Matt Taibbi has an excellent post on his blog about the appeal of Sarah Palin. He argues that previous cultural warriors such as Rush Limbaugh actually present information to support their arguments on various issues, however fallacious the information and trivial the issue, whereas Sarah Palin tends to discuss issues that revolve around herself and her personal life, such as the photo used by Newsweek for their recent cover story on Palin. In short, the Palin political narrative centers on the various assholes Palin encounters and conquers, and that’s something everyone can relate to, because,

Complaining about the assholes we interact with on a daily basis is the #1 eternal pastime of the human race. We all do it, and we get to do it every day, because the world is full of assholes. Me personally, I waste an enormous amount of time seething over people [. . .]. We all get into furious arguments at work that make us want to explode in self-righteous fury (in my office dramas I always realize I was actually the asshole a day or so later) and when we get home from work, this is usually what our loved ones hear about for at least the first hour or so.

Therefore,

[. . .] Katie Couric’s notorious Palin interview last year really was a cheap shot. After all, Katie was trying to nail Palin — which is mean! Who among us can’t sympathize with the experience of being sandbagged by some slick professional rival who catches you in a moment of weakness and, instead of lending a helping hand, drives a fireplace poker through your eye? [. . .]
You’d have to be thinking about the broader picture, about the fact that the president of the United States ought not to be a drooling yahoo [. . .] who thinks living near Canada counts as foreign policy experience, to not see what an asshole Katie Couric was being.

[. . .]

With Going Rogue, the 2012 reality show has already begun. As brainless political theater, she can’t be topped. It’s just too bad for conservatives that she happens to be unsustainably divisive and, as Newsweek points out, a really good bet to permanently marginalize the Republican party by reducing it to a pissed-off, semi-coherent mob that repulses independent voters on a visceral level. To paraphrase John Doman’s Deputy Ops Rawls character from The Wire, she’s “brilliant — fuckin’ shame it’s gonna end our careers, but still.”

The whole thing is worth a read, and bonus points for quoting The Wire.