Advertisement

Aaron Sorkin on Sarah Palin: She’s worse than Michael Vick

Share

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Aaron Sorkin has gotten all riled up about Sarah Palin, which is surely bad news for Sorkin, since it means that he’s spending entirely too much time watching ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ reality TV show. But it’s good news for the rest of us, since if you read his new, wonderfully OMG! post in the Huffington Post, you can almost imagine Sorkin trying to figure out how to turn Palin into a character in his next play or movie.

Let’s just say that the rhetorical steam literally wafts off your computer as you read the profanity-studded rant. Appalled by seeing Palin kill and carve up a caribou during a segment of her show, Sorkin compares the program to a snuff film, dubs Palin a ‘witless bully’ and a ‘phony pioneer girl’ and argues that he is unable to ‘make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing.’ Just to make sure we know where he stands, Sorkin ends the piece by saying: ‘Sarah Palin is deranged and The Learning Channel should be ashamed of itself.’

Advertisement

Having hung around campaign operatives for years, especially during his ‘West Wing’ days, Sorkin is shrewd enough to know that Palin had a very media-savvy reason for killing the caribou, knowing it would inspire from liberals exactly the sort of outrage that Sorkin is demonstrating. As he put it in the post: ‘That was the first moose ever murdered for political gain.’

So why bother to get all head up about it? In fact, Sorkin’s whole post offers a perfect illustration of the psychological difference between liberals and conservatives. While Palin blithely takes action, without any worries about its consequences (sort of like invading Iraq without ever finding any weapons of mass destruction), Sorkin frets about the consequences of her actions, his abhorrence riddled with guilt and self-flagellation (sort of like the Obama White House caving in to GOP demands to give the wealthiest Americans a tax break).

Much of Sorkin’s post is given over not to bashing Palin, but tying himself into knots trying to defend himself against charges of hypocrisy because he eats meat and has shoes made of leather. Sorkin admits to eating dead animals, but argues that he doesn’t take any pleasure in it, saying ‘if I were picked to be the one to kill them in some kind of Lottery-From-Hell, I wouldn’t do a little dance of joy while I was slicing the animal apart.’

I hate to break the news to Sorkin, but hunting and fishing really aren’t anything worth getting all that worked up about. Most Americans love to imagine themselves as outdoorsmen, which is why for years, zillions of people drove gas-guzzling SUVs, even though they never once took a spin on a dirt road. I grew up in the South, where it was a big treat to go out with my uncles, liberals all of them, either hunting in the Everglades or deep-sea fishing in the Gulf Stream. To say that hunting is torture is a sure way to stereotype yourself as a pointy-headed elitist.

If Sorkin is smart enough to realize that Palin wants to provoke him into a rabid rant, then he should be smart enough to figure out that he’s just playing into the hands of a pretty damn shrewd media manipulator. Sorkin has one of the world’s most eloquent big mouths, but this is one time when he should keep it zipped.

-- Patrick Goldstein

Advertisement