I’ve criticized Andrew Sullivan as a political commentator. He’s a very bright person but somehow it took him a long long time to realize that American conservatives are nothing like the British Tories he grew up admiring. George W. Bush is not Margaret Thatcher. Sullivan, however, is offering some of the most interesting commentary of this year’s election. He seems to get the Johnah McPalin ticket better than most people.

Case in point:

Again: this is the clear pattern with Palin: she publicly denies reality, insists on repeating that denial and is unable to deal with real world the way psychologically healthy people do. That’s why I called her lies “odd lies.” They are not the lies of a devious politician. They are much more troubling than that. They reflect a psyche unable to process fact when it conflicts with a delusional self-image. She is even worse in this psychotic denialism than Bush. She is a politician who can only survive in a propaganda state.

In another post, Sullivan describes Palin as making George W. Bush’s fundamentalist mindset appear flexible by contrast. Sullivan has clued into the most troubling aspect of Sarah Palin as candidate and governor – her inability to see that she has made mistakes, errors, and misjudgments. The infamous incident in which Bush was asked to name mistakes he’d made and he literally couldn’t think of any springs to mind.

Sarah Palin is a fundamentalist and her lies make sense in that light. Fundamentalist thought reaches a conclusion and never moves beyond it; Sarah Palin is the poster child for that mindset. She reached her conclusion and stopped – she was done thinking, done examining, done wondering. Fundamentalism divides the world into good and bad – if you are a believer, you are good and what you do is guided by God and is hence good. If you are a non-believer, you are bad (right up until you convert in which case all is forgiven). Palin’s attacks on her ex-brother in law, which caused the whole Troopergate nonsense, make perfect sense; in divorcing her sister, he became apostate, dangerous and must be destroyed (one can see a similar dynamic in Utah at times; people who leave the Mormon church are often regarded as dangerous in some, unnameable way).

Fundamentalist lies are almost always odd. Claims, for instance, crop up regularly that evolutionary theory is about to crash and burn and the scientific community is just itching to embrace Creationism (or its red-headed bastard step-child Intelligent Design). That abstinence only education is a roaring success (Bristol Palin notwithstanding). That prayer is more effective than medicine. Such lies are odd precisely because they are at odds with the best available evidence. The more the evidence piles up against them, the more passionately their believers embrace them, tell them, believe them. The evidence, in fact, showing these lies are lies seem to encourage true believers to embrace them even more passionately – a process of self-justification; since believing them is hard work, it must be even more worth it to believe them so the true believer believes even harder. The human psyche is a weird and wonderful place.
The odd lies of Sarah Palin would be nothing more than a distraction, an odd footnote, if not for the fact that she clearly aspires to be more – and that some conservatives are touting her for 2012 as President. From Kagro at Big Orange:

Holy shit, these people are dumb as all fuck. They just cannot help themselves. They’re like spoiled children, and now, they want the entire United States to suffer under their vindictive stupidity . . . Can you even imagine the disasters in store for us if these guileless, instant gratification-addicted, tantrum pitchers get installed in Washington, with the national security apparatus at their command?

That’s the point isn’t it? Palin wants power, the First Dude sees his wife’s office as his rightful property as well and feels no compunction whatsoever to not use her office to get what he wants. I’m just guessing, but my instincts tell me Sarah Palin will be a one term governor and she can go back to festering in the wingnut waters of Wasilla with her whole dysfunctional brood.