Kathleen Parker, Martyr?

I like Ms. Parker and have enjoyed many of her columns. However, lately she’s turned her guns on her fellow conservatives, and has taken some heat for it. Apparently she considers herself a martyr, but who fired the first round? Let’s think about this: You shoot at a BIG group of people with your one gun, and they fire back in a hail of bullets. Too bad for you, but what did you expect?

Oh, reasonable conversation? Please don’t offend everyone’s intelligence that way. Offer me more than ‘Palin was picked by McCain’s sex drive’ and we’ll have something to talk about.

Now Ms. Parker whips out her holier-than-thou-ness and blames those idiot evangelicals for McCain’s defeat, and Jonah Goldberg nails her on the arrogance and faux-martyrdom. I swear the woman expects a hagiography.

Update: Jeff Goldstein over at Protein Wisdom also takes Ms. Parker to task, though with a different angle and some constructive ideas:

…what Parker seems to miss is that Palin is “part of the problem” largely because Parker gives cover to the Democrats and the liberal media to paint her — and those like her — as crazed religious fanatics, rather than as ordinary people of faith who happen to believe in the tenets of their religion.

…

So rather than highlighting those instances where Sarah Palin’s belief in God — and her own personal sense of morality — was overridden, in terms of public policy, by fidelity to the law, and a truly conservative style of governing, Parker went instead for the easy target, scoring points with the “right” kinds of people by attacking something that proves increasingly easy to attack: faith.

The Denver Post’s libertarian columnist David Harsanyi and others outlined Gov Palin’s governing philosophy and found it far more palatable than, say, the governing policy of the “Maverick” John McCain. (Recall, Palin vetoed a Republican effort to deny same sex couples certain privileges on the grounds that she thought the measure likely unconstitutional.)

Yet, were you to ask the average voter about Palin, those not diehard conservatives or political junkies would know virtually nothing of her governing philosophy — but plenty about her speaking in tongues, or her burning books, or her stance on abortion, or her slaughtering of helpless wolves, or her pregnant daughter, or her career as a beauty pageant contestant.

And people like Parker, putative conservatives, are largely to blame for allowing that caricature to take shape and breathe.

Preach it, brother.

anti-PUMA activities?

Simon Owens at Bloggasm is reporting that a number of anti-Obama blogs were shut down after complaints:

After some digging it became apparent that several Blogspot accounts had been shut down because of similar spam issues, and nearly all of them had three things in common: Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website.

I haven’t verified it, but since PUMA blogging seems to have become my thing recently, I thought I’d note it.

h/t Protein Wisdom

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Update (2008 July 1): An article in the NYT gives more information.  Google (which owns Blogspot) claims it was a problem with their spam filters.  The PUMAs don’t buy it.

Related: PUMA: more wild and wacky election fun, Obambi: hatin’ on Obama