Kathleen Parker has been enjoying quite the surge of relevance these days. She said that Sarah Palin was unqualified and then said that all that God was turning the Republicans into a fringe party. Well, there's some stunning political acumen!
Parker has been syndicated in the Trib for years. Long before she got her job at the Washington Post, I was reading her. It was Kathleen Parker, as a matter of fact, that brought me to my most famous (in my own mind) axiom: it's OK to be an asshole if you're not stupid. And it's OK to be stupid if you're not an asshole. It is never OK to be a stupid asshole. Guess which of these I think Kathleen Parker is?
To wit:
A column in which she avers that gay people who want kids do so out of profound narcissism because:
As long as children are viewed as mere extensions of our selves, put here to satisfy some narcissistic need for self-actualization, it is easy to suppose that our needs and their needs are complementary.
She leaves as understood why it's different for straight people.
Another column in which she said the main reason for opposing Intelligent Design as a school subject is because:
Atheists, secularists and others whose aversion to religion sometimes borders on fanaticism — there's no dogma like no dogma — see in Bush's remark a subversive move toward replacing Darwin's theory of evolution with a creationist view of man's origin.
It's got nothing to do with how Intelligent Design is NOT science.
And my all time favorite, low-brow pop culture is responsible for Abu Ghraib:
The images from Abu Ghraib, now irreversibly tattooed on the Arab brain, were every frat-house cliche magnified. The human pyramid, males mooning, masturbation, bags over heads. What we saw, at least in part, was "The Farrelly Brothers Do Baghdad."
Oh, also if you're reading this and you voted for Barack Obama, Kathleen Parker says you probably did it because you're a big fat narcissist.
If we want to talk about a conservative speaking the truth about the Republican Party, I can think of a WAY better example than Kathleen Fucking Parker.
****Edited to add: The reason those of us on the left should be leery of extolling Kathleen Parker is because once she's done basking in her newfound credibility, she WILL start writing about gay marriage and adoption by gay couples and intelligent design and the American Assault on Masculinity again. Either she is a credible source for those of us on the left, or she isn't. She isn't.
