Pre-Debate Reading

I'm a big fan of Steve Chapman, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He took a lot of heat a couple of years ago for daring to suggest to the Republicans that, yes, in fact the war on terrorism is a crime-fighting endeavour despite all the derision of that suggestion by the Bush administration. He is one of the first mainstream news people I've read that came out to challenge the notion that we can't fight terrorism with the rule of law. And he's no hard-core lefty. (Can't find the article, Trib's archives are not free)

Anyway, he wrote a great column for today's Trib about Palin's small-town snobbery.

Go read the article. It starts like this:

Americans disdain snobbery in all its forms except the most popular one: reverse snobbery. Joe Biden would never get up in front of a crowd and suggest that the citizens of Manhattan are morally superior to the residents of Possum Gulch, Ark. But Sarah Palin was happy to tell the Republican National Convention that
the very best people come from the country.

It goes on to challenge the whole myth of life being better in rural America. He also points out that if it were so great there, why does 80% of our population live in metropolitan areas?

I was bitching about this during her speech and wondered why no one else was picking up on the fact that she was insulting the majority of Americans. I only wish more of the media would also point out that she's not really from small town America, she's from suburban America (Wasilla is even on Anchorage's water system). That's a big difference.

Anyway, I hope you'll all be here for our live blogging of the debate tonight. We might not suck at it.