When Obama says he’ll “restore America’s reputation” what it really means is that people who hate America will be delighted by his election. Why so many Americans don’t see it that way astounds me.
Via Mark Steyn.
Quotations
Quote of the Day
…And with that grand Pacific Northwest/Alaska variant on the Midwestern accent that is, or should be recognized as, standard English.
Wiseguy.
Quote of the Day
The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media’s prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.
Bill Kristol. RTWT — a sneering but still accurate assessment.
I love that line: McCain/Palin v. Obama/Media. We know who Obama’s real “running mate” is! It’s his horde of little pals who are working away like Santa’s elves to bring to an America that is hungry for change the gift of hope we can believe in.
Feh. (Spits on ground.)
Governor Palin as Frontierswoman
Michael Ledeen is characteristically insightful:
For the first time in memory, we have a major candidate who comes from the frontier, and it’s not surprising that the pundits are having a hard time coming to grips with this phenomenon. For Sarah Palin’s world is not defined by the major media or by the glossy magazines; she hunts and fishes, she’s unabashedly patriotic, her son is in the Army, her husband races across the snow. Unlike the other three candidates, she is not a member of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. When she talks about shattering the glass ceiling, she actually means it; it is not a mask for yet another ideological program. Some of her supporters sense this when they call her “authentic.” It’s the wrong word, however; Barack Obama is an authentic radical, for example. Palin is a frontierswoman. Her state capital, Juneau, cannot be reached on the highways of Alaska. If you want to get there, you must either fly or sail. And for much of the year, sailing isn’t smart. No subways in Juneau, but lots of bars. The main bookstore caters mostly to the tourist trade, with a small selection of used paperbacks and a few recent best sellers.
It’s not so much authenticity as independence, and self-reliance, which have always been the basic characteristics of frontier people. They think for themselves. They have to think outside the box, because there’s no available box for them to think in. If they accepted the conventional wisdom they wouldn’t be on the frontier, they’d be in some city and they’d brag about their degrees from the failed institutions of higher education. They’re not big on “conflict resolution,” they prefer zero-sum games. If you go up against a grizzly, you’re poorly advised to look for a win-win solution.
She comes from a world that’s almost totally unknown to the pundits, which is why so much of the commentary has been unhelpful. Most of the intellectuals I know have never driven across this continent. They have little appreciation of the life of the Great Plains and the Klondike, and I suspect that, as time passes, they will have increasing difficulty defining Sarah Palin in the outmoded terms of left and right, liberal and conservative. As McCain said when he introduced her, she’s very serious about changing government, as her record shows. She knows that means purging corrupt people, a dangerous notion among the inhabitants of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. Is it a conservative notion? Wrong question, I’d say.
One thing that’s interesting about this presidential election is how radical two of the candidates are. Obama is a radical leftist pretending to be a pragmatic liberal. Palin is a radical of a different type, not quite a libertarian as we use that term and certainly not a conservative. “Frontierswoman” is as good a characterization as any.
Your Move, Mr. Donkey
For the first time ever in this election cycle the GOP actually has momentum.
We were watching this election slowly trickle down our pantlegs, until last night.
But now McCain and Palin have gone off-script.
The planned ritual execution of the Old White Guys before the coronation of His Holiness Barack I is now officially not-going-as-scheduled.
McCain threw a barracuda into the swimming pool. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t.
But it has made life interesting, for now.
(And it has made Obama’s defensive eat-up-the-clock approach look ill-advised. It has also made his, or his wife’s, rejection of Hillary look like the weak decision it was. Real leaders have the stones to surround themselves with the strongest people in their own party. JKF took LBJ, Reagan took Bush I, Clinton took Gore. That is how the pols with balls do it.)
The MSM and the Donks are stunned.
But they won’t stay stunned.
Their initial volley of vicious slime attacks and jeering, arrogant condescension have failed. The Donks and their MSM allies, the ones who are assigned to do the dirty work, will now come back like cornered rats, like animals. It is going to get way, way worse.
Expect a massive and vicious counter-attack, possibly based on some purported “new revelations” of corruption, against Palin to begin today or tomorrow. No doubt Mr. Axelrod and his team, Obama’s brain, are working hard right now on the counter-attack.
They have to destroy her now.
Gov. Palin and her family are going to have an ugly two months.
UPDATE 1: “I’m really looking forward to the VP debates. And – for the first time – the election itself, although there’s a lot of water between here and there, and something tells me that the long knives are being sharpened.” Neptunus Lex (The Other Lex!) gets it.
UPDATE 2: I laughed out loud at the spirit of this, and its apparent accuracy:
There’s also more to the pit bull thing: Why do they bite so hard? Because that is what they love to do most in life. And it’s not funny, unless the person get chewed up richly deserves it. She even found a funny, extemporaneous (apparently) way to say explicitly that she was, in fact, a pit bull, though one with lipstick. Translation: I wear lipstick and I am your worst nightmare.
This lady was not fighting for her life. She was having the time of her life. She’s a stone fighter, not the kind of victim the bullies want. I begin to get the barracuda moniker. A natural born killer. I think I’m in love.
UPDATE 3: Here’s the photo of Gov. Palin with the moose she bagged. I’d heard about it, but I had not seen it before. Looks like good eatin’.