The <i>New Yorker</i> Wants Palin Elected?

Can it be that The New Yorker, that bastion of unabashed liberal politics, wants Sarah Palin, that unabashed opponent of liberal politics, elected? Can it be that the magazine would take this position and do it twice in one issue, the current issue -- the very same issue in which it endorses Barack Obama for president? Yes it can -- if it does so ironically, and it is indeed being ironic.

The first instance is in a cartoon by Kim Warp which has two women strolling in New York's Central Park, and one says to the other, "I'm voting Republican just so Tina Fey will keep impersonating Sarah Palin."

The second is in a very serious article by James Wood, Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard, who takes Sarah Palin to task for her brutal mangling of the English language. After expressing exasperation and displeasure for six paragraphs, Wood writes that it, "almost made one wish for a Republican victory in November, so that her bizarre locutions might be available a bit longer to delve into."

But then the professor returns to the task of censuring Palin's odd language, going so far as to reference a most unlikely source to make his case: Sean Hannity of Fox News. Professor Wood cites an interview that Hannity had with Palin, and then relates how Hannity's eyes, "like the headlamps on an Army jeep, went blank, as if registering the abyss we are teetering above."

Hannity's reaction was to Palin's response to a question about Obama's criticism of John McCain's statement that the economy is sound. She said, "Well, it was an unfair attack on the verbiage that Senator McCain chose to use, because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our workforce, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course that is strong, and that is the foundation of our economy. So that was an unfair attack there, again, based on verbiage that John McCain used."

My eyes would have not have gone blank, they would have either glazed over or searched for the exit.