In Piling On Palin, Liberals Make Fools of Themselves

Watching liberals vilify Sarah Palin all over again bothers Lee Siegel. He finds her terrifying as a political prospect—"some of her positions, like her religious opposition to health-care reform and her opposition to stem-cell research, strike me as just shy of sociopathic"—but as an American story, she's fascinating. She's a true outsider, he writes, and "true outsiders often discombobulate the liberal mind.”

She's a kind of "Huck Finn in reverse: "Instead of fleeing civilization and lighting out for the territory, she started in the territory and lit out for civilization," he writes on the Daily Beast. The encounter was bruising, indeed. "Palin may have disgraced herself through her ignorance, childish fantasy of power, and lack of dignity as a vice-presidential candidate," he says, but "the more liberal 'wisdom' that is wreaked on Palin with such self-celebration, the more 'rogue' she really seems"—and the more appealing. (More Sarah Palin stories.)