The National Review's Mark Goldblatt is offering Sarah Palin some advice on how to handle that snippy Gwen Ifill at the upcoming VP debate. His essay begins this way:
Thank you for the question, Ms. Ifill — patronizing though it is. And, yes, if pressed, I could probably stand up right now, walk across the stage and name every country on that blank map of the Middle East you’ve so graciously set up for me. But I think I’ll pass.
Get that? In Goldblatt World, Ifill is going to unfurl a map and ask -- nay, demand -- that Sarah Palin name the countries on it. And Sarah could do it! But she just doesn't want to.
But in Goldblatt's mind -- his paranoid, belligerent, cornered little mind -- Palin will go on to show up all the elites! Follow me inside and see how...
I’d rather not log onto the Internet next week and discover that one of your producers has surreptitiously supplied Bill Maher, who two weeks ago called me a “category five moron,” with a camera angle that shows a flash of cleavage — which, of course, he will freeze-frame and weave into an obscene rant.
See, folks, Gwen Ifill isn't a journalist. She's just up there to make sure a cameraman gets a nipple shot and forward it to Bill Maher. That's the whole point of the debate!
Even at her most paranoid, I don't think Michelle Malkin would've come up with that.
But if there's a cake to be taken, this paragraph does it:
I’ve been working hard to get up to speed on foreign policy and global issues. The reason I wasn’t up to speed beforehand is that, curiously enough, I’d been focusing all my energy on doing the jobs I’d been elected to do. When I was elected mayor of Wasilla, I tried to be a good mayor. When I was elected governor of the Alaska [sic], I tried to be a good governor. I didn’t regard either position as a stepping stone to anything else. I saw no need to go on fact-finding tours, at taxpayers’ expense, to foreign countries in an effort to bolster my geopolitical credentials for higher office.
Sarah Palin has been "working hard to get up to speed" on the job she's been nominated to do. So there.
At this point, you may be wondering, "Who is this defensive, bitter little man?" Goldblatt's self-penned biography provides some insight:
Mark Goldblatt is a novelist, columnist and book reviewer as well as a college professor at Fashion Institute of Technology of the State University of New York. He earned a Ph.D. from the City University of New York, where he completed his dissertation on the theological tensions that underlay the Protestant Reformation in England.
Goldblatt's controversial first novel, Africa Speaks, was published in 2002 to glowing reviews from Kirkus, the Newark Star Ledger and Free Williamsburg, a mixed review from Publishers Weekly, and no review whatsoever from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe or the Los Angeles Times.
Ah. A novelist neglected by the media elite. The same media elite that slights a woman like Sarah Palin.
A first-time novelist who doesn't seem to realize that most first-time novelists don't get reviewed by the big papers, and that Kirkus and Publishers Weekly review almost every book that isn't self-published or vanity-press material. He's been neglected. Like Sarah Palin.
So what was Africa Speaks about? Let's let Goldblatt himself tell it:
It was the Darwinian function of satire that I had in mind when I wrote a novel, Africa Speaks, which right now is probably not appearing in a bookstore near you. Despite the fact that it was published by a prestigious, literary press. Despite pre-publication reviews that ranged from respectable to downright glowing. So why won't you find Africa Speaks on the shelves of your local bookstore chain?
You be the judge; here's the first paragraph:
A salaam aleichem, in the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate, the one true God. Yo, yo, yo, I'd like to send a shout out to my people, to my kings and queens. You know what I'm saying? My kings and queens. Yo, and a special shout out to my soldiers, my niggas in arms, the One-Forty-Ninth Street Crew — vagina findas, no doubt. Crazy mad dawgs! I got nothing but love for you. Even you, Herc! It's all good. The name's Africa Ali, I'm just 23, and I'm about to drop the four-one-one. Just keeping it real, 'cause that's what I'm all about. Reality to the utmost.
That's right: I satirized African Americans.
At this point, you might surmise that the big book review sections ignored Goldblatt out of politeness, not terror. But he has a different theory:
As far as I can tell, I'm being whiteballed.
Which is a shame. Not just for me (though of course for me especially) but for African Americans. For, to return to my original point about the effect of satire, no one nowadays needs to be satirized more than African Americans. If not for the French — who've retired all such trophies — African Americans would currently rank as the most hypocritical, most paranoid, most pretentious group of people on the planet.
And that's where all the pieces fall into place. An African-American candidate for president? An African-American moderator for a presidential debate? After the media elite completely ignored his debut novel, the book that would put him in the same category as Baudelaire and Swift?
So he feels a kinship with Sarah Palin. And he wants to help her:
By the time John McCain and I take office in January, rest assured I will be up to speed on geopolitics. I will be altogether qualified to be a heartbeat from the presidency. And I’ll surround myself with altogether qualified advisers and staff, not yes-men and yes-women. Because I know from experience — the very experience my opponent, Sen. Biden, lacks — what it is like to make an executive decision. I know what it is like, after the legislative wrangling is done, after the wheeling and dealing by party hacks who are determined to maintain political cover and plausible deniability, to have the buck stop at my desk, to enact a law by my signature, to put my name on the bottom line.
So no, Ms. Ifill, I think I’ll keep my seat.
And in his mind, as Sarah Palin keeps her seat, she's showing up Barack Obama, and Gwen Ifill, and all the "hypocritical, paranoid, pretentious" African-Americans who no doubt sank his brilliant work of satire and kept it from its rightful place on the best-seller list.
Take THAT, media elite!