mixture of anger, frustration, resentment and resignation. After more than a year of uncritically praising Barack Obama as a supernatural figure destined by fate to solve all of the world’s problems, European elites are suddenly coming to terms with the unwelcome possibility that the junior senator from Illinois might just be another human being after all.
European commentary on Sarah Palin has ranged from ridicule, to ridicule, to more ridicule, to reluctant acknowledgment that Barack Obama may have met his match. In any case, many European elites are sensing that the Democratic presidential candidate, by failing to pick US Senator Hillary Clinton as his running mate, may have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
A common theme running through much of European commentary is that Palin lacks qualifications; it is a critique European elites could, but will not, apply to Obama, presumably because he is a Democrat, and thus ideologically acceptable to Europe’s enlightened class. Many Europeans lament that Palin is (according to Europeans) pushing the US presidential election into a battle of values rather than of policies, as if there is any real substance to Obama.
But if there is one single aspect to Sarah Palin that threatens the smug certitude of Europe’s secular gatekeepers, it is her Christian faith. It therefore comes as no big surprise that Europe’s media elites have directed the bulk of their fury at American evangelical Christian voters. As if European secularism is not also a religion. [...]
The article goes on to give samples from across Europe, of what European Newspapers and magazines are saying about Sarah Palin. Read it, if you dare. It makes Charlie Gibson's interviews with Sarah seem downright friendly in comparison.
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