Beyond Versailles: Obama to Africa, but Sarah Palin and Rand Paul bring a touch of class

She’s not at “Versailles” — as Tom Brokaw called the annual collection of strivers at The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner of journalists, apologists, preachers, propagandists and pirates — just a little high school in the hills, where Palin gave a high school graduation speech.

And Breitbart reposts that Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R) has done the same. Last week he gave the commencement address to the Boys’ Latin of Philadelphia Charter School class of 2013.

{mosads}The “military-industrial-education-entertainment” establishment hovers above, detached and alien, like the UFO come to warn us in that old harbinger of a movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” But Paul of Kentucky and Palin of Alaska, real people from real places, hit a populist chord. And they get it in West Monroe, La., where the bewhiskered Duck Commander holds court. 

This is grass roots. Vice President Biden got it right this time when he said last week at a West Coast fundraiser: “I’ve never seen a time in all the years I was in the Senate that two freshmen have so much impact on the entirety of the Republican Party,” referring to Paul and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

This is the new political era rising, and this is where it comes from.