Quotations

Noonan On Palin

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Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.[WSJ Online]

Palin does remind me very strongly of the women I grew up with in Texas. All them could literally ride and shoot. I have one cousin I never see because she spends every Thanksgiving and Christmas hunting. The idea that such women look weak in the eyes of “feminists” says a great deal about the defects of contemporary  “feminist” thinking.

Quote of the Day

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Above all – as in his appraisal of Obama and Hillary – Nader doesn’t talk like a spinmeister for his political team. With the post-2000 polarisation of the country and Bush Derangement Syndrome, more and more people – ordinary people, not paid campaign politicos – now conduct ordinary conversations about politics as though they were lawyers pushily trying to spin a jury for their political side. Unlike such lay people (especially Democrats, I think) who now seem to do this as a matter of course, Nader really is more or less a professional politician. But he talks like a human being, and seems to say what he really thinks. More power to him.

–Maimon Schwarzschild

Quote of the Day

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While America has a legitimate concern in encouraging former Soviet states to develop into market democracies, there is no intrinsic economic or strategic American vital interest in Georgia per se and even less in South Ossetia. Georgia is our ally for only two reasons: Tblisi was enthusiastic to send troops to help in Iraq in return for military aid and it occupies a strategic location for oil and gas pipelines that will meet future European energy needs. In other words, Georgia’s role is of a primary strategic interest to the EU, not the United States. Which is why European and British companies have such a large shareholder stake in the BTC pipeline and why European FDI in Georgia exceeds ours. Yet it will be American troops in Georgia handing out bottled water and MREs, not the Bundeswehr or the French Foreign Legion. Something does not compute here.

Mark Safranski, a/k/a Zenpundit.

Mark has an excellent post on Pajamas Media entitled Let’s Not Rush into Cold War II, which the quote above comes from. RTWT.

See also a post on his site with additional comments and links.

And congratulations to Mark on the Pajamas Media gig. Nice.

Quote of the Day

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The appropriate personification for Russia circa 2008 is not an oil-fueled Genghis Khan, threatening to surge once more across Eurasia … no, it is more like a drunk with a knife unable to admit they have terminal liver disease .. a vodka-fueled Genghis Khan’t if you will.
 
Surely a policy of political containment is really all that is needed while nature, rust and liver sclerosis on a Biblical scale do the rest.

Perry de Havilland