Randy Bodice Rippers
by digby
Roy Edroso has a tour de farce in Alternet called 10 Shameless Right-Wing Tributes to Ayn Rand That Should Make Any Sane Person Blush:
My favorite:
Sarah Palin as Dagny Taggart
If modern life has taught us anything, it’s that science can always make things worse. What if, for example, we were — by grafting — able to create a monstrous hybrid of Ayn Rand and the very worst of American conservatism?
“This is a real life Dagny Taggart who built herself up from nothing,” writes Living Jersey. He is speaking of…Sarah Palin.
“[Palin] is an American original,” sighs View from the Right, “almost like, say, an Ayn Rand heroine, Dagny Taggart, the beautiful young woman who runs a transcontinental railroad.” (Actually Palin only ran a car wash — and badly — but you get the idea.)
“I speculated a while back that Sarah Palin was positioning herself as a new Rush Limbaugh,” says Amused Cynic in “Sarah Palin as Dagny Taggart,” “probably not a radio personality, but something like Rush, a rallying point, a Joan of Arc sort of figure, Neo in The Matrix.” “Sarah Palin sounds like Dagny Taggart,” said Ben Barrack.
Commenters are all over it: “BTW, does anyone else see vague similarities between Palin and Dagny Taggart?” “Sarah shares a lot of the plainspoken, free market tenets of Dagny Taggart.” “…she is the embodiment of Dagny Taggart.” “Sarah Palin is Dagny Taggart incarnate,” etc.
Despite her self-evident tendency to make a virtue of selfishness, some Randroids don’t see the relevance of the early-retiring former governor to Objectivism. (“Interest any which way in Sarah Palin, from my perspective, is the litmus test for one’s irrelevance to me and my life,” sniffs Save The Humans.) But that hardly matters. For the new conservative Randians, Palin and Rand share the one key attribute that trumps everything else — they can both pull a crowd in election season. And as far as philosophy goes, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” isn’t exactly Ayn Rand, but — for both the purists and the political fixers — it’s close enough.
I think even Ayn Rand would blush at that crapola and that’s saying something.
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