The Daily Plunge

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
-Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
“And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.”
-Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address
Ever since the publication of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, fellow travelers on the left, either consciously or unconsciously, have followed Alinsky’s roadmap to affect sweeping change to American society.
Two points regarding Rules for Radicals are pertinent to Sarah Palin’s story. First, it emphasizes the destruction of the individual to discredit the policy views and beliefs of that individual. Second, it seeks to distract and complete the personal destruction by levying accusations of wrongdoing, whether true or not (known euphemistically in Rules for Radicals as, “Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.”)
Certainly, Palin has been victimized by the particular methods outlined, which, in part, contributed to her resignation from the governorship. Despite the fact that she had accomplished much in her short time as governor, her effectiveness was being sapped by any number of frivolous ethics complaints. It is no coincidence that these complaints coincided with Palin’s rise to prominence. Rules for Radicals anyone?
These distractions, which were costing the state and Palin millions of dollars, were launched in conjunction with a public campaign of personal destruction unprecedented in modern American politics. I won’t go into the litany of rumor, innuendo and outright lies disseminated about Palin; they’re already well documented.
The point is that she is a threat to the status quo, at least the status quo as envisioned by the progressive elites in politics and the media. Palin is a lightning rod for conservative values. She represents everything the elites hate: independence and freedom from government control.
Progressives seek to change the very fabric of our society, using the state as the mechanism to force conformity to their vision of Utopia. As has been mentioned here before, this particular Utopia requires the enslavement of the individual to the state, which is only possible through concerted attacks on the values of a functional society.
A dysfunctional society in which the family is useless and meaningless makes the individual ripe for state control. It is the breakup of the traditional family that was used as a control mechanism for the worst 20th Century tyrants. Palin, on the other hand, represents traditional American values, based on limited government and the supremacy of the family and the individual as the core drivers of society.
Thus she was targeted for destruction. The destruction was almost complete when Palin announced her resignation, or at least it seemed that way. It was apparent that the hits would just keep on coming, so Palin wisely announced that she would take the hits as a private citizen. This provides her the freedom and leeway to deal with those hits on her own terms, without having to fight off trumped up ethics charges that are so effective against a public official. She also has more time to support the causes she believes in.
Will she run for president in 2012? I doubt it, and believe it would be foolish to do so. She draws crowds and fires up the so-called “base” of the Republican Party wherever she goes, so she could be instrumental in turning the tide in 2010. I bet if she hones her speaking chops and policy positions between now and 2016 she could be a formidable force indeed in a presidential election, but not any sooner.