"An absolute nightmare"

From Caffeinated Thoughts, A Little Perspective on Steve Schmidt:

...Let me give you some perspective from Iowa. Here is what I learned from two former Iowa McCain/Palin Campaign staffers. Because of campaigns they are currently involved with I'm keeping them anonymous. Here's what I learned:

• "Steve Schmidt was an absolute nightmare."
• "Incompetent"
• "We McCainiacs (people around from the beginning) never felt like he had McCain's best interest in mind."
• "Was never around, and once (when in Iowa) disappeared for three days and we were unable to get a hold of him."
• "Let his personal positions get in the way of the campaign."
• "Did not have a clue about Iowans." (demonstrated by canceling a hunting photo op with Palin without explanation and said, "Iowans won't care about that")

This doesn't paint a picture of competence. Schmidt is not credible, he ran a horrible campaign and is trying to cover his butt.

So please do us a favor Schmidt, shut up and never, ever go near a campaign ever again. Unless it's a Democrat's campaign; that would be all right.

Cunctando regitur mundus...

This is just something I fudged up for a friend...

I don't know who made the Palin/Reagan picture, it's just something I found on the web. So I can't give them credit...

And the "kick your ass" motto has apparently actually been used on Kern County Sheriffs cars... Here's a link to a photo. (Charlene grew up in Bakersfield, so it's kind of an in-joke with us.)

Update: By the way, if you feel like doing something that might make a difference, donate to Scott Brown today...

Palin/Cheney (Liz, that is) 2012....

From Facebook | Sarah Palin: It's War, not a Crime Spree:

...It simply makes no sense to treat an al Qaeda-trained operative willing to die in the course of massacring hundreds of people as a common criminal. Reports indicate that Abdulmutallab stated there were many more like him in Yemen but that he stopped talking once he was read his Miranda rights. President Obama's advisers lamely claim Abdulmutallab might be willing to agree to a plea bargain – pretty doubtful you can cut a deal with a suicide bomber.

John Brennan, the President's top counterterrorism adviser, bizarrely claimed "there are no downsides or upsides" to treating terrorists as enemy combatants. That is absurd. There is a very serious downside to treating them as criminals: terrorists invoke their "right" to remain silent and stop talking. Terrorists don't tell us where they were trained, what they were trained in, who they were trained by, and who they were trained with. Giving foreign-born, foreign-trained terrorists the right to remain silent does nothing to keep Americans safe from terrorist threats. It only gives our enemies access to courtrooms where they can publicly grandstand, and to defense attorneys who can manipulate the legal process to gain access to classified information.

President Obama was right to change his policy and decide to send no more detainees to Yemen where they can be free to rejoin their war on America. Now he must back off his reckless plan to close Guantanamo, begin treating terrorists as wartime enemies not suspects alleged to have committed crimes, and recognize that the real nature of the terrorist threat requires a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor. ...

"A commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor." Amen, sister.

Sarah Palin Rifle Training

Utter contrast...

I thought last year that the 2008 presidential election was really between Obama and Palin, with McCain and Biden just place-holders in nice suits. Everything that has happened since just seems to confirm that. And the pattern is always that Obama is given every possible advantage, and ought to simply outshine Governor Palin...... and yet it never happens! If someone had written this story as a novel it would be dismissed as "too contrived."

In the story below there is a line about how the press didn't fact-check Obam's books because "they likely feared what they would find" Wow, isn't that just the pattern of so much we see on the Left? Isn't that exactly why they keep insisting that the "science is settled?" Wasn't that the Bush-Kerry military service clash? The Left lives in fear. We need to understand that. That's what "political correctness" is; a whole bunch of "don't go there signs." Don't discuss, don't fact-check, don't criticize. Fear.

I recommend this piece by Jack Cashill in American Thinker, The Competing Narratives of Barry and Sarah:

...In 1992, while an anxious Obama dithers in an office that the University of Chicago has given him to write Dreams, half of his $150,000 advance already cashed, Palin is pulling her babies, Track and Bristol, along on a sled as she goes door-to-door seeking votes in her run for Wasilla city council.

Not yet thirty, Palin settles upon the philosophy that will guide her political career: reducing taxes "and redefining government's proper role." Like few Republicans this side of Ronald Reagan, Palin will adhere to these principles throughout her political ascent.

Not surprisingly, Palin's tenacity makes enemies among those who have cashed in their Republican heritage for the perks and power of office. Palin's perseverance in the face of this resistance makes for compelling political drama. That she is a woman challenging the good old boys of backroom Alaska heightens that drama.

Yet despite pushing the boundaries of female accomplishment throughout her career -- as sports reporter, as commercial fisherman, as councilwoman, as mayor, as oil and gas commissioner, as governor, as vice-presidential candidate -- Palin never loses her sense of the feminine. Having five children surely helps. So does living in an environment where manly virtues still matter.

An exchange with the larger-than-life Todd helps clarify Alaskan reality. Todd is a four-time winner of the Iron Dog competition, a 2,200 mile snowmobiling marathon. One night, Sarah expresses interest in competing. Says Todd:

Can you get the back end of a six-hundred-pound machine unstuck by yourself with open water up to your thighs, then change out an engine at forty below in the pitch black on a frozen river and replace thrashed shocks and jury rig a suspension using tree limbs along the trail?

When Sarah answers "Nope," Todd replies, "Then go back to sleep, Sarah." Todd lives his Eskimo heritage. He does not just dream about it, let alone exploit it...

...While Palin is slugging through Alaska's political morass like a determined Iditarod musher, Obama is cruising through Illinois politics on skids greased by his Chicago cronies. In his 2004 run for U.S. Senate, both his chief primary opponent and his expected general election opponent are undone by damaging personal information leaked to the media. Obama wins both elections easily.

The combination of his black genes and white upbringing makes the famously "articulate and bright and clean" Obama an irresistible choice to keynote the race-conscious 2004 Democratic convention. "I mean, that's a storybook, man," alleges the inimitable Joe Biden.

The story told in Dreams will become a huge bestseller in the wake of the 2004 convention. The lofty, lyrical style of the book will seal the Ivy-educated Obama's reputation as a genius, and its much-celebrated narrative would serve as a foundational myth for Obama's ascent to the White House.

Said NEA chairman Rocco Landesman just last month, reiterating the accepted wisdom of the chattering classes, "This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln."

The establishment will not be so kind to Palin. In the week of Going Rogue's release, the New York Times house conservative David Brooks will call her "a joke." Dick Cavett, the Norma Desmond of TV talk, will dismiss her as a "know-nothing." Ex-con Dem fundraiser Martha Stewart will brand Palin "a dangerous person." And literally thousands of lesser liberal lights will deride her as "stupid," an "idiot," or a "moron" (8.5 million Google hits and counting for "Palin" "moron").

In that same week, Chris Matthews was worrying out loud that Obama was "too darned intellectual," and author Michael Eric Dyson was celebrating Obama's "sexy brilliance." But while the Associated Press was sending a platoon of reporters to fact-check Palin's book, neither the AP nor any other media outlet dared check either Dreams or Audacity of Hope.

They likely feared what they would find -- namely that Obama's genius depends solely on his willingness to lie about it. "I've written two books," Obama told a crowd of teachers in Virginia last year. "I actually wrote them myself." He did no such thing. He had massive help with both books....

Remember this when people chirp about Palin's RNC campaign clothing expenses...

The Associated Press: First lady wears Naeem Khan gown to state dinner:

...Designer Khan is no stranger to helping women make a grand entrance; he has become a fixture on the Hollywood red-carpet circuit, dressing Beyonce, Carrie Underwood, Katherine Heigl and even Queen Noor of Jordan. Mrs. Obama's gown took three weeks at the designer's family workshop in India — with 40 people working on it — to complete, Khan said....

40 people, working three weeks. I struggle with complex math, but that looks to me like 120 man-weeks. Which is, ummm, a bit over 2 man-years. (I suppose I should say "person-years.) For one dress.

But it would be racist of me to criticize...

I wish I'd been so clueful when I was 17!

The young gal in this video is 17 year-old Jackie Seal. [Starts about 1:15] She was ambushed quite unfairly by Norah O'Donnell of MSNBC, but held her ground most admirably. I'm so impressed. If I'd been in that kind of spot at that age I doubt if I could have gotten a word out.

This isn't the first time we've seen a reporter argue with a Palin supporter, rather than, like, report the news! What a meltdown! Astonishin' what Sarah does to these people. I mean, how hugely insecure O'Donnell must be to feel the need to defeat a teenager!

This is from Jackie's blog....

...I then see Norah O'Donnell approach a man all decked out in Palin garb. She asked him a few questions (camera not rolling) then said she'd like to have a woman in the shot. She asked a woman who refused then pointed at me and said "Hey talk to her" So I walked over. I knew I was walking into hot water with MSNBC— thought I was prepared.... Seconds later I met her... One of the many faces of liberal media bias. She asked me my name and then before going on air asked me why I liked Sarah Palin, I repeated what I told the NYT reporter. Norah didn't seem to like that much.

So what did she do? I mean she couldn't ask me that question on television, heaven forbid her not have a biting response.. I noticed her look down at my shirt then, she turned around blackberry in hand spoke to a man, thumbs tapping the blackberry (I don't remember if she called or not, she may have. But she was on her blackberry), then jotted down a quick note. Little did I know that note would be used against me. She told us she'd be walking up to us. You know like she just stumbled upon us. The shot began... I kept telling myself answer her question well, don't freak out. Well, I thought she'd ask me the same question. She asked the man beside me (who by the way is NOT my dad) the same question she had before we went on air. Myself on the other hand, not the same story. She had me read my shirt and then proceeded to ask me "Did you know Sarah Palin supported the bailout" to be 100% honest I was like, are you kidding me? She is trying to use my shirt against me. I was so shocked by the craftiness she had that I was truly stumped. I asked her where she got her fact and she read her little note. Then she asked me what I liked about Sarah, and I talked about the Constitution...

(Here's the link to her blog-post)

Truth to tell....

This is a teaser for tonight's Palin interview with Sean Hannity. In it she says that Major Hasan is an obvious case for profiling. And she says she's going to get clobbered when the interview is aired for saying such an un-PC thing.

We'll see. I'm guessing she's picked the right moment to say what needs to be said.

Somebody gettin' nervous?

I think this Newsweek article by Christopher Hitchens is interesting, not because of what it says about Sarah Palin, but what Hitchens is revealing about himself..

Sarah Palin's Political Instincts:

...The Palin problem, then, might be that she cynically incites a crowd that she has no real intention of pleasing. If she were ever to get herself to the nation's capital, the teabaggers would be just as much on the outside as they are now, and would simply have been the instruments that helped get her elected. In my own not-all-that-humble opinion, duping the hicks is a degree or two worse than condescending to them. It's also much more dangerous, because it meanwhile involves giving a sort of respectability to ideas that were discredited when William Jennings Bryan was last on the stump. The Weekly Standard (itself not exactly a prairie-based publication) might want to think twice before flirting with popular delusions and resentments that are as impossible to satisfy as the demand for a silver standard or a ban on the teaching of Darwin, and are for that very reason hard to tamp down. Many of Palin's admirers seem to expect that, on receipt of the Republican Party nomination, she would immediately embark on a crusade against Wall Street and the banks. This notion is stupid to much the same degree that it is irresponsible.

Then there's the question of character and personality. Decades ago, Walter Dean Burnham pointed out that right-wing populists tended to fail because they projected anger and therefore also attracted it. (He was one of the few on the left to predict that the genial Ronald Reagan would win for this very reason.) Let's admit that Sarah Palin is more attractive—some might even want to say more appealing—than much of her enraged core constituency. But then all we are considering is a point of packaging and marketing, where charm is supposed to make up for what education and experience have failed thus far to supply. We are further obliged to consider the question: exactly how charming is the Joan of Arc of the New Right, who also hears voices speaking to her of "spiritual warfare"?...

Now I like Hitchens, and have always respected him even when I disagree with him. But recently he's been writing stuff that's just not very good and not very convincing. His Atheist book, and his scratching at Sarah in particular. And I think that tells us something about him. For instance, what evidence does he have that Sarah is "duping the hicks?" None, as far as I know. And in fact the tea party crowd aren't really hicks. At least, I've been to a tea party and that simply wasn't true. Most attendees were not sophisticated or intellectual, but they seemed to be thoughtful concerned ordinary citizens. Nor did they show any interest in the "teaching of Darwin."

Palin supporters are angry at things that ordinary Americans have always gotten angry about, from the very beginning of this country. Americans have often angrily protested high taxes, big government programs (What were called "improvements" in Jefferson's time) and intrusive government. To pretend that tea parties are some sort of ugly primitive aberration is just stupid. Why is a smart guy like Hitch being stupid?

My theory is that Hitchens has, intellectually, gotten himself into an unnerving spot, and he's lashing out in anger because he's frightened. He has several times in recent years criticized his fellow leftists, for things such as supporting tyrants like Saddam, and not being willing to fight the War on Terror. (For which I honor him.) But for a thinking person (which Hitch is and most Lefties aren't) the obvious question that comes next is, how many other things does my Lefty crowd have wrong? Could we have it ALL wrong?

Palin is a symbol of Hitchens' uneasiness. She's the most exciting politician in the country right now... Maybe in the world. And every aspect of her is a repudiation of the Leftist zeitgeist. Her clothes, her hair, her baby... everything about her. She's far more of a threat to a wavering Lefty than some "moderate" Republican would be, because the threat is that—if she's right—everything might have to change!

Same thing with the atheism schtick. If you are a thinking atheist, there are lots of disturbing things to ponder right now. For instance, Hitch was probably raised to assume that Euro-socialism and secularism were successful projects, the "wave of the future." How's that working out? Or how about those assumptions that humanity was going to "outgrow" religion? Also, it's not a good time to be a thinking atheist, when the only world-class European figure is the Pope!

And that stuff about "duping the hicks?" And "cynically inciting crowds?" Could that be, er, projection, Mr Hitchens?It sounds more like what one might say about Obama than Palin.

Likewise with "instruments that helped get her elected." Perhaps that should read "him?" Or "ideas that were discredited when William Jennings Bryan was last on the stump." What precisely do you mean? I'd say you ought to be pondering whether socialism or big-government liberalism or unions might be called "discredited." I'd be a bit nervous if I were in your intellectual shoes...

As Rush says, they always tell us who they are afraid of...

Mark Steyn, on the AP's preposterous efforts to "fact check" a stolen copy of Governor Palin's forthcoming book:

...Wow. That's ten "AP writers" plus Calvin Woodward, the AP writer whose twinkling pen honed the above contributions into the turgid sludge of the actual report. That's 11 writers for a 695-word report. What on? Obamacare? The Iranian nuke program? The upcoming trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

No, the Associated Press assigned 11 writers to "fact-check" Sarah Palin's new book, and in return the 11 fact-checkers triumphantly unearthed six errors. That's 1.8333333 writers for each error. What earth-shattering misstatements did they uncover for this impressive investment? Stand well back:...

"Stand well back" I'll have to remember that locution!

And how fine it feels to be supporting such a solid person. Leftists have been desperately hammering on her since "Palin Day," 8-29-08...... and what have they come up with? Nothing of substance. The squirmy-ness of Dems right now has got to be partially because they know deep down that their guy could never stand up to such scrutiny. Aren't there still a few whole years of Obam's life unaccounted for? Not to mention Chicago politics. Dead fish could float to the surface at any time! Or bodies.

Life is so much better when one does not have to live in fear. And it makes a person smarter. There are no "Don't go there" signs in my brain, such as Leftists seem to have. (Think of "political correctness.")

"Hang 'em high!"

Thank you, governor...

Facebook | Sarah Palin: Obama Administration's Atrocious Decision:

Horrible decision, absolutely horrible. It is devastating for so many of us to hear that the Obama Administration decided that the 9/11 terrorist mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be given a criminal trial in New York. This is an atrocious decision.

Mohammed and his terrorist co-conspirators are responsible for the deaths of more than 3,000 Americans. Thousands of American families have suffered through the loss of loved ones because of the disgusting attacks launched against the United States, and now this trial venue adds insult to injury, in addition to compromising our efforts in the War on Terror. Heaven forbid our allies see this decision as a reason to become less likely to support our efforts in the future. [They'd be stupid not to.]

Criminal defense attorneys will now enter into delaying tactics and other methods in the hope of securing some kind of win for their "clients." [Send for Johnny Cochran!] The trial will afford Mohammed the opportunity to grandstand and make use of his time in front of the world media to rally his disgusting terrorist cohorts. It will also be an insult to the victims of 9/11, as Mohammed will no doubt use the opportunity to spew his hateful rhetoric in the same neighborhood in which he ruthlessly cut down the lives of so many Americans.

It is crucially important that Americans be made aware that the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks may walk away from this trial without receiving just punishment because of a "hung jury" or from any variety of court room technicalities. If we are stuck with this terrible Obama Administration decision, I, like most Americans, hope that Mohammed and his co-conspirators are convicted. Hang 'em high. [And if anyone raises the objection that this would be un-Christian, I reply that Obama's appeasement is un-Christian, and will make bloodshed and violence and terrorism more likely. Like most "pacifists," he is an enemy of peace, and of the USA.]

"Leadership is mimetic"

Rob Harrison:

...Now, as I've noted before, I'm a preacher, and I think like one; and one of the things that years of preaching the word of God given through such hard-headed types as Paul and James has taught me is that "out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks." In other words, what we say (and also what we do) proceeds out of our beliefs, our attitudes, and our moral commitments. The willingness to set aside the moral crimes of foreign governments and just "do bidness" with them Chicago style cannot be judged or regarded merely as an intellectual approach; it is a moral act, it is an expression of the faith of our president, and must be understood as such. The same is true of his remarks following the Fort Hood shooting.

Similarly, the fact that Gov. Palin persists in addressing such events as the shooting at Fort Hood and the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that she was willing to take a stand amidst the chaos of the NY-23 special election, cannot be interpreted merely in terms of political calculation; this, too, speaks to her moral qualifications for leadership. Her statements give us indications as to whether she has the strength of character to lead without flinching from the task, and the wisdom to lead well; they also tell us much about what she believes at the core of her being, and how those beliefs drive and shape her as a leader. As such, while most have been parsing her statements for what they say about her intellectual qualifications (for, in particular, the top job)—and while this is not insignificant—what they say about her moral qualifications is, in my view, more important.

You see, from a biblical point of view, the most basic part of leadership isn't decision-making or setting the agenda or casting the vision or knowing the issues; rather, the most basic part is providing a model for people to follow. The most basic statement of Christian leadership is offered by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:1: "Be imitators of me as I am of Christ." Now, obviously, this doesn't transfer directly to political leadership (though for those who claim to be Christians, the correspondence is a lot closer than you might think), but the basic principle holds: leadership is mimetic, which is to say, it's about imitation.

To be specific, it's about taking your faith—the principles you believe in, the truths you understand to be primary, the values you see as of first importance—and incarnating it, making it real in your life, so that others can look at you and see what it means to live, in the real world, according to those beliefs. For most people, that's the only way they'll be able to go and do likewise. Most people need more than just to have it explained, they need to see it in action—and that is the heartbeat of leadership. This necessitates a deep commitment to one's faith, a staunch consistency in adhering to it, and the courage to stand to it even when that seems to be the harder, riskier or more dangerous path; it requires leaders to choose what they believe to be right over what is popular or expedient or safe, trusting that their vindication will come in due time....

"Our legislators can listen now, or they can hear us in 2010"

A good strong statement from Sarah Palin, The Pelosi Bill Was Rammed Through on Saturday, But Sunday's Coming:

...We've got to hold on to hope, and we've got to fight hard because Congressional action tonight just put America on a path toward an unrecognizable country.

The same government leaders that got us into the mortgage business and the car business are now getting us into the health care business.

Despite Americans' decisive message last Tuesday that they reject the troubling path this country has been taking, Speaker Pelosi has broken her own promises of transparency to ram a health "care" bill through the House of Representatives just before midnight. Why did she push the 2,000 page bill this weekend? Was she perhaps afraid to give her peers and the constituents for whom she works the chance to actually read this monstrous bill carefully, if at all? Was she concerned that Americans might really digest the details of a bill that the Wall Street Journal has called "the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced"?

This out-of-control bureaucratic mess will be disastrous for our economy, our small businesses, and our personal liberty. It will slam businesses at a time when we are at double-digit unemployment rates — the highest we've seen in a quarter of a century. This massive new bureaucracy will cost us and our children money we don't have. It will rob Americans of more of our freedom and further hamper the free market.

Make no mistake: we're on course to have government commandeer one-sixth of our economy. The people who gave us Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now want to run our health care. Think about that.

All of us who value the sanctity of life are grateful for the success of the pro-life majority in the House this evening in its battle against federal funding of abortion in this bill, but it's ironic because we were promised that abortion wasn't covered in the bill to begin with. Our healthy distrust of these government leaders made us look deeper into the bill because unfortunately we knew better than to trust what they were saying. The victory tonight to amend the bill and eliminate that federal funding for abortion was great — because abortion is not health care. Now we can only hope that Rep. Stupak's amendment will hold in the final bill, though the Democratic leadership has already refused to promise that it won't be scrapped later.

We had been told there were no "death panels" in the bill either. But look closely at the provision mandating bureaucratic panels that will be calling the shots regarding who will receive government health care.

Look closely at provisions addressing illegal aliens' health care coverage too.

Those of us who love freedom and believe in open and transparent government can only be dismayed by midnight action on a Saturday. Speaker Pelosi's promise that Americans would have 72 hours to read the final bill before the vote was just another one of the D.C. establishment's too-common political ploys. It's broken promises like this that turn people off to politics and leave them disillusioned about the future of their country.

But despite this late-night maneuvering, many of us were paying close attention tonight. We'll keep paying close attention. We need to let our legislators in Washington know that they still represent us, and that the majority of Americans are not in favor of the "reform" they are pushing. After all, this is still a country "of the people, by the people, and for the people." We will make our voices heard. It's on to the Senate now. Our legislators can listen now, or they can hear us in 2010. It's their choice.
    -- Sarah Palin...

Succisa viresci...

Dr Zero, on Palin's endorsement of Hoffman, Rogue Stars Rising:

...It pains me to say this about Gingrich. He accomplished some amazing things, in the mid-90s. He's a smart man who has offered some interesting ideas, in his second life as a conservative intellectual. The problem is that Newt is a political tactician, and in the final stages of a losing war against collectivist ruin, the time has come to focus on grand strategy, rather than tactics. The second decade of this century will be an existential war for the American soul, not a police action.

Gingrich is always thinking about the tactics of the moment, trying to win on points that will never be awarded fairly. He spent far too much of his time as Speaker of the House shouting in vain for media referees to throw penalty flags that remained stuffed in their pockets. Meanwhile, the political battlefront has shifted into the fatal terrain of essential liberties and economic freedom. This is the time for courage, conviction, and bold action… not whining about "big tents," while pushing a product of the Pataki machine with a Margaret Sanger award dangling around her neck. A Republican party that embraces Scozzafava over Hoffman isn't a "tent." It's not even a lean-to.

The most urgent task for conservatives is building a logical, consistent vision to place before the voters. They're looking for a comprehensive explanation of why Democrat policies are wrong. They can see Obama's failures all around them, but in the absence of a compelling narrative from the opposition party, they're likely to conclude those failures were inevitable, and learn to accept them....

The Culture War is the only war. Everything else is just surface-froth generated by leviathans grappling in deep waters, where we can hardly perceive them......

"Political parties must stand for something."

Fascinatin' to me. Sarah Palin has endorsed Hoffman, for NY 23. Good move. [Link] I'm a moderately "big tent" guy myself, but this one's ridiculous. I get calls from the RNC asking for donations, and they sound like an organization that's, as who should say, conservative. If they are giving my money to Dede Scozzafava, that that's just a lie.

...Our nation is at a crossroads, and this is once again a "time for choosing."

The federal government borrows, spends, and prints too much money, while our national debt hits a record high. Government is growing while the private sector is shrinking, and unemployment is on the rise. Doug Hoffman is committed to ending the reckless spending in Washington, D.C. and the massive increase in the size and scope of the federal government. He is also fully committed to supporting our men and women in uniform as they seek to honorably complete their missions overseas.

And best of all, Doug Hoffman has not been anointed by any political machine.

Doug Hoffman stands for the principles that all Republicans should share: smaller government, lower taxes, strong national defense, and a commitment to individual liberty.

Political parties must stand for something. When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of "blurring the lines" between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections. Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate that more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race. This is why Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party's ticket.

Republicans and conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: no more politics as usual.

You can help Doug by visiting his official website below and joining me in supporting his campaign: http://www.doughoffmanforcongress.com/donate3.html

As Marc Steyn put it:

Newt really needs to re-think his support for Dede Scozzafava. This isn't RINO but DIABLO - Democrat In All But Label Only...

Couldn't happen to a more deserving little sweetie...

Swamp_Yankee writes Peggy Noonan, The Crazy Cat Lady, Gets the Sarah Palin Treatment at Harvard...

This autumn, Peggy Noonan left her New York City digs for Cambridge to be a guest lecturer at Harvard. I'm leery of self-anointed, East Coast, Republican elites, but my distaste for Noonan reached new levels when she decided to act like a teenage girl in a Miley Cyrus movie and hurled such petty insults at Sarah Palin that her invective had to be personal. These insults came from the same woman who wrote a book called 'Patriotic Grace' and made it a point to be gracious to some of the most loathsome liberals.

The sophisticated and cosmopolitan Noonan may have thought she'd be comfortable at Harvard. Although she may believe in some different principles, she was amongst the educated elite, her people. Instead, she is turning into a campus joke. The word on campus is that she is an airhead who can't put a cohesive and cogent lecture together....


...It was only a short while ago when Noonan wrote that Palin "doesn't read" and that Palin is a "ponder-free zone" who "wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough". Noonan cast Palin off with a resounding good riddance. But the verdict from the intellectual elite at Harvard is in and they decree that Peggy Noonan is also a "ponder free zone". Now, it is Noonan who is being mocked for being an incoherent airhead and an intellectual lightweight. The beautiful irony.

I bet Peggy had mushy romantical notions of the free exchange of ideas among opponents who respect truth and candor! Ha ha. I could have told her that wasn't going to fly. I've been waiting through eight years of blogging for an principled truth-seeking liberal opponent to appear.

"Democrats do not understand conservatives..."

Palin Goes Rogue — Nikitas3's blog:

...Going Rogue is a perfect title for Palin. She is the wild card that the Democrats have tried to snuff out, but who seems only to get stronger with every attack. Sure she made a few mistakes in the campaign, but they were much less worse than Obama or Biden.

And over the next few years, she will grow and prosper because Democrats do not understand conservatives. They think conservatives are like them... weak, insecure and dependent on media coronation....

A lie gets halfway around the world before ....

Apparently the lie that Sarah Palin banned books when she was Mayor of Wasilla is still being circulated, this time at a school library "Banned Books Week" display. You can read about it (and get the truth) here.

The whole censorship/banned books theme is just a bunch of crap. When I owned a bookstore back in the 90's, there would be a big annual brouhaha from the ABA about how we should all be aware of this shocking situation, and put up displays of "banned books."

It's bullshit; no country on earth is more open in making books available than this one. There is no book on those "banned books" lists that any American can't get easily. No one is deprived of information because we're too Fahrenheit 451'ish.

It's just anti-Americanism. Lefty excuse #992 to despise our country. (While continuing to suck in all the good things she provides, like spoiled children sneering at the parents who support them. And NEVER moving to one of those worker's paradises they extoll.)

Meanwhile, in communist countries you can be sent to a prison camp for circulating books. Do any "liberals" care? No. "Progressives?" No. Do librarians put up displays about the librarians in Cuba who were jailed? Jerks. Frauds.

"de facto leader of the free world"

Dr Zero , on Sarah's speech in Hong Kong:

...These remarks were made in Hong Kong, not the United Nations building. The speaker was not the current President of the United States, who is sadly irrelevant to the cause of freedom. It was Sarah Palin - who is, for the moment, the de facto leader of the free world.

It's very unusual to see the position occupied by a private citizen, with no official power to back up her words. I doubt Mrs. Palin likes the situation any more than I do. It's a position with absolutely no tenure, outside of high office - a new standard bearer could speak with greater clarity and passion tomorrow. Someone with power must soon fill the role... but for now, a voice pouring the right words into hungry ears will have to suffice. The free world holds ideals above power anyway. It cannot be led through force. It uses power to defend its ideals, not to impose them....

Well, if not her, then who? Hmmm? (You can read her remarks here, by the way. Good stuff. Given with notes, not teleprompter)

It's been Palin v. Obama since 8-29-08...

...Biden and McCain were just the comic sidekicks...

David Horowitz:

...But perhaps the most remarkable moment of the speech — and certainly the most politically bone-headed — was to single out Sarah Palin and call her a liar because she has dramatized the indisputable fact that when you have government-controlled health care you have rationing, and when you have rationing you inevitably create a government bureaucracy which will encourage and then force elderly and infirm people to premature deaths. Palin's image of "death panels" to capture what is the undeniable truth about the Democrats' plans (Greta Van Susteren actually read, on-camera, the passage from the bill which justifies Palin's claim) was a politically brilliant stroke. In singling her out and defaming her tonight, the president made her the symbol of the opposition to the steamroller he is driving. And that's the fight she wants and anyone opposed to the Democrats' socialized scheme should want, too.... (Thanks to C4P)

It's hard to realize how strange this is. Sarah was unknown a year ago. She lost as VP, quit as governor (for good reasons, but most people don't know them). She's a private citizen, who made a post on FaceBook. To which the President of the United States has just replied in an address to a joint session of Congress! Incroyable! Stupefying! What an amazin' time to be alive, if you are a conservative! The collectivists have WON! They control the White House and Congress. We should be in despair. They should be on cloud nine. And yet they are flummoxed! By a chick from Alaska no one had heard of one short year ago! Sweet. Sweet! SWEET! Sarah Palin, I love you forever! If only for the pain you are inflicting on those frauds!

And there was a recent quote from one of these Obam guys—Axelrod or Emmanuel—claiming they don't sit around in the white House worrying about Palin. HAH! How many times has Obam defended himself against Romney, or Steele, or Pawlenty or Gingrich?

By the way, It's not just old people that are nudged over the edge. I've read at least three news stories about Canadian women being sent to the US to get care for prematurely-born babies. The Canadians have far fewer neonatal ICU beds than we do (per capita).

WHY? Because some government committee decide not to spend money on such a low-return investment. And what do you call that committee? Well, "death panel" is a logical fit, is it not?

Charlene and I know about this subject because our oldest son was born with a lung problem, and spent 7 weeks in the ICU. If he'd been born in Canada, well, who knows?

Just fisking another Lefty who's terrified of Sarah. Not important.

I shouldn't waste time on this, but it's too much fun... Marc Ambinder:

Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, has every right to submit an opinion piece on health care to the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page, and they've got every right to print it. [It's gracious of you, Oh Wise Elder Statesman, to make that clear.]

But Palin's existence in this debate does not (a) lend her voice any credibility [so why are you writing about her?] and, beyond that, even if you believe that her experience as a state governor does give her at least a modicum of credibility, [well, it gives her FAR more credibility than Obama, who's never accomplished anything in his life! To date.] it does not follow that, because her voice is credible, it ought to be influential. [Why not? Why does Palin bug you? And not other Republicans?] Newt Gingrich is influential by rights; he's done the work, come up with original ideas, and been in the trenches. (Replacing Medicare with vouchers...not new or remotely plausible, even if GOPers do well in the next two elections. Quoting Ronald Reagan talking about that type of proposal...not new. Etc.) [You WISH Gingrich was the face of the party! Ha ha. No way, sucker.]

The media -- by which I mean the cable news networks, primarily, will determine whether Palin's view on health care becomes influential. [As if the issue were in doubt!] There are many Republican, conservative health care spokespeople who have earned the right to speak for their party's principals, [Hey, dimwitski! She IS a principal. She was our VP candidate a few months ago, remember?] and, truth be told, can recite the talking points (complete with Ronald Reagan quote) better than Palin and her writer can. They're the ones who should be offended if Palin's op-ed becomes the voice of the opposition tomorrow, [So you are telling us Republicans what ought to offend us? Gee, thanks for the help.] because Palin isn't seen by most Americans as a particularly trenchent [sic] analyst of policy. Indeed, the reason why Palin's team wants to get her pieces in publications like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal is that, in this next phase of her political career, Mrs. Palin has to burnish her policy skills. [Yeah, yeah. We get it. She's just a pretty face managed by "a team." We'll cry all the way to the bank.] And the Journal is all too willing to lend some space to this project, because plenty of people will see the piece.

So here's a challenge to the media: if you want to do justice to conservative ideas [The media wants to do justice to conservative ideas? Who'da thunk!] and find some balance in your coverage tomorrow, [AND they're eager to be "balanced?"...Wow! Amazin'!] book serious [ie: Dull] Republicans with original ideas [New ideas are always better than those moldy old conservative ideas. Ask any liberal.] on your programs. If you don't, Palin is giving herself a voice at your expense and through little effort of her own.

By implying, incidentally, that Palin gets help from a speechwriter, I mean to make an observation. Barack Obama didn't draft his op-ed, either. But, reading Obama, it's not a leap to believe that the ideas are truly his. ['cause they lead to bigger government, less freedom, and higher taxes.] Palin has no chops and no experience talking about health care [she has more than Obama has] and isn't participating in this debate; [Dream on, dweeb,] the content of her op-ed piece isn't original, and the points are points that Republicans make every day. [SO, if Republicans make these points every day, WHY is it hard to imagine that these are her ideas? She's a Republican, and she writes like a... *gasp* Republican! But she's a GIRL! Must be speechwriters doing it for her.]

This is the reality. Palin has policy credibility problems. [Repeat that over and over. Like a mantra.] Big ones. A few op-eds aren't going to help her. [But two words on FaceBook made the Senate jump through hoops! Ha ha.] But if the media ["the media." Still able to fog a mirror? I doubt.] treats her as as a legitimate and influential voice today, she won't need to do the hard work that will result in her learning more about policy and actually becoming conversant in the issues that she, as a potential presidential candidate, will deal with... [So GOOD of you to help Sarah by keeping her in kindergarten where she belongs. I'm sure it is selfless idealism on your part, and has nothing to do with the way Leftists seem to find Sarah, umm... somehow... THREATENING.]

A pet peeve of mine...

Thanks to Joshua Livestro for this:

...One more thing before I chuck his sorry behind into my spamfilter: cut the cr*p about Palin's use of speechwriters somehow being evidence that the ideas in her pieces aren't truly hers. As a former speechwriter (a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) I think I'm reasonably qualified to tell him that this is total baloney. Any speechwriter worth his salt will have read every scrap of paper ever produced by his boss, as well as every biographical sketch ever written about him/her. That way, he is able to write with confidence from the politician's perspective, using their ideas and - where possible - even their language. Any speech writer that doesn't do this, will be an ex speech writer before he knows it....

Every major public figure uses speechwriters. Even if they are quite capable of writing a great speech themselves. Why? Because an important speech might take days or weeks of work, that's why. Important people have all sorts of things done for them that they could do themselves. Because their time is very valuable, and needs to be used for their essential business. Somebody washes their socks, too, and fills out their tax-returns. doesn't mean they are incapable.

I've heard the "uses-a-speechwriter" criticism leveled against Republicans all my life. Stupid. And it is actually a sure sign of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Left. The cowards can't fight us with facts or logic, so they snipe at trivial issues.

I long ago read a memoir by William Safire of his time as a speechwriter for Nixon. President Nixon had three speechwriters, and he would review speeches, annotate them, and pass them on to a different writer for whatever that man's particular strength was. I remember that Pat Buchanan was his go-to guy for toughening up a speech, and making it more pugnacious! Nixon was using them as tools, to get the speech he wanted.

I'm just amusin' myself here...

I've added some comments to an article by a midget in our local rag. Palin and America's paranoid-style politics, by Geoffrey Dunn:

..."I call it the paranoid style," Hofstadter wrote, "simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." [You're referring to Jeremiah Wright, I presume?]

In many ways, Hofstadter's prescient essay anticipated the entree of Sarah Palin into contemporary American politics, that last month marked the one-year anniversary of her failed candidacy as the Republican vice presidential nominee. [Failed to become VP. Succeeded hugely in becoming a national leader.] During the past year, the former governor of Alaska has tapped into a narrow, albeit tenacious, strain in the national polity that stretches back to the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. [Geez, you mean we STILL haven't extirpated those witches? Try harder, folks!]

[...]

Reagan understood the "big tent" concept of the Republican Party and reached out to moderates and disaffected Democrats. For better or worse, he forged a majority coalition that defined American politics for a quarter century. Even Obama paid homage to it in "The Audacity of Hope," in which he acknowledged Reagan's appeal to "the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism and faith." [Hmmm. Why does the word "Wasilla" pop into mind? Just my twisty paranoia no doubt. Of course those are the virtues found in SF and Santa Cruz, not in Neanderthal enclaves like Alaska..]

Palin is all about small ball....

Palin is all about small ball. While she has big personal ambitions, her political vision is both narrow and attenuated. She knows nothing about reaching out, and everything about cutting off. Expand the GOP as Reagan did? [SO, when Reagan "reached out" to all those "Reagan Democrats," he was lauded by Lefties like Dunn, right? Liberals are honest, right? Ha! No, they said about Reagan just what they are saying about Palin now. Probably including quoting Hofstadter!] Hell no. She's all about shrinking it. During her campaign for vice president, she actually refused to appear with Republican leaders who were either pro-choice or differed with her position on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. [WHAT! She refused to appear with John McCain? What a bigot! And wait a minute? Don't I remember her hugging Joe Lieberman? And appearing with Olympia Snowe? No doubt I'm hallucinating...] The paranoid style is constrictive. [Sure. Just compare the refulgent sunbeams of that "happy warrior" Hillary Clinton with the pinched tight-lipped peevishness of Sarah Palin.]

"Catastrophe or the fear of catastrophe," Hofstadter declared, "is most likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric." [The President's "Green Jobs Czar" just resigned for being a 9/11 Truther, and saying white environmentalists and polluters steer poisons into minority communities. Perhaps that's what Hofstadter has in mind?] Recall Palin's recent Facebook delusions of "death panels" and her characterization of Obama's proposed health care reforms as "downright evil." [Funny how the Senate scurried to remove various Death Panels from their bill immediately after Ol' Small Ball mentioned the nonexistent things...]

While right-wing radio hosts and cable news commentators like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh give voice to the new millennium's paranoid impulse, Palin not only personifies the style, she has franchised it. She is the only political figure in the conservative movement with electoral gravitas. The likes of Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee are mere wannabes. They have neither Palin's mojo nor her charisma. [So how can you "personify paranoia" AND have "electoral gravitas?" Somebody's confused.]

Since her emergence on the national political stage, Palin has forged a formidable presence in the American political arena fueled by fear and anger, as when she accused Obama of "pallin' around with terrorists" [Which is exactly what he did.] and not being "a man who sees America like you and I see America." [Which he obviously doesn't.] That there is a racist undertone to the paranoid style quite nearly goes without saying. [Must be true. No Leftist would throw accusations of racism around carelessly, would they?]

In his essay, Hofstadter was careful to distinguish clinical paranoia in an individual from "paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people." In the case of Palin, this distinction becomes blurred. Ever since her political debut 17 years ago in Wasilla, Alaska, she has embraced the paranoid style as not only a form of communication but, even more importantly, as a means to power. The style has both shaped and defined her entire political career. [Typified by her working with Alaska Dems to fight entrenched corruption in her own party. You can't get more crazy-paranoid than that, right? ]

The paranoid tendency, Hofstadter contended, is "aroused by a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise." [Sounds like Lefties talking about President Bush.] Palin is an absolutist. Hers is a win-lose world of political Manichaeism. Everything is black and white, good and evil. [Projection.]

Palin's inability to negotiate political compromise [So how did that pipeline happen? Tooth Fairy?] was definitively confirmed last month in Anchorage when the Alaska Legislature - a body largely composed of Republicans - overrode Palin's veto of an energy component included in the federal stimulus package. It provided a perfect coda to Palin's failed and abandoned governorship. In true paranoid style, she blamed the outcome on everyone else but herself. [And if she didn't stick to her position he'd claim she has no principles!]

The silliest thing is that this guy is apparently writing a book about Palin. He'll sell a bunch of copies around here, you can be sure. Of course he'll have sold his soul by deliberately attempting the personal destruction of another person by spreading lies. But then he knows he doesn't have an immortal soul, because, like, you know, everybody in Santa Cruz knows that!

Update: Also, this style of Lefty why-can't-today's-horrid-Republicans-be-like-our-great-Ronald-Reagan comments is total crap. When Reagan was actually on the rise people like Dunn said exactly the same sort of stuff about him they say now about Palin. They said he was a far-right fringe kook, and why couldn't he be like the great unifying Republicans of the past.

Actually Palin is more like Reagan than anyone since Reagan. Not in her specifics, but in the ability to talk to ordinary Americans, and remind them of the simple truths they tend to forget under the barrage of life, and the barrage of nihilist propaganda they receive from the news media and the academy. That's why lefties are obsessing over her right now. They know where the danger lies.

Sarah one year ago today...

Can she call 'em, or can she call 'em? (Thanks to C4P)

"This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the word 'victory' except when he's talking about his own campaign...........

"But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed.....when the roar of the crowd fades away.....when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot.....When that happens, what is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet?

• "The answer is to make government bigger.......
• "And take more of your money..........
• "To give you more orders from Washington...........
• "And reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world...........
• "America needs more energy...........our opponent is against producing it.
• "Victory in Iraq is finally in sight.........he wants to forfeit.
• "Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay..........he wants to meet them without preconditions.
• "Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America........he's worried that someone won't read them their rights?
• "Government is too big........he wants to grow it.
• "Congress spends too much money.......he promises more.
• "Taxes are too high........he wants to raise them. His taxes are the fine print in his economic plan, and let me be specific: The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes.......and raise payroll taxes........and raise investment income taxes.......and raise the death tax.......and raise business taxes.......and increase the tax burden on American people by hundreds of billions of dollars."

Toldja. And remember, Obama ran as a sort of moderate. Orrin Judd has a great post on how Bush as President worked to pass the very things he campaigned on. And how Obama in office is not at all like Obama on the campaign trail.

Here's an ad from the lying Obama presidential campaign:

Can we say "bait and switch?" Tooooo bad, all you "independents" and "moderates" who voted for hopey changey. You were suckered. You were played for fools. You should have been reading Random Jottings. [Link, link, link, link.] But NOOOOO. That would be tacky. Fad and fashion and wishful thinking are much more important than truth.

And all you "Progressives" and far leftists who assumed that Obama was a vicious liar who would say anything to get elected, but would then come home to his real self, taught by Ayers and Wright? You were right! You win! Your prize will be big "Democrat" Party losses in 2010! And maybe a President Palin in 2012. Ha ha ha. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of commie creeps.

The challenge is to educate...

Doctor Zero on Charles Krauthammer's absurd statement that Sarah should "leave the room" while the experts debate...

...Every political movement needs both academic intelligence, and vital charisma. The Left has always viewed the relationship between its intellectuals and politicians as something like the production and marketing departments in a business – and when it comes to accumulating power, socialists are all business. People like Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers spent decades weaving the strings that control the Obama marionette. They openly wrote of their understanding that savvy merchandising would be needed to make the public accept their agenda, at least until the public no longer has a meaningful choice about accepting it. When was the last time you heard a leftist intellectual belittle a popular liberal politician, the way Charles Krauthammer treated Sarah Palin?

The challenge for conservatism is to educate the voters in its basic principles, since they received no such education in the public schools. Conservatism always triumphs on the elementary questions of freedom and capitalism. The ideas of the Left are diseased in root and branch — history has shown there is no need to allow them to blossom, in order to see they are poisonous. Conservatives who allow themselves to be dragged into bickering about page 945 of a 1200-page bill have already conceded far too much of the debate. Americans deserve better than being told to sit down and shut up, while Washington plays Jenga with Obama's obscene health-care proposals. They should be angry and insulted their time and money were ever wasted with this madness....

Ka-ching!

Score One for Sarah Palin on the Healthcare Reform Death Panels - Peter Roff (usnews.com):

In what can fairly be described as an admission that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin knew what she was talking about, the Senate Finance Committee Thursday dropped language from its bipartisan healthcare reform package that Palin and others had suggested would eventually lead to mandated end-of-life counseling sessions for seniors...

"Death Panels." Gotcha!...

Conservatives4Palin.com: Democrats Fixated on Private Citizen Palin:

After her resignation, many Democrats were certain that Sarah Palin was finished in politics. They rejoiced that she would no longer garner any significant attention, and that she would disappear from the public arena.

Thus far, the opposite has occurred. Governor Palin demonstrated that she can shake up the entire national health care debate with nothing more than a post on Facebook. Since she left the governor's office, she has become even more visible and influential in national policy debates. ...

She sure made the chomskys howl with this one! "The guilty flee when no man pursueth." I bet "death panels" sticks to Dems for, like, forever. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch...

Making news by doing nothing!

Pretty funny. The AP writes a whole news story on how there's no news from Sarah! Citizen Palin begins private life quietly.

But of course we all know she's finished. Washed up. A has-been. Not a serious anything.

Go here, click on chart....

I caught a bit of Rush this morning. He mentioned this New York Post piece, DEMOCRATS HEALTH CARE PLAN FUNDING MAY TAX NEW YORK WEALTHY 57%. I'm sure you agree with all sensible people that the wealthy are parasites who should be relieved of the riches they have stolen from the little people, but, um, there IS the teensy little fact that NYC's economy is dependent, much more than most big cities, on........wealthy people. Get rid of them and the city dies.

...Congressional plans to fund a massive health-care overhaul could have a job-killing effect on New York, creating a tax rate of nearly 60 percent for the state's top earners and possibly pressuring small-business owners to shed workers.

New York's top income bracket could reach as high as 57 percent -- rates not seen in three decades -- to pay for the massive health coverage proposed by House Democrats this week....

The chart that accompanies this article makes things veddy clear. It's no wonder such a bill gets crafted behind closed doors, and that Dems are trying to rush it through.

Rush was also commenting on a poll that showed Sarah Palin with a 72% approval rating among Republicans. And on just how amazing that is, considering the year of non-stop trashing she has received from the media.

Not to mention attacks and sneers by what he called, charmingly, low-wattage looking-down-the-nose elitists on the Republican side.

Tell half your readers to just go away...

Highly recommended: Carl M. Cannon, Sarah 'Barracuda' Palin and the Piranhas of the Press

...Meanwhile, an unrelated development put journalism on the firing line.

That event was the decline of conservative, mostly Southern, Democrats (and, eventually, liberal Republicans as well). A patchwork quilt of ideology and regionalism gave way to a U.S. political system more closely resembling that of Great Britain. Today, an American who is liberal tends to be a Democrat, a conservative is almost always a Republican. This may help clarify things for voters, but it created a little-understood crisis for journalists. If being "liberal" now meant sympathy for the Democratic Party, and being conservative implied sympathy for Republicans, all those liberal newsrooms across the country were gradually going to alienate themselves from about half their readers.

That this might pose a problem never dawned on the men and women who controlled the media — even as it drove their right-of-center readers and viewers away in droves. When I tell my friends working in places like The New York Times that they created Rush Limbaugh, they respond with shock and disbelief. But it's obvious to me that it's true, even as the anointed sages of the Old Media solemnly denied that an animal such as "liberal bias" existed at all....

Most people today don't even realize that there used to be conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans! When I was a boy the most important liberal vs conservative wars were within the two parties. The rise of Goldwater conservatism was a revolt within the Republican party against "eastern establishment liberals" such as Nelson Rockefeller. And the Democrats back then were the (very Catholic) party of traditional morality. Also the party of Southern white racists.

If you are still not sure that the press was grossly unfair to Palin, Cannon lays out the facts in great detail. It was absurd, insane, and utterly vile and dishonest!

The real coin...

Angelo M. Codevilla, Who the Hell Do They Think They Are? - - The Corner on National Review Online:

....But as the nation celebrates the anniversary of the revolution of 1776, every presidential hopeful should realize that in the next election Sarah Palin — or someone like her — could be the vehicle for another revolution. The distinctions between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, are being overshadowed by that between what we might call the "Court party" — made up of the well-connected, the people who feel represented by mainstream politicians who argue over how many trillions should be spent on reforming American society, who see themselves as potters of the great American clay — and the "Country party" — the many more who are tired of being treated as clay.

As of July 4, 2009, Sarah Palin is the leader of the Country party. The fact that she did almost nothing to earn that position underlines that party’s nature and power. Neither did Ross Perot, who led that party in 1992. Perot, recall, never identified himself with any sector of American opinion or society. His appeal was simple and powerful: The U.S. government and the top rungs of American society, he argued, are filled with incompetents at best, corrupt losers at worst — people who make no sense and don't like the rest of us. Unlike the rulers, he spoke ordinary English, like one of the ruled who had had enough. He sounded like Ronald Reagan without the conservatism. Until his eccentricities disqualified him, tens of millions were ready to vote for him simply as the representative of the "outs."� Just as in 2008, when Barack Obama won by adding a few Country-party votes to his liberal ones, Sarah Palin could win in 2012 by adding a potentially huge number of Country votes to conservative ones.

We can see the nature and power of today's Country party by noting how little Sarah Palin did to become its head. The person whom candidate John McCain introduced on August 29, 2008, struck the nation like James Stewart in the 1939 movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: somebody like you, who speaks your language, unlike the politicians and bureaucrats who talk, act, and live as if they were better than you. To confirm that impression, Palin hardly had to do anything. The Court party did it for her, and she leads the Country party because highly placed people have demeaned her and everything she stands for more than they have anybody else. They heaped contempt on her for the unpardonable sin of being an ordinary American....

Codevilla's statement that Sarah "didn't do anything" to become head of the "Country Party" is true, since a large part of the people who warmed to her just looked at a few symbolic items—Moose-hunting, Trig, big family, heartland style—and were satisfied. But the statement is also factually ridiculous.

She's no Perot. Unlike a Ross Perot, who jumped into the role more or less on the spur of the moment, Palin has been living that role, and turning it into solid accomplishments, for many years. She's the PTA mom who decided to run for city council. And then for mayor. An office where she didn't just posture, but rolled up her sleeves and did stuff. (And made mistakes. That's GOOD! A person who never makes mistakes isn't trying anything difficult.)

And then did real work at the state level, and fought against the Republican entrenched elites. And, as governor, focused on one big difficult thing, and did it. (The natural gas pipeline, which had been deadlocked for decades.) That showed real managerial wisdom—the leaders who make a difference always focus their energy on a few key points, rather than try to fix everything.

Sarah Palin is the real coin. That's why I'm a fan. Not because she's being attacked by frightened elites. I never wased a minute on Ross Perot. And I've always thought that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington stuff is STUPID. Working in government is a skill, won over years of hard mucky toil. The built-in weakness of the Republican Party is that it is anti-big government in its genes, but needs to use as tools politicians...that is, people who want to be part of government! (The Dems have their own structural weakness—they are socialist in their genes, and socialism never works.)

The most precious asset the Republican Party can have is effective politicians who are not seduced by power and elitism.

Not a quitter...

I think this piece by "Jude," at Hugh Hewitt's blog, Sarah Palin Is Running A Marathon, is the best thing I've seen yet on the subject. Read the whole thing....

....She's no quitter. She's just running her own race.

Imagine the kitchen table conversation at the Palin house. 'Hey, would you guys like this stuff to stop for a while, and for Dad and I to have the option to fight back against it when does happen, and to fight for good people more often, at our own pace, on our own schedule? Would you like it if I can be home more often but also do more for America? Oh, and do you think I should be responsible and step aside as governor since the bad guys have made every day I remain in office more damaging to the state?' 'Hell, yeah.' (I like to think that one was Piper.)

Sarah Palin is the biggest star in politics after the sophist in the oval office, and Sarah Palin has been abandoned by too much of the Right. [Amen, brother!] Mitt Romney is a cyborg and probably has 2012 in hand already, which I think is great. Love the guy, think we should be so lucky. But how can the GOP and the RNC fail to defend and champion Palin? She is a superstar media talent who's natural charisma could light the sun. Don't listen to the garbage about how she hurt the ticket - that's something Democrats tell themselves to sleep at night. She is a major voice in the conservative movement, the most prominent female Republican, and on and on. Is it so hard to defend her at parties that we have to say she's finished, or that we never thought she could make it back anyway? If she's taking herself out of politics, then fine, we can let her be... but don't bet on it. Sanford has clearly taken himself off the board, but she's securing and defending her place. Palin has a remarkable killer instinct and she climbed the political ladder in a way no one expected. She may very well be passing the ball because she believes it's the right thing to do, but she's also going to become a more effective national figure by doing so. We might see more of her, not less, and if that's the case, will the RNC want to help her? More importantly, will it even know how? I think it's just as likely that she's going to learn how to play the national media all by herself, and she may be better for it in the end.

And if I'm wrong and this is the beginning of the end of Palin's political career? Well, as I said at the top of the post, this race is called life, and no one could blame her for making sure she wins that one.

It will be interesting.

I don't think she's going to leave public life. But I also think the various political maneuverings are just the trivial surface ripples of the vasty deeps of what's really going on. Palin and Obama are symbols of the two paths that America faces. The 2008 Presidential race was really between the two of them. It was a game in which Obama seemed to have all the good cards. He was prepared...prepared by years of Alinskyite dirty dealing and holier-than-thou fakery. Palin was plucked suddenly from obscurity, and painfully un-prepared.

But truth has a power of its own, and above all Sarah radiates that power. She is herself, she's not acting or playing a part. (My guess is that even Obama himself doesn't know who Obama is.) And that self is pure USA. The very attacks on her just go to show how honest she is, and how pathetic and weak they are. Think of poor Andrew Sullivan trying to prove that Trig isn't Palin's child!

Palin is, just by existing, a symbolic attack on the atheism of the Left. And on its Gnosticism! Her and Todd's decision to welcome a Downs Syndrome child with love and joy is a total repudiation of everything the trendy Left believes. It is more powerful than a thousand speeches.

My guess is that she will continue to be weak in worldly terms, and scorned by all elites, including those of her own party.... and yet somehow never finally defeated.

Palin Derangement Syndrome goes on...

Jim Geraghty, on the absurd Vanity Fair hit piece on Sarah Palin: Why They Hate Her, The Angelina Jolie of Politics:

...Liberals believe their ideas, philosophy, worldview and policies liberate its believers and contend the conservative equivalents limit people. Liberals see themselves are rejecting outdated beliefs and obsolete ideas, overturning established orders and discarding traditions established by superstitious and ignorant forebears who weren't as enlightened as we are. Conservatives, in their minds, are runaway cultural super-egos, always wagging their fingers about individual responsibility, dismissing excuses, reminding people that they always can't do what they want because of the consequences to themselves and to others.

Conservatism, they suspect, will leave you in a marriage that doesn't satisfy you, burden you with children you don't want, repress your passions and trap you in a empty, boring and unfulfilled life, with no hand of government able to help....

...In her opponents' minds, Palin's made all the wrong choices, and cannot, they insist, be very bright. Yet she's happy and successful. She is an anomaly that invalidates their worldview, and for that, they attempt to immiserate her — regardless of whether she wishes to run for national office again....

"An anomaly that invalidates their worldview." That's for sure. And few things have validated my suspicions that most of what's happening in our world are battles over symbols more than the lefty reaction to Sarah Palin. The crazy thing was that Sarah has never been a "values conservative" in her practical political life. Her issues have always been good government and economic development, especially energy policy. She's never fought in the culture war, she's never mounted any attacks on liberalism or secularism!

But that didn't make any difference. Symbolically, she proclaims that the way to happiness and fulfilment is exactly the opposite of what liberal theory says it is.

"..Liberals believe their ideas, philosophy, worldview and policies liberate its believers..." That stuff is not "liberating," it's slavery.

Busy over the weekend...

So probably no bloggiting until Sunday...

But here's a little alternative to the Obamists...an example of how Americans solve energy shortages, stimulate the economy and make the world a better place...

We're a "vast and broken-hearted thing." Why wasn't I told?

I liked this piece by Noemie Emery, Palinphobes and the audacity of type:

Now that the Obama presidency is nearing the 60-day mark, it's time to thank those fastidious scribes on the left and the right who worked so hard to warn us against Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, and the dire things that would surely occur if she ever got close to executive power.

How right they were to insist that she was unfit for high office. Let's just imagine what she might have done:

As president, she might have caused the stock market to plunge over 2,000 points in the six weeks after she assumed office, left important posts in the Treasury unfilled for two months, been described by insiders as 'overwhelmed' by the office, and then gone on to diss the British Prime Minister on his first state visit, giving him, as one head of state to another, a set of DVDs plucked from the aisles of Wal Mart, a tasteful gift, even if they can't be played on a TV in Britain. (Note, the Prime Minister, who is losing his eyesight, may even be blind in one eye).

As vice president, she might have told Katie Couric that when the stock market crashed in 1929, President Franklin D. Roosevelt went on TV to reassure a terrified nation. Or on her first trip abroad as Secretary of State, she might have, as the AP reported, "raised eyebrows on her first visit to Europe...when she mispronounced her "EU counterparts names and claimed U.S. democracy was older than Europe's," then gave the Russian minister a gag "reset" button, on which the word "reset" was translated incorrectly.

What a good thing that Palin, whom Christopher Buckley called "an embarrassment, and a dangerous one," wasn't in office to cause such debacles, and that we have Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton instead.

"This is not a leader, this is a follower," wrote ex-Reagan muse Peggy Noonan. "She follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine...she doesn't seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts."...

Poor Peggy. Sad case.

Alaska, by the way, seems to be weathering the financial crisis better than many places. I saw this headline: Alaska Dodges Banking Collapse, and thought it referred to some scary almost-disaster narrowly averted. But the article is merely about how Alaska financial institutions are in good health because they've mostly avoided risky loans and toxic assets. This has probably got nothing to do with Palin personally, but perhaps a lot to do with AK being the sort of place that produces people like her. I'd not be surprised if Wall Street hot-shots (yuppie Democrats most of them) feel the same contempt towards back-wood bankers that Beltway pundits feel about Sarah. So who's looking good now?

And I didn't know about the PM's vision problems. Way t'go, Barack. Give a blind man DVD's, to make him feel good.

Same now as the year I was born.

From a piece by Thomas Sowell, "Not One of Us":

...Governor Palin's candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.

Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, "He's not one of us."

The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was "one of us." As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.

The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today.

Before the first trial of Alger Hiss began, reporters who gathered at the courthouse informally sounded each other out as to which of them they believed, before any evidence had been presented. Most believed that Hiss was telling the truth and that it was Chambers who was lying.

More important, those reporters who believed that Chambers was telling the truth were immediately ostracized. None of this could have been based on the evidence for either side, for that evidence had not yet been presented in court....

The causes and people morph and change, but lefties are still working for Stalin. Same as the year I was born, when the guilty verdict was handed down in the Hiss trial. And I used to think that Whittaker Chambers' book Witness was sort of a period piece. Now I think of it in conjunction with Tolkien's words: "...and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat."

Witness remains one of the great American books.

Me, I align with the trogs...

Peter Robinson, Neither Moderate Nor Centrist - Forbes.com:

...A couple of implications here are worth noting. The first is that a deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite.

Buckley, Gergen and Brooks all attended expensive private universities, then spent their careers moving among the wealthy and powerful who inhabit the seaboard corridor running from Washington to Boston. If any of the three strolled uninvited into a cocktail party in Georgetown, Cambridge or New Haven, the hostess would emit yelps of delight. Yet all three originally got Obama wrong.

Contrast Buckley, Gergen and Brooks with, let us say, Rush Limbaugh, whose appearance at any chic cocktail party would cause the hostess to faint dead away, or with Thomas Sowell, who occupies probably the most unfashionable position in the country, that of a black conservative.

Limbaugh and Sowell both got Obama right from the very get-go. "Just what evidence do you have," Sowell replied when I asked, shortly before the election, whether he considered Obama a centrist, "that he's anything but a hard-left ideologue?"

The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right. As our national drama continues to unfold, bear that in mind....

<armchair psychologist mode> My guess is that Sarah, symbolically, is a pie-in-the-face to many peoples' hidden gnostic fantasy that their uber-coolness or crunchy-granola-ness show that they are shedding the dross of the material world and ascending to a higher spiritual state. To a sort of transcendental oneness that is glowing... golden... almost.... dare I say it? European! (Or, if not that good, at least not tacky!) Everything about her is the down-to-earth opposite of that sort of airy-fairy crap. </armchair psychologist mode>

I'd extend this and say that, on a symbolic level, the Palins' decision to not abort a Downs syndrome child was an extreme affront to our elites, and was more important than anything she actually said or did. (She's actually never been an anti-abortion crusader.) Sort of a declaration of war. Trig Palin symbolizes the utter intractableness of the fallen and broken nature of our material universe. Gnosticism in all its slippery and protean forms is an attempt to escape from this. To slough it off!

For the Palins to embrace, symbolically, the gritty ugly realness of things is to reject the deep underlying assumptions of almost every leftist or elitist worldview.

It is also exceedingly Catholic. Not in being anti-abortion (Catholics consider that natural law, not something Catholic) but in embracing the world and reality in the way it is, and not trying to squirm away from the pain and ugliness at the cost of distancing God's creation.

Clotted liberal cliches...

Camille Paglia:

...As I have repeatedly said in this column, I have never had the slightest problem in understanding Sarah Palin's meaning at any time. On the contrary, I have positively enjoyed her fresh, natural, rapid delivery with its syncopated stops and slides -- a fabulous example of which was the way (in her recent interview with John Ziegler) that she used a soft, swooping satiric undertone to zing Katie Couric's dippy narcissism and to assert her own outrage as a "mama grizzly" at libels against her family.

Ideology-driven attacks on Palin became clotted liberal cliches within 24 hours of her introduction as John McCain's running mate. What a bunch of tittering lemmings the urban elite have become in this country. From Couric's vicious manipulations of video clips to Cavett's bourgeois platitudes, the preemptive strike on Palin as a potential presidential candidate has grossly misfired. Whatever legitimate objections may be raised to Palin on political grounds (explored, for example, by David Talbot in Salon) have been lost in the amoral overkill that has defamed a self-made woman of concrete achievement in the public realm.....

There's nothing much I can do about the nihilist ant-workers who are busily devouring and destroying the culture. They will win in the end, because they are too stupid to realize they are destroying themselves at the same time. Sort of termites eating the ship, and going down with it.

But the remaining pleasure I can have is to hurt them---to make them suffer. And one way I can do that is to support Sarah Palin. Few things have been more revealing than the way they HATED her from the first day, even without knowing much about her. She's REAL, and our empty-hearted zombies, our fake-pacifists and fake-liberals and fake-progressives and fake-Quakers...they knew it instantly!

Sarah, if you never do anything else in the world, I will love you forever for the way you made the lefty slime-creatures squirm! what fun that was!

"The people who make the lists turn out to be wrong about nearly everything..."

...As noted above, global warming alarmists are going out of fashion, owing to the collapse of their tenuous evidence, and the global cooling alarmists have yet to organize their fans. This eliminates all the leading climatologists except Reid Bryson.

The pioneer of modern climatology, Prof. Bryson has been blowing holes in man-made climate-change alarms for decades. He is the man who replied to the "retreat of the Alpine glaciers" hysteria by asking, "And what did you find when the snow melted?" (A silver mine, with all the tools stacked up for the next spring: i.e. the glacier was recent.) He should have been man of the year around 1999.

Among other leading "scientists and thinkers," it is the same story, endlessly repeated. The people who make the lists turn out, nearly invariably, to be wrong about nearly everything; the people who have been fairly consistently right never make the lists. It was typical of the year in which the Large Hadron Collider debuted as the most expensive dysfunctional white elephant in history, that the Nobel physics prize went to three particle physicists...

....That is probably enough drumroll. We must get to business. Pass myself the envelope, please.

My selection for "Man of the Year 2008" is: Sarah Palin.

The citation reads: "For a politician of real accomplishment and promise, who has somehow managed, for the first time since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, to cut through the verbiage and posturing of an election campaign, and look an electorate in the eye; a politician whose policy instincts are sound, whose wits are sharp, and whose moral vision is unclouded -- who drives all the right people crazy, across party lines."...

I'm looking forward to years of having her drive all the right people crazy!

She's a "living treasure" just for the way she reveals who is UNSOUND. The easy way to detect the phonies, on either the Left or the Right, is to note who hates Sarah.

I'm not referring to those who disagree with her, but to the multitudes who felt an instant visceral dislike. The kind of "conservatives" who suddenly discovered the importance of rule by Ivy-League elites. Or the "liberals" whose guilty consciences "saw" a Palin campaign focussed on abortion--which in fact I don't think she even mentioned on the campaign trail.

Why I love Camille....

Camille Paglia, on, among many other things, Dick Cavett's absurd slam at Sarah Palin's English...

...Yes, that is the lordly Yale that formed Dick Cavett's linguistic and cultural assumptions and that has alarmingly resurfaced in the contempt that he showed for the self-made Sarah Palin in "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla." I am very sorry that he, and so many other members of the educational elite, cannot take pleasure as I do in the quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant way that Palin speaks -- which is closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.

English has evolved, and the world has moved on. There is no necessary connection between bourgeois syntax and practical achievement. I have never had the slightest problem with understanding Sarah Palin's meaning at any time. Since when do free Americans subscribe to a stuffy British code of veddy, veddy proper English? We don't live in a stultified class system. In the U.K., in fact, many literary leftists make a big, obnoxious point about retaining their working-class accents. Too many American liberals claim to be defenders of the working class and then run like squealing mice from working-class manners and mores (including moose hunting and wolf control). What smirky, sheltered hypocrites. Get the broom!...

"Get the broom!" Ha ha. "Street rapping." Well, it's true. Sometimes her cackle just makes my head spin, it comes so fast...but it always makes good sense.

Life is frustrating in many ways, but I take comfort in thinking that Sarah will be making effete liberal frauds squirm and suffer for years to come...

Just fisking this for the fun of it...

Not important...Silly stuff in fact...

US News and World Report, Sarah Palin for President in 2012? No Way :

...But for all the enthusiasm she generated among the base, Palin has become a caricature for millions of casual political observers. [Uh, EVERY Republican is "a caricature for millions of casual political observers." Comes with the territory. Reagan = B-actor, Bush = cowboy. They managed.] Many people, including crucial swaths of the independent and youth vote, will be unable to distinguish the real Sarah Palin from Tina Fey's Saturday Night Live impression of her. To them, she will always be remembered, fairly or not, as an overmatched vixen in an overpriced wardrobe. [Their tiny brains will soon forget.]

The fundamental question, then, is: Do Republicans at the grass-roots and national levels really want to start the most significant rebuilding the party has faced since Watergate, having to convince a large segment of voters that Palin is qualified to be president, when a majority of Americans recently said otherwise? [You're saying that the election was a referendum on PALIN?? McCain had nothing to do with it? Wow, she's really got you intimidated.]

There is also the inconvenient reality that Palin would have to mastermind a run for president at a distance of nearly 4,000 miles and four time zones from New York City and Washington. The Internet makes many things possible, but changing geography is not yet one of them. [Well it seems to make more and more things possible. And more and more "insiders" redundant.] And who among the savvy D.C. insiders that are essential to building buzz [I bet this guy thinks of himself as a "savvy insider," and is desperately hoping that makes him important. Actually, Sarah seems to generate a ton of buzz with no help from the savvy's.] for potential candidates is willing to hop on a snow machine for regularly scheduled huddles in Wasilla? [If she looks like the next big thing, they will crawl over broken glaciers to bask in her radiance. And so will you, turkey.]

Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, there has not been a presidential nominee whose 'day job' kept him more than one time zone from the centers of media and government. George W. Bush had the greatest distance to travel, but his disadvantage was mitigated by three factors, none of which apply to Palin's circumstances. He was the head of a decentralized executive branch in which the lieutenant governor arguably has more day-to-day responsibilities. His father and grandfather had spent decades building the family name and network in Washington, including 12 years in the White House. And this base allowed him to build a sense of inevitability two years out from the presidential race, meaning that advisers and fellow governors were tripping over themselves to come to Austin to meet with him and discuss a run. [Hmmm. "Sense of inevitability." I wonder who could fit that description, among Republicans right now?]

Four more years as governor (assuming she wins re-election in 2010) may add some gravitas for Palin, but it will also complicate her path to the nomination. For example, the gas pipeline deal that she brokered will move from the conceptual stage to implementation, bringing on the attendant complexities. [Complexities! Surely too much for a mere girl to handle.] And she will face a legislature with Democrats, and some Republicans, eager to take the gleam off her credentials as a reformer. [Well, they will try.]

But perhaps the most difficult roadblock to Palin's candidacy is the same thing that has generated so much of her appeal—her status as America's most famous 'hockey mom.' Putting aside the demands of being governor, Palin's domestic plate runneth over. She is a mother of five, including an infant with Down syndrome and a son in Iraq. She is also about to become a grandmother to the child of her 17-year-old daughter, with all the responsibilities that entails. And don't forget her remaining daughters, ages 13 and 7. [RFK had what, ten kids? What sexist nonsense. Also there is the teensy detail, that the Palins are going to have lots of money now. Sarah can probably ask 50k for a lecture fee, and her book will get a multi-million $ advance. So.....they will be able to HIRE HELP, stupid. ]

Finally, her husband's careers in oil production and commercial fishing necessarily mean he is away from home regularly, as does his championship-level snow-machine racing. By all accounts, the Palins have raised a happy family while excelling in their chosen fields. And they appeared to manage their domestic duties seamlessly during the recent campaign. But this was a two-month sprint, not the multiyear marathon required of successful presidential nominees. [Sorry to break it to you, but those marathons are attempts to become known and liked by the Republican base. Guess what Sarah's ALREADY accomplished?]

Sarah Palin will remain a star in the Republican Party for decades, perhaps even ascending to the presidency someday. But to imagine that day is just four years away is to deny the very simple calculus of her current situation." [Dream on, pal. Other Republicans will put up a fight, and maybe a better candidate will come to the fore. But right now Palin's the obvious front-runner, and you "savvy insiders" will be begging for her crumbs...]

Photo thanks to Meghan McCain's blog. Which I recommend for its pictures of life on the campaign trail.

The Africa thing was a hoax...

New York Times: A Fake Expert Named Martin Eisenstadt and a Phony Think Tank Fool Bloggers and the Mainstream News Media

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. 'Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,' Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn't exist. His blog does, but it's a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.....

Tim Blair is still catching "journalists" reporting the lie that President Bush posed with a plastic turkey in Iraq in 2003! Perhaps he can start a Palin/Africa watch too, since I'd guess a lot of people will find this "too good to check" even after it's been checked and debunked...

Hmmm. Perhaps I should bill myself as a "Fellow of the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy!" It has a nice sound. Maybe "Senior Fellow." Or perhaps "Visiting Scholar?" That's nice and slippery, hard to pin-down... What do you think?

So let's wait and see who apologizes...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - A report has cleared Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin of ethics violations in the firing of her public safety commissioner. Released Monday, the report says there is no probable cause to believe Palin or any other state official violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act in connection with the firing. The report was prepared by Timothy Petumenos, an independent counsel for the Alaska Personnel Board.

The previous "report" was an obvious smear. It was by the hired investigator alone, and had no official imprimatur. Now the official report comes out, timed to be too late to effect the election.

I expect no apologies from you cowardly fake-progressives who have been claiming that Governor Palin has "serious ethical problems" in Alaska. And seeing-no-evil in Chicago politics...

She's my gal...

What was that famous advertising line? "They laughed when I sat down at the piano...But when I started to play!" (From 1925. Here's a link)

From CBS News' Scott Conroy: It was less than two weeks ago when Sarah Palin astonished her traveling press corps by lifting the curtain (literally) and journeying to the back of her campaign plane to answer reporters' questions for the first time after 40 days on the campaign trail. But the candidate who has been criticized for having a bunker mentality when it came to the national media can now lay legitimate claim to being more accessible than either Joe Biden or Barack Obama.

In the past two days alone, Palin has answered questions from her national press corps on three separate occasions. On Saturday, she held another plane availability, and on Sunday, she offered an impromptu press conference on the tarmac upon landing in Colorado Springs. A few minutes later, she answered even more questions from reporters during an off-the-record stop at a local ice cream shop.

By contrast, Biden hasn't held a press conference in more than a month, and Obama hasn't taken questions from his full traveling press corps since the end of September. John McCain—who spent most of the primary season holding what seemed like one, never-ending media availability—hasn't done one since Sept. 23....

She won't get a lot of credit for this---it's the job of the press to be "useful idiots" and get the lefty candidate elected. But I'm smiling right now, thinking it was less than a month ago that people were sneering that Sarah couldn't handle the press. And now she's doing it, as Willie Brown said, "...like she was just BS-ing on the street with the meter maid." [Link].

And if you would read that piece by Brown, you will notice the last line: "As for Palin herself, she is going to be very, very effective on the campaign trail, especially if McCain's people can figure out how to gently keep her from getting into confrontations with the press." HA HA. Way past that, Willie Brown!

I put my chips on Sarah from day one, and vicariously endured the abuse and lies thrown at her. So, NOTICE THIS, lefty losers. Sarah's the real deal, Obama's the clever bullshitter. And you know it in your hearts. You knew it from the beginning; that's why you hated her.

"I will be proud to have lost with Sarah Palin"

Mark, writing about how certain "conservative intellectuals" are jumping ship...

....As for the "old" vs the "new" McCain, I've had little use for either, as NR subscribers who read my cover story on him from eight-and-a-half years ago might dimly recall. I support him faute de mieux, and that's it. Clearly, he's found it difficult (to put it mildly) to make the transition from running against his party to running for it. There's a lesson there: "Maverick" is an attitude, not a coherent worldview, which is why McCain has been unable to make maverickiness (maverectomy?) into a viable electoral platform. Of course, "hope" and "change" are attitudes, too, but so fluffy as to float free of the constraints of reality.

But, if the combination of gazillions of dollars in illegal foreign donations, Acorn's Dig-Up-The-Vote operation, a doting media that would embarrass Kim Jong-Il and the Republican nominee's inability even to speak up on issues where he was right all along (like Fannie Mae), if all that is now unstoppable, I will be proud to have lost with Sarah Palin, who (unlike Brooks and Buckley) runs a state bigger than most European Union nations, has fought an honorable campaign, and has been responsible for such energy and enthusiasm as the ticket can muster.

Given that neither of us are likely to be in the club-car caboose with Brooks et al come January, if she's ever in New Hampshire, I'll be happy to thank her and buy her dinner at the state's least worst restaurant. Which should set me back all of 12 bucks, but it's the thought that counts.

Amen, Brother Mark. Can I come too?

Look folks, things are bad. Everything is probably going to go by the board. I shall go down honorably, spitting my contemp for David Brooks and Christopher Buckley.

BUT, the birds still sing,, the sun still rises, and......there is, awesomely, Jewgrass Music! Enjoy.

Oh Sarah. Go Sarah!

It may be too late, but it is sweet to finally finally see the Obama rock turned over, and some light shone on all the horrid crawly things as they go scurrying away to their crevices...

ABC News:

..."You know, what's next, claiming that he didn't know two of his biggest supporters were running Fannie Mae, the subprime mortgage giant? Palin said. "Maybe he thought they were just guys in the Washington neighborhood."

Palin continued the line of attack by questioning Obama's judgment in saying he would meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"And since he got called out on his plans to meet unconditionally with terror state leaders like Ahmadinejad, will he now claim he was unaware of his radical background?" Palin added, in mocking reference to Obama saying at a Democratic primary debate last year that he would meet leaders of rogue states without preconditions....

Heck, ol' Mahmoud is just one of those guys around the neighborhood. Or at least, he would fit in fine in Obama's Hyde Park neighborhood. He hates America, he hates Jews, has a violent revolutionary past, wears a suit now but is really still the old hostage-taker. He could help Obama be a "school reformer, no problemo... Or hey, Mahmoud could move to San Francisco. Get a Prius and an Obama sticker....He'd be popular...

Ain't that the truth...

Tim Blair quotes the WSJ:

Mrs. Palin may not know as much about the world as Mr. Biden does, but at least most of what she knows is true.

I'll drink to her....

The more I think about the debate the more jazzed I get. (Or maybe it's the Laphroaig. They have it at Costco now. You just gotta drink it. Life's too short not to.) The attacks on our Sarah over the last few weeks have been the most insane thing I've ever seen in politics.

I was even reading somebody's screed about how her lip liner or lip gloss or some such was a fake! I mean, this was seriously discussed! With blown-up photographs. I kid you not. She is Kryptonite to Lefty losers, and they knew it from the first day McCain announced her. They went berserk, they've thrown everything they could at her...... And tonight she just made all that ankle-biting moot. She just went right past it onto new ground.

And think about when her e-mail was hacked. What was cool and really interesting was that they didn't find anything useful. There was really nothing there for anyone to be ashamed of. Her private life is exactly the same as her public life. Just imagine if people could eavesdrop on a private conversation by Obama and his radical leftist pals. Wow. If that went public he would be dead. Sarah: WYSIWYG

The situation for Republicans is not good, and Mr Creepy may well end up being our Jimmy-Carter-of-color. But that, bad as it will be for the country and the world, will just beg for a Reagan to follow on. And we may have found her....

My heart's with the grassroots....

...But the fact still remains that if you are thrilled about Palin, you have a grassroots sensibility. If you are not, you have an elite/establishment sensibility. The delegates on the floor are the grassroots. Mike Murphy and Peggy Noonan are the elite. The dividing lines have always been there, but Palin provides the ultimate litmus test....

...A major contributing factor to conservative despair these last two weeks is that the fear that the Palin choice would be defined as a warped historical error. Conservative and grassroots leverage over the party would be gone, at least for the foreseeable future. Sarah was our gal, and if she messed it up, it would be a long time before the conservative narrative about the future of the GOP would be trusted again. Meanwhile, conservatives were being asked to depart from principle in supporting the bailout. It was a wrenching and sobering couple of weeks.

Just as with her brilliant RNC speech, Palin did not let us down. And once again, she becomes the hope of the ticket and a standardbearer for the young guns who include Jindal, Portman, Cantor, McCarthy, Ryan, and many more.

Palin can no longer be defined as a liability in any meaningful political or analytical sense. Her claim to leadership in the next Right stands stronger than ever

Best comment...

Ramesh: "The big loser tonight was Tina Fey."

And Peggy Noonan: "she killed."

I have to admit I was worried. I know she has what it takes, but I hadn't been seeing it for the last few weeks. Thank you, Governor Palin!

Who do you stand shoulder to shoulder with?

....LIBERAL AMERICAN Jews, like liberal Americans in general, and indeed like their fellow leftists in Israel and throughout the West, uphold themselves as champions of human rights. They claim that they care about the underdog, the wretched of the earth. They care about the environment. They care about securing American women's unfettered access to abortions. They care about keeping Christianity and God out of the public sphere. They care about offering peace to those who are actively seeking their destruction so that they can applaud themselves for their open-mindedness and tell themselves how much better they are than savage conservatives.

Those horrible, war-mongering, Bambi killing, unborn baby defending, God-believing conservatives, who think that there are things worth going to war to protect, must be defeated at all costs. They must intimidate, attack, demonize and defeat those conservatives who think that the free women of the West should be standing shoulder to shoulder not with Planned Parenthood, but with the women of the Islamic world who are enslaved by a misogynist Shari'a legal code that treats them as slaves and deprives them of control not simply of their wombs, but of their faces, their hair, their arms, their legs, their minds and their hearts.

The lives of 6 million Jews in Israel are today tied to the fortunes of those women, to the fortunes of American forces in Iraq, to the willingness of Americans across the political and ideological spectrum to recognize that there is more that unifies them than divides them and to act on that knowledge to defeat the forces of genocide, oppression, hatred and destruction that are led today by the Iranian regime and personified in the brutal personality of Ahmadinejad. But Jewish Democrats chose to ignore this basic truth in order to silence Palin.

They should be ashamed. The Democratic Party should be ashamed. And Jewish American voters should consider carefully whether opposing a woman who opposes the abortion of fetuses is really more important than standing up for the right of already born Jews to continue to live and for the Jewish state to continue to exist. Because this week it came to that.

Most people probably find this situation confusing. Why would Jews reject help in standing up to terrorists who want to kill Jews? Why would they put lefty politics ahead of preventing the possible destruction of Israel? Regular readers of Random Jottings know the answer, everyone else has to flounder.

I was going to rant here, but really, you can guess my opinion on this... and I won't try to top Caroline.

Obama squirted with seltzer water...

Peter Robinson has a good article on what could be Mr Obama's big lack as a presidential candidate. A sense of humor....

...True, you could have argued that so far he hadn't needed much of a sense of humor. Hillary Clinton hadn't had them rolling in the aisles herself. That changed the following week, when the Republicans held their own convention. In an acceptance speech of just 3,000 words, Sarah Palin provided no fewer than six laughs--real belly laughs, each followed by thunderous applause--five of which came at Obama's expense.

Gov. Palin's performance undermined Sen. Obama in two ways. It made him appear prim and self-serious by comparison. And it thoroughly unnerved the man. "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,'" Palin told the GOP convention, contrasting her work when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, with Obama's efforts on the south side of Chicago, "except that you have actual responsibilities." For several days afterward, Obama appeared dazed. "Community organizer," he kept insisting at campaign appearances, was so a real job. Even now, more than two weeks later, he has yet to employ humor effectively. Instead he has "sharpened his speeches," to quote the Associated Press, adding "bite." Obama can take a blow. What he can't take is a joke.

Sen. Obama's self-seriousness is understandable. At Columbia and Harvard, the faculty would have seen him, an exceptionally gifted African-American, as destined for great things. In Chicago, he would have been seen as destined for great things because he had attended Columbia and Harvard. What no one anywhere appears to have pointed out to him, however, is that humor itself is great thing....

Obama's problem is that humor is always conservative. Leftish thinking is based on the possibility of fixing this world. Making things OK, making the trains run on time. Making people happy.

We conservatives are sure those aren't possibilities. Not only will Utopia never be achieved, but if we even think we are within telescope-distance of the most minor sort of utopia (or just a veto-proof majority in the Senate) we are probably about to crash spectacularly and look like fools. And humans will never be happy or contented.

The old name for this is Original Sin. And even those who are not religious at all can understand it. (An atheist can be a conservative, but he really ought, out of simple justice, to admit to himself every half-hour or so that Irenaeus got this one right.) And it's funny as long as you don't expect perfection. We conservatives slip on a banana peel, and laugh at ourselves. Or at least admit that other people have a right to laugh.

But the liberal is the Grand Dame whose very body-language radiates, "That's NOT funny!" Whose elegant party is reduced to chaos by the Marx Brothers squirting bottles of seltzer.

And we saw it happen! Think of sober Mr Obama with his Greek temple and stadium full of fans and his not-quite-thrilling climactic moment. And then the next day John McCain grins and waves his cape, and poof! Presto! The anti-Obama! The most stupendous political reversal of our lifetimes. It was wacky! It was FUNNY. It's still funny.

Has ever a joke produced such a quantity of sputtering outrage from the fat ladies? From the straight men? We keep trying to analyze the Leftist responses to Palin, but really they all add up to, "How DARE they!"

We'll cry all the way to the bank."...

It's getting to be hilarious how freaked-out leftizoids are about our Vice-Presidential pick! I've haven't seen something get under their skin like this since GW Bush suggested to the world's "liberals" that since they are always bloviating about how bad Hitler was---surely they will be glad to help take down a present-day Hitler! Ha ha. Didn't that put the frauds on the hot-spot.

But Palin's better. Her mere existence is like sprinkling salt on Lefty slugs. Pure delight... Like this example:

By Charles M. Blow, NY Times:

Mr. McCain, on Monday you repeated your delusional notion that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. [Grew at a 3.4% rate last quarter--sounds strong to me.] Now, the federal government is working on a deal to save that economy from collapsing. [No retard, it's the financial sector that is a problem, not the economy as a whole. Of course this will damage the economy in the future if not fixed, but right now all the other economic sectors are still strong.] You have admitted that the economy is not your forte, so you could have used a running mate with some financial chops. (Remember Mitt Romney?) [McCain is only a phone call away from Romney's advice. Plus about 10,000 other economic experts. Why this weird obsession about Palin? Since when is the V-P the main economic advisor?]

But no. Who did you pick? SnowJob SquareGlasses whose financial credentials include running Wasilla into debt, [One project got hit with a big lawsuit, and that cost the city millions, but it was otherwise a thrifty administration.] listing (but not selling) a plane on EBay [She got a talking-point that drives you nuts, then she sold the plane the usual way. Sounds pretty smart to me!] and flip-flopping on a bridge to wherever. [Ended up doing the right thing--when has Obama ever?] In fact, when it comes to real issues in general, she may prove to be a liability. [So why aren't you nihilists happy? Hmm? Who are you talking to here? Are you whistling past the graveyard of failed Leftist candidates?]

In what respect, you may ask?

It turns out that the Republican enthusiasm for Sarah Palin is just as superficial as she is. They were so eager for someone to cheer for (because they really don't like you [Actually we like him MUCH more now.]) that they dove face first into the Palin mirage. But, on the issues, even they worry about her. [No, we worry that she may get tripped-up by some Palin-deranged leftist. But she's obviously fundamentally sound and wise.]

In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this week 77 percent of Republicans said that they had a favorable opinion of Palin. But when asked what specifically they liked about her, their top five reasons were that she was honest, tough, caring, outspoken and fresh-faced. Sounds like a talk-show host, not a vice president. [Liar. You would KILL for a candidate those words fit. You haven't had one in my lifetime.] (By the way, her intelligence was in a three-way tie for eighth place, right behind "I just like her.") [Oh yeah. Our stupid candidates like Reagan and Bush keep getting rejected by the voters. Not. As my mother says, "I'll cry all the way to the bank."]

When those Republicans were asked what they liked least about her, they started to sound more like everyone else. Aside from those who said that there was nothing they didn't like, [You don't seem to be telling us what percentage said that. I bet it's high.] next on the list were: her lack of experience, her record as governor and her lack of foreign-policy experience.

Also, most Republicans think you only picked her to help with the election, not because she is qualified, and a third said that they would be "concerned" if for some reason she actually had to serve as president. [Concerned about your head exploding and splattering us with brain tissue...]

And Palin is proving to be just as vacant as people suspected. In her interview with Charles Gibson last week, she didn't know what the Bush doctrine was. [I answered that one here. She knows the concept, just not the name. Let me explain. The world is like the Old West. If Jesse James and his gang move in nearby, YOU GUYS want to wait until AFTER he has pillaged the town and raped the women and killed the men to do something (If the UN allows, of course). The dumb cowboy says, "T' hell with that, boys, let's go smoke 'em out!" Would you care to ask ordinary Americans which view they support?]

Update: I keep laughing about guys like this, who put on a mantle of ponderous seriousness to tell us that Sarah Palin is an insignificant fluff-ball who no one could possibly take seriously! And by the way tell us Republicans what we really think, since we can't figure it out ourselves. Psst. What we really think is that we could kiss Sarah's feet in gratitude, for giving these chomskys indigestion.

We don't have to think about this, it's in our blood....

From What is truly frightening about Sarah Palin, By Bradley Burston

....The question about the Bush Doctrine was not a trick. It was not a trivial point designed to make Sarah Palin look bad. It is the summary of a worldview that has guided American foreign and military policy for the seven years since September 11, 2001. It is America's formal explanation for sending Americans into harm's way. It is America's explanation to the world for what America has done.

Even my Israeli cab driver, a non-American through and through, knew more about the Bush Doctrine than Sarah Palin. And that is cause for serious concern.

The cabbie knew, for example, that the doctrine provided for anticipatory self-defense, and pre-emptive strikes to forestall hostile acts even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack.

"This would never have happened in Israel, ever" remarked a journalist friend, referring to the choice of Governor Palin, whose credentials in the realms of foreign policy, statecraft and the military are limited in the extreme.

With irony bordering on the painful, the journalist added, "Sarah Palin has restored my faith in Israel."

Israel is far from a model of good government, wise policymaking and exemplary leaders. But here, at least, voters and the politicians they make it their business to know inside and out, relate to politics not as if it were a spectacular bowl game or a reality show.but for what politics really is, in America and Israel both: a matter of life and death....(Thanks to Orrin)

Sorry, Mr Burston, but I think you are wrong here. Do you imagine Governor Palin doesn't GET "pre-emptive strikes to forestall hostile acts?" Of course she does. It's just American cowboy common-sense. It's Jacksonian. For all I know she's never heard of the Osirak raid, but do you imagine she wouldn't understand it in the blink of an eye? And say, "Well duh! They're building nuclear bombs to fry you? Of course you should hit them. Go for it."

And the Bush Doctrine on the subject of spreading democracy? We Americans started arguing furiously on that subject even before we had written our Constitution. I don't know what her views are, but she would absolutely understand the question. It's in our blood. (And I'm guessing your Tel Aviv cab driver hasn't thought much about that part.)

Update: An irony is that all the major Democrats, such as Clinton, Kerry, and Gore, are on record before 2000 saying that Saddam is a danger to us, and ought to be removed from power. Once Bush proposed actually doing something about it they pretended they had never heard of such a disgusting non-European idea. But that was not a failure to understand the concept, it was moral bankruptcy

Not a blinker...

By former Reagan/Bush speechwriter Clark Judge:

....But, as I say, experience is NOT the reasons that Governor Palin is better suited as a steward of our national security than Senator Obama. Here is the reason.

Presidents are surrounded with lots of foreign policy experts. Most of the National Security Council staff will be the same, whichever ticket wins. Both Obama and Palin are intelligent people who will quickly absorb their briefing books and lectures and within months be extraordinarily well versed in the full range of foreign policy issues.

But then something will happen and, not only will the president have make decisions, but it will be essential that he or she be able to stand firm. No quality is more fundamental to the success of a keeper of our security than strength. In recent weeks, one McCain ploy after another has thrown Senator Obama and his campaign. The senator has backed off one position after another that had been previously cast in cement. He and his campaign have acted deeply intimidated by McCain television ads — well, not ads actually broadcast on television, internet ads, an incredible display of weakness

Meanwhile, Governor Palin has uttered three critical words that mark her as having the strength of a Thatcher or a Reagan — the most telling words she said to Charlie Gibson: "You can't blink."

That's what we learned this week. Under pressure, Senator Obama blinks. Under pressure, Governor Palin does not. That is why Governor Palin has emerged as the one better suited to assume our national security leadership, should she need to step in....

All the simple truth. It's good to keep in mind that Palin did not succeed in Alaska politics by subterfuge or by presenting a small silhouette.. She decided who her targets were going to be, and then destroyed them in head-on attacks. Not a blinker, thet's for sure.

May he live long and prosper, but if, God forbid, Mr McCain was to die two years and one day after his inauguration, Sarah Palin could legally, if re-elected twice, serve as President for ten years! Pretty funny to think of Lefties chocking on that one!

Various Palin interview tidbits...

And this is right on...

[link] ...Charles Gibson of ABC News was out for blood and inherently applied a double-standard compared with the kid gloves George Stephanopoulos used on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on Sunday night.

Gibson was out to embarrass Palin and expose her presumed ignorance from the word go. By contrast, when Obama referred to his "Muslim faith" on Sunday and did not correct himself, Stephanopoulos rushed in at once to help him and emphasize that the senator had really meant to say his Christian faith...

Well, the poor empty suit needs a lot of help. The whole Obama phenomenom is just a big improvization, without any underlying philosophy. He has no ballast.

This was interesting, but wrong I think...

Ross Douthat: Sarah the unready. Now that we've seen the entirety of the Palin-Gibson tete-a-tete, I concur with Rich Lowry and Rod Dreher. The most that can be said in her defense is that she kept her cool and avoided any brutal gaffes; other than that, she seemed about an inch deep on every issue outside her comfort zone.

Yes, the questions were tougher than the ones that a Tim Kaine or Tim Pawlenty probably would have been handed, but they were all questions that a vice-presidential nominee needs to be able to answer. And there's no way to look at her performance as anything save supporting evidence for the non-hysterical critique of her candidacy - that it's just too much, too soon - and a splash of cold water for those of us with high hopes for her future on the national stage.

Maybe. But I don't put a lot of emphasis on that kind of knowledge. Character, moral courage, intelligence, judgement, faith in America....all are more important than knowledge. George W. Bush was held up to ridicule for not knowing the name of the President of Pakistan. But when the moments of testing came, he made the right decisions (in my opinion, and I'm always happy to back my opinion up with facts and logic) while a lot of people with a lot more knowledge than he failed. And there was another V-P who was suddenly thrown into the Oval Office, who was widely considered a lightweight. But Harry Truman made (in my opinion) the right choices, while many of the wise were morally adrift.

....Watching her grasp for her talking points at times called to mind Spinal Tap ("But this one goes to 11!") This was especially clear when asked about Israel. See if you can pick out her talking point (emphasis mine):

GIBSON: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

PALIN: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don't think that we should second guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.

GIBSON: So if we wouldn't second guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative or agree with that.

PALIN: I don't think we can second guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.

GIBSON: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.

PALIN: We cannot second guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.

Now we know why they've kept her away from the press for two weeks....

Actually, Palin is being very clever here. She's not just mindlessly repeating a talking point, she is evading a trap. The question is a trap. Either she looks like a warmonger, or she looks like she's not supporting Israel. Either way the press will gleefully trumpet her mis-step. That's why Gibson keeps pressing her. He knows exactly the sort of thing he needs to help his party. By repeating the same "second guess" line she shows clearly how he is badgering her despite having been given her answer. And it's a good line. It shows pretty clearly that we are on the side of the good guys, without being explicit about an attack. Thank you Sarah for being smarter than the horrid little creeps of the lefty press!

If you are not smart enough to earn a living, become a journalist.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) By Ed Stoddard and Yereth Rosen- Is Sarah Palin a friend or foe of big oil?

As governor of Alaska, she raised taxes on oil companies and clashed with them over a planned pipeline through her state.

But on the fundamental issues of drilling for oil and the environment, her positions look very much like those of the man she seeks to replace: Vice President Dick Cheney...

Personally I consider a comparison with Dick Cheney to be a big compliment. But this really shows desperation by the Media Wing of the DNC.

And stupidity! The world is not divided between "friends and foes of big oil." Oil companies are just businesses, with good points and bad points. The idea that they are reservoirs of mysterious evil, and that any sane person would be "foes" of them is the level of thinking of sociology professors at junior colleges. Or Reuters "journalists." Imagine someone dividing people into friends or foes of "big auto." Pretty stupid, right?

If you are Governor of Alaska, you very much want to have big oil working in your state, but you need to negotiate hard to get the best terms you can. That's what Palin did. She's neither friend nor foe of the oil industry, and I'm sure they don't consider her a friend or a foe. More like a tough but honest business partner. Alaska is in the oil business almost as much as they are. I'd trust any oil company employee over a Reuters hack.

We are nearing the end of eight years of the Bush Administration. I'll take this moment to say, "Thank you Mr Cheney. You are a patriot and a great public servant, and your life should be an inspiration to all real Americans. And the fact that you have attracted the ankle-biting hatred of the pit-Chihuahua's of the nihilist Left is just confirmation of this."

Clear objectives....

You are probably getting bored with Sarah Palin. Sorry, I'm not---she just gets better the more I learn.

This piece, Sarah Palin is not such a small-town girl after all, by James Bennett is just great...

....Palin quickly realised that Alaska had the potential to become a much bigger player in global energy politics, a conviction that grew as the price of oil rose. Alaska had been in hock to oil companies since major production began in the mid-1970s.

As with most poor, distant places that suddenly receive great natural-resource wealth, the first generation of politicians were mesmerised by the magnificence of the crumbs falling from the table. Palin was the first of the next generation to realise that Alaska should have a place at that table.

Her first target was an absurd bureaucratic tangle that for 30 years had kept the state from exporting its gas to the other 48 states. She set an agenda that centred on three mutually supportive objectives: cleaning up state politics, building a new gas pipeline, and increasing the state's share of energy revenues....

....The surprise is not that she has been in office for such a short time but that she has succeeded in each of her objectives. She has exposed corruption; given the state a bigger share in Alaska's energy wealth; and negotiated a deal involving big corporate players, the US and Canadian governments, Canadian provincial governments, and native tribes - the result of which was a £13 billion deal to launch the pipeline and increase the amount of domestic energy available to consumers. This deal makes the charge of having "no international experience" particularly absurd.

In short, far from being a small-town mayor concerned with little more than traffic signs, she has been a major player in state politics for a decade, one who formulated an ambitious agenda and deftly implemented it against great odds.

Her sudden elevation to the vice-presidential slot on the Republican ticket shocked no one more than her enemies in Alaska, who have broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of Palin in Washington, guiding the Justice Department's anti-corruption teams through the labyrinths of Alaska's old-boy network...

So, as a thought experiment, try to imagine Mr Obama being described by the sentence: "he set an agenda that centred on three mutually supportive objectives."

Please, Br'er 'Bama, pleeeese don't trow me in dat briar patch!

The day McCain's party blew its political advantage By James Carville

In all my years in national politics since 1982 there had been one constant until August 29. It was that the Republican party cornered the national security market. They were willing to give up advantages on healthcare, environment and, in the end, even fiscal responsibility. But never, ever, would they cede that patch of high ground they refer to as "American security". Any time I had a race against a Republican opponent, I respected their operation. And often (I am not afraid to admit), I was scared to run against them because you knew most of the candidates were going to be selected carefully, based on a combination of experience, adherence to tradition, national security or public safety credentials. John McCain fits this profile almost to a T. Strangely, he has chosen to cede this advantage not just for himself but for the Republican party for the foreseeable future...

Please attack us on this! I beg you, Barack. Go for it! Convince America that the soft delicate flower from the sheltered purviews of Wassila is going to crumple when tough men oppose her on the world stage. And that the steely-eyed crisis-tested metrosexual from Hyde Park will never get rattled when things get hairy....