Why Do Liberals Hate Sarah Palin?

While I'm on the topic of Sarah Palin, Mark Belling, a Milwaukee-area talk show host, who has also subbed for Rush Limbaugh, has argued that Palin drives liberals crazy because she's attractive.   Today he discussed another theory from the New York Daily News... that Palin is too happy, and that her happiness offends liberal women, who apparently think she shouldn't be so sunny.   I think both of these make some sense -- if a liberal woman disagrees with Palin politically, it is human nature that cattiness and envy about Palin's looks, happy marriage, five kids, career success, money (now rolling in with book deals and TV deals and speaking fees), will ratchet up disagreement into something close to hatred.   But I don't think that's everything. 

My theory... the hatred for Palin emerged immediately in 2008 when it became widely known that she had given birth to a child with Down's Syndrome.   That was the key fact that was different about her.  That was the fact that was known before America had any chance to gauge the relative sunniness of her personality.  And the liberal left, and particularly liberal left women, can't bear the thought that a woman would willingly accept the responsibility for raising a Down's child and not have an abortion.  It galls them, perhaps because they must feel, on some deeper level, that she's right and they're wrong, that a society that cannot protect the most vulnerable among us isn't a good society, and that a liberalism that sanctions killing the weakest among us sacrifices its moral standing.   The unspoken truth in America is that the constituency of women who have had abortions must be in the tens of millions, and the constituency of women who have aborted a Down's child might be in the millions.   There's a lot of guilt out there, and that guilt, in my judgment, is a main source of the hatred toward Palin. 

Who could hate this picture?   I mean, really, who could hate it?

I'd also bet that Trig Palin explains a good deal of the extraordinary affection and loyalty of his mom's supporters nationwide.   If there were a poll of the parents of Down's Syndrome children -- there are more than 5,000 Down's kids born a year, maybe 50,000 or so a decade, so there must be hundreds of thousands of parents -- I'll bet Sarah Palin gets 90% support.   Unapologetic, unashamed, unconditional love is the really attractive thing about Sarah Palin.