672 Special report: Life in the tribal belt! PART 1—SACRED SCRIPTURE (permalink): Progressives should be very busy at this point in time.

For one thing, progressives should be insisting that major newspapers cover the increasingly ludicrous GOP budget plans in substantial detail. When someone like Tim Pawlenty presents a delusional budget plan, that should qualify as major front-page news. That said, your big newspapers won’t want to go there. Progressives should be pushing such newspapers hard, even if that might jeopardize someone’s future employment.

Even if it might jeopardize some career liberal’s party invites! Even if it makes for awkward chatter at the club!

A second obvious task: Progressives should be brain-storming, every day, looking for ways to speak to average voters. In this morning’s New York Times, Paul Krugman lays out very important facts about the nature of Medicare. But most average voters won’t read that column. Progressives should be looking for ways to bring this sort news to the public. Progressives should be inventing forums average voters will hear about. In conducting these forums, they should be using spokespeople voters will trust.

On Saturday, we saw no sign that major progressives or major career liberals were actually doing such things. At Salon, liberals were instead being encouraged to paw through Sarah Palin’s e-mails in search of some holy grail. In this sad and pathetic report, the “SALON STAFF” reported on the great hunt. Here’s how the foolishness started, ridiculous headlines included:

SALON STAFF (6/11/11): Revelations from the Sarah Palin emails

Highlights from this afternoon's coverage of today's 24,199-page release

At 9 a.m. Juneau time—that's 1 p.m. ET—a small cadre of journalists camped out in Juneau, Alaska, started to open boxes full of previously unpublished emails sent by Sarah Palin while she was governor of Alaska. Here are the highlights of what they've discovered so far.

“Here are the highlights of what they’ve discovered,” these pitiful losers wrote.

(The “SALON STAFF” didn’t sign their names. We can’t say that we blame them.)

What “highlights” had Salon’s pseudo-journalists spotted? In the pitiful mind of today’s career liberal, “revelations” like the following met that test. In each case, the time the revelation came to light is noted:

SALON STAFF: 1:20: The Daily Beast's Shushannah Walshe tweets: "The first e mail I took out of the box. A poem sent to a group including the gov of Alaska.

[…]

2:30: Over at the Mother Jones liveblog, Tim Murphy notes: "Even in professional correspondence, Palin had a propensity for the folksy expressions that have become her hallmark." E.g. "Unflippinbelievable."

[…]

2:40: ABC News's liveblog, updated by Michael Falcone and Shushannah Walshe in Juneau, notes that Palin may have "had her eye on" the VP slot "months" before she was nominated. Falcone and Walshe cite several emails from the summer of 2008, in which supporters encouraged Palin to join the race—all of which were forwarded on by Palin to her aides.

[…]

3:00: [T]he LA Times writes that Sarah Palin and her team were "swamped" (that's Palin's word) with media requests in the weeks following her addition to the McCain ticket. Palin responded to an email in which her communications director listed several of the questions he'd received like this:

"Arghhhh! I am so sorry that the office is swamped like this! Dinosaurs even?! I'll try to run through some of these in my head before responding. And the old, used tanning bed that my girls have used a handful of times in Juneau? Yes, we paid for it ourselves. I, too, will continue to be dismayed at the media and am thankful you and Sharon are not part of the stange [sic] goings-on in the media world of today."

[…]

4:20: At the New York Times, Michael Shear points out an email from early August, 2008, in which Palin complimented a speech given by then-candidate Obama."[Obama] gave a great speech this morn in Michigan," Palin told her aides—before moving on to accuse her soon-to-be-rival of "[stealing] our Energy Rebate $1000 check idea [and] our TC-Alaska gasoline talking points." Her conclusion: "He did say 'yay' to our gasoline. Pretty cool. Wrong candidate."

Among the “highlights” of the day’s “revelations:”

Palin used the term "unflippinbelievable." Some unnamed person once sent her a poem. Palin was swamped with media requests after becoming McCain’s running-mate. And she mistyped “strange” in an e-mail! (That “sic” was included by the eagle-eyed SALON STAFF.)

By the way: Everyone has always known that Palin was being promoted for the VP slot by some supporters in the summer of 2008, even by a few major players. There’s no “revelation” in that. And by the way:

That “TC-Alaska gasoline” was actually the TC-Alaska gasline. Did Shear perhaps introduce a mistake into the text of these emails?

We don’t know. No sane person would check.

Heroically, some Salon commenters complained, quite bitterly, about the utter stupidity of this breathless report. But then, the brainlessness of the modern “liberal” enterprise has rarely been quite so clear. Your nation is in enormous peril. There are many serious actions liberals and progressives ought to be taking, actions in which we might start to make up for decades of “liberal” passivity. But within the modern liberal world, a silly tribal mindset reigns. This is especially true where career liberals sell their wares to us unsuspecting rubes, thereby increasing their publications’ popularity and profits.

Or the profits of their cable channel.

Many ranking liberals encourage you to adopt this silly mind-set. Some of them are simply hustlers; they make money off the gullibility of their tribe, much like Rush and Sean before them. But many are full-blown tribal believers; to them, correction of Sarah Palin’s mistakes carries the full force of scripture. They live in a thoroughly tribal world—you might even say, in the tribal belt. For these shrunken minds, politics consists of one thing: Showing that our tribe includes the good/smart people, while their tribe is very bad/stupid.

Sacred scripture takes many forms. Some people believe in the literal word of the Bible. Others take this same cast of mind to their love for the tribe. On Saturday, some tribal believers at Salon encouraged us to be very dumb. But then, a whole lot of that tribal dumbness has been on display in the past few weeks.

We’re good and we’re smart; they’re bad and they’re stupid. They are the hypocrites; we never are. If you live in the tribal belt, people around you believe this way.

Progressive interests can’t be advanced in this self-pleasuring manner.

Tomorrow: Wouldn’t take yes for an answer