Regular readers might not have noticed, but we entertained about four-thousand extra visitors yesterday as a result of Andrew Sullivan snarky link to this ten-month-old post in which I noted parallels between Sarah Palin and the Biblical Queen Esther, expanding on a meme that a variety of mainstream news outlets (e.g., CNN and the New York Times — hardly friends to her candidacy) had already picked up, just a week after her nomination as McCain’s VP. Even before the Dish’s link (in which he likens those of us with religiously conservative viewpoints to dogs), the Palin/Esther post was already one of my top all-time hit-generators.

I might write it slightly differently today, however the basic idea still stands up:

Iran poses a pressing, murderous, existential threat to the Jewish people… just as its precursors, the Persians, did in Esther’s time. Nearly everyone agrees, left, right and center, that the whole thing is wildly risky and unsolvable by conventional means (negotiation, military strikes, economic sanctions, what-have-you)… just as in Esther’s time. Back last September, an apparently Godly woman seemed called to take on the problem directly where others had only made excuses for, or pushed off confronting the reality of a Hitler-in-our-time, bent on ushering in the 12th Mahdi and perpetrating a pending microwave-quickie Holocaust (six million dead in six minutes instead of six years).

As in Esther’s time, there seemed to be, with Sarah Palin, last September, someone both able and inclined to look at the sweep of ongoing history with a Biblical worldview, ask God’s help in all humility to guide her hand in shaping it to His Will, take a bold moral stand against obvious evil and, in so doing, take on extreme personal risks of humiliation and political ‘death’ as well as the collective risks necessary to avoid yet another mass-annihilation of innocents.

Much has changed about Ms. Palin’s political prospects since then, of course. Little has changed with regards to Iran and Israel except that the new administration seems rigidly determined to view Ahmadinejad through Chamberlainian lenses no matter what is actually going on. The time on the clock is shorter; both sides even more determined. That’s about it.

So here’s the thing. Sullivan and others seem to be spilling an enormous amount of ink (that post was but one of several he made yesterday) trashing Sarah Palin — again. The reaction — once again — is far, far out of proportion to what a soon-to-be retired political figure would warrant if she were in fact as unviable as their misogynistic and thinly veiled anti-Christian vitriol would suggest.

And here’s the other thing. The line Sullivan and others seem to be taking in trashing Palin revolves (again) around her ‘incompetence’ and lack of ‘qualifications’ for the presidency. It’s not hard to see how that stems from a combination of insecurity, simple bigotry, and projection. They can question Palin’s qualifications all they want. Such scrutiny is a good thing. It’s just that… the only thing she’s running for right now is housewife whereas the most basic vetting of their guy remains shockingly lax, six months into his first term:

We still don’t have his birth certificate.
We don’t have his Selective Service registration.
We still don’t have his passport and travel trail.
We still don’t have any of his records from Occidental College.
We still don’t have the rest of his Columbia records.
We still don’t have his Harvard papers – none, zip, zilch, nada.
…
What is this man hiding?

We’re not dogs, Mr. Sullivan. We’re your fellow citizens. Tolerance and standards need to work both ways.

UPDATE: As goes the leader, so go the acolytes.

Obama himself insists that he’s guided by nothing other than a cool-headed pragmatism. Indeed, Obama has a grating habit of describing any position not his own as “ideological,” as if his is the only sober, practical understanding of the problems we face. Just days before he was inaugurated, he gave a speech in Baltimore in which he proclaimed, “What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry — an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.”

So ideologues — i.e. millions of Americans who disagree with his policies on principle — belong in a list along with bigots and dim bulbs. At home, this attitude has allowed him to dismiss opponents of socialized medicine and the government takeover of various industries as “ideologues,” and critics of trillions in debt-fueled spending as small-minded cranks.