Previously: The cult of the lost cause, part 3

Well, one out of three is just terrible. Bumper stickers on a van parked in front of the Warrensburg post office today.

Like those “W ’04” and “Bush/Cheney ’04” bumper stickers, which we all had to stare at while waiting in traffic for four years, the 2008 republican campaign chum is just not going to go away (I have a line on a “Palin 2012” bumper sticker – I may have to drive an hour or so to get a photo). As long as they’re out there I’ll keep my “Obama ’08” bumper stickers on the vehicle. At least for a little while longer.

Vanity Fair has a satisfying take on the winners, losers, dead enders, and triumphalism in the current aftermath of the 2008 election. There’s one passage in particular:

The Good, the Bad, and Joe Lieberman

by James Wolcott February 2009

…Michael Barone, a once stolid and reliable fixture (co-author of the authoritative Almanac of American Politics and senior writer at U.S. News and World Report) who has slanted so far right in recent years that the straw has come out of his head. A week after the election, in a speech in Chicago, he gave voice to quite a faux pas. “A roomful of academics erupted in angry boos Tuesday morning,” wrote Mike Allen and Andy Barr at Politico in one of the year’s cheeriest ledes, “after political analyst Michael Barone said journalists trashed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee, because ‘she did not abort her Down syndrome baby.’?” Beneath the jovial masks of his fellow journalists lurked a ghoulish zealotry, Barone claimed. “They wanted her to kill that child…. I’m talking about my media colleagues with whom I’ve worked for 35 years.” The boos and angry walkouts provoked by Barone’s aspersions were the first clues that his speech wasn’t going over very well…

Heh. Let the purity purges begin.

And it is good.