I saw this item at Reason.com the other day.  It’s a short piece reflecting on a video of a speech by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talking about how one’s “sensitivity to disgust” is supposedly some sort of predictor of one’s political views.  I haven’t watched the whole video yet, but the speech was given at the Museum of Sex in New York City, so some amount of its content seems designed to appeal to the audience that would be attending a speech in that location.

Jim Epstein at Reason.com summarizes the key points of the speech as follows:

“Morality isn’t just about stealing and killing and honesty, it’s often about menstruation, and food, and who you are having sex with, and how you handle corpses,” says NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who is author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics.

Haidt argues that our concern over these victimless behaviors is rooted in our biology. Humans evolved to feel disgusted by anything that when consumed makes us sick. That sense of disgust then expanded “to become a guardian of the social order.”

This impulse is at the core of the culture war. Those who have a low sensitivity to disgust tend to be liberals or libertarians; those who are easily disgusted tend to be conservative.

The full video of the speech is available at the above link.

My reaction to all this is that it 1). depends on how one defines conservative, and 2). it depends on what kinds of things one labels or considers to be examples of disgust.

With respect to point 1)., I think that a large portion of the conservative coalition is rather heavily libertarian-leaning, and it just makes more sense for us to identify as conservative and vote for Republicans because  the Libertarian party seems doomed to remain a fringe party, at least as long as that party’s leadership continues to endorse an isolationist or head-in-the-sand approach to foreign policy.  Now while it may be the case that many traditional “social conservatives” have a “high sensitivity to disgust” with respect to issues of sex, I’m not even convinced that that is as widely the case as Haidt’s remarks suggest.  I’ve heard socially-conservative Christian ministers talk about sex in ways that show they may have a better understanding of the variety of human sexual experience than many academics who claim to be experts on the subject.

On the other hand, with respect to point 2)., I can find many, many examples of “disgust” fueling the attitudes of liberals and leftists.  One could begin by looking at their intense hatred of Sarah Palin and anyone like her.  Some of that hatred, I would argue, was fueled by a disgust at the lives of anyone who doesn’t live the life of a modern liberal in a major coastal city.

Most modern liberals are disgusted by hunting, by the people who shop at Wal-Mart, by the petroleum industry, by the food industry, by the military, by evangelical Christians, and by the reality of life in small-town, rural America.  James Taranto and British Philosopher Roger Scruton call it “oikophobia”: it is a worldview which accepts or excuses the transgressions of select special-interest groups or of non-western cultures, while it judges the familiar by a harsh standard and condemns them with expressions of disgust at the nature of their lives.

Just caught this on Yahoo!

Washington Post fooled by fake story of Sarah Palin joining Al-Jazeera

How eager are our friends in the legacy media to believe the worst about this accomplished reformer.

As we’ve noted on more than one occasion, all too many on the gay left — as well as some of their straight allies — are ever ready to call opposition to gay marriage as hate speech. Their reaction to prominent defenders of traditional marriage, like Chick-fil-A’s president Dan Cathy, resembles that of their reaction to certain prominent Republicans, from Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to Newt Gingrich in the 1990s to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin in the 2000s, to the Koch Brothers in the current decade.

Some have developed quite a habit of using harsh language to decry what they describe as “hate”.  Indeed, more often than not, their language seems far more hateful than that of the supposed haters.  Like the loyal citizens of George Orwell’s Oceania, they seem to delight in venting their negative emotions upon those deemed enemies of the party.  Yet, their venting does seem to last longer than two minutes.

Mr. Cathy’s unapologetic advocacy of traditional marriage made him — and his chicken chain — an appropriate target to which certain leftists could direct their venom.  This whole hullabaloo seemed more about the need of some to vent than about the merits (or lack thereof) of the target’s arguments.

No wonder that Glenn Reynolds, like a good number of social moderates and libertarians, doesn’t think the response to this venting, AKA Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day . . .

can be interpreted as opposition to gay marriage, so much as a response to bullying. But I do think that the bullying has probably tainted the gay-marriage brand, which is too bad. The gay-marriage argument is already winning — there’s no need to engage in Rahm Emanuel-style attacks, and doing so merely invites pushback. And, frankly, I’m happy to live in a country where people’s response to bullying is to push back.

It is those very “Rahm Emanuel-style attacks” that served as the tipping point for many social libertarians (including yours truly).  As blogging law professor William A. Jacobsen put it:

The threat to free speech represented by the actions of the liberal political leaderships in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia should be the ultimate wake up call. (more…)

This is a screen capture I just made of my search on HRC’s blog for “Dan Savage“:

It has been a full month (and three days) since Mr. Savage used “faggot” as a derogatory slur.  And still HRC still hasn’t spoken up.

And yet when Sarah Palin’s grandson used the same slur and his mother said (on her reality show) that this suggests she’s “doing a terrible job disciplining Tripp. I know he’s going to continue to push the boundaries and push the limits.” Seems she’s acknowledging this is not a good term to use.

Maybe she should talk to Dan Savage.   Someone’s been doing a terrible job disciplining that bully; he continues to push the boundaries, push the limits.

The folks at HRC’s blog found the Palin episode worthy of a blog post, reminding us “this isn’t the first time the anti-gay phrase has landed one of the Palin daughters in hot water. Two years ago, Willow herself used the same slur on Facebook.”  (H/t reader Just Me in the comments.)

When a three-year-old utters the word, “faggot,” HRC sees fit to issue a blog post.  When a grown man uses it to slur his political adversaries, the supposed gay advocacy outfit is silent.  Wonder why that is.

UPDATE: Did 3-year-old really use the gay slur? (Via Mark Steyn.)

The editors at Yahoo! consider this the top news item? They even consider it worthy of reporting?

Their obsession with Sarah Palin (and her family) runs deep.

Back in the 1990s (and into this century), whenever conservative men criticized the then-First Lady within earshot of her partisans, they quickly lashed out against us, telling us how afraid we were of strong women.

Such folks quickly forget how many Hillary critics in the 1990s had been, in the 1980s, enthusiastic supporters of then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a Mrs. (now Lady) Margaret Thatcher who just happened to be a woman.  And some of us also admired an American woman whom for some reason I have long called Lady Jeane, the Democrat Ronald Reagan tapped to serve as his Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick.

As I read Peter Collier’s biography of this great lady, Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick.  I am reminded that despite her intellectual acumen, Ambassador Kirkpatrick was subject in the 1980s to the same sort of attacks, another more charismatic conservative woman would face a quarter-century later.

Gloria Steinem called the ambassador a “female impersonator”.  Wendy Doniger quipped that Sarah Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

How ready some folks on the left who see us as somehow sexist when we don’t love the women they love.  Yet, when conservative women rise in public favor, some liberals are quick to criticize them — and question even the reality of their sex.  You would think feminists would welcome women who succeed in endeavors once reserved for men — and earn the admiration of men, particularly conservative men.

Why do accomplished conservative women arose such ire on the left?

May build on this post later.  Was just at a brunch where a very intelligent man refused to accept that Sarah Palin had a record of accomplishment as Governor of Alaska.  Why is it that some Democrats (and a few Republicans) refuse to acknowledge — or even familiarize themselves with this woman’s record?

Is it because she is a woman?

I mean, when John McCain tapped her as his running mate, she enjoyed a 75% approval rating . . . among Alaska Democrats.  When Katie Couric interviewed the then-Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, the CBS News anchor didn’t once ask her interlocutor about her record.  Or what she had done to win support among Democrats as well as Republicans.

Do these folks just assume that a woman can’t stand up to a corrupt political establishment and effect real reforms?

If, back in 2008, our legacy media had taken the time to look into Sarah Palin’s actual record in Alaska politics, three names of corrupt politicians would forever be associated with her, Frank Murkowski, Greg Renkes and Randy Ruedrich.  And the reason we would associate their names with hers was not because she turned a blind eye to their double-dealing, but because she exposed it.

She stood up against corruption in her own party.  Each of those men is a Republican.  As she put it in her post yesterday on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government:

Barack Obama and I both served in political office in states with a serious corruption problem. Though there is a big difference between serving as the CEO of a city, then a state, and regulating domestic energy resources, and being a liberal Community Organizer, bear with me on the comparison. The difference between my record and Barack Obama’s is that I fought the corrupt political machine my entire career (and I have twenty years of scars to prove it) on the local, state, and national level. But Obama didn’t fight the corruption he encountered. He went along with it to advance his career.

Read the whole thing.

And yet our friends in the legacy media bought into the claim that that career Chicago poll was some new kind of politician.  They neither asked nor looked for any evidence to buttress his claims.

Sarah Palin, by contrast, had a real record of reform.  It’s just that some journalists thought her tanning bed of greater interest.

But, we’ve been through this before.  That said, it serves as an important reminder about necessary battlefield preparation for the coming presidential contest.

NB:  Tweaked the title to make it less clunky

“Apparently“, writes Rob at JoshuaPundit, “Rush Limbaugh meant what he said when he told his listeners, ‘Those advertisers who no longer want your business, fine, we’ll replace them.‘”

The conservative talker, who has apologized for slurring a woman who defended the administration’s contraception mandate, is taking in stride the handful of companies no longer advertising on his program:

Less than an hour after AOL officially became the eighth company to pull its ads from Limbaugh’s radio show, the conservative host cracked a joke [then] continued his broadcast in typical, pontificating fashion. . . .

While the conservative host said that the advertisers’ disaffiliation was a “shame,” at the end of the day he just doesn’t care.

“Those advertisers who no longer want your business, fine,” Limbaugh continued. “We’ll replace them. It’s simple, really.”

You know the Limbaugh-haters should have left well enough alone when the talker apologized.  I think that’s called quitting when you’re ahead, right?  Well, as they continue to demonize the popular broadcaster, his standing among conservatives will only strengthen.

Rush is not the only conservative to see a coordinated attack backfire.  Seems that HBO, despite massive promotions, had trouble scrounging up an audience for “Game Change”.  Only a handful of its subscribers, writes John Nolte, “bothered to tune into one of the most hyped movies in the history of television. Glitzy, glamorous premieres, all kinds of free publicity through the cable news outlets, controversy galore, and yet ‘Pawn Stars’ kicked its ass.”  He quotes the Washington Post:

One massive marketing and GOP-undies-bunching campaign later, the unveiling ofHBO’s Sarah Palin flick, “Game Change,” attracted 2.123 million viewers Saturday night at 9. HBO says “Game Change” brought in the biggest original-movie opening crowd in about eight years.

To put the audience in perspective, that’s slightly fewer people than sat down the next afternoon at 2 to watch a rerun episode of History’s “Pawn Stars” (2.129 million viewers). (more…)

Don Surber was on a roll this past weekend. Glenn linked his must-read post on the videos linking Barack Obama to radical law professor Derrick Bell:

This video will not bring down President Obama. His sorry record of no accomplishments will. We cannot afford to live in 2008 and mope about Obama not being vetted. The job before us is to show that the last 3+ years have sucked and 4 more years of Obama — a red-blooded, true Christian American who was born in Hawaii — will suck even harder.

While over at Surber’s site, I caught up on some of his recent posts, including this critique of Rick Santorum’s organization, a piece on the record level of polar ice, an alert to an Obama campaign attack on Sarah Palin, and the video included at the end of this post.

And he post the chart “Obama used to sell the $787 billion stimulus” contrasting the unemployment rate projected when he put forward the nearly $800 billion program with the latest figures.  Not only is the unemployment rate 2.3% higher than the administration forecast, but it’s even higher than the level expected “without” the “recovery plan.”

He contends the Palin ad shows that the president runs “on diversion” that the Democrat “is running for re-election as a troll.”  Do hope my fellow Republicans follow the lead of another conservative blogger, Jim Hoft and focus on another Democratic attempt at diversion, illegal robocalls targeting Republican Congressmen who just happen to be on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) hit list.

If the Democrats are so confident of victory this November, how come they keep trying to distract voters? (more…)

You have to wonder about people in politics who define themselves by their animosities.  Some people seem to spend the better parts of their day obsessing about Sarah Palin and other right-wingers who figure prominently in their demonology.  If you really hated this accomplished reformer, why would you want to subject yourself to seeing her picture every day on your wall calendar:

WTF stands for Winning the Future, right? We conservatives tend to put up Ronald Reagan Wall Calendars — not those mocking Jimmy Carter.

It’s not just the publishers of this wall calendar who obsess over the former Alaska Governor. As Byron York reported last month, “‘Game Change,’ the movie version of the 2008 campaign best-seller that premieres” next week on HBO, has a peculiarly Palin focus:

The book, by journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, focused equally on the bitter contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, and the troubled McCain-Palin ticket that went down to defeat in November ’08.

But the movie is about just one topic: Sarah Palin. Director Jay Roach jettisoned most of the book’s riveting political story so he could focus on the tumultuous period in which John McCain chose the then-governor of Alaska as his running mate. (more…)

A few days ago, Bruce alerted me to Pat Dollard’s tweet reminding us that current MSNBC host Al Sharpton once referenced “Greek homos.”  After a quick google search, I learned that the left-leaning pundit also used a term that caused the folks at HRC to get their panties all in a bunch when the daughter of a prominent Republican celebrity used it.

Although I could find no reference online indicating that HRC rebuked the bombastic Reverend for his use of the term, they did honor him in 2005 as one of their “Top 10 Straight Advocates for Gay and Transgender Rights“.

Now, people can surely change.  And perhaps HRC did fault Mr. Sharpton when he made these statements and their rebukes are no longer online.  But, that man did, in recent years, defend a prejudiced pastor who used anti-gay rhetoric.

Wonder why HRC and GLAAD are not calling for him to publicly rebuke his past statements in order to retain his post on MSNBC.  I mean, if they called on Sarah Palin to apologize publicly for her teenage daughter’s remark.

Just sayin’ . . .

Commenting on a Newsweek cover designed to make Michele Bachmann look demonic, Michelle Malkin posts (with numerous examples on  ”The liberal media fetish of demonizing conservative women and their looks goes back years.”

It is a fascinating phenomenon.  Wouldn’t feminists want conservative women to succeed to show females earning the accolades of the Republican rank and file and demonstrating a capacity to lead?

Yesterday, Jim Geraghty reprinted account that Mike Allen had included in his newsletter from Politico about a meeting of hedge-fund billionaires in New York where “venture capitalist Ken Langone . . . implored New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to reconsider and seek the GOP presidential nomination.”  Several in the audience indicated that they were Republican show voted for Obama because they “couldn’t live with Sarah Palin”:

Many said they were severely disappointed in the president. The biggest complaint was what several called “class warfare.” They said they didn’t understand what they had done to deserve that: If you want to have a conversation about taxation, have a conversation. But a president shouldn’t attack his constituents — he’s not the president of some people, he’s president of all the people. Someone mentioned Huey Long populism.

Well, does seem the media did their job, destroying the reputation of Mrs. Palin while ignoring the background of Mr. Obama, leading Geraghty to comment:

But not all of us are shocked and stunned about Obama’s class warfare and his demonization of you and the sense that he doesn’t think of himself as your president too. Some of us spent two years telling anyone who would listen that he was a lot more liberal than his bland, blank-slate rhetoric suggested. And was all of this worth it because you “couldn’t live” with Sarah Palin? Really?

Emphasis added.  We had news media rifling through Mrs. Palin’s garbage, yet uninterested in checking out Mr. Obama’s story, so much did they swoon over his narrative.  And now, bit by bit, we’re learning not just how far left he’s always been, but also how he’s misrepresented his own background.

Many in our mainstream media have taken Barack Obama’s word as gospel.  And when it comes to subjecting him to the same sort of scrutiny to which they subject Republicans, particularly Republican women, well, they’ve just taken a pass.

So, MSNBC has suspended its senior political analyst Mark Halperin for using a derogatory synonym for wiener to describe the president.  Calling “Halperin’s crack . . . crude and dumb,” Greg Sargent says, “it doesn’t deserve indefinite suspension.”

Two years ago, over on CBS, David Letterman said that then-governor of Alaska had the style of a “slutty flight attendant” and joked about a baseball player having sex with hee teenage daughter.  The former funnyman was not suspended and still appears on the air.

Guess MSNBC must just have stricter standards for political discourse than CBS.

It seems that Sarah Palin arrived just in time for the Bush-hating left.  In 2008, as the much (and mostly unfairly) maligned President of the United States was preparing to head off into a constitutionally-mandated retirement, his political party nominated the charismatic governor of Alaska as its vice presidential candidate.

And ever since, those who once projected their inner demons on George W. Bush found a new target for their wrath.  He might be going into retirement, but they would still have a Republican to revile.

So much has their demonology of Sarah Palin developed that her haters remain clueless how this accomplished reformer earned so much respect among Republican reformers — even before John McCain tapped the Alaskan as his running mate.  Indeed, mainstream media outlets were so convinced they’d find dirt in her recently released e-mails that they dispatched as many as thirty reporters to Juneau to sift through them.

They were simply not prepared to discover e-mails which showed a focused and energetic executive doing her job.  The emails, as the editors of the Richmond Times-Dispatch put it, “have redounded to the author’s benefit and have left her critics dismayed” (via Instapundit).

They were dismayed because the e-mails did not confirm their conviction of her incompetence.  Reality did not conform to their narrative.

Maybe if they had actually bothered studying her record as governor of the Last Frontier, they might realize that she reached across the partisan divide to accomplish real change for Alaska, where she was, to borrow an expression, a kind of a post-partisan politician.  They wouldn’t have been so dismayed had they taken the time to study her record and consider her accomplishments, instead of viciously responding to her nomination.

. . . to, as Bill O’Reilly put it, sift ”through 24,000 pages of emails written by then-Gov. Sarah Palin?”

And she’s a former governor.  And not now a presidential candidate.  I wonder how many reporters are investigating how “a radical left-wing special interest group gets a big boost in federally funded grants and contracts after one of its most visible leaders is appointed to a key White House job.”  Or Operation Gunwalker.

Or Obama’s background.

As I pointed out in a post earlier today, when on John King’s CNN show yesterday, Obama strategist David Axelrod offered up this whopper, “This president was scrutinized, more perhaps than any candidate ever had been.”  Perhaps clueless about the latest Sarah Palin-inspired media frenzy, King chose not to challenge the Democrat on his assertion.

Perhaps, Mr. King should join me in subscribing to the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary.  Yesterday, in that e-newsletter, John Fund, commenting on said frenzy asked us to

Contrast this with the level of interest that reporters have shown in Barack Obama’s lack of a paper trail during the 2008 campaign and afterwards. No, I’m not talking about the issue of his birth certificate. I am thinking of his college records and papers; his application to the Illinois bar to become a lawyer; his complete list of clients while he was in private practice; and his records from his service in the Illinois State Senate. Almost none of this has been released in whole or in part by Mr. Obama, and requests have been airily dismissed.

And then there are Mr. Obama’s longtime associations with very left-wing political figures and foundations. With the exception of journalist Stanley Kurtz, author of a richly documented new book called “Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism,” almost no one has been interested in those ties.

Do hope Mr. King asks Mr. Axelrod about this missing paper trail and these associations the next time he has him on CNN (and he does seem to be a frequent quest on that network).  In the meanwhile, it would be nice if other reporters at CNN started subjecting the incumbent to the same sort of scrutiny it subjects Mrs. Palin.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  The Griper may not “like to use this type of argument but” remains “certain that in this case if Sarah Palin were a liberal and the right held her up to this scrutiny there’d be accusations of sexual prejudice flying all over the nation.”  Indeed.

UPDATE:  Ann Althouse offers some perspective on the nature of the scrutiny the media have made into Mrs. Palin’s affairs:

In the run up to the receipt of the boxes of xeroxes, air time was devoted to speculating about what might be in those emails. Most notable — it’s in the middle of the “Daily Show” montage — was the suspicion that the governor’s husband was secretly running the show, pulling the strings. (You know, the shameful sexism.) But there was absolutely nothing that looked at all like that. Maybe there’s another montage that could be made of these reporters spelling out clearly what was disproved by the emails. But I think what’s they did was dribble out statements like “no smoking gun yet” — seemingly expecting that we’d gradually lose interest and move on to something else.

Read the whole thing.   Via Instapundit.

In a thoughtful piece on the media frenzy surrounding the release of the “13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska“, Toby Harden gets one thing wrong:

The email release could mark the end of a chapter of what conservatives have termed “Palin Derangement Syndrome” [PDS]. Her enemies in the media appear to have overplayed their hand.

He may well right that the accomplished former governor “seems likely to emerge from the scrutiny of the 24,000 pages, contained in six boxes and weighing 275 pounds, with her reputation considerably enhanced” at least to those concerned with her actual record.  But, Mrs. Palin had already developed a solid reputation in her home state — well before John McCain tapped her as his running mate fewer than three years ago.

Many of those afflicted with PDS never paid much attention to that record.  Recall, that in her celebrated interview with the then-Republican nominee for Vice President of the United States, Katie Couric never once asked the charismatic conservatives about her record in office.

Indeed, you talk to most of those afflicted with PDS and they repeat some talking points about earmarks Palin asked for when Mayor of Wasilla.  Or books she supposedly wanted banned from the local library.  They’ve always given short shrift to her actual record.  Or the record approval she once enjoyed.  Among Alaska Democrats.

Palin Derangement Syndrome is not a rational reaction to an imperfect understanding of Sarah Palin’s record in office, but an irrational antagonism to a charismatic conservative woman.  Facts didn’t matter to their initial opposition to this strong woman.  And they won’t cause some Palin-haters to reassess their animus.

Via Big Government.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Rick Patel quips:

It does seem like Sarah Palin is the Emanuel Goldstein of the American left. She provides them with their two minutes of hate every day. You can imagine them all together in a howling mob.

It does seem hatred of Sarah Palin is part of the doctrine of the church of liberalism.

. . . putting more effort into combing through Sarah Palin’s e-mails than they did combing through the details of the “stimulus” and Obamacare legislation — and those were actual bills considered and passed by Congress and signed into law by the president.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Palin is the former governor of one state and is not, at present, a candidate for any public office.

UPDATE:  A nice rejoinder to the flurry of MSM interest in Mrs. Palin’s e-mails:

Other former vice-presidential candidates or potential presidential candidates whose entire email archive from their time in office has been released so the press (or just people who read the WaPo online) can comb through looking for something interesting

. . . .

You know, I can’t think of any. Nope, not a single one.

Via Instapundit.