David Broder writes glowingly of Sarah Palin.

(The WaPo’s web editor seems to have dug deeply to find an unflattering photo to run with the column.)

…This was not the first time that Palin has impressed me. I gave her high marks for her vice presidential acceptance speech in St. Paul. But then, and always throughout that campaign, she was laboring to do more than establish her own place. She was selling a ticket headed by John McCain against formidable Democratic opposition and burdened by the legacy of the Bush administration.

Blessed with an enthusiastic audience of conservative activists, Palin used the Tea Party gathering and coverage on the cable networks to display the full repertoire she possesses, touching on national security, economics, fiscal and social policy, and every other area where she could draw a contrast with Barack Obama and point up what Republicans see as vulnerabilities in Washington.

Her invocation of “conservative principles and common-sense solutions” was perfectly conventional. What stood out in the eyes of TV-watching pols of both parties was the skill with which she drew a self-portrait that fit not just the wishes of the immediate audience but the mood of a significant slice of the broader electorate.

Freed of the responsibilities she carried as governor of Alaska, devoid of any official title but armed with regular gigs on Fox News Channel and more speaking invitations than she can fulfill, Palin is perhaps the most visible Republican in the land.

More important, she has locked herself firmly in the populist embrace that every skillful outsider candidate from George Wallace to Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton has utilized when running against “the political establishment.”

It doesn’t always win. There are more John Edwardses and Mike Huckabees than I can count. But it wins more often than you’d guess and for a greater variety of people, especially when things are not going well for the country.

Palin’s final answer to Wallace showed how perfectly she has come to inhabit that part. When he asked her what role she wants to play in the country’s future, she said:

“First and foremost, I want to be a good mom, and I want to raise happy, healthy, independent children. And I want them to be good citizens of this great country.

“And then I do want to be a voice for some common-sense solutions. I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person. I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist, because for too often and for too long now, I think the elitists have tried to make people like me and people in the heartland of America feel like we just don’t get it, and big government’s just going to have to take care of us.

“I want to speak up for the American people and say: No, we really do have some good common-sense solutions. I can be a messenger for that. Don’t have to have a title to do it.”

It’s fascinating to see how much Sarah Palin gets under the skin of virtually all liberals (and some conservatives.)

Lefties were foaming at the mouth this weekend after discovering (aha!) that Palin had some notes written on her palm.

When I first saw the headline, I thought they meant Palm as in Palm Pilot etc. But no, Palin went old school.

Powerline notes:

We haven’t written about the faux controversy over Sarah Palin’s writing a few words on the palm of her hand at the Tea Party convention, apparently as reminders for her speech or the Q & A session that followed. Liberals purported to find the presence of phrases like “tax cuts” significant. It isn’t clear why; pretty much everyone who gives a speech uses notes if he doesn’t actually read a prepared text, and Barack Obama seemingly can’t order a cheeseburger in a restaurant without his Teleprompter. So the Left’s huffing and puffing was pointless.

Which didn’t stop Palin from getting the last laugh. Campaigning for Governor Rick Perry in Texas yesterday, she wrote “Hi Mom!” on her palm:

You have to love the sense of humor, particularly when it’s directed at the humorless left.

Palin also delivered a speech at the Tea Party convention. I haven’t watched but a few minutes, but one is clear: this woman has rare political skills. I can remember a politico who seems so comfortable at the podium.

Just listen to how she pronounces “Hello” to C-SPAN — it’s in the opening minute of the speech.

Sarah Palin at the Gridiron Club dinner:

If the election had delivered a different result, she said Barack Obama’s balding vice-president, Joe Biden, could be in her shoes. “I could be the one overseeing the signing of bail-out cheques and vice-president Biden could be on the road selling his book Going Rogaine,” she said.

by J.C. Phillip

If indeed former Alaska Governor and Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin is the joke the new left claims her to be, one wonders why they don’t simply ignore her. On the contrary, they devote an unusual amount of energy into making her the butt of their jokes and seeking every opportunity to discredit her and cover her with political dirt. The Associated Press for example assigned 11 reporters to fact-check her new book “Going Rogue.” The AP assigned exactly 2 reporters to read through the more than 4 thousand pages of the Obama healthcare bills. So much attention seems to belie the New Lefts claims that Palin is a light-weight– not worthy of our respect or attention.

Such a focus of energies seems a tacit acknowledgement that Palin and the principles she represents are a force to be reckoned with.

The primary knock against Palin is that she is dumb, or what is more politely called an anti-intellectual. Of course, the new liberal narrative views all conservatives as not only evil, but downright stupid – not ill informed or teachable, but simply intellectually inferior. From Carter to Obama the new left has consistently claimed a superior intellect.

I can’t help but smile when I recall a conversation I had with a professional friend during the early part of last year’s presidential campaign. She was excited about her opportunity to meet then candidate Barack Obama. “What do you like about the candidate?” I queried. “He is brilliant,” she responded. “He understands the issues so clearly.” Fair enough. But would she, I wondered, be as excited if the candidate were a Republican? “Suppose you were preparing to meet candidate Condoleezza Rice?” I asked. There was a pause and then she responded, “Well, she is very bright.”

‘Nuff said.

Brilliant liberals and “bright” conservatives is the window through which leftists view the world because their vision of America is one that relies on appeals to authority and claims of moral and intellectual superiority. The administrative state posits that the cure for a world teeming with poverty and injustice is within our grasp. There exists a community of anointed intellectuals, trained in our finest universities that can solve all of society’s ills and bring our lives into moral order if only they had the power; if only the rest of us would conduct our lives as they wish.

Witness Democratic Party leader Howard Dean recently standing before a group of French journalists extolling the virtues of this president. According to Dean the battle between socialism and capitalism has been settled. (I will give you 3 guesses which side he believes won.) It is Dean’s belief that our current President and the party he represents understands that American benevolence demands socialist policy. The question therefore is no longer whether or not we will have socialism, but how much socialism we will have. Dean is proud of the Democrat party for its political clarity.

The problem for Dean and the rest of the new left is that Americans tend to have an independent streak that leads them to largely reject the idea of a centralized intelligentsia deciding how best they should live their lives. Palin represents the American individualist that says, “I know what is best for my family and what is in agreement with my faith. I would rather do things my way.” The administrative state is incompatible with such independence and can only thrive by stamping it out.

Palin and those that root for her may not have graduated from Harvard, but they are smart enough to know that Howard Dean is wrong and Ronald Reagan was correct when he said the question was one of moving “Up to man’s age-old dream-the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.” We are indeed bright enough to know that just as there was no moral good in slavery, there is nothing benevolent about socialism. The barbed wire around socialist utopias is there to keep people in – to force them (in the name of liberty) to do what the intellectuals say to do.

It is not Palin’s grit, her good looks or her “you betcha” small town persona that drives the new left to distraction. Rather it is her elementary ability to recognize the danger in putting too much trust in the smart guys– especially when their solutions require that we place our liberties at their disposal. “Palinism” is not a rejection of intellect; it is however, to say in no uncertain terms that some of us regular folk might just know a bit more about how to run our lives and this country than a room filled with Ivy educated czars.

Dan Calabrese in the Appeal Democrat:

You can’t help but notice that just about everyone who is part of the political establishment detests Sarah Palin. And you can’t help but notice that Palin couldn’t care less.

Early in the second chapter of “Going Rogue,” a chapter titled “Kitchen-Table Politics,” you learn everything you need to know to understand why. This is the way Palin has been wired for a very long time. During her two terms on the Wasilla City Council, followed by two terms as the city’s mayor, she consistently demonstrated a refreshing immunity to the insider mentality that tends to afflict people who serve in government at any level.

Recruited to run for the council in 1992 by local power broker Nick Carney, Palin was seen as an attractive face who would support the usual way of doing business in Wasilla. She wasn’t.

In one of the first tests of her independence, Palin opposed a proposal touted by Carney, her political patron, to force residents to pay for neighborhood trash pickup rather than hauling their garbage to the dump themselves, as most did, and as Palin says she still does.

Why was this so important to Carney? Because he owned the local garbage truck company. If you’ve never had much exposure to local politics — and this is largely true anywhere you go — it’s a pretty big deal for a young, inexperienced politician (especially a woman) to so blatantly go against the person who recruited you into politics and supported you in your first campaign. You come under tremendous pressure to fall into line. Most cave, right then and there, long before they ever sniff politics at a higher level.

Palin didn’t.

During her terms on the council, she consistently opposed heavy-handed community planning initiatives and burdensome taxes. But she was not anti-government, as she explains:

As a council member, I focused on what I believed to be the key functions of government: infrastructure development, fiscal responsibility and simply being on the side of the people.

She continued this emphasis after being elected mayor in 1998, supporting the building of roads and sewers, which helped to attract stores like Walmart and Fred Meyer to Wasilla for the first time. She also spurred the paving of the city’s airport runway. You read that right: Wasilla’s airport had a gravel runway before Palin worked to get it paved.

It was as Wasilla’s mayor that she encountered the kind of insider resistance to responsive government that would also await her later in Juneau. After she defeated the incumbent mayor, Palin recalls assembling her cabinet for the first time. These were holdovers from the previous mayor. As they sat with their arms folded, glaring at her, she received little enthusiasm as she talked about reviewing budgets and looking for places to cut in order to redirect money to building roads and sewers.

The chief of police flat-out refused to even look for budget savings, beginning a chilly relationship that ultimately resulted in Palin firing him and — get this — being sued by him for sex discrimination. (It took three years, but Palin was vindicated — another harbinger of things to come.)

Among Palin-haters, one of the most popular canards is that she is an airhead, and clearly not capable of dealing with the intricacies of government. As this chapter demonstrates, nothing could be further from the truth.

Palin not only has a keen grasp of the details of governing and budgeting, she also understands the political difficulties inherent in making government responsive. Many of her antagonists at the national level scoffed at the notion that her experience in Wasilla was of any value. Quite the contrary, local government is where a public official’s decisions have the most direct impact on the electorate. It’s where you really have to understand the ins and outs of what you’re doing.

No voting for bills without reading them first.

As I’ve said many times before, and will say again now, I have no idea if Palin ever wants to run for president, and it is not my intention here to either tout her for president or argue for (or against) her qualifications.

But it has become widely accepted conventional wisdom that Palin is nothing more than a populist sloganeer who has no serious grasp of governing substance. Even a fair number of conservative commentators have bought into this notion, and are warning against the support of Palin as the mere embrace of empty style over substance.

Bullshit.

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of governing, Palin is one of the most substantive politicians to arrive on the scene in quite some time. And when it comes to having the intestinal fortitude necessary keep the interests of the people at the top of the agenda, I can’t think of a single person anywhere in politics who is Palin’s equal.

If you disagree with Palin’s philosophy of governing because you are a political liberal, that’s fine. But if you’re an honest person, stop trying to pretend she’s some sort of good-looking moron.

The more you read about Palin’s experience in governing, the more you understand why the national political establishments of both parties hope to smother her political career in its crib. She knows how to govern — better than most of them do, in fact. She just won’t do it the way they do it, and that scares the crap out of them.

Sarah Palin in the WSJ:

Writing in the New York Times last month, President Barack Obama asked that Americans “talk with one another, and not over one another” as our health-care debate moves forward.

I couldn’t agree more. Let’s engage the other side’s arguments, and let’s allow Americans to decide for themselves whether the Democrats’ health-care proposals should become governing law.

Some 45 years ago Ronald Reagan said that “no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds.” Each of us knows that we have an obligation to care for the old, the young and the sick. We stand strongest when we stand with the weakest among us.

We also know that our current health-care system too often burdens individuals and businesses—particularly small businesses—with crippling expenses. And we know that allowing government health-care spending to continue at current rates will only add to our ever-expanding deficit.

How can we ensure that those who need medical care receive it while also reducing health-care costs? The answers offered by Democrats in Washington all rest on one principle: that increased government involvement can solve the problem. I fundamentally disagree.

Common sense tells us that the government’s attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy. And common sense tells us to be skeptical when President Obama promises that the Democrats’ proposals “will provide more stability and security to every American.”

With all due respect, Americans are used to this kind of sweeping promise from Washington. And we know from long experience that it’s a promise Washington can’t keep.

Let’s talk about specifics. (more…)

James Taranto:

The first we heard about Sarah Palin’s “death panels” comment was in a conversation last Friday with an acquaintance who was appalled by it. Our interlocutor is not a Democratic partisan but a high-minded centrist who deplores extremist rhetoric whatever the source. We don’t even know if he has a position on ObamaCare. From his description, it sounded to us as though Palin really had gone too far.

A week later, it is clear that she has won the debate.

President Obama himself took the comments of the former governor of the 47th-largest state seriously enough to answer them directly in his so-called town-hall meeting Tuesday in Portsmouth, N.H. As we noted Wednesday, he was callous rather than reassuring, speaking glibly–to audience laughter–about “pulling the plug on grandma.”

The Los Angeles Times reports that Palin has won a legislative victory as well:

A Senate panel has decided to scrap the part of its healthcare bill that in recent days has given rise to fears of government “death panels,” with one lawmaker suggesting the proposal was just too confusing.

The Senate Finance Committee is taking the idea of advance care planning consultations with doctors off the table as it works to craft its version of healthcare legislation, a Democratic committee aide said Thursday.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the committee, said the panel dropped the idea because it could be “misinterpreted or implemented incorrectly.” . . .

The Palin claim about “death panels” was so widely discredited that the White House has begun openly quoting it in an effort to show that opponents of the healthcare overhaul are misinformed.

You have to love that last bit. The fearless, independent journalists of the Los Angeles Times justify their assertion that the Palin claim was “widely discredited” with an appeal to authority–the authority of the White House, which is to say, the other side in the debate.

One suspects the breathtaking inadequacy of this argument would have been obvious to Times reporters Christi Parsons and Andrew Zajac if George W. Bush were still president. And of course this appears in a story about how the Senate was persuaded to act in accord with Palin’s position–which doesn’t prove that position right but does show that it is widely (though, to be sure, not universally) credited.

…with a well reasoned argument, shocking for someone we’ve been told is a dolt.

Yesterday President Obama responded to my statement that Democratic health care proposals would lead to rationed care; that the sick, the elderly, and the disabled would suffer the most under such rationing; and that under such a system these “unproductive” members of society could face the prospect of government bureaucrats determining whether they deserve health care.

The President made light of these concerns. He said:

“Let me just be specific about some things that I’ve been hearing lately that we just need to dispose of here. The rumor that’s been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for death panels that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we’ve decided that we don’t, it’s too expensive to let her live anymore….It turns out that I guess this arose out of a provision in one of the House bills that allowed Medicare to reimburse people for consultations about end-of-life care, setting up living wills, the availability of hospice, etc. So the intention of the members of Congress was to give people more information so that they could handle issues of end-of-life care when they’re ready on their own terms. It wasn’t forcing anybody to do anything.” [1]

The provision that President Obama refers to is Section 1233 of HR 3200, entitled “Advance Care Planning Consultation.” [2] With all due respect, it’s misleading for the President to describe this section as an entirely voluntary provision that simply increases the information offered to Medicare recipients. The issue is the context in which that information is provided and the coercive effect these consultations will have in that context.

Section 1233 authorizes advanced care planning consultations for senior citizens on Medicare every five years, and more often “if there is a significant change in the health condition of the individual … or upon admission to a skilled nursing facility, a long-term care facility… or a hospice program.” [3] During those consultations, practitioners must explain “the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice,” and the government benefits available to pay for such services. [4]

Now put this in context. These consultations are authorized whenever a Medicare recipient’s health changes significantly or when they enter a nursing home, and they are part of a bill whose stated purpose is “to reduce the growth in health care spending.” [5] Is it any wonder that senior citizens might view such consultations as attempts to convince them to help reduce health care costs by accepting minimal end-of-life care? As Charles Lane notes in the Washington Post, Section 1233 “addresses compassionate goals in disconcerting proximity to fiscal ones…. If it’s all about obviating suffering, emotional or physical, what’s it doing in a measure to “bend the curve” on health-care costs?” [6]

Speaking before a friendly crowd at a park here Friday night, two days before she resigns, Palin invoked her soldier son to assure supporters that she is not downcast over the political frustrations that are prompting her to quit before her term is up.

She told the hundreds gathered in a military “Honor Garden” that she wanted to “do something… more worthy than speaking politics” before sharing a story about a reporter who had asked her about how she handles difficult days.

“I said, ‘Oh no,’ it is not a down day – my son called this week from Iraq,” Palin recalled, referring to her son, Track, an Army enlistee. “He is safe, he is sound. It is always a good day when my son calls.”

Interrupting the applause, Palin said: “I wish that some in the media would keep things like that in perspective, what is really important in our country. And what is important is our freedoms, America’s security, our liberty.”

Later, citing military families that have lost loved ones, she again drew loud applause by saying: “Let us continue to love our country, be proud of our country, never apologize for our country.”

Hey, Junior, you listening?

From Red Planet Cartoons.

Tastes change as you mature. When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came out, I thought it was quite funny and cool. We rewatched it recently in stone silence, astonished at how bad it was.

Early on, I thought David Letterman was funny — his ironic humor, almost anti-humor — hit the spot.

That all ended when he hosted the Oscars. I rarely watch that spectacle of the over-celebrated celebrating themselves, but tuned in because of Letterman. Then I saw this:

It was so lame I pitied him. Never again have I found him very funny.

Now his ugly joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter has focused attention on him. He openly disdains Sarah Palin like much of the media elites do. Inside their echo chamber, this joke is harmless. Just as WASPs once told Jew and nigger jokes, thinking they were harmless fun.

Sarah Palin is not one to take it. She watched as the elites marginalized her as a doofus during the campaign while ignoring Joe Biden’s legacy of embarrassments — a legacy he’s eagerly adding to.

Palin’s appearance on Today touches on the politics. It’s amusing to see Matt Lauer concern himself about Letterman being tagged a dirty old man.

Victor Davis Hanson imagines a different media world…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The first 100 days of the Palin presidency, according to a consensus of media commentators, have proven a near disaster. Perhaps it was Palin’s scant two years’ experience in a major government position that has eroded her gravitas, or maybe it was her flirty reliance on looks and informal chit-chat. In any case, the press has had a field day, and it is hard to see how President Palin can ever recover from the Quayle/potatoe syndrome. Here is a roundup of this week’s pundit mockery.

LET THEM EAT MOOSE
“Ted Stevens may have gotten off,” wrote Bob Herbert in the New York Times, “but he taught our Sarah something first — like using $100-a-pound beef for her state dinners. And what’s this $50 mil for her inauguration gala? Since when do you fly in your favorite pizza-maker from across the country on our dime? Or send the presidential 747 for a spin over the Big Apple for a third-of-a-million-dollar joyride? Does Palin think she’s still in Alaska and has to have everything flown in from the South 48 by jumbo jet?”

WASILLA CHIC
Also in the Times, Gail Collins weighed in on the already-tired yokelism of the new commander in chief. “What we’re getting is Wasilla chic. That’s what we’re getting. She arrives in the Oval Office, and first thing sends back Blair’s gift of the Churchill bust as if it’s a once-worn Penney’s outfit. Then she gives the Brits some unwatchable DVDs as a booby prize — as if she idled the old Yukon and ran into Target’s sale aisle. Did Sarah send Bristol into Wal-Mart back in Anchorage for that ‘engraved’ iPod for the queen? And what’s this don’t-bow-to-the-queen stuff, but curtsy for a Saudi sheik? Maybe that explains why she brags to Stephanopoulos about her ‘Muslim faith.’ So far, the best things going for her are Todd’s biceps.”

IT’S THE MATH, STUPID!
“Well,” lectured Paul Krugman, again in the Times, “we were worried that they didn’t teach math at Idaho U., and now we know for sure they don’t. Is it $1.6 trillion, $1.7 trillion, or $2 trillion in red ink this year? Are we supposed to be impressed that she offers ‘fiscal sobriety’ by cutting 0.003 percent of the budget? She gives out money to those who don’t pay taxes and calls it a tax cut. And now Queen Sarah tells us that in four years she’ll ‘halve’ the deficit, as if she hasn’t borrowed another $5 trillion in the meantime. Does she think we’re morons? How many ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ oil wells can she tap into up there in Alaska to pay for the extra $11 trillion in debt she’s saddling us with?”

Read it all.

Yuval Levin writes a long, yet pithy analysis of the VEEP candidate’s time on the national stage.

Two political figures dominated the final months of the 2008 presidential campaign. One was the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama. The other had been unknown to all but 670,000 Americans only a few minutes before she was first introduced by the Republican nominee, John McCain, at a rally in Ohio on the Friday before the Republican National Convention, only 66 days before the November election.

By the close of that first weekend, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska had become a national sensation. Two days after that, she delivered her debut address at the Republican National Convention as the party’s vice-presidential nominee—a dazzling stemwinder, it was all but universally acknowledged. McCain’s dramatic and unexpected bet appeared to have paid off in spades.

But by November 4, the day of the election, Sarah Palin had been transformed into one of the most divisive figures in recent American history. There was almost no middle ground between those who had come to adore her and those who believed she represented just about every dark and dangerous element of contemporary American politics.

Camille Paglia:

…my concern about Ayers has been very slow in developing. The mainstream media should have fully explored the subject early this year and not allowed it to simmer and boil until it flared up ferociously in the last month of the campaign. Obama may not in recent years have been “pallin’ around” with Ayers, in Sarah Palin’s memorable line, but his past connections with Ayers do seem to have been more frequent and substantive than he has claimed. Blame for the failure of this issue to take hold must also accrue to the conservative talk shows, which use the scare term “radical” with simplistic sensationalism, blanketing everyone under the sun from scraggly ex-hippies to lipstick-chic Nancy Pelosi.

Pursuing the truth about Ayers, I recently rented the 2002 documentary “The Weather Underground,” from Netflix. It was riveting. Although the film seems to waver between ominous exposé and blatant whitewash, the full extent of the group’s bombing campaign is dramatically demonstrated. It’s not for everyone: The film uses gratuitous cutaways of horrifying carnage, from the Vietnam War to the Manson murders (such as Sharon Tate’s smiling corpse, bathed in blood). But the news footage of the Greenwich Village townhouse destroyed in 1970 by bomb-making gone wrong in the basement still has enormous impact. Standing in the chaotic street, actor Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, seems like Everyman at the apocalypse.

Ayers comes off in the film as a vapid, slightly dopey, chronic juvenile with stunted powers of ethical reasoning. The real revelation is his wife, Bernardine Dohrn (who evidently worked at the same large Chicago law firm as Michelle Obama in the mid-1990s). Of course I had heard of Dohrn — hers was one of the most notorious names of our baby-boom generation — and I knew her black-and-white police mug shot. But I had never seen footage of her speaking or interacting with others. Well, it’s pretty obvious who wears the pants in that family!

The mystery of Bernardine Dohrn: How could such a personable, attractive, well-educated young woman end up saying such things at a 1969 political rally as this (omitted in the film) about the Manson murders: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!” And how could Dohrn have so ruthlessly pursued a decade-long crusade of hatred and terrorism against innocent American citizens and both private and public property?

“The Weather Underground” never searches for answers, but it does show Dohrn, then and now, as a poised, articulate woman of extremely high intelligence and surprising inwardness. The audio extra of her reading the collective’s first public communiqué (”Revolutionary violence is the only way”) is chilling. But the tumultuous footage of her 1980 surrender to federal authorities is a knockout. Mesmerized, I ran the clip six or seven times of her seated at a lawyer’s table while reading her still defiant statement. The sober scene — with Dohrn hyper-alert in a handsome turtleneck and tweedy jacket — was tailor-made for Jane Fonda in her “Klute” period, androgynous shag. Only illegalities by federal investigators prevented Dohrn from being put away on ice for a long, long time.

Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World. (more…)

Anyone who doubts Palin should watch this video, which was part of the article linked below. It shows how Palin can connect with women of both parties.

She’s also easy to listen to, unlike anyone else in the race. Palin speaks, she doesn’t give speeches.

Elaine Lafferty:

It’s difficult not to froth when one reads, as I did again and again this week, doubts about Sarah Palin’s “intelligence,” coming especially from women such as PBS’s Bonnie Erbe, who, as near as I recall, has not herself heretofore been burdened with the Susan Sontag of Journalism moniker. As Fred Barnes—God help me, I’m agreeing with Fred Barnes—suggests in the Weekly Standard, these high toned and authoritative dismissals come from people who have never met or spoken with Sarah Palin. Those who know her, love her or hate her, offer no such criticism. They know what I know, and I learned it from spending just a little time traveling on the cramped campaign plane this week: Sarah Palin is very smart.

I’m a Democrat, but I’ve worked as a consultant with the McCain campaign since shortly after Palin’s nomination. Last week, there was the thought that as a former editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine as well as a feminist activist in my pre-journalism days, I might be helpful in contributing to a speech that Palin had long wanted to give on women’s rights.

Now by “smart,” I don’t refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don’t really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a “quick study”; I’d heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. What is often called her “confidence” is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is.

For all those old enough to remember Senator Sam Ervin, the brilliant strict constitutional constructionist and chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee whose patois included “I’m just a country lawyer”…Yup, Palin is that smart.

So no simple task then, this speech on women’s rights. For the sin of being a Christian personally opposed to abortion, Palin is being pilloried by the inside-the-Beltway Democrat feminist establishment. (Yes, she is anti-abortion. And yes, instead of buying organic New Zealand lamb at Whole Foods, she joins other Alaskans in hunting for food. That’s it.

She is not a right-wing nut, and all the rest of the Internet drivel—the book banning at the Library, the rape kits decision—is nonsense. I digress.) Palin’s role in this campaign was to energize “the Republican base,” which she has inarguably done. She also was expected to reach out to Hillary Clinton “moderates.” (Right. Only a woman would get both those jobs in either party.) Look, I am obviously personally pro-choice, and I disagree with McCain and Palin on that and a few other issues. But like many other Democrats, including Lynn Rothschild, I’m tired of the Democratic Party taking women for granted. I also happen to believe Sarah Palin supports women’s rights, deeply and passionately.

Read it all.

Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?

Promising to “get this nation back on the right track,” GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin urged a raucous crowd of nearly 20,000 Hoosiers on Friday to keep Indiana a Republican state on Election Day.

On a day when vendors were selling “Sarah the Pitbull” buttons, Sen. John McCain’s running mate continued her role as attack dog during her stop at Verizon Wireless Music Center.

The Alaska governor wasted no time in trying to tie Democratic Sen. Barack Obama to ACORN, a nonprofit organization being investigated for possible voter registration fraud.

Palin told the crowd that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is being investigated in about a dozen states and alleged the Obama campaign gave a “front group” for the organization $800,000.

She said not only had Obama represented ACORN as an attorney, but he also had been endorsed by the group and trained its staff in the past.

“All of this would be a lot of baggage to drag into the Oval Office,” Palin said.

She then called on Obama’s campaign to release all of its correspondence with ACORN.

“These associations are important and they go to the heart of someone’s judgment and truthfulness,” Palin said. “Americans are entitled to answers before Election Day.”

Beldar:

Today, however, in an episode of political theater that would make Josef Stalin blush, French gave it his very best shot: The investigator he hired and directed, Steve Branchflower, has labored mightily and given birth to a bloated and redundant 263-page report which boils down, for purposes of the ongoing presidential campaign, to two paragraphs that completely contradict one another. And the one of them that’s unfavorable ignores the most important — indeed conclusive — evidence on point, but goes on to provide Branchflower’s guess as to whether Gov. Palin has done anything improper.

Please understand this, if you take nothing else away from reading this post: The Branchflower Report is a series of guesses and insupportable conclusions drawn by exactly one guy, and it hasn’t been approved or adopted or endorsed by so much as a single sub-committee of the Alaska Legislature, much less any kind of commission, court, jury, or other proper adjudicatory body. It contains no new bombshells in terms of factual revelations. Rather, it’s just Steve Branchflower’s opinion — after being hired and directed by one of Gov. Palin’s most vocal opponents and one of Alaska’s staunchest Obama supporters — that he thinks Gov. Palin had, at worst, mixed motives for an action that even Branchflower admits she unquestionably had both (a) the complete right to perform and (b) other very good reasons to perform.

Last night’s dreary 90 minutes illustrated why so many people respond to Sarah Palin: she speaks English, not wonkish.

McCain blew an opportunity to nail Obama on Fannie Mae. His answer came off as nyah-nyah-nyah. It was a sloppy job of explaining the situation.

Here’s how — my imagination, folks — Sarah Palin would have put it:

Back in the Clinton days, Democrats began leaning on lenders to make “sub-prime” loans to poor people and minorities. Sub-prime is politician talk for risky. 

Clinton and them, they all had their hearts in the right place. We all want everyone to live well, to own their home, to have a financial stake in their neighborhoods.

But risky means some loans won’t get paid back. Now, you’ve all heard of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — two quasi-government agencies that were not just busy buying up these risky loans, but pushing lenders to make even more of them.

And Fannie was run by Democrats, many of whom got rich. Franklin Raines walked away with $90 million after cooking Fannie’s books. He was forced out. You’d think he’d be hanging his head in shame, like those guys from Enron, but no, he was advising Obama on housing issues.

As early as April 2001, President Bush and key Republicans warned about the looming sub-prime disaster. They wanted to regulate Fannie and Freddie, but key Democrats threw a fit. One Democrat got so mad, he accused Republicans of “lynching.” Fannie and Freddie also threw a lot of money into their campaign coffers.

Now, for the past two weeks, Barack Obama has been blaming the financial crisis on Republicans who refused to regulate. It takes a special kind of brass to peddle that whopper, but with the New York Times and other media covering for him, why not?

But if Obama can’t honestly diagnose the cause, how can he honestly expect us to believe he can find a cure? Oh, and by the way, Obama collected the second most money from Fannie and Freddie.

President of Los Angeles NOW endorses Sarah Palin:

“Our opponent … is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country,” Palin told a group of donors in Englewood, Colo. A deliberate attempt to smear Obama, McCain’s ticket-mate echoed the line at three separate events Saturday.

“This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America,” she said. “We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism.”

So said Sarah Palin yesterday before a crowd of 15,000 in Carson, California. The AP thinks, somehow, that this carries a racial tinge.

Before continuing, let’s revisit a pithy analysis of the election by Gerard Baker in the Times of London:

This election is a struggle between the followers of American exceptionalism and the supporters of global universalism. Democrats are more eager than ever to align the US with the rest of the Western world, especially Europe. This is true not just in terms of a commitment to multilateral diplomacy that would restore the United Nations to its rightful place as arbiter of international justice.

It is also reflected in the type of place they’d like America to be – a country with higher taxes, more business regulation, a much larger welfare safety net and universal health insurance. The Republicans, who still believe America should follow the beat of its own drum, are pretty much against all of that.

Yep. Obama, self-proclaimed citizen of the world, does not believe in American exceptionalism. He’s more in line with the elites who, immediately after 9/11, wondered aloud what America had done to deserve it.

Note: believing in American exceptionalism does not mean being blind to our mistakes. We are not a perfect nation. We just come closer than anyone else.

Back to the AP’s analysis,  “Palin’s words carry racial tinge”:

Her reference to Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground, was exaggerated at best if not outright false. No evidence shows they were “pals” or even close when they worked on community boards years ago and Ayers hosted a political event for Obama early in his career.

Obama, who was a child when the Weathermen were planting bombs, has denounced Ayers’ radical views and actions.

Obama’s relationship with Ayers is much deeper than this. Obama has lied about it, which should make any sensible journalist curious at the very least. Instead, this is the weekend of the great Ayers whitewash.

“There appears to be a newfound sense of confidence in Sarah Palin as a candidate, given her performance the other night,” Galen said. “I think that they are comfortable enough with her now that she’s got the standing with the electorate to take off after Obama.”

Second, Palin’s incendiary charge draws media and voter attention away from the worsening economy. It also comes after McCain supported a pork-laden Wall Street bailout plan in spite of conservative anger and his own misgivings.

“It’s a giant changing of the subject,” said Jenny Backus, a Democratic strategist. “The problem is the messenger. If you want to start throwing fire bombs, you don’t send out the fluffy bunny to do it. I think people don’t take Sarah Palin seriously.”

Sarah Barracuda a fluffy bunny? Keep dreamin’,  sport.

The larger purpose behind Palin’s broadside is to reintroduce the question of Obama’s associations. Millions of voters, many of them open to being swayed to one side or the other, are starting to pay attention to an election a month away.

For the McCain campaign, that makes Obama’s ties to Ayers as well as convicted felon Antoin “Tony” Rezko and the controversial minister Jeremiah Wright ripe for renewed criticism. And Palin brings a fresh voice to the argument.

And why not? Obama has no substantial track record, so to voters “vetting” him, knowing who he associates with is important intel.

Palin’s words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee “palling around” with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers’ day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as “not like us” is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

What a load of crap.

Rich Lowry: 

A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It’s one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O’Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy.

I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing.

It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.

She’s also authentically middle class, something you cannot fake. Whether that means anything in terms of governance is a separate issue. But it contrasts with Joe Biden’s phoniness:

Look, all you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie’s Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me where I spend a lot of time and you ask anybody in there whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration has made them better off in the last eight years.

Katie’s restaurant has been gone 25-30 years, according to locals who kinda remember the place, and it was not on Union Street.

Last night Sarah Palin added her voice to the populist chorus:

Darn right it was the predator lenders, who tried to talk Americans into thinking that it was smart to buy a $300,000 house if we could only afford a $100,000 house. There was deception there, and there was greed and there is corruption on Wall Street. And we need to stop that.

How? If private citizens are adults, how does the government prevent them doing something dumb? Or greedy?

Truth in Lending laws already compel lenders to spell out terms (that mountain of paperwork required for every loan closing.) So what if borrowers won’t/don’t take the time to understand what they’re signing?

How big a Nanny must the state be?

While responsible American taxpayers fume about bailing out/rescuing Wall Street, they should reserve some ire for their greedy neighbors on Main Street. After all, who borrowed the billions that are not being repaid?

As we now see, when your neighbor stiffs the bank, he’s also stiffing you.

During the real estate boom, many gleefully watched their home equity boom. Many tapped that equity (windfall profits?) to buy (speculate?) on second houses, finance cars, go on vacations etc. Those that couldn’t or wouldn’t pay back the loans are predatory borrowers, no?

Palin added a moment later: 

We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings and we need also to not get ourselves in debt. Let’s do what our parents told us before we probably even got that first credit card. Don’t live outside of our means. We need to make sure that as individuals we’re taking personal responsibility through all of this.

According to pollster Frank Luntz, who had an audience wired as they watched the debate, this comment registered a jolt of approval.

Palin added:

It’s not the American people’s fault that the economy is hurting like it is, but we have an opportunity to learn a heck of a lot of good lessons through this and say never again will we be taken advantage of.

That’s wrong. It is certain people’s fault that the economy is hurting. It may be bad politics to say so, but it’s the truth.

The Washington Post has a good profile of Sarah Palin, who is quite the frontierwoman.

It’s a household that explains much about Palin, 44, and how she acquired her set-jawed, swaggering demeanor, one that her mother first noticed “about the time she started to walk.” Above all, the house suggests how she came by her dissident, out-of-category feminism, a code by which she tackles old-boy networks relentlessly, while remaining blank if not unsympathetic on traditional women’s issues with a capital W, such as sexism in the workplace.

…In 1970, Wasilla was a village of 400 on the edge of the wilderness in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, a river-split basin where the first leg of the Iditarod dog sled trail runs. There was one road to Anchorage, “and parts of it were gravel,” recalls neighbor and close friend Marie Carter Smith, “so it was an all-day trip.”

The Heaths lived in a small cabin heated by a wood-burning stove, all four children crowded in an attic bedroom, where they huddled under quilts and watched their own breath. Since store-bought food was hard to come by, area families relied on wild game as their main form of sustenance. The Heaths and the Carters hunted together, and “one moose would feed both families for a winter,” Smith says.

Palin stacked firewood endlessly and worked in a large communal garden where winter vegetables were grown. Anyone who dined at the Heath home remembers large stews of whatever the family had shot. “Bear, moose, sheep,” recalls Kim Ketchum, one of Palin’s childhood friends.

By age 10, Palin was picking off rabbits out the back door and sniping at ptarmigan, an Alaskan game bird, on cross-country skis. Her father would rouse her at 4 a.m. to hunt duck before school. On hunts, she learned how to field-dress a moose, a fancy term for butchering it.

Jim Treacher:

Mayor Palin, Barack Obama is a handsome, charismatic demigod. How many boxes of Kleenex will you need after your crushing loss?

Senator Biden, what is your favorite color? And if you have time for a follow-up question: Why?

Mayor, you talk funny and you own a tanning bed. Why haven’t you released Trig’s birth certificate?

Senator, have you seen those pictures of Obama in his swim trunks? If not, I have them right here.

Mayor, what are the names, ages, and blood types of all 71 members of the Belgian Senate? And why are you unwilling to admit that your inability to instantly produce any and every fact I demand makes you unfit to stand in the way of history?

Senator, you’ve spoken at length. Could you please continue?

Mayor, which is your preferred method of stifling dissent, banning books or burning them? Since it’s both, please explain how you can deny the accusation that you’re a fascist, which I am making now.

Victor Davis Hanson has some fun grafting Biden’s gaffes onto you know who:

“What was John McCain thinking in selecting the gaffe-prone Gov. Sarah Palin?”

In what has now become a disturbing pattern, the Alaska governor seems either unable or unwilling to avoid embarrassing statements that are often as untrue as they are outrageous. Recently, for example, in an exclusive interview with news anchor Katie Couric, Palin gushed, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’ ” Apparently the former Alaskan beauty queen failed to realize that in 1929 there was neither widespread television nor was Franklin Roosevelt even President.

Sometimes the Idaho-native Palin seems to confuse and embarrass her own running mate. Shortly after her nomination, she introduced a “John McAmerica;” then she referred to the Republican ticket as the “Palin-McCain administration;” and finished by calling Sen. Obama, “Senator George Obama.” The Palin gaffes seem to be endless: on her way to Washington to meet the national press corps, Palin, the mother of five, once again stumbled — this time characterizing Senator Biden as “Congressman Joe Biden,” who, she chuckled, was “good looking.”

Michelle Malkin asks rhetorically:

Can you imagine a right-leaning journalist writing a book about the “stunning” McCain campaign and its “bold” path to reform timed for release on Inauguration Day – and then expecting a slot as a moderator for the nation’s sole vice presidential debate? 

Oy! 

On Thursday, PBS anchor Gwen Ifill will serve as moderator for the first and only vice presidential debate. The stakes are high. The Commission on Presidential Debates, with the assent of the two campaigns, decided not to impose any guidelines on her duties or questions.

But there is nothing “moderate” about where Ifill stands on Barack Obama. She’s so far in the tank for the Democrat presidential candidate, her oxygen delivery line is running out.

In an imaginary world where liberal journalists are held to the same standards as everyone else, Ifill would be required to make a full disclosure at the start of the debate. She would be required to turn to the cameras and tell the national audience that she has a book coming out on January 20, 2009 – a date that just happens to coincide with the inauguration of the next president of the United States.

The title of Ifill’s book? “Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” Nonpartisan my foot.

Read Malkin’s full post — there’s more about Ifill’s magazine pieces on the Obamas.
Watch Ifill’s pained report after the Sarah Palin convention speech.

Listen to the interview here. It’s about 10 minutes long.

Palin absolutely vexes Democrats who sputter that she has very limited experience. True.

But as we review the past week, who hasn’t thought — about both parties — that the “experienced” hands are near morons. That, in a nation of 300 million, we can’t do better than them?

Peter Sterne wrote to Instapundit:

Democrats are questioning whether Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President while Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker-In-Tongues-of-the-House is two heartbeats (and one with issues) away from the Presidency. Nancy Pelosi is proving herself completely unqualified to lead anything.

I wouldn’t trust her to lead a troop of Girl Scouts. At a time when she should have been, umm, actually, leading the House (BTW, that means the entire House … both aisles), she morphed into House Majority Leader Pelosi, made a vicious partisan attack on Republicans, and derailed the $700B bail out.

And she couldn’t count votes, a basic test for any Speaker. Oh, and Nan went to Syria to kiss up to the murderous Assad. I guess meeting a foreign head of state counts as “experience.”

Listening to Palin, in just ten short minutes, there were several things that jumped out. Unlike every other politician pretending to empathize with the middle class, she and her family are middle class. They lost $20k in Todd’s 401k last week — a loss that they feel.

Then this:

HH: Last question, Governor. Have you and Todd heard from your son? And how is it on your nerves having your son deployed? 

SP: That little stinker, I guess he’s called his girlfriend a couple of times, but can you believe he hasn’t called his momma yet?

THE VILLAGES – Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin told wildly cheering, flag-waving, chanting supporters that John McCain is “the only great man in this race” and promised Sunday he will fix the nation’s economy if voters give the GOP four more years in the White House.

“He won’t say this, so I’ll say it for him,” the Alaska governor said in an almost confidential tone at the close of her first Florida stump speech. “There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you. John McCain wore the uniform of his country for 22 years — talk about tough.”

The Villages, a vast, upscale planned community north of Orlando, has about 70,000 mostly adult residents — many of them military retirees — who vote reliably Republican in statewide races. Tens of thousands inched along roads into the picturesque town square of the complex, where they stood in sweltering heat for about four hours as local GOP officials and a country band revved up the crowd.

“Sa-Rah! Sa-Rah!” they chanted at every mention of her name, applauding loudly and waiving tiny American flags that were distributed — along with free water bottles — by local volunteers. The fire chief estimated the crowd at 60,000.