Shopping

Ordinarily, I wouldn't have anything to say about La Palin; she's a huckster and a grifter, and her "policy" positions are laughable.

But recently there was an interesting outbreak of Anti-Palinism over her claims about... grocery prices.

She said that grocery prices were rising and that the recent move by the Fed to flood the markets with dollars ("QE2") would push grocery and other prices even higher.

She was immediately attacked by Anti-Palinists who insisted that "statistics show" that there is no food price inflation, and she is just wrong.

This was immediately countered by people who actually shop for groceries, who, for the most part, assert anecdotally, from their own experience, that indeed grocery prices have been going up, in some cases sharply, and all the national statistics are meaningless at the shopper's individual checkout stand.

In other words, on this issue, La Sarah was and is right.

What I found interesting about the controversy was how rigidly Anti-Palinists insisted Palin was wrong about the rise in grocery prices, regardless of any experiential evidence to the contrary. It absolutely did not matter whether shoppers were paying more for groceries, Palin was WRONG and that was that.

And this attitude intrigued me because it is a version of the Languid Indifference to the Plight of the Masses in this Endless Recession that I have repeatedly taken issue with. Languid Indifference, of course, is how the Dems and especially the White House have approached the indecencies of massive unemployment, bankruptcy and foreclosure among the Masses -- in stark contrast to their immediate (and generous) responses to the collapse of the financial sector and major industries.

Here we had a situation in which Sarah Palin was demagoguing the hell out of an issue that affects millions and millions of everyday people -- which is why she could demagogue it in the first place -- and her opponents simply denied the facts she was citing which in turn denied the experience of millions upon millions of Americans every day.

No wonder Dems lose. No wonder "Progressives" get nowhere.

You simply cannot deny experience this way because you don't like the politician making hay with the truth of that experience.

What you do is acknowledge the truth of that experience and offer a strategy to deal with it. A better strategy than the idiocies of Sarah and her TeaBaggers.

Is there no political education on the Left in this country at all?