Ordinary Women and Sarah

“I Am Sarah Palin. Her Story is My Story”

T-shirts with that slogan are beginning to show up on websites and on the backs of women at political rallies. Women and men are excited by Sarah Palin because she is so recognizably one of us. More than that she represents a practical feminism that many women and thinking men have been yearning for and not finding.

Because she is pro-life, Sarah is ipso facto not a feminist…at least if you subscribe to the Gloria Steinem-Patricia Ireland definitions. Abortion is the cutting issue for the official women’s movement. Causes like withdrawal from Iraq, support of the Democratic Party and dedication to “racial justice” are also litmus tests of the true feminist.

When men and women watch discussion shows or read magazine articles about feminist ideals, the conversation is often about career (not job) issues verses home life and ways in which the sexual dynamic between men and women is changing. It is not about the ordinary problems of ordinary women.

Most of the women I know do not have glamorous careers or sophisticated sex lives. Quite a few are waitresses or coffee shop barristas. They include hospital orderlies who have to do nasty cleanup work. They are behind the counter at convenience stores. They are checkout clerks and stock clerks at the supermarket. They operate farm machinery.

They sell tickets at the multiplex, or they are behind the refreshments counter. Some are dispatchers and some drive cabs. Some wash dishes at the diner. Some answer the phone at the office. Some of them are young and attractive, some of them are old and, frankly, kind of tired. Some make good money; most don’t. And some work a second job –in addition to raising one or more children. Often, this is done without a father in the house, living one or two desperate paychecks away from ruin.

The feminist movement isn’t talking about women like these when it talks about “having it all.” These women have it all dumped on them. Work and a family aren’t even a choice for these women, but matters of necessity.

The feminists don’t even know who these women are. Waitresses, maids, janitors, farmers, cops, cabbies, and orderlies --they may or may not be from “flyover country” but to the feminist elite they are “flyover people.” The left elites reason that powerless and poorly educated, these women can only be led. They cannot lead.

Then, improbably, from the Republican Party, emerges a woman who demonstrates the universality of true feminism and proves that respect and equality for women are deeply conservative values.

Sarah Palin has earned her bread through hard physical labor alongside her husband. She has a decent education but not a fancy one. She is articulate but not glib. Her accent is a northwestern drawl. Her clothing is unfashionable but respectable. And she is prickly.

She has that same prickly quality the women we know ourselves get when the school defaults on a promise to their kids, or they plan to locate something hazardous in our neighborhood, or the town refuses to put up stop signs at that dangerous corner. Sarah gets her back up and speaks up.

Sarah does as she likes. If she wants to hunt, she hunts. If she wants to go snowmachining, she’s off! And if she wants to run for office, she gathers a bunch of her friends together and gives it a shot. Her husband is there to pick up the slack with childrearing and housework –when Sarah is not attending to those items personally. They make a good team as she makes the most of the choices that life in Alaska gives her.

The issues that preoccupy the women we know so well, the Wal Mart Moms, these Hockey and Soccer Moms who try to do the right thing for their families, are the issues Sarah Palin has lived with all her life. How are we going to pay for groceries? Where is the rent/mortgage money coming from? Do I like those kids my daughter is hanging out with lately? Should I get a third job on the weekends?

With enormous talent and energy Sarah Palin has answered the big issues in her life through enterprise and hard work. This ability to solve life problems in the same way men have always been able to in a free society, by using all her God-given talents, earning respect and recognition for deeds rather than sexual characteristics, ought to be the ultimate expression of the feminist ideal.

Well, it’s not. The left has defined in very specific terms what feminism is and what a feminist must believe in if she would call herself “feminist.” Sarah Palin, does not have a fancy degree, has no show business talents, is not a part of the L.A.-D.C.-NYC cocktail circuit, has no bonafides as a member of the permanent political class, dresses unstylishly, prays in church and is a breeder.

She is, talents aside, common and ordinary. Modern feminism has no use for common women and their issues. But thanks to Sarah Palin, the Republican Party has discovered that these women we know so well are a natural constituency.

The WORST Generation

Sometimes when our children emulate their parents it can be a beautiful tribute to the older generation. And sometimes it is neither beautiful nor flattering either to a generation or a country.

The generation being emulated in the streets of St. Paul Minnesota this week was not the generation that worked and served during the Vietnam War. They were –and are—The Unsung Generation, the heroes who did the work, fought the battles and were spat upon and called names by expensively educated leftist vagabonds.

And it was not the generation that grew up in the Depression fought in the Second World War, and who came home to raise the standard of living in the United States to the highest of any nation in history –while at the same time feeding our former enemies, rebuilding Europe and protecting them from Soviet invasion. That was, undeniably, the Greatest Generation.

No, the generation being emulated by the hoards of vile-mouthed, masked vagabonds in St. Paul last week were imitating the generation that ridiculed the hard work and conformity of their parents, who mated with barnyard indiscrimination, who introduced drug abuse to our culture as something that celebrated freedom, and who, in the streets of our cities, did the work of our enemy in time of war. It was that most self-absorbed, self-righteous and deeply self-centered youth the country ever produced. They were, and are, The Worst Generation.

In Denver, they protesters nd Worst Generation types were pretty much under self-control for Obama and the Democrats. There was a kind of 1960’s retro festival vibe to the week as today’s “activists” hobnobbed with real-live unreconstructed Worst Generation types. They did not “Recreate ’68.”

In St. Paul, in the land of “Minnesota Nice,” the “protesters" and Worst Generation types were as obnoxious as they could be, calling police vile names, smashing store windows, overturning trash barrels, attacking and threatening delegates, starting fires, throwing glass bottles, puncturing tires, blocking traffic, and skirmishing with the police. Some Molotov cocktails were seized; conspirators planning to kidnap delegates were thwarted. The convention was protected and 818 protesters were arrested.

It was pretty weak tea compared with the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Maybe today’s young hooligan simply does not have what it takes to live up to the standards of The Worst Generation…

McBrilliant and the Polar Bear

A month ago I was comparing John McCain to a sack of wet oats…unfavorably. There was no spirit to his presentation, no presidential charisma, just a tired looking Old White Guy stalking the speaker’s platform while Barack Obama bestrode the world like a rock-star colossus.

McCain’s lack of vim was contagious. The conservative base of the party was going to hold their proverbial noses and vote for the ticket, but they sure weren’t going to get very enthused about it either. Some simply shrugged and said, “I’m gonna sit this one out.”

Then McCain performed his first authentic political miracle. Somewhere deep inside the former Skyraider pilot, the quintessential Navy jet jockey decided he had had enough.

Advised by his campaign manager Rick Davis, McCain’s television messages against Obama took on a satirical edge, tying the Illinois democrat to the triviality of the celebrity culture, and mocking the stage-managed pomp of some of his appearances –like the speech at Berlin’s Victory monument. McCain jumped all over Obama when he suggested that keeping your tires inflated properly could be just as effective as drilling for new oil. Thousands of “Obama pressure gages” were distributed –to the fury of the Democratic candidate—and the daily polls showed the gap between the two men narrowing as the Democratic convention neared.

The DNC turned out to be a pretty good show, with Obama emerging from a Greek temple on the last night to give the best speech of his life before 80,000 adoring fans. It was the talk of the political world…for twelve whole hours.

Then John McCain pulled off his second and most brilliant --and luckiest—political miracle of the year by announcing he had selected as his running-mate Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin, 44, an attractive brunette who also happens to be as tough as railroad spikes, an accomplished reformer, a gifted speaker, an authentic values conservative and the most popular governor in the United States.

The public got one look at her Friday in Ohio and went bananas. Suddenly the electricity and excitement that Obama’s appearances generated became a part of the McCain Straight Talk Express. Wherever he and Palin went, they were mobbed by excited, adoring masses who wanted a better look and to connect with them. Obama and his speech disappeared from the national conversation.

As everyone who reads this blog or who has opened a web page or read a newspaper in the past week knows, Sarah Palin found herself on the receiving end of the biggest effusion of bile ever spewed at one person by the liberal press and the left blogosphere.

They accused Sarah Palin of every kind of moral, political and motherly failing they could think of. They questioned the parentage of her Down’s syndrome child and then used him to question whether she could be a good mother if elected. They uttered half-truths and rumors that no one bothered to check out. For a solid (and sordid) week new gallons of mud were flung at the candidate almost every hour in the hopes that something would stick.

Last night, with the mainstream media ginning up rumors that McCain would have to dump her, Palin walked out onto the stage of the Republican convention, poised, attractive, recognizably and typically American and looking every inch like a happy warrior. For some forty minutes, demonstrating incredible skill and poise as a speaker, she demolished the Obama-Biden ticket without once mentioning them by name. With devastating wit and impeccable timing, she skewered the Democrats while simultaneously showing herself to be supremely likeable and competent. It was the best political speech by an American woman…at least in its delivery…ever, and one of the very best by anyone in the past ten years.

This latter-day pioneer woman of grit, wisdom and good cheer appeared unbroken and unbowed by the oceans of spew that had been dumped on her. Instead she was fighting back like an angry polar bear –forget the pit bull metaphor—and showing veteran politicians how to fight back against slander.

How the convention loved it! There had not been such rapture at a GOP gathering since the active career of Ronald Reagan. Some people were strongly reminded of the Gipper and of Margaret Thatcher. Cross a Great Communicator with an Iron Lady and Sarah Palin is what you get.

The next day even Palin’s critics were grudgingly admitting she had done a good job speaking. Her friends, I assure you, were over the moon. Rush Limbaugh, never a big McCain supporter, was calling him “McBrilliant.” The ever-lovin’ base was awake, on the phones and digging up cash for the campaign. People who were sitting out the election were chomping at the bit to vote for McCain-Palin.

As the left continued to pile on the slime she only became more and more of a sympathetic figure to the American public –which for some reason never seems to side with the bullies. Was this planned or just the kind of good luck granted to great commanders like McCain, who are willing to take a bold risk?

Thursday afternoon, a former sack of wet oats swung onto the podium for a walkthrough of his acceptance speech. He walked with the gingerly tread of a hotshot Navy jet pilot, and grinned like the happy warrior he is –a man whose bones might break but never, never, never his spirit. The game was on!

John McCain, Sarah Palin and Good and Evil

A reader responds: The jury is out on Johnny Mac's brilliance but [the Palin announcement] did upstage a great speech.

Out here [California], everyone thinks the Palin choice was not one of McCain's finest moments.

He seems to make snap decisions and views this complicated gray world in black and white moments of impulse.

If he picked her because "the base" would revolt on the convention floor if Ridge or Lieberman were chosen, then where is the “maverick” in him.

Why do you think he did not pick Huckabee (who can play a little bass as well as have somewhat of a grasp on things Republican?)

And I replied: I have to admit that Mike Huckabee's bass playing endeared him to me early on...and that he was my second pick for the nomination...after Fred Thompson.
I think Huckabee comes across as too much of a hick for McCain's tastes. Also, he does not really think out everything he says.
As for Lieberman and Ridge, they are pro-choice, which means that they would be spat out as readily by the GOP convention as a pro-life candidate would have been rejected by the Dems…had Obama selected one. Corollary: The Democrats will never nominate a pro-life candidate and the GOP will never nominate a pro-choice candidate.
Sarah Palin is a woman of surprising capacity. I have been reading and watching old interviews of her and she grasps the number one issue--energy--firmly and authoritatively. I also admire the way she has knocked down the GOP Corrupt Bastards Club's hold on the Alaska Government...and beat a windfall tax out of Big Oil that she turned over to individual Alaskans...and got the natural gas pipeline project started after 30 years of failed negotiations...
When McCain says he vetted her as thoroughly as the other candidates I believe him as he is an honorable man.

If McCain wasn't able to see nuances, he would not have been able to write campaign finance reform law with Russ Feingold or forge a deal on appointments of federal judges with Ted Kennedy, or write a bill on immigration reform both parties (but not the president) could heartily endorse... and play a major part in every bipartisan piece of senate legislation over the past 18 years or so...
McCain has a very keen sense of what is good and evil...a sense that was sharpened under five years of torture as a POW. That's why he can buck his president on the waterboarding issue.

It's fashionable now for people to say that there are no such things as "good" or "evil." Morality tends to be nuanced out of existence. Pat Moynahan called the process, "Dumbing deviancy down."
And yet, in this world there are some things that are decidedly good and decidedly evil. Evil exists in this world...metaphysically, spiritually, physically. The genocides in Darfur and Rwanda are and were evil. Racism is evil. Torture is evil --and we have no business doing it, because we are supposed to be the Good Guys... Nazism is evil. Crime for profit is evil ...even if the profit is only revenge or a sexual thrill. Starvation is evil. Sickness is evil (believe me I know). All forms of cruelty are evil.
Fortunately, the undisputedly good things are in much greater supply. Work is good, because it confers dignity. Familial love is good, because it banishes loneliness and selfishness. Erotic love is good...as long as the "love" part is not forgotten, and as long as it is loving and not using...Knowledge is good...Peace is good....unless it is a peace of fear that allows others to do evil things (see the rise of Nazi Germany as an example)...Charity is good...as long as it does not stand in the way of capable individuals finding work. Hope is good...if it makes us persevere and is grounded in at least a small but reasonable expectation of success…and what we hope for is itself neither selfish nor evil.
I don't dislike Obama. I think he is a good man. I just don't think his ideas will work. McCain comes closer to my way of thinking.

Shame Enough to Go Around

There is still plenty of shame to go around as the leftist press and blogosphere reach deep down into the mud bucket to smear Sarah Palin through her daughter and even her daughter’s fiancé.

Shame on the New York Post and the New York Daily News and all the other papers that quoted from high school junior’s Levi Johnston’s My Space page in which he uses a vulgarity to describe himself. Is it the prurience of this little detail or the desperation of some media types to smear Sarah Palin –however indirectly through her daughter’s boyfriend—that drives this sort of “coverage?”

Shame on Representative Robert Wexler (D-Florida) for taking the rumor that Palin had supported the Pat Buchanan campaign (back in 2000 –she actually supported Steve Forbes), and elaborating on the lie by saying:

“John McCain’s decision to select a vice presidential running mate that endorsed Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 is a direct affront to all Jewish Americans. Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer *with a uniquely atrocious record on Israel …John McCain has failed his first test of leadership and judgment by selecting a running mate who has aligned herself with a leading anti-Israel voice in American politics. It is frightening that John McCain would select someone one heartbeat away from the presidency who supported a man who embodies vitriolic anti-Israel sentiments.”

It takes your breath away, doesn’t it? But there is more, so…

…Shame, doubled, on Mark Bubriski, an Obama campaign operative, who emailed the Miami Herald, among others, saying, “Palin was a supporter of [MSNBC analyst] Pat Buchanan, a right-winger or as many Jews call him: a Nazi sympathizer,”

Bubriski deserves double the shame because he not only smears Sarah Palin, but Barack Obama as well. I believe Obama when he says lay off the kids. I believe him when he reminds people his mother was only 18 when he was born. I believe him when he says he wants a new kind of politics. But loose cannon like the left bloggers and campaign “aides” like Bubriski smear Obama by belying his principles. For shame.

Shame on The New York Times, and specifically reporter Elizabeth Bumiller who claims, incorrectly, that Palin was a member for two years of the Alaska Independence Party, “which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede.” ABC’s chief Washington correspondent, Jake Tapper, repeated the stories. –but at least he added this: “Gail Fenumiai, director of the Alaska Division of Elections, tells ABC News that …’Gov. Sarah Palin first registered to vote in the state in May 1982 as a Republican, and she has not changed her party affiliate with the Division of Elections since that time.’”

The reason for the story, besides administering a good old fashioned sliming of the candidate, is to call into question the process by which McCain selected Palin…a major Democratic talking point.

At the rate that the militant left is slinging mud at Sarah Palin, her kids and even her kid’s boyfriend, I expect to have ample material for two to three blogs a day, as will the rest of the right-of-center blogosphere… At least until the left realizes how it is hurting, not helping, Barack Obama’s cause.

They may get a clue tonight when Fred Thompson gives his speech to the GOP convention. The topic is the sliming of Sarah Palin. I’m not going to miss it…

* Emphasis added. Buchanan denies this vehemently.

Psst! Hey! We Won the War! Pass It On…

Iraq’s bloody Anbar Province is no longer an American battlefield.
Anbar, along with Baghdad, was the birthplace of the Iraqi Insurrection, which developed after we beat Iraq’s conventional forces in 2003 without any kind of cogent plan for military government afterward. Thank you Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush.
Beginning as the kind of lawless destruction and looting you typically get when no one is in charge of enforcing the law after a war, the Insurrection evolved into a loose coalition of tribes and Sunni veterans of Saddam Hussein’s army out to make the U.S. Occupation of Iraq as costly (and brief) as possible.
The world’s attention was finally caught by the insurrectionists when they ambushed a carfull of Blackwater civilian security personnel in Fallujah, lynched them and strung up their mutilated remains on a bridge.
Our response was slow in coming, but the city of Fallujah was to enter the annals of the U.S. Marines as one of its great battlefields. We fought in that city repeatedly, and in Ramadi, and along the highways of the province. We fought two enemies in Anbar, the Sunnis themselves and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which was made up mostly of foreign fighters.
We were on the defensive. We reacted to events. We won our battles, but typically went back to our snug bases after victory, leaving the battlefields, like Ramadi and Fallujah for the enemy to reclaim. We did not have the confidence of the civilian population, who said nothing when they knew when and where improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were being planted to mine the highways. Amputated limbs and grisly head wounds caused by the IEDs became symbolic of our war there.
In February 2007, General David Petraeus took command of coalition forces in Iraq. He authored The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, which had become the Army’s counterinsurgency manual. Now he would apply it’s precepts practically.
Petraeus told Congress before shipping out that his plan called for decentralizing U.S. forces, especially in places like Baghdad. We would no longer concentrate in places like Camp Liberty, but go out to meet the enemy and stay on the battlefield after we’d won. It would require more troops to do this, which Bush and his new Defense Secretary provided –the famous Surge.
One thing that makes a commander great is that he is lucky. AQI made Petraeus lucky by acting like a combination occupying army, de facto government and Gestapo in Anbar Province. These Jordanians, Saudis and Syrians tried to run the Sunni province using terror and murder to enforce their fundamentalist Islamist rule over the native clans and their sheikhs. The Sunnis turned to the Americans for help just prior to Petraeus’ command.
Petraeus eagerly accepted the friendship of our erstwhile Sunni enemies and the two sides began to work in concert to crush AQI between them. With the people themselves on our side now, letting us know who were planting IEDs and where and where the enemy was basing their forces, American casualties began to taper off while AQI deaths and captures soared. Together, the Coalition armies, the Iraqi Army and the Sunnis drove AQI out of Anbar.
And now with AQI (for the moment) thoroughly beaten, with a competent Iraqi Army in existence, with the civilian government gaining more confidence and credibility every day ruling over a united Sunni-Shi’a Iraq, the most violent province of the war, Anbar, has been turned over to complete Iraqi control.
You might have missed the news, because the announcement came while Gustav threatened New Orleans, while Sarah Palin and her family was in the news and the Republican Convention was getting under way.
That’s how a modern war ends these days –slowly, gradually and unspectacularly. There is no surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri, just a statement to the press that, in effect, the war is over and we won.

Obama is Right About Palin’s Family

I am willing to believe that Barack Obama has more class than many of his supporters. The Internet has been jumping for the past 60 hours with the nasty rumor that Trig Palin, the five month old baby of Sarah Palin is actually her granddaughter and that she was covering up for her daughter Bristol who, the Obamist bloggers say, was the real (and unwed) mother.

Today Governor Palin set matters straight. Bristol, 17, is pregnant –five months pregnant. The timing is such that if the initial rumors were true, she would have conceived her present baby while she was still expecting the other. Given how these bloggers think nature works, I would not be surprised if they thought that was possible, but believe me, it isn’t.

Obama, in the meantime, has spoken up about the rumors and Palin’s announcement making a statement for which he should be commended: “We don't go after people's families. We don't get them involved in the politics. It's not appropriate and it's not relevant. Our people were not involved in any way in this and they will not be. And if I ever thought there was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they'd be fired.”

To make his point even clearer, Obama added, “This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as a governor or potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories.”

In their treatment of Sarah Palin and her family, the left blogosphere and the mainstream media are tying a big fat anchor rope around Barack Obama’s neck. If the Obama campaign can call ordinary criticism of their candidate “smear tactics,” then what do we call the slime being hurled at Sarah Palin and her family?

A lot of people have a lot to be ashamed of.

Shame on Alan Colmes for insinuating that Palin endangered the life of her unborn child (“Did Palin Take proper Pre-Natal Care?” The story is here. ) by finishing her day’s work in Texas when she had only leaked a trivial amount of amniotic fluid. She was not in contractions when she boarded an Alaska Air flight to go home, and made the trip after consulting with her doctor.

Shame on Andrew Sullivan and the Obamist blogosphere for passing around the Sarah Palin is a grandmother rumor. What a smarmy little piece of trash that was. People like Sullivan ought to know better.

Shame on the Daily Kos and blogger ArcXIX for pushing the above rumor. They do know better but apparently don’t care. And shame on the Kos bloggers nauseatingly rejoicing at the Palin family’s crisis.

Shame on Andrea Mitchell of NBC for stating, on “Meet the Press,” that college-educated persons will not want to vote for Mrs. Palin. Because why, Andrea? Because she is not part of the privileged political class to whom you relate so well? Your condescending tone, your arrogance is breathtaking.

Shame on Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift for denigrating and dismissing Palin on "The McLaughlin" group. I don’t know how many newsrooms she was in when McCain announced Palin on Friday. I doubt that, like a Catholic saint, Clift can bilocate and physically be in more than one place at a time. But Clift reported that, “This is not a serious choice. It makes it look like a made for TV movie. If the media reaction is anything, it's been literally laughter in many places…in very, very many newsrooms.” Hear the audio of this segment by clicking here (13 seconds, 80Kb).

Shame on Politico for disguising four Democratic Party stalwarts as uninterested “presidential historians.” They are David Kennedy (who has donated the maximum allowable amount of money to the Obama campaign), Joel Goldstein (also a cash donor),

Doris Kearns Goodwin (who has donated to the Party) and Matthew Dalleck (Dick Gephardt’s former speech writer). This is a nice way to disguise a rehash of Obamist talking points.

Shame on ABC’s Rick Klein and Jennifer Parker for calling the announcement of Bristol’s pregnancy “A damaging revelation,” and then failing to prove that notion when interviewing Republicans and family-values sources at the convention --all of whom praised the decision of Miss Palin to keep her baby and praised the family values of Governor Palin.

Shame on CNN for using Bristol’s story as the basis of a hitpiece on her mother.

Shame on Morton Kondracke –who knows nothing more about the circumstances of Bristol’s pregnancy than we do-- for chiming in with the same criticism as the CNN hitpiece (see him here.)

There is a lot more shame to go around. Barack Obama says he is against the hyper-partisan “say anything to win” kind of politics seen in the last several elections. He says he is against making political hay with the children of candidates. I believe him. But the radical left doesn’t.

That’s not “change;” that’s more of the same.

McCain Turns Out to be Brilliant

John McCain, it turns out, is a genius.

His pick of Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running-mate completely upstaged Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. As of Friday morning the putative brilliance of the speech was the only thing the press and the chattering class could talk about. If McCain had not announced his running mate when he did, they would still be talking about The Speech well into the Monday news cycle.

Instead, the topic is Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. The press is asking, “ Who is she? Is she qualified? What does she do for the ticket?”

Obama’s speech? Yesterday’s news. Oprah may have cried her false eyelashes off in vain.

Palin’s style, her accent, her politics and her values are all straight from the heartland –or as the coastal liberal elites call it, “Flyover Country.” With knee-jerk speed, the Obamists took a dismissive tone with Palin that the supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton will recognize at once.

The very first release from the Obama camp pooh-poohed Palin as the mayor of a small town. That she was, but as mayor she did things that Barack Obama has not yet done…such as manage a budget and a payroll and administer something larger than a charitable fund. As Governor of Alaska she has governed the largest state, in area, in the Union. She has mastered the complex issues of energy and the environment. She has managed a state budget in the billions of dollars.

Well, she’s only done that for two years, scoff the Obamists. But it’s two years more experience as a government executive than Barack Obama can boast of.

Obama has been hailed as a “post-partisan” politician, but it is Sarah Palin who is the genuine article. You’ve got to like the fact that her worst enemies in the state are Republican pols –the arrogantly self-described “Corrupt Bastards Club”-- whose bribe-taking from big oil and ethical lapses she fearlessly exposed and held to up to public scrutiny. How those Alaska Republicans despise her!

The Obamists are trying every talking point they can think of to gain traction against Palin: Does the selection of Palin indicate McCain’s judgment is too poor for the presidency? (On the contrary, it was a bold stroke of genius –see above.) McCain, it is complained. has “rolled the dice” on an ex-beauty queen (second place in the Miss Alaska pageant for which, I imagine, she got $10 and passed “Go.”).

The critics claim Palin’s pro-life views are too extreme (because she believed her unborn Down syndrome baby was a human being and because she brought him into the world —and a loving family— instead of aborting him?). Having complained about Palin’s pro-life views s the Obamists cynically ask if is appropriate for her to accept the Vice Presidency while raising an infant? (Are we saying a woman’s place is in the home??)

She has no foreign policy experience, the liberals cry …Except that she visited Alaskan National Guard troops in Kuwait and was able to visit wounded soldiers in Germany –a feat Obama failed to accomplish. In fact, she has the rare skill of being able to run for president and visit Germany without demanding to make a speech at the Brandenburg Gate.

There is very little mention of how she has lived the kind of typical American life Obama talks so much about but has no experience with personally. Her dad was an elementary schoolteacher and her mom was the school secretary. As point guard of her high school basketball team she helped lead the team to a state championship –while courageously playing through pain thanks to a stress fracture in her leg. She married her high school sweetheart and is still with him 20 years later as a mom of five. She and her husband both earned their livings doing hard physical work. She believes in the Second Amendment: Palin enjoys moose meat stew –especially if she shot the moose herself and most of all if she has spent the day snowmachineing.

She has moral courage that complements her physical stamina. She stands up to big oil and protects the interests of her state’s citizens in the development of Alaskan resources. She insists on clean and ethical government. She won the governorship without the help of the corrupt Republican state establishment, Palin is beholding only to the people, who have given her approval ratings of 80 percent and better.

It was very instructive to watch the Sunday morning news shows. The tone of condescension was overwhelming. Reporters and columnists said that she had appeal –not to college-educated voters, of course, but to blue-collar types who live between the coasts.

New York Times columnist David Brooks told Bob Schieffer that, yes, Palin stood up to big oil; she is a reformer; she took on the Corrupt Bastards Club and beat them…but she hasn’t really done anything! Rudy Giuliani, on “Face the Nation,” corrected Bob Schieffer’s dismissive characterization of her stint as a small town mayor. Palin, Giuliani said, has had to use all the skills of an executive in managing payrolls, making budgets and setting policy. What, he asked, has Obama run? All he has done is make speeches, Giuliani said, answering his own question.

I liked Jesse Jackson’s answer some months ago better. All Obama has run, said Jackson, “is his mouth.”

With Sarah Palin, McCain is attacking Barack Obama on the latter’s home territory by demonstrating he is willing to take bold action to bring change to government. Comparing Obama’s vice presidential pick of Washington insider (and serial plagiarist) Joe Biden to McCain’s choice of a little-known woman with solid reformist credentials argues credibly that McCain is the genuine agent of change…the real maverick.

Veep! Veep! Straight Talk Express Runs Over Obama’s Big Entrance

Obama’s side is complaining that the decision by McCain to let it slip that he has picked a running mate amounts to “political malpractice.” What that statement amounts to is whining. McCain has cleverly upstaged Obama’s address from Olympus by giving the press a hard news story to dig into…Last minute VP speculations….Maybe Carly Fiorina, the former head of Hewlett-Packard and chairwoman of the RNC’s Victory ’08. Is she headed for Dayton? …Mitt Romney and family have left for Dayton where they will appear with McCain. He was spotted today with what appeared to be a Secret Service detail….Colin Powel’s spokesperson says General Powell has not been vetted and has not filled out a McCain vetting questionnaire…Kay Bailey Hutchinson tells MSNBC she does not want to spend 4 years in DC as Veep. She wants to go home and run for governor of Texas…. Sadly no noticeable buzz for Condi Rice. The smart money is on Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney. Pawlenty has canceled all his public appointments for tomorrow….

Olberman vs. Scarborough …and Brokaw …and Murphy …and Bush …and Wolfson …and Hillary …and Cheney …and etc., etc….

Portfolio’s Jeff Bercovici says feuding anchors Keith Olberman and Joe Scarborough (the latter being the token moderate on the left-oriented MSNBC) should just get the measuring tape, whip out the appropriate equipment and start a’ measuring.

The squabble of anchors going on at MSNBC is easily the least professional-looking spectacle in television news, cable or broadcast. Leaving Olberman’s mike on while Scarborough was attempting political analysis was bush-league. For Olberman to beg for a shovel in the middle of Scarborough’s piece is a stunt no self-respecting college radio station would allow.

Olberman, the converted sportscaster who has taken his “Countdown” show from third place in cable news ratings for that hour to …third place, is reputedly difficult to work with. I have no evidence to back that up --aside from the viral video clip of the “shovel-to-shovel” confrontation with Joe Scarborough described above –and the rumor, which is crisscrossing the Internet, that Olberman wants Tom Brokaw banned form MSNBC. He also reportedly wants to ban Mike Murphy, a moderate columnist from Time, off MSNBC’s air. This, of course, takes nothing away from the loathing Olberman expresses for Bush, Rove, the Clintons, Howard Wolfson, Cheney, etc., etc…

Though it is number one in the cable news field, FOX News still has an unpolished feel to it. Its coverage, I submit, is not as thorough as CNN’s and its production values are only acceptable at best. But the shenanigans at MSNBC and their left-wing bias, make FOX News look like the Tiffany of its field by comparison.

Thank goodness the issue has been cleared up. Barack Obama does NOT think he is the Lord Jesus.

Apparently, he is Zeus.

Or so it would seem, given the stage setting at Mile High Stadium he has had erected for his “acceptance” speech tonight. It is a columned Greco-Roman temple. Only instead of Zeus emerging from amid the snowy columns of the Temple of Obama bearing thunderbolts, we will get Obama --with a teleprompter, but alas, no toga, and no laurel wreath upon his brow.

Seventy thousand will be on hand at Mile High…er… Barackopolis to hear the candidate’s remarks in a setting of such grandeur it could even satisfy a politician’s ego. The event will amount to a recreated Roman triumph, but without the traditional servant to whisper in the honoree’s ear, “Remember, thou are but mortal,” and without, alas, a balloon drop. What, I ask, is a convention without a balloon drop?

John McCain, it is reported, plans to release the name of his running mate today. This will take some of the public and press attention away from Obama’s acceptance speech from Olympus if the story is true.

My dream VP nominee would be Colin Powell, who did NOT attend the convention to praise Obama or put his name in nomination. My second choice: Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas. She is from a state McCain will win anyway, but she is a very able Senate veteran and a woman –too bad she and McCain are not chummy. I would also recommend (if McCain were to listen to me) Condi Rice. How about Mike Huckabee or Fred Thompson? How about General David Petraeus? How about someone that people have HEARD of…??

Keep fingers crossed that it isn’t Joe Lieberman. Though my Connecticut neighbor has lots to recommend him, his pro-choice views would injure McCain with his conservative and evangelical base voters. The very notion of a pro-choice running mate made Rush Limbaugh fly off the handle on his show yesterday, declaring such a selection would destroy the GOP.

What we are most likely to get is governors Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty –both nice guys but not as powerful a choice as Biden is for Obama.

Critique of Obama Becomes Thoughtcrime

Barack Obama would like to see a Dallas billionaire, Harold Simmons, prosecuted and sent to jail.

Now there is nothing novel about a Democrat at the far left of his party wishing ill for a billionaire. They hate billionaires on principle, if for no other reason. But Obama’s complaint comes straight from George Orwell: Thoughtcrime.

Specifically, Simmons funded and bought television time for a commercial detailing Barack Obama’s relationship with radical bomb-thrower and former Weatherman Underground member William Ayers.

I can call him a “bomb-thrower” without facing libel, because he is admittedly the guy who planted bombs at the Pentagon, New York City Police Headquarters and the U.S. Capitol and who was on the run for 10 years. His wife is another ex-Weatherman fugitive Bernadette Dohrn.

In a 2001 autobiography Ayers said, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Another interesting Ayers quote from back in the day was, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents." "What a country," Ayers said in 2001, after having met Obama years before; "It makes me want to puke."

In the 1990’s the couple hosted the Obama at a meet and greet for his first State Senate run. This was the launch of Obama’s political career. Ayers served with Obama from 1999 through 2001 on the non-profit Woods Fund of Chicago as paid board members. Ayers has donated at least once before to an Obama campaign.

Ayers has not expressed any regret for having set bombs in public buildings.

Now that is the content of the ad, which you can see here: http://www.americanissuesproject.org/. Obama general counsel Bob Bauer is calling for the prosecution of Simmons for what he alleges is “a knowing and willful violation of the individual aggregate contribution limits.” (Politico Aug. 27, 2008). In other words, he is not challenging the content, but the legality of running any such ad in the first place.

Of course it is the thought that counts. Would Bauer be calling for a prosecution if the ad were just another item in the media worship of Barack Obama?

Ed Martin, president of The American Issues Project, observed acidly that despots in the past, “generally had to wait until they were in power to throw people who disagreed with them into jail.”

Nancy Pelosi has just as little patience with thoughtcrime. The Savior of the Planet, as she describes her mission, was confronted by demonstrators yesterday chanting “Drill here! Drill now!” reflecting the views of about two thirds to three quarters of the population.

Pelosi responded, “Right here?…Can we drill your brains?” Charming. Congressional Majority Leader Steny Hoyer chimed in saying that “thinking Americans” (his emphasis ...remember only liberals are officially intelligent) know that Americans don’t have a quarter of the world’s oil, though we use 25 percent of all fossil fuel energy.

Meanwhile Ms. Pelosi’s new career as a Catholic theologian continues to attract, if not rave reviews, raving Catholic bishops. You may recall Pelosi appealed to her ardent Catholicism as authority when she claimed on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” that the “doctors of the church,” by which she meant its most distinguished theologians, have been unable to state when human life begins.

So far Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, CT, the chairman of the Bishop’s Committee on Doctrine (what the Church teaches), Archbishops Donald Wuerl of Washington and Charles Chaput of Denver, Cardinal Edward Egan of New York and Cardinal Justin Rigali chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Pro-Life Activities, have all had the audacity to contradict Ms. Pelosi by stating that Catholic doctrine has always taught that human life begins at the moment of conception.

Brendan Daly, a Pelosi spokesman, set these thoughtcriminals straight saying the congresswoman bases her statement on Saint Augustine who wrote that “the law does not provide that the act [abortion] pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation.”

Cardinal Rigali and Bishop Lori responded stating that while uniformed and unscientific beliefs about embryo development in the Middle Ages led to differences in the penalties for commission of the sin of abortion, “the Church's moral teaching never justified or permitted abortion at any stage of development.''

Daly was obliged to fall back on the final, lame argument of pro-choice Catholic Democrats, saying that many American Catholics disagree with the Church’s teaching. Anyway, he observed, Pelosi believes making family planning more available could reduce the number of abortions.

The Church forbids contraception, too.

Junge und Spieljunge (Boy and Playboy)

As this century progresses, scholars are going to give a lot of thought as to which philosophers had the greatest influence on the 20^th Century.

Was it Karl Marx, whose “scientific” reading of history and modern definition of communism sparked so much conflict and political change?

Was it Nietzsche, whose theory of the super-man and declaration that “God is dead” unintentionally provided the underpinnings for the rise of Nazism in Germany?

Was it Jean Paul Sartre, whose existentialism gave us all a word to use to that makes our conversation sound intellectual –even if we don’t quite know what it means? *

Or was it Hugh M. “Call me ‘Hef’” Hefner?

Aside from Hefner’s genius in figuring out that it is the publishers, not the writers, who make all the money in the literary field, it was his philosophy that has changed society most profoundly, deeply and permanently.

Hefner went to great lengths to produce a product –Playboy-- that was many cuts above the near-pornographic “men’s magazines” of his day (the 1950’s) and infinitely classier than the raw hardcore stuff your local variety store owner kept under the counter for his “special” customers.

Hef dressed up Playboy with fiction from top writers and cutting-edge articles on music, art, clothing, theatre, cinema, hi-fi, and all the other accoutrements of the good life. The magazine discussed issues such as racial prejudice, the hypocrisy of modern advertising (while maxing out its ad pages) and modern politics. It offered celebrity interviews, satire, humor and even poetry.

There was so much substantial and serious content in the magazine that you could almost believe it when your friend, when admitting he read Playboy, claimed, “I only read it for the articles about jazz and men’s fashion.”

It was a hell of a lot of cover that Hef provided for the individual who wanted to look at girlie pictures without the stigma attached to the traditional men’s magazines. Hef had recreated Esquire, but with a tad less drapery on the girls.

With a liberal slant that gave the magazine a bit of political cover, and quality content to offset the girlie pictures, Playboy achieved a kind of legitimacy. And being a legitimate way to look at semi-naked women, the magazine took off like a rocket, its wild success admittedly surprising Hefner and all others involved. Playboy and its readers acquired a sort of semi-respectability in the first 15 years of publication that gave Hefner a lot of influence on popular culture.

In Playboy, Hef was selling an outlook on life and on women, all protests to the contrary. Readers were encouraged to see themselves as hip, well informed and sophisticated. A desirable woman was defined as the girl next door –the compliant one with the big breasts, that is.

It was in the change in attitudes about sex that Hefner’s magazine demonstrated the most influence –with the help of modern feminism. Hefner was smart enough not to equate feminism with man-hating in the pages of Playboy, a mistake some men made when the movement gathered strength in the late 1960’s and through the 1070’s. In fact, the rejection of women being forced to conform to traditional roles and stereotypes, the insistence on women’s total personal freedom, meshed perfectly with the consequences-free lifestyle that Playboy illustrated for men.

And in a world of no consequences, where anything “consenting adults” do whatever they want to, women became disposable, as did relationships and responsibility. Sex, which had been a kind of seal binding a relationship, was now just another part of dating recreation, like dinner, drinking and dancing.

Then, in the 1970’s, the door Hefner cracked open was kicked in.

If Hefner’s magazine had been the thin entering wedge for classy pornography, it served the same purpose for enterprises that Hef did not choose to undertake. At first, Playboy was cloned. The British magazine Penthouse, which could be described as a slightly rougher imitation of Playboy, appeared in an American version. Gallery (where I freelanced as a music and book reviewer and who still owe me $1,400) soon followed: a low-rent version of Playboy that didn’t bother to airbrush out the bruises or the cellulite on the legs of their models. Then came Hustler.

To say, as publisher Larry Flynt remarked recently, that Hustler “pushed the envelope of taste,” is something of an understatement. Flynt reveled in what he could get away with. Let Hefner have the artsy, good-taste end of the business: Flynt wanted the rest of the market that Hef was careful not to cater to. Not everyone who bought Playboy was a young, hip, upscale exec who carefully read the articles on jazz and fashion. A lot of the readership was guys who wanted to buy explicit pictures of naked women without feeling like perverts doing so. And, until Hustler, Playboy and its clones were all they had. For the not-necessarily-young, un-hip, working-class Joes, Hustler was an exact fit in content and taste –and, thanks to the legitimacy Hefner achieved for Playboy, Hustler was just as publicly purchasable without the buyer feeling like a deviant. Flynt became a wealthy man.

Now it was Flynt, not Hefner, on the cutting edge, daring to do more and show more, challenging government, law enforcement and organized religion on

free speech and obscenity. Flynt conferred on the more straight laced (!) Hefner a sort of establishment respectability by comparison.

By the 1990s events had long been out of Hefner’s power to influence. With the coming of the Internet a man could see anything –absolutely anything!-- he liked for a few bucks or for nothing at all, in the comfort of his own home, without the embarrassment of having to purchase the material in public, and even if owning the material was in defiance of the law. Thanks to the Internet, the whole world is awash in pornography that every day profoundly influences and defines how millions of men think of women.

To borrow a thought from the late Daniel Moynahan, pornography is dumbing deviance down --for both genders. It is certainly one of the engines behind the sexualization of children, and the fragility –or disposability, if you will-- of modern relationships. Women are arguably more objectified than they were before the feminist revolution. Men are used to thinking of virtually any sexual behavior as permitted, as legitimate. Women are used by men more viciously now than in the Bad Old Days before the Sixties, for now they lack even the protection of society’s hypocrisy, much less its religion and traditional mores. Too many women are faced with choosing a life of anger, solitude or victimhood. Or they can embrace deviance –which is now the norm.

Without Hef, the publisher turned philosopher, it might never have happened.

* The word is “existential.”

Thank God for Misty May...

Thank God for Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh.

If you live in a cave and don’t know who they are, they are the gold medal-winning stars of that classic Olympic sport, Micro-Bikini Women’s Beach Volleyball.

Every fourth summer, the youth of the world assemble, the torch is lit and the struggle of Misty’s and Kerri’s gluteii maximii inside their volleyball outfits begins. NBC makes a gallant, even daring, attempt to portray what is going on around them as a sporting event, but what it is in reality is blessed relief from the mundane fare of primetime television.

Misty is the wife of the luckiest catcher in Major League Baseball and is demonstrably one of the most perfect physical specimens at the XXIX Olympics –and that is with tough competition from the Brazilian team—and the Chinese and every other beach volleyball duo. As a group these extraordinarily fit-looking young ladies are eye-popping advertisements for diet and exercise. There are other edifying aspects of the game which, I discovered, is even more enjoyable to watch when it is played in the rain.

The entire spectacle, as it unfolded in Beijing, represents the apex of Chinese civilization since Mao introduced the country (by force) to Glorious Socialism in 1949. The freethinking young intellectuals who were paraded around in dunce caps and mocked during the Great Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s (at least those not actually murdered) run the country now and their gift to the People’s Republic is to bring real bikini volleyball, to the heart of the late Chairman Mao’s domain.

What would Mao have thought, tuning in to Must See TV this week and seeing a line of Chinese models in bikinis doing their cheerleader thing as a couple of tanned and lithe American women prepare to face off against two nubile goddesses from the beach at Ipanima? Knowing his history, which included a gourmet’s (and a gourmand’s) appreciation of women, Madame Mao notwithstanding, the Chairman probably would have put down his Little Red Remote and settled in for a night of quality television.

The Chinese have made sure there is something for everyone at this Olympics, especially pedophiles, it seems, since the Chinese women’s national gymnastics team are only slightly older than actual embryos. Being of a certain age, I had to avert my eyes for most of their part of the competition. Ever since the death of Jon Benet Ramsay I have found the sight of little girls wearing more than an even pound of makeup to be just a smidge unsettling. Doing that, and then putting said eight year old in a leotard for the world to ogle in High Definition is just wrong. Not that staring at actual 16 year olds is right, but it is measurably less creepy.

I forget that these girls, some of whom was missing a baby tooth for the Games, have ironclad proof that they are 16: a certificate from the Chinese government. Why would they lie? Ogle away!

You don’t have to be Humbert Humbert* to enjoy the rest of the games. You don’t even have to like sports –though if you do, the competition alone is worth the watching. There is women’s trampoline, ladies’ platform diving, the women’s 100 meter and 200 meter dashes, ladies’ hurdles, and women’s pole vaulting. If you think you discern a trend here, you are so right.

If only the Olympic Games lasted forever. But soon they will be replaced by such entirely plausible dramas as Life, in which a former detective, sentenced to life in prison, and exonerated after doing time, comes back to the police force and picks right up where he left off. Then there is the series where British nannies cure deeply dysfunctional families and then take off in hot air balloons to challenge the Luftwaffe in the skies over Germany.

Okay, I made that last one up, but I am sending the idea to Program Development at FOX.

And all kidding aside, Misty and Kerry are amazing athletes who actually play better than they look. And they look really good. I can’t wait for the XXX Olympics.

*Literary reference. See Nabokov, Vladimir.

Russia's Power Politics, 1914-Style

There is no reason on God’s green earth why Russia and the United States should ever come to blows.

On the other hand, in 1914 there was no reason why Russia, France and England should have to have gone to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. No reason except the insanity of power politics as practiced before the Great War. It was the sheer purposelessness of the struggle, the insanity of it all, that was the most demoralizing aspect of the Great War.

After two world wars and the Cold War, our European cousins are very keen on "soft power;" getting things done by diplomacy, persuasion and moral force. It worked for a while and then reality set in, first in the former Yugoslavia and now in Georgia. Now power politics, 1914-style, is back in vogue. Here's why:

Russia has grievances against us that won’t go away. In the 1980's we blocked the Soviet expansion into Afghanistan by arming the Mujahideen. Once they learned how to shoot down Hind helicopters with Sparrow air-to-air missiles it was only a matter of time. We also lured the Soviets into an arms race they didn’t need --or could afford-- to pursue in the 1980’s. When we tossed in the Star Wars chip, they had a breakdown of national will because they utterly believed we could build a system that would negate their intercontinental rocket forces.

Fooled ya! We’re still trying to make the damn thing work 20 years later. It was Ronald Reagan’s coup de grace to the back of the head of communism.

Instead of propping up the USSR in gratitude for being liberated 60 years earlier, the ungrateful eastern European satellite nations gleefully quit the Warsaw Pact. Now they are mostly members of NATO and the European Union and out of Moscow’s grasp. The fact that the presidents of Poland and the Balkan nations dared travel to Tiblisi in the middle of the war, to proclaim solidarity in public with Georgia indicates enormous moral courage –and the knowledge that their security is America’s direct concern.

Except for recently, with the fighting in Georgia, the Russian public regards the United States the Number One Enemy. Russians, from the man in the street to the ex-KGB operative who manipulates the president of Russia like a marionette—they all long for the days when a threat from Russia made the United States and the West tremble.

They long for the days when, in what they call the “near abroad,” the leaders of nations on the Soviet periphery phoned Moscow to check in before making a rest room visit. They don’t just miss the respect the mighty Soviet Union generated; they miss the fear the USSR inspired. Bullying is a part of Russian life, families, neighborhoods, schools, even the armed forces, are riddled with bullies.

Vladimir Putin is an old-time KGB bully.

Putin believes in the power of the bully. Disgusted after the Chechin terrorist attack on a grade school and subsequent massacre, Putin noted darkly that in this world, “The weak are to be beaten.”

Georgia was made an example of because it was weak. Weakness inspires contempt in Russia. More than the so-called provocations in South Ossetia (really stirred up by the Russians themselves), more than siding with the United States, Georgia’s major crime was to be weak. The Russian instinct, when presented with the face of a homeless, helpless, weeping civilian, is to smash that contemptible face in with the heel of a jackboot, as Orwell said, forever and ever.

Having beaten Georgia on the battlefield, Russia now wishes to humiliate her. Again and again. In the past week the Kremlin announced, “Georgian territorial integrity is a dead issue.” Russian soldiers are acting in accord with that statement, robbing everything of value they can get their hands on and digging in on Georgian national territory, despite the promise from Moscow that they were leaving.

We are flying in humanitarian supplies and, I hope, weapons to rearm Georgian soldiers and militia. We are going to have to stand beside our friends when their noses are bloodied because they are our friends, and especially because they are weak. In this world, Americans believe, the strong help the weak, whatever the risk.

Russia is richer than ever in its history thanks to energy revenues. It has all the land it can use and all the raw materials. They simply aspire to smash a few faces from time to time as their God-given right and to scare the rest of the world.

Which leads me to a question. Of the two, who is best suited to deal with Fascist Russia? Barack Obama, or John McClain? This is turning out to be much more important a presidential election than we had dreamed just 14 days ago.