From Andrew Sullivan:
"Nugent perfectly channels Palin's appeal to a bewildered, beleaguered, older white America. This appeal is not about policies or even Palin's actual life so much as projection onto someone of an ideal type that represents something deep down in the national psyche. See if you can observe any policy reasons to support Palin in Nugent's poem. Now look at the way he conflates her neurotic fundamentalism and delusional grip on reality with those dry deists who founded this country on Enlightenment principles. Then look at how most see her as "authentic" when she is, of course, less authentic than even John Edwards. And note too the judgment that a governor who quit halfway through her first term represents a "herculean work ethic." We are in Imaginationland here. And boy, how it makes Nugent - and so many others - feel good again, feel as if they have recaptured their country again. They see in this immaculate misconception (with a bonus miraculous birth to another symbol of the pro-life movement, a child with Down Syndrome!) the salve to every anxiety and view all criticism of her as somehow illegitimate, and stemming from a hatred of the real America. Rejecting Palin, of course, is actually a hatred of fake America, with its magical realist narratives and Christianism as a doomed cover for collapsing social norms."
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