The Intolerant Euro-press: From Smug Certitude to Pulsing Blood Vessels

Soeren Kern writing in The American Thinker surveys the attitude-revealing European press coverage of US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and finds that we're being treated rather unsurprisingly to the usual confusion and rattling off of "opinions-as-facts".

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.

In other words, the usual. The press aren't analyzing, and the opinion-makers of the continent of superior enlightenment, are as we've seen so many times citing their owninventions and imaginings. What's revealing about them is the limited and usual set of subject they are spun around: imagining that she is a literal creationist in the mold of a hermit or aesetic, citing her lack of experience despite having treated Sen. Obama to no such
scrutiny with regard to many subjects, but his even thinner experience in particular.

And just in case the paper's editors were not being absolutely clear about their choice for US president, yet another article proclaims: "Obama embodies the future King dreamt about."

Britain's leftwing Guardian newspaper tries to figure out "How to solve the Sarah Palin problem." Another story titled "Sarah Palin's war against information" asserts that "The McCain team knows that if the media do their job and give Palin the same scrutiny that any candidate for high office must endure, she will collapse." Still
another story warns that "Obama faces lurking forces of darkness."

Left out are any inkling of awareness that the Guardian doesn't have dictatorial and coercive powers over the whole of humanity, or that Palin was put under more scrutiny and obvious hostile electioneering against her by the American press that Obama has had at all (virtually all of it involving the press
electioneering in his favor) over the 20 months since his media constructed success has. The reader and viewer of the general interest press still knows nearly nothing about his policy outlook. We've been offered umpteen fawning spreads on his family life, his any other sort of secular sainthood he could be offered, but little else.

But more than anything, what we find as always in the European press is the expression of a kind of personal intolerant hatred based entirely on Palin not being entirely like them in their predictable and suspiciously uniform world view. Never mind the arrogance evident in that expectation, or the negligence to report much of anything substantial at all – these writers are quite obviously looking through
the prism of where they fit into the story, not where the story fits into the news. All we're left with is the narcissism of these writers showing through – one which European readers have grown numb to, and have grown to accept any opinions they register as fact.

According to France's center-right Le Figaro,
Palin will "trigger the eruption of moral intolerance in the campaign." This is actually rather funny, because French elites are notoriously tolerant with everyone, except for those who do not agree with them.

In keeping with the policies versus values theme, the Paris-based leftwing Le Monde says "The choice of Ms Palin has turned the centrist John McCain into the 'heir to Bush'." And the weekly newsmagazine Le Point calls Palin "the fanatic of the American heartland." It describes her speech to the Republican Convention as a "declaration of war [on the] Democrats as well as on the media and elites who dare to raise doubts about her ability to serve as vice-president of the United States."

Unsurprisingly, the opinions expressed by these rags reflects an incredible ignorance of American society. It's the radicalism of the Democrats and their further-fringe hangers on that has placed Republicans in the White House. Moreover, when a French newspaper starts to actually appear to be worried about tolerance, you know that you have a rare and special moment where
they've even found themselves running out of the usual lazy and specious arguments so obvious to those living outside of their bubble.