‘The Undefeated’ Review: Doing the Job the Corrupt MSM Won’t

by John Nolte     
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
June 6, 2011

What an indictment of the mainstream media that in order to present to the public the missing pieces of a major political figure’s governing record, an independent filmmaker has to drop a cool million of his own dollars. While our corrupt journalist-class is (at this very moment) out trashing Governor Palin’s children, blaming her for their own acts of public urination and proving they know nothing about Paul Revere (or Google), writer/director Steve Bannon is putting the final touches on “The Undefeated” (this is a review of a rough cut), a feature-length documentary that does the MSM’s job for them — tells the intentionally ignored and buried stories of Sarah Palin’s two decades as an unconventional but very effective public official. Unless you’ve read the Governor’s autobiography “Going Rogue,” anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty will find it impossible to sit through this film and not ask themselves, “Why haven’t I been told this?”

Broken into a series of chapters that focus solely on Palin’s political career, the film itself opens with a jarring (in a good way) montage of bitterly hostile celebrities who obviously don’t have enough humanity of their own to see the same in a mother of five. Among others, Bill Maher, Rosie O’Donnell, Matt Damon, Joy Behar, David Letterman, and comedian Louis CK lash out at this woman and her family (including Trig, her Down Syndrome son) in jaw-droppingly cruel and sexual ways that would surely garner an R-rating (there will be an unrated and PG-13 version released). Even though part of my job is to track this celebrity venom and nothing I saw was new, the sheer volume of hate still takes your breath away. Bannon’s answer to this is one of the film’s more effective moments: a credit sequence over home movies where we watch Sarah Palin — someone’s little girl — grow up. Since none of those celebrities were born with a shame-gene, you almost have to feel ashamed for them.

From here the narrative smartly avoids the personal biographical beats of Palin’s life and jumps directly into her life as a political figure. Bannon secured the audio rights to “Going Rogue” which allows Palin herself to tell much of her own story and right off the bat we’re treated to one of those inconvenient facts the MSM ignores. What inspired this blue collar, hockey mom married to an oil worker to get into politics was the devastating 1989 Exxon Valdez environmental catastrophe. The oil companies clearly held too much power in Alaska and a seed was planted that would eventually grow into the woman currently giving the GOP establishment and corrupt media fits as she tours America in a bus.

There’s nothing partisan about “The Undefeated.” The Republican establishment and Big Oil take a well-deserved beating from open to close. If anything, they come off worse than the Left who are really only guilty of being their awful selves. It’s just a fact that throughout most of her career (and the film’s second act) — as Palin moved from Wasilla Mayor to Chairwoman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to Governor — she fearlessly and effectively battled her own party and Big Oil almost every step of the way. I don’t want to get too wonky in a film review, but as you watch this particular section you’re going to learn as much about the MSM as you do the Governor. Try to imagine how many elite, blow-dried souls Lucifer was able to secure the rights to in order for them to gain the sway needed to convince the public that an undistinguished half-term Senator most famous for voting present was more qualified to be President than one of the most successful and popular governor’s in the country.

——

An important theme that develops is Palin’s unwavering principles. That doesn’t mean she’s not willing to work with the other side. In fact, just the opposite is true. But during an interview in one of the many pieces of heretofore unseen news footage we’re treated to, Palin says it best (paraphrasing): “A politician has a choice between eating well and sleeping well.” In her public life, Palin has resigned from two offices; once as Chairwoman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation in order to call attention to corruption and most famously as Alaska’s governor. The former put her at odds with the GOP establishment and cost her middle-class family a six-figure salary.

The latter cost her a ton of political capital.

In both cases, it’s quite obvious the Governor understood that the consequences of her stepping down would be personally devastating, but in both cases she chose to sleep rather than eat well. Sure, Palin could have hung on as Governor and avoided taking fire as a “quitter” even from some on our side, but at what price to the State of Alaska? A never-ending stream of frivolous ethics complaints not only threatened to bankrupt Palin’s family but had also frozen the government’s ability to get anything done. A mercenary politician more concerned with his her own personal ambitions would’ve held on to that office at any cost (to everyone else). Instead, Palin made the kind of sacrifice you just don’t see those in power make. Should Palin choose to run for president in 2012 there’s no way around the fact that her decision to step down as Governor will be a major headwind — which means that those of us looking for leaders willing to make unpopular choices for the greater good should appreciate her decision all the more. 

Leftists in the MSM (but I repeat myself) have already complained about “The Undefeated” being commissioned by Palin (a lie) and that it skips over issues like the nonsense-scandal that was TrooperGate. But the very fact that everyone reading this already knows about TrooperGate answers that criticism. “The Undefeated” is about filling in the gaping holes the corrupt MSM intentionally dug. The documentary is new information for anyone still stupid enough to watch the Nightly News and read Politico. Furthermore, unlike the MSM, Bannon makes no secret of his biases. He’s not weaponizing objectivity or trying to con anyone. But if the early response is any indication, critics intend to do to the film what they to do to Palin: ignore substance at all costs.

Among others, thanks to Andrew Breitbart, Kate Obenshain, Tammy Bruce, and Mark Levin, “The Undefeated” closes strong — especially when Breitbart attacks GOP establishment “eunuchs” who to this very day lack the “chivalry” and courage to fight those who seek to destroy this woman in unprecedented ways. But even larger-than-life personalities can’t outshine the Governor herself. In a series of well-selected clips from recent speeches, there’s Sarah where she always is: alone on a stage in the middle of the fight talking about her love for America, her belief in liberty, and fearlessly giving hell to whoever has it coming … regardless of party.

Will “The Undefeated” change minds? I think it will, especially among open-minded Independents who have yet to be introduced to “this” Sarah Palin. Thankfully, due to New Media and a filmmaker willing to put a million of his own dollars where his mouth is, we can now get the truth out there using our own Bus Tour — our own message-delivery device that works around the GOP eunuchs and corrupted MSM.

With any luck, the season of watching the insufferable choke on a hockey mom’s exhaust has only begun.

“The Undefeated” is a comprehensive and at times moving must-see for anyone interested in the truth about Sarah Palin.

In Defense of Sarah Palin

She understands that the U.S. has been a force for good in the world—which is more than can be said of our president.

By NORMAN PODHORETZ
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
March 29, 2010

Nothing annoys certain of my fellow conservative intellectuals more than when I remind them, as on occasion I mischievously do, that the derogatory things they say about Sarah Palin are uncannily similar to what many of their forebears once said about Ronald Reagan.

It's hard to imagine now, but 31 years ago, when I first announced that I was supporting Reagan in his bid for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, I was routinely asked by friends on the right how I could possibly associate myself with this "airhead," this B movie star, who was not only stupid but incompetent. They readily acknowledged that his political views were on the whole close to ours, but the embarrassing primitivism with which he expressed them only served, they said, to undermine their credibility. In any case, his base was so narrow that he had no chance of rescuing us from the disastrous administration of Jimmy Carter.

Now I knew Ronald Reagan, and Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan. Then again, the first time I met Reagan all he talked about was the money he had saved the taxpayers as governor of California by changing the size of the folders used for storing the state's files. So nonplussed was I by the delight he showed at this great achievement that I came close to thinking that my friends were right and that I had made a mistake in supporting him. Ultimately, of course, we all wound up regarding him as a great man, but in 1979 none of us would have dreamed that this would be how we would feel only a few years later.


Associated Press

What I am trying to say is not that Sarah Palin would necessarily make a great president but that the criteria by which she is being judged by her conservative critics—never mind the deranged hatred she inspires on the left—tell us next to nothing about the kind of president she would make.

Take, for example, foreign policy. True, she seems to know very little about international affairs, but expertise in this area is no guarantee of wise leadership. After all, her rival for the vice presidency, who in some sense knows a great deal, was wrong on almost every major issue that arose in the 30 years he spent in the Senate.

What she does know—and in this respect, she does resemble Reagan—is that the United States has been a force for good in the world, which is more than Barack Obama, whose IQ is no doubt higher than hers, has yet to learn. Jimmy Carter also has a high IQ, which did not prevent him from becoming one of the worst presidents in American history, and so does Bill Clinton, which did not prevent him from befouling the presidential nest.

Unlike her enemies on the left, the conservative opponents of Mrs. Palin are a little puzzling. After all, except for its greater intensity, the response to her on the left is of a piece with the liberal hatred of Richard Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush. It was a hatred that had less to do with differences over policy than with the conviction that these men were usurpers who, by mobilizing all the most retrograde elements of American society, had stolen the country from its rightful (liberal) rulers. But to a much greater extent than Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, Sarah Palin is in her very being the embodiment of those retrograde forces and therefore potentially even more dangerous.

I think that this is what, conversely, also accounts for the tremendous enthusiasm she has aroused among ordinary conservatives. They rightly see her as one of them, only better able and better positioned to stand up against the contempt and condescension of the liberal elites that were so perfectly exemplified by Mr. Obama's notorious remark in 2008 about people like them: "And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

***

But how do we explain the hostility to Mrs. Palin felt by so many conservative intellectuals? It cannot be differences over policy. For as has been pointed out by Bill Kristol—one of the few conservative intellectuals who has been willing to say a good word about Mrs. Palin—her views are much closer to those of her conservative opponents than they are to the isolationists and protectionists on the "paleoconservative" right or to the unrealistic "realism" of the "moderate" Republicans who inhabit the establishment center.

Much as I would like to believe that the answer lies in some elevated consideration, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the same species of class bias that Mrs. Palin provokes in her enemies and her admirers is at work among the conservative intellectuals who are so embarrassed by her. When William F. Buckley Jr., then the editor of National Review, famously quipped that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT, most conservative intellectuals responded with a gleeful amen. But put to the test by the advent of Sarah Palin, along with the populist upsurge represented by the Tea Party movement, they have demonstrated that they never really meant it.

Whether Buckley himself really meant it may be open to question, but it is certain that his son Christopher (who endorsed Mr. Obama) does not now and probably never did. Listen to the great satirist who blogs under the name of Iowahawk, writing in the fictional persona of T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII, son of the founder of The National Topsider, which he describe as a "once respected conservative magazine" now controlled by a bunch of "state college neanderthals."

"For more than a year," Van Voorhees tells us, "I have warned that . . . the conservative movement risked abandonment by its few remaining serious intellectuals"—"luminaries" like "the vivacious [Washington Post columnist] Kathleen Parker, Dame Peggy Noonan, and those two mighty Davids of conservative letters, Frum and Brooks"—and "being overrun by the unsightly hordes of Wal-Mart untermenschen typified by the loathesome 'Tea Party' rabble" with their "base enthusiasms and simian grunts. As is now obvious, events have proven me right."

I fear that the attitude satirically exaggerated here by Iowahawk is what underlies the rejection of Sarah Palin by so many conservative intellectuals. When push came to shove, they could not resist what Van Voorhees calls Mr. Obama's "prodigious oratorical and intellectuals gifts" and they could not resist attributing Sarah Palin's emergence as a formidable political force to "the base enthusiasms and simian grunts" of "the loathesome Tea Party rabble."

As for me, after more than a year of seeing how those "prodigious oratorical and intellectual gifts" have worked themselves out in action, I remain more convinced than ever of the soundness of Buckley's quip, in the spirit of which I hereby declare that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.

Mr. Podhoretz was the editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995. His most recent book is "Why Are Jews Liberals?" (Doubleday, 2009).

Sarah Palin, version 2009: Going rogue, getting even

Debra J. Saunders
San Fransisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/saunders/
Sunday, November 29, 2009

"Going Rogue: An American Life" acquaints the reader with author Sarah Palin's life and work before she was plucked from her Little House on the Tundra to serve as John McCain's running mate and turned into a national caricature.

Here you see the Alaska governor with the 90 percent approval rating, who took on not only what became known as the GOP's "Corrupt Bastards Club" but also Big Oil companies that were "just sitting on" their North Slope leases when they should have been drilling.

The 2008 campaign coverage portrayed Palin as a rigid culture warrior. Breaking with the stereotype, "Going Rogue" tells the story of a social conservative who in 2006 vetoed a bill to ban the extension of benefits to the same-sex partners of state employees, because she thought it was unconstitutional. Despite her aversion to tax increases, the pragmatic Palin also championed a sales tax to fund Wasilla law enforcement.

Palin never addresses the frequent criticism thrown her way by journalists who wondered if Palin possessed any intellectual curiosity - in light of her failure to get a passport until 2007. If she failed to roam the Tuscan hills in her junior year abroad, at least thanks to her teacher father, Sarah Heath grew up majoring in the exotic natural world around her. She knew all about the state bird (ptarmigans), the difference between glacial crevices and crevasses, as well as what differentiates the grizzly from the brown bear. Dang.

To establish her literary credentials, Palin offers quotes from Blaise Pascal and Pearl S. Buck. She was the reader of the Heath family. Growing up she recalls reading "The Pearl," "Animal Farm" and "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" - which probably had folks at the New York Review of Books howling. And that's OK, because Palin never aspires to be seen as an intellectual - not when she perkily observes, "Everything I ever needed to know, I learned on the basketball court."

Of course, no Sarah Palin story would be complete without a media pile-on - and the virulently anti-Palin have been happy to oblige.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich whacked Palin for her "wide-eyed infatuation with show-business celebrities" because Palin mentioned talking to Bono and Warren Beatty on the phone. That's a choice hit, considering how star-slobbering and celebrity-waving Democrats tend to be.

Rich also went after the Alaska governor for drafting a letter from God to her family about Trig, the Down syndrome baby whom she was about to deliver. Now I understand that in some exalted circles it is fashionable to make fun of people's faith, even when a working mother of four is bargaining with her God as she faces the daunting prospect of bringing into the world a special-needs child. So: Ha, ha, ha. Thanks for the lesson in liberal compassion.

Newsweek didn't boost its credibility with its cover of Sarah Palin in running shorts next to the headline: "How do you solve a problem like Sarah?"

The Associated Press assigned 11 reporters to "fact-check" the book. I use quotes because the article ignores big issues in the book while it selectively culls minutiae. For example, Palin writes that a Supreme Court Exxon Valdez decision went "in favor of the people." The AP story somehow ignores Palin's history in pushing for monetary damages for the victims, but instead quotes Palin having once said she was "disappointed" at the court's reduction in damages. The piece fails to give Palin credit for taking a position that put the pro-drilling Palin at odds with Big Oil - in its trivial pursuit to bare a niggling inconsistency. AP used a lot of people to tell readers nothing.

Much ink has been devoted to Palin's salvos against McCain campaign gurus Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, whom Palin blames for overhandling her and underselling McCain. Schmidt told "Politico" that Palin's book is "all fiction."

Palin wants readers to believe that she would have been a better running mate if only McCain handlers had heeded a grassroots "Free Sarah" campaign. The problem is: Palin's failure to own up to her knowledge gaps on foreign policy - she couldn't even answer a simple question about bad Supreme Court decisions - suggest that if freed to just be herself, Palin may well have fallen flatter faster.

The book begins with an Arctic-centric map that shows "The View from the Top of the World." It's a nice touch that shows how insignificant and distant Washington looks from Wasilla.

While I appreciate Palin sharing the perspective, it would be nice if she had taken on many of the perceptions some voters have developed of her. There's no question that many in the media treated Palin - and her family - poorly. That said, Palin herself blew the Katie Couric interview, and not just because she appeared impatient. Palin herself quit her job as Alaska governor, despite her obligation to state voters. Palin herself seems happy to parade herself as the far right's favorite victim, when a serious politician would be out trying to woo skeptics.

Sarah Palin has her shtick down. She's folksy and quotable. She has delivered a book that will thrill a base that loves to shout, "They done her wrong." Her true believers will see even measured criticism as another assault on their gal. At the end of the book tour, she returns to her now-familiar role of victim, a victim on the top of her world.

You can e-mail Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle

FORGETTING SARAH PALIN

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
July 8, 2009

Sarah Palin has deeply disappointed her enemies. People who hate her guts feel she's really let them down by resigning.

She's like the ex-girlfriend they're SO over, never want to see again, have already forgotten about -- really, it's O-ver -- but they just can't stop talking about her.

Liberal: Ha, ha ... Sarah who? She's over, she's toast, a future Trivial Pursuit answer, nothing more.

Normal person: Whatever. How about the North Korean missiles?

Liberal: Can you believe she just resigned the governorship like that? What a quitter!

Normal person: Speaking of quitting, how's work?

Liberal: Did you hear she might get a TV show? There's no way Sarah Palin's getting a TV show! No way! I can't believe stupid Sarah Palin could get her own stupid TV show now. Well, I'm sure not gonna watch it -- that's for sure!

Normal person: Have you seen all the Michael Jackson coverage on TV?

Liberal: How does she think she can run for president in 2012 if she can't finish her term as governor of a Podunk state? She's finished.

Normal person: OK, then! You won't have to vote for her.

Liberal: I was never going to vote for her! But now I'm not going to vote for her twice. And I will never watch her TV show. I am so over her.

Reporters had already written their stories on Palin's press conference -- "rambling!" "incoherent!" -- before she even stepped to the podium.

Whatever you think of Palin, her argument for resigning was the opposite of "rambling" and "incoherent."

Palin's basketball analogy couldn't have been clearer, even to prissy liberal pundits who get uncomfortable when the subject turns to sports: She decided to destroy the other team's game plan, which has been to obsessively focus on her, by resigning.

This is particularly apt here -- she's passing the ball to a fantastic right-wing lieutenant governor, who shares her principles but doesn't set off the left's neuroses.

This is better for him, better for the state, better for the conservative program and better for Palin personally, whose family is sick of all the crap. Now she can make a lot of money and promote conservatism on a national stage.

It certainly won't be held against Palin by people who don't already loathe her. (On the other hand, her approval ratings among people who think she's worse than Hitler are down to 48 percent.)

With the left frenetically filing ethics complaint after ethics complaint against Palin, costing her state millions of dollars and her personally half a million dollars, citizens of Alaska must be asking, "Can we please have our state back?"

But to read the news reports -- which actually were rambling and incoherent -- you would think Palin was speaking in tongues.

The truth is liberals are furious they won't have Sarah Palin to kick around anymore -- at least not with Palin's hands tied behind her back by her public office.

Something tells me Keith Olbermann isn't going to be pulling any big numbers this summer attacking Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann. I don't anticipate any sudden outbreaks of "Mitch McConnell Derangement Syndrome."

Soon we'll only hear about Keith when his creepy e-mails using his mother's death to hit on chicks start making the rounds again. (Tip to Keith: When a girl refuses to give you her phone number, her assistant's phone number or her personal e-mail address, and only gives you her assistant's e-mail address, you're not halfway in the sack.)

Bonus: If Olbermann gets canceled as a result of Palin's resignation, that will put her in a really good position for 2012.

But instead of being honest and saying, "Oh well, it was a good ride while it lasted," liberal chatterers indignantly demand: "Is this not the greatest betrayal a public servant ever committed against the people?"

On one hand, liberals are enraged at the heinousness of Mark Sanford -- whom they didn't vote for -- for not resigning and, on the other, they're enraged at Palin -- whom they also didn't vote for -- for resigning.

The peculiarly venomous hatred of Palin is driven by women of the left and their whipped consorts. All that needs to happen is for a feminist to overhear two Nation readers saying, "I hate to admit it, but Palin is kind of hot" and ...

WHAT??????????? YOU CALL THAT HOT? I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW WE'VE GOT A MEGA-SUPER HOTTIE IN DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. AND NEED I REMIND YOU AGAIN OF THE RAW SEX APPEAL OF RACHEL MADDOW?

Democrats are a party of women, and nothing drives them off their gourds like a beautiful Christian conservative. (How much money has that other beautiful born-again, Carrie Prejean, been forced to spend on lawyers to respond to liberal hysteria?)

So the motives are clear, but the money is not. Who is paying the rent for the losers filing all these frivolous complaints against Palin?

At least when Richard Mellon Scaife was funding investigations of Bill Clinton, we knew who Scaife was, he was an American citizen, and his money was accessible to U.S. tax authorities and not stashed in offshore accounts like a certain Hungarian Nazi-collaborator I can name.

How about some modern-day Scaife investigate the investigators?

The Establishment's Palin Panic

By William Kristol
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Monday, July 6, 2009 5:14 PM

I like Sarah Palin (though I don't know her well). I respect her (though I'm aware of some of her limitations). I wish her well (though I'm not convinced she should be the 2012 Republican presidential nominee).

I am convinced, though, that she should have a chance to compete and make her case. In this, I seem to differ from many of my friends in the mainstream media and the Republican establishment. They tend not only to dislike and disdain Palin, they also want to bury her chances now as a presidential possibility. What are they so scared of?

It's silly to claim Palin has no chance to win the nomination or the presidency. The fact is, despite a rough campaign in 2008, Palin has been (for what it's worth at this stage) a co-front-runner in polls of GOP primary voters for 2012, along with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. In a recent Pew survey, she had the strongest favorable-unfavorable numbers of the likely candidates among Republicans.

She has fervent supporters, which would presumably help her in primaries and caucuses. Among the general public, she has a not-great but not-unmanageable 45-44 favorability rating.

Will her poll numbers fall because she has opted to step down early from the Alaska governorship? Perhaps. But the short-term effect of that decision will soon be swamped by judgments people make as they see her out and about, speaking and opining on the issues of the day.

She'll be able to make the case effectively that she should be the nominee, or she won't.

The odds are that she won't -- just as the odds at this point are against any one of the GOP candidates. It's a wide-open race. And Palin may not even run. But the panic among mainstream media commentators and the GOP establishment suggests real worry that if she does, she might pull off an upset. Why else the vehement assertions that she's clearly made a terrible mistake? Why else the categorical insistence that her political career is finished? Aren't they all protesting too much?

The media establishment didn't protest much about the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. He gave a good speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, was elected to the Senate that fall, and immediately started running for president. He didn't accomplish much in his four years in the Senate (nor could he have been expected to). But that didn't seem to hurt his standing. Isn't Palin about as well positioned for the 2012 GOP nomination as Obama was in 2005 for the 2008 Democratic one?

I think so -- except that her own party's establishment fears and even loathes Palin, while the Democratic establishment wasn't set against Obama. The hostility of the GOP establishment may be an obstacle to her success. On the other hand, given the performance of GOP operatives and pols over the past few years, maybe their opposition isn't a bad thing.

In any case, this is the same GOP establishment that rallied behind first-term governor George W. Bush in 1997-98 and then propelled him to the nomination in 1999-2000. Had Bush accomplished more than Palin at that point?

Texas has a lot more people than Alaska does, but the Texas governorship is a weaker office -- and some of Bush's first-term initiatives went down in flames, while Palin's have largely succeeded.

It's true that Bush didn't quit as governor and successfully ran for reelection. But why is it more admirable to run for national office while a sitting governor (or senator), spending a fair amount of time out of your state (or away from Congress), necessarily neglecting or delegating some of your duties -- than to turn the office over to your constitutional successor so your constituents have someone working full time on their behalf? Palin will have to endure some fair criticism for abandoning her office before her term ended. But she should also get credit for not using her state office as a means of campaigning for a higher one.

She won't get that credit. For psychological and sociological reasons too deep for me to grasp, a good chunk of elite America hates Sarah Palin and what they've decided she stands for. But if she wears their scorn as a badge of honor, comports herself with good cheer and personal dignity, studies up on national issues and takes the lead in selected debates on behalf of conservative principles against Obama administration policies, she has a shot.

If she's as foolish, erratic and even nutty as her critics claim, then of course she'll fail. If she performs well, she may succeed. If you have an anti-mainstream-media and anti-GOP-establishment bone in your body, it's hard not to root for her at least a bit.

William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, writes a monthly column for The Post.

Ashley Judd: Clown in Wolf Guardian's Clothing

By Michelle Malkin
http://www.vdare.com/
February 05, 2009

Actress Ashley Judd has finally earned her Hollywood stripes and provided award-winning comic relief. With Washington poised to shove a trillion-dollar "stimulus" pork pie down our throats, we need all the distractions we can get. I give Judd's unintentionally entertaining performance in a new Sarah Palin-bashing animal rights ad two diversionary thumbs up.

Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

Ashley Judd

The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund sponsored the YouTube video starring Judd. They've dubbed their campaign, launched this week, "Eye on Palin." With all the serious, socially responsible celebrity earnestness she could muster, Judd decried the aerial hunting of wolves in Alaska, the GOP governor's state. "It is time to stop Sarah Palin and stop this senseless savagery," Judd intoned.

Casting herself as an environmental expert, Judd attacked Palin for "casting aside science and championing the slaughter of wildlife." The video shows a wolf being shot, writhing in pain, with an ominous soundtrack throbbing and menacing photos of Palin flashing across the screen. "Riddled with gunshots, biting at their backs in agony, they die (pause for quiver) a brutal death," Judd enunciates slowly as wolf squeals punctuate the video. Defenders of Wildlife assails Gov. Palin for proposing a $150 bounty for every wolf killed by aerial hunters. She's cruel and bloodthirsty, and she must be stopped!

It's a compelling black-and-white storyline. But like the world Judd inhabits, this plot is make-believe.

Fact is, the policy is intended to protect other animals—moose and caribou—from overpopulation of wolves. Alaskans rely on caribou and moose for food. Not all Americans care to live on environmentally correct starlet diets of tofu salad and Pinkberry yogurt.

Neither Palin nor the aerial hunters in those scary low-flying planes that have Judd quivering promote the program out of malice and animal insensitivity. On the contrary, they are the true compassionate conservationists. The bounty helped state biologists collecting wolf age data and provided incentives to reduce the wolf population when wildlife management efforts had fallen behind. This is about predator control. But to liberal, gun-control zealots thousands of miles away, it's all heartless murder.

Federal law makes specific exceptions to aerial hunting for the protection of "land, water, wildlife, livestock, domesticated animals, human life or crops." Targets are not limited to wolves. And, as Alaska wildlife officials note, the process is tightly controlled and "designed to sustain wolf populations in the future."

No matter. As Judd proclaimed, "It is time to stop Sarah Palin." That is the true aim of left-wing lobbying groups and their allies in Hollywood. Palin is a threat not to Alaska's wolves, but to the liberal establishment's wolves. Defenders of Wildlife isn't targeting the ads in states affected by these policies. They're running the Judd-fronted ads across battleground states. It's about electoral interests, not wildlife interests. The eco-Kabuki theater is just plain laughable.

On a deadly serious note, Judd's selective concern for savagery is not lost on longtime observers of the activist entertainer's political forays. A militant, pro-choice feminist, Judd lashed out at the Republican ticket during the campaign: "[A] woman voting for McCain and Palin is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders." Yet, not a peep has been heard from Judd about the serial predators of Planned Parenthood who have been caught on tape urging young girls to cover up statutory rape to facilitate abortion procedures. And she won't be starring in any YouTube ads decrying grisly late-term abortion procedures.

In a starlet's world, "senseless savagery" only applies to the poster pet of the month.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

- Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin's latest book is Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.

Sarah Palin: Conservative of the Year

by Ann Coulter
http://www.humanevents.com/
12/22/2008

Sarah Palin wins HUMAN EVENTS’ prestigious “Conservative of the Year” Award for 2008 for her genius at annoying all the right people. The last woman to get liberals this hot under the collar would have been … let's see now … oh, yeah: Me!

The entire presidential election year was kind of a downer for conservatives. Once the “maverick” John McCain won the nomination, the rest of the year was like watching a slow motion car crash. Except at least a slow-motion car crash is occasionally entertaining. So it was going to be a long year.

Until Palin.

When McCain chose our beauteous Sarah as his running mate, the maverick was finally acting like a real maverick -- as opposed to the media’s definition of a “maverick” which is: “agreeing with the editorial positions of the New York Times.”

Pre-Palin it had been one race -- boring old “You kids get off my lawn!” John McCain versus the exciting, new politician Barack Obama, who threw caution to the wind and bravely ran as the Pro-Hope candidate. And then our heroic Sarah bounded out of the Alaska tundra and it became a completely different race. This left the press completely discombobulated and upset. They didn't know whether to attack Sarah for not having an abortion or go after her husband for not being a sissy.

I assume Palin was chosen because McCain had heard that she was a real conservative and he had always wanted to meet one -- no, actually because he needed a conservative on the ticket, but that he had no idea that picking her would send the left into a tailspin of wanton despair.

But if anyone on the McCain campaign chose Palin because she would drive liberals crazy, my hat is off to him!

True, Palin made some embarrassing gaffes.

She complained that we didn’t have enough “Arabic translators” in Afghanistan -- not realizing the natives don’t speak Arabic in Afghanistan, but rather a variety of regional dialects, the most common of which is Pashtun.

Speaking to military veterans one time, Palin said, “Our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today.”

She bragged about passing a law regulating the nuclear industry that it turned out never became a law at all.

Some days Palin said Venezuela's dictator Hugo Chavez should suffer "regional isolation" -- but then on others she’d say she supported the president’s meeting with Chavez.

She told one audience about recent tornados in Kansas that had killed 10,000 people. In fact, a dozen people were killed in the tornados.

She referred to the “57 states” that make up the U.S.

Speaking of her eldest daughter’s pregnancy, she said Bristol was being “punished” with a baby.

As you probably know -- or guessed by now -- none of these gaffes were uttered by Palin. They are all Obama gaffes. Luckily, he made them to a star-struck press that managed not to ask him a difficult question for two years.

It seemed like the media would introduce an all-new double standard each day throughout the two glorious months of Palin’s candidacy.

I don’t remember, for example, zealous inquiries into the supposedly peculiar religious practices of any candidates in past elections. No one in the press touched on Sen. Joe Lieberman’s religious beliefs when he was Kerry’s running mate. (Nor, while we’re on the subject, was the media particularly interested in the beliefs of the religion that inspired the 9/11 attacks on America.)

But the press snapped right back into their anti-religious hysteria for a candidate who was a Pentecostal! The same media that couldn’t be bothered to investigate Obama’s ties to former Weathermen or Syrian Nationalist Tony Rezko was soon hot on the trail of a rumor that Palin’s church had a speaker 30 years ago who spoke in tongues!

Let me think now: Were there ever any unusual or otherwise noteworthy speeches or sermons given in churches where Obama worshipped? Hmmm … it's on the tip of my tongue.

Liberals also suddenly decided that a woman with children could not handle the stress of higher office. Until Palin reared her beautiful head, this is precisely the sort of thinking liberals would have denounced as the Neanderthal, backwards, good old boy network attitude that had created a “glass ceiling.”

Let’s consider the facts: Palin’s oldest son was about to be under the tender care of Gen. David Petraeus after being shipped off to Iraq. Her next oldest child was about to be married and probably would prefer that her parents butt out. That left three children under the age of 15, which was almost the same as Obama had.

So Palin had one more child -- and a lot more executive experience -- than the guy at the top of the Democrats’ ticket. (I suspect what liberals were really mad about was that if Palin became Vice President, she probably would have hired a nanny who was a U.S. citizen.)

Having indignantly rejected experience as a presidential qualification in the case of Obama, liberals had to raise questions about Palin’s experience gingerly. But, in short order, they threw caution to the wind and began energetically criticizing Palin for her lack of experience. I call that two … two … two standards in one!

Like most Democrats, both Obama and Biden boasted of their humble beginnings, while having fully adopted the attitudes, pomposity and style of the elites.

Meanwhile, Palin is the sort of genuine American that brings out the worst, most egregious pomposity of liberals. For weeks, Carl Bernstein was showing up on TV to announce: “We still don’t have the date of first issuance of her passport.” Members of the establishment would be astonished to learn that more Americans have guns than passports.


Palin blows a kiss to fans during a rally in Kissimmee, Fla., on October 26. (Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT)

Liberals were angry at Palin because they thought she should look and act like Kay Bailey Hutchinson: Upper crust, prissy and stiff.

Palin had a husband in the Steelworkers Union, a sister and brother-in-law who owned a gas station, and five attractive children -- one headed for Iraq, one a Down’s syndrome baby and one the cutest little girl anyone had ever seen.

In a nutshell, Palin was everything Democrats are always pretending to be, but never are.

She didn’t have to conjure up implausible images of herself duck hunting as Hillary Clinton did. Nor was Palin the typical Democratic elected female official who went straight from college into politics, like Nita Lowey.

Despite their phony championing of “women’s issues” (i.e. abortion) there was not one Democrat woman who could win a head-to-head contest with Palin. Especially not if we got to see their faces. Democrats may have a fleet of women politicians, but they don’t have a deep bench of attractive ones. You don’t even think of most Democratic woman as women: Rosa Delauro, Nita Lowey, Patty Murray, Janet Napolitano -- and the list goes on. Oh, sure, there are the odd female Democrat sex kittens -- your Janet Renos, your Donna Shalalas -- but they're the exception to the rule.

After Palin gave her barnburner of a speech at the Republican National Convention, a friend of mine in a liberal industry told me his friends were aggressively confronting him demanding to know if Palin was raised by a secret cult of Christians that taught children nothing but Creationism and public speaking.

Oh, how I wish he had said “yes.” Imagine the aneurisms! I think what liberals were to say was: Gosh, she’s an exceptionally attractive mother of five!

The Obama campaign was so alarmed by Palin’s speech, it loudly dismissed the speech saying she didn’t write it. At least that’s what a press release written by an Obama campaign staffer said.

Indeed, the first words out of every Palin critic's mouth were: "Good speech, but she didn't write it." So I guess all liberals were reading the same talking points written for them by the Obama campaign. At least Palin pays her speechwriters. Neil Kinnock is still waiting for his check.

Speaking of Joe Biden, he said that Palin’s speech had a lot of style but little substance. Inasmuch as Biden was Obama's running mate, I think that meant he liked it!

A newspaper in Boston responded to Palin’s speech by interviewing hairdressers who criticized Sarah's hairstyle. (Where were these people after Joe Biden's speech?)

Trendy dinner party opinion soon demanded that all liberals take up the cry that Palin must let the press have a whack at her. Almost immediately after she was introduced to the nation, the cry went up: “When are we going to be allowed to ask Palin questions?”

Palin’s refusal to meet with the press for one week after being chosen as McCain’s running mate was evidently more maddening than Obama's refusal to appear on Fox News for almost the entirety of his campaign.

Everyone acted as if Obama’s feat of running for President for two years constituted a complete and thorough vetting.

It might have been, except that the entire media had apparently agreed: “OK, none of us will ask Obama about Tony Rezko, William Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright.”

Hillary was hissed by the audience for mentioning Rezko at a Democratic debate and George Stephanopoulos nearly lost his career for asking Obama one William Ayers question at another.

Osama bin Laden was more upset about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than liberals were -- especially after "Jeremiah Wright videos" passed "al Qaeda videos" for most total viewings on Youtube. (He was kicking himself for not coming up with that “God Damn America” line first!)

Who cares if Palin was qualified to be President? She was running with John McCain! There was no chance that ticket was going to place her anywhere near the presidency. In fact, I can’t think of a better place to put someone you wanted to keep away from the White House than on a ticket with McCain.

Palin was a kick in the pants, she energized conservatives, and she made liberal heads explode. Other than his brave military service, introducing Sarah Palin to Americans is the greatest thing John McCain ever did for his country.

But unless Palin is going to be the perpetual running mate of “moderate” Republicans who need conservative bona fides, she will need to become wiser and better read. Even Reagan didn’t run for President in his 40s. (True Obama is in his 40s, but we are not Democrats.)

Perhaps Palin’s year is 2012, but I would recommend that she take a little more time to become older and wiser. She ought to spend the next decade being a good governor, tending to her children so none of them turn out like Ron Reagan Jr., and reading everything Phyllis Schlafly, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan and “Publius” have ever written. (She also might keep in mind that HUMAN EVENTS was Ronald Reagan’s favorite newspaper!)

In time, HUMAN EVENTS’ 2008 Conservative of the Year will be ready to be our President and someday can sweep into office and dismantle all the heinous government programs Obama and the Democrats are about to foist on the nation. Who knows? She might even be able to run as the candidate of "hope" and "change."


Read HUMAN EVENTS' exclusive interview with Gov. Sarah Palin.

Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and author of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Slander," ""How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," "Godless," and most recently, "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans."

Cinderella vs. the Barracuda

A perfect example of the bowel-stewing self-indulgence of elite liberalism.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
December 19, 2008, 0:00 a.m.

For people who think there’s no cultural divide in this country, consider the treatment of two women much in the news in 2008.

The first is Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. A woman from very humble roots and with a very blue-collar life story, she worked with her steelworker and professional-fisherman husband to provide a life for their large family. She got involved in the PTA. She became mayor of her small town, then rose, by dint of her dedication and almost naive fearlessness, to the job of governor. In a mainstream, almost romantic sense, it’s almost like she was designed by God for a Hallmark movie of the week.

But, when John McCain picked her to be his running mate, the full fury of the liberal establishment — and sizable swaths of the conservative establishment, some of whom dubbed her a “cancer” on the GOP — came down on her with a vengeance usually reserved for Klansmen and pedophiles. Don’t get me wrong: There were valid criticisms to make. But that is quite a different thing than saying all of the criticism was valid or that the intensity and volume of the criticism was warranted.

Then there’s Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, daughter of John F. Kennedy, sister of John Jr., niece of Senators Ted and Robert Kennedy, granddaughter of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, and the cousin of myriad other Kennedys and Shrivers who’ve burrowed deep into the timber of the house of liberalism. A multimillionaire from birth, Ms. Kennedy has spent most of her life on the charity-benefit and cotillion circuit. A product of the Brearley School in New York and the Concord Academy in Massachusetts before she attended Harvard and Columbia, Kennedy has made the importance of public education her signature cause.

Sweet Caroline (she was the inspiration for the Neil Diamond song) recently made it known that she would like to be appointed to Hillary Clinton’s vacant Senate seat.

One could say without fear of overstating things that the liberal reaction to the inexperienced Caroline has been somewhat more gracious than the reaction to the “inexperienced” Palin. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post has devoted two columns in as many weeks to this “fairy tale” scenario in which Kennedy, our “tragic national princess,” is finally rewarded — for her years of quiet dignity, selflessly avoiding scandal and the paparazzi — with the Senate seat that once belonged to her uncle Bobby. What’s astounding about the normally sensible Marcus’s case for “the Cinderella Kennedy” (New York magazine’s phrase) is that she doesn’t really make one, at least not on the merits. Marcus doesn’t even bother. It’s all schoolgirl gushing.

The editors of the New York Times, in a more skeptical editorial, summarized her qualifications thusly: “Ms. Kennedy has much going for her. As a public figure, she carries the glamour and poignancy of her family ...” The editors then went on to describe what great liberals her dad and uncles were. That’s it.

This a perfect example of the bowel-stewing self-indulgence of elite liberalism.

Here’s a news flash: Not everyone truckles with doe-eyed awe at “America’s royal family.” Some of us don’t even like the idea of American royal families. JFK and RFK had their good points, but they don’t deserve the beatification they receive on a daily basis. As a man, Teddy Kennedy is hardly a role model, and as a public servant he’s not much better. I, for one, don’t think denying poor black kids private-school scholarships (aka vouchers) is heroic. Nor do I think his support for alternative energy, except when it might obstruct his Hyannis Port estate’s views with windmills, is admirable.

Simply, the Kennedy clan is no priestly caste, serving as the conscience of the nation, and its progeny do not deserve eternal deference.

Now, I know the comparison between Palin and Caroline Kennedy is not perfect. Each has strengths where the other has weaknesses, and the jobs of senator and vice president aren’t identical (the former actually has more responsibility, for starters).

But the comparison is nonetheless revealing. Palin’s selection triggered troughs of bile, vomited up from nearly every respectable liberal quarter. A Florida congressman, and Obama surrogate, insinuated that Palin was a “Nazi sympathizer” and anti-Semite (she’s not, but Caroline Kennedy’s grandfather was). Her by-the-bootstraps story was ridiculed by nearly every ex-debutante newsreader and avowed “feminist” in America.

Meanwhile, Caroline, with a resume perfectly suited to being a Kennedy and little else, is a Cinderella who deserves a Senate seat because, well, she just does.

Whatever Palin’s faults, Sarah Barracuda’s America has a lot more going for it than Sweet Caroline’s.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

© 2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

An Unnecessary Defeat?

By Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.vdare.com/
November 06, 2008

Why did John McCain lose?

Let's start with those "headwinds" into which he was flying.

The president of the United States, the leader of his party, was at Nixon-Carter levels of approval, 25 percent, going into Election Day.

Sixty-two percent of the nation thought the economy was the No. 1 issue, and 93 percent thought the economy was bad. Two-thirds of the nation thought the war McCain championed was a mistake, and 80 percent to 90 percent thought the country was on the wrong course.

As a political athlete, measured by charisma and communications skills, McCain is not even in the same league with Barack Obama. He was outspent by vast sums, and his political organization was far inferior.

It is a wonder McCain was even competitive, dealt such a hand.

Yet, by Sept. 10, McCain, thanks to Sarah Palin, whose selection had proven a sensation, had come from eight points behind to take the lead, and Joe Biden was wailing that maybe Hillary would have been a better choice for Obama.

Then came the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the bailout of AIG, McCain's assertion that the economy was fundamentally sound, and his panicked return to Washington to assist Bush and Hank Paulson push through a wildly unpopular bank bailout—using 700 billion in tax dollars to buy up rubbish paper the idiot bankers had put on their books.

The Establishment's Man had come to save the Establishment.

Suddenly, it was McCain who was down 10 points, as the feline and feral press went on a wilding attack on Sister Sarah. He never recovered, though the McCain-Palin final push left egg on the faces of pollsters who were predicting a double-digit triumph for Obama.

Perhaps no Republican, in these circumstances, could have won, especially with that month-long bloodletting on Wall Street that wiped out $4 trillion to $5 trillion in stock and bond value, ravaging IRAs and 401Ks, portfolios and pensions alike.

Yet, McCain might still have won had he not, like his three fellow establishment Republicans Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, been inhibited by the Mainstream Media and his own Beltway beliefs.

Consider. In California, where a liberal judiciary had ordered the state to recognize homosexual marriages, voters, by 52 to 48, slapped the judges across the face and ordered the ban reimposed and placed in the California constitution. Arizona and Florida also voted to outlaw gay marriage, by landslides.

The New York Times deplored the "ugly outcome" of these three referenda and said voters were "enshrining bigotry," thus calling the majority of Californians, Arizonans and Floridians bigots and their Bible-rooted Christian beliefs nothing but bigotry.

Good to know what they think of us. Yet, McCain, who might have been out front on these moral and cultural issues, paid only lip service—and lost Florida, and California by a landslide.
In Missouri, where McCain eked out a victory, a proposal to make English the official state language carried six to one. In Nebraska, a proposal to ban affirmative action carried 58 to 42, but lost in a 50-50 tie in Colorado.

Parental notification won 48 percent support in California, a far higher share of the vote than McCain got, while a measure to outlaw abortion except in cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother got 45 percent in South Dakota. Had McCain made an issue of Obama's support for a Freedom of Choice Act that would eliminate all state restrictions on abortion, he could have forced Obama to defend what yet remains a radical and extreme view in America.

While Barack was locking up black America, McCain failed to hold onto Bush's share of the white working class, though Obama had the most liberal voting record in the Senate and long associations with the likes of Jeremiah Wright and '60s bomber William Ayers.

Perhaps fearful his "good guy" reputation with his old buddies in his media "base" would be imperiled, McCain ruled Wright off limits and seemed hesitant even to go after the Ayers connections. Lee Atwater would not have been so ambivalent. Leo Durocher put it succinctly: "Nice guys finish last."

Ultimately, however, the Beltway Republicans are losing Middle America because they are ideologically incapable of addressing two great concerns: economic insecurity and the perception that we are losing the America that we grew up in.

Economic insecurity is traceable to NAFTA-GATT globalization, under which it makes economic sense for U.S. companies to close factories here, build plants in China and export back to the United States. Manufacturing now accounts for less than 10 percent of all U.S. jobs.

Social insecurity is traceable to mass immigration, legal and illegal, which has brought in scores of millions who are altering the character of communities and competing with U.S. workers by offering their services for far less pay.

These are the twin causes of death of the Reagan coalition, and as long as the Republican Party is hooked on K Street cash, it will not address either, and thus pass, blissfully addicted, from this earth.

- Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.


Patrick J. Buchanan Archive

The Cowardly Character Assassination of Sarah Palin

By Michelle Malkin
http://www.vdare.com/
http://michellemalkin.com/
November 06, 2008

Sunken ships loosen bitter lips. The failed McCain campaign, for all its high-minded talk of honor, duty and courage, is now teeming with unscrupulous gossipmongers. Seems the dishy staffers forgot to crack open their copies of Sen. McCain's bestseller, Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember.

Rest assured: Their cowardly character assassination of Sarah Palin won't be forgotten.

The finks turned to Newsweek and Fox News to spread petty rumors about Palin's intellect and character. The magazine peddled anecdotes from sources horrified that Palin greeted top advisers at her hotel room—gasp!—"wearing nothing but a towel" and "wet hair." Fox News reporter Carl Cameron breathlessly reported that his unnamed McCain sources told him Palin lacked "a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate" because, they claimed, she didn't know which countries were parties to the North American Free Trade Agreement and "didn't understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself."

Let's assume for a moment that the McCain rumormongers are telling the truth about Palin (and I don't believe they are). Who would it damn more: Palin, or McCain and his vetters, who greenlighted her for the vice presidential nomination? Don't need a fancy Ivy League degree to figure that one out.

In introducing her to America, McCain praised her independence and backbone: She "stands up for what's right, and she doesn't let anyone tell her to sit down." The inside snipers are now roasting her for that very attribute—redefined as "going rogue"——because she had the nerve to try to schedule media interviews on her own. The nerve of her!

Palin's response to the campaign fragging? At a late Wednesday night airport press conference in Anchorage, immediately upon landing home after the election defeat, she smiled cheerfully. The Alaska governor shrugged off the "foolish things" said by the McCain saboteurs, and simply said, "It's politics. … It's rough and tumble and you've got to have a thick skin just like I've got."

Hollywood savaged Palin. Journalists mocked her. Liberal blogs slimed her. Opponents cursed her, Photoshopped her, hacked her e-mail, hanged her in effigy, called her bigot, Bible-thumper and bimbo, and attacked her husband and children. But nothing Palin endured during the election season compares to the treatment she's receiving from these backstabbing blabbermouths who worked on the same campaign she poured herself into over the last three months.

Sarah Palin worked her heart out. She energized tens of thousands to come out when they would have otherwise stayed home. She touched countless families. I didn't agree with everything she said on the campaign trail. But she vigorously defended the Second Amendment and the sanctity of life more eloquently in practice than any of the educated conservative aristocracy. And she did it all with a tirelessness and an infectious optimism that defied the shameless, bottomless attempts by elites in both parties to bring her and her family down.

Liberty needs a virtuous people to survive; self-governance requires virtuous leaders. "Knowledgeability" is a necessary trait in political life, but it is not sufficient. The elitist critics of Palin, so blindly enamored of Barack Obama's ability to hold forth for hours on theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, ignored the Founding Fathers' counsel: Character counts. In times of adversity and crisis, it counts more than IQ points, instant trivia recall and bloviation skills.

"The most important thing I have learned, from my parents, from teachers, from my faith, from many good people I have been blessed to know, and from the lives of people whose stories we have included in this book," John McCain wrote in Character Is Destiny, "is to want what they had, integrity, and to feel the sting of my conscience when I have risked it for some selfish reason."

John McCain not only failed to make that message stick with the electorate, he apparently couldn't persuade his own staff to heed his advice and practice what he preached.

- Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin's latest book is Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.

The Campaign Autopsy

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
November 07, 2008

[I don't agree with everything Mr. Krauthammer has to say here, particularly his assessment of Sarah Palin's impact on the campaign, but it's an interesting piece, nonetheless.
I think the campaign would have been far better off with a different candidate altogether...you know...possibly an actual Republican...maybe even a real, live conservative...with a personality...and some charisma. - jtf]


WASHINGTON -- In my previous life, I witnessed far more difficult postmortems. This one is easy. The patient was fatally stricken on Sept. 15 -- caught in the rubble when the roof fell in (at Lehman Brothers, according to the police report) -- although he did linger until his final, rather quiet demise on Nov. 4.

In the excitement and decisiveness of Barack Obama's victory, we forget that in the first weeks of September, John McCain was actually ahead. Then Lehman collapsed, and the financial system went off a cliff.

This was not just a meltdown but a panic. For an agonizing few days, there was a collapse of faith in the entire financial system -- a run on banks, panicky money-market withdrawals, flights to safety, the impulse to hide one's savings under a mattress.

This did not just have the obvious effect of turning people against the incumbent party, however great or tenuous its responsibility for the crisis. It had the more profound effect of making people seek shelter in government.

After all, if even Goldman Sachs was getting government protection, why not you? And offering the comfort and safety of government is the Democratic Party's vocation. With a Republican White House having partially nationalized the banks and just about everything else, McCain's final anti-Obama maneuver -- Joe the Plumber spread-the-wealth charges of socialism -- became almost comical.

We don't yet appreciate how unprecedented were the events of September and October. We have never had a full-fledged financial panic in the middle of a presidential campaign. Consider. If the S&P were to close at the end of the year where it did on Election Day, it will have suffered this year its steepest drop since 1937. That is 71 years.

At the same time, the economy had suffered nine consecutive months of job losses. Considering the carnage to both capital and labor (which covers just about everybody), even a Ronald Reagan could not have survived. The fact that John McCain got 46 percent of the electorate when 75 percent said the country was going in the wrong direction is quite remarkable.

This is not to say that McCain made no errors. His suspension of the campaign during the economic meltdown was a long shot that not only failed, it created the McCain-the-erratic meme that deeply undermined his huge advantage over Obama in perception of leadership.

The choice of Sarah Palin was also a mistake. I'm talking here about its political effects, not the sideshow psychodrama of feminist rage and elite loathing that had little to do with politics and everything to do with cultural prejudices, resentments and affectations.

Palin was a mistake ("near suicidal," I wrote on the day of her selection) because she completely undercut McCain's principal case against Obama: his inexperience and unreadiness to lead. And her nomination not only intellectually undermined the readiness argument. It changed the election dynamic by shifting attention, for days on end, to Palin's preparedness, fitness and experience -- and away from Obama's.

McCain thought he could steal from Obama the "change" issue by running a Two Mavericks campaign. A fool's errand from the very beginning. It defied logic for the incumbent party candidate to try to take "change" away from the opposition. Election Day exit polls bore that out with a vengeance. Voters for whom change was the most important issue went 89-to-9 for Obama.

Which is not to say that Obama did not run a brilliant general election campaign. He did. In its tactically perfect minimalism, it was as well conceived and well executed as the electrifying, highflying, magic carpet ride of his primary victory. By the time of his Denver convention, Obama understood that he had to dispense with the magic and make himself kitchen-table real, accessible and, above all, reassuring. He did that. And when the economic tsunami hit, he understood that all he had to do was get out of the way. He did that too.

With him we get a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin. (I say this admiringly.) With these qualities, Obama will now bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.

But before our old soldier fades away, it is worth acknowledging that McCain ran a valiant race against impossible odds. He will be -- he should be -- remembered as the most worthy presidential nominee ever to be denied the prize.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Hatin' Palin

WONDER LAND

She's not the reason Americans can't stand their politicians.

By DANIEL HENNINGER
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/public/us
October 23, 2008

The abuse being heaped on Sarah Palin is such a cheap shot.

The complaint against the Alaska governor, at its most basic, is that she doesn't qualify for admission to the national political fraternity. Boy, that's rich. Behold the shabby frat house that says it's above her pay grade.

Sarah Palin appears with Lorne Michaels on Saturday Night Live (NBC).

Congress has the lowest approval rating ever registered in the history of polling (12%!). She isn't the reason polls are showing people want the entire Congress fired, with many telling pollsters they themselves could do a better job.

Sarah Palin didn't design a system of presidential primaries whose length and cost ensures that only the most obsessional personalities will run the gauntlet, while a long list of effective governors don't run.

These rules have wasted the electorate's time the past three presidential elections, by filling the debates with such zero-support candidates as Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Al Sharpton, Duncan Hunter, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden (8,000 total votes), Wesley Clark and Alan Keyes.
Daniel Henninger discusses the "cheap shots" taken at Sarah Palin and highlights some problems with the political system. (Oct. 23)

Out of this process has fallen a Democratic nominee who entered the U.S. Senate in 2005 fresh off a stint in the Illinois state legislature, with next to no record of political accomplishment. He may be elected mainly because, in Colin Powell's word, he is thought to be "transformational." One may hope so.

By not bothering to look very deeply at the details beneath either candidate's governing proposals, the media have created a lot of downtime to take free kicks at Gov. Palin. My former colleague, Tunku Varadarajan, has compiled a glossary of Palin invective, and I've added a few: "Republican blow-up doll," "idiot," "Christian Stepford wife," "Jesus freak," "Caribou Barbie," "a dope," "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party," "liar," "a national disgrace" and "her pretense that she is a woman."

If American politics is at low ebb, it is because so many of its observers enjoy working in its fetid backwash.

The primary discomfort with Gov. Palin is the notion that she doesn't have sufficient experience to be president, that Sen. McCain should have picked a Washington hand seasoned in the ways of the world. Such as? Here's an opinion poll question:

If as Joe Biden suggests the U.S. is likely to be tested by a foreign enemy next year, who of the following would you rather have dealing with it in the Oval Office: Nancy (of Damascus) Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Joe (the U.S. drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon) Biden, Mike Huckabee, Geraldine Ferraro, Tom DeLay, Jimmy Carter or Sarah Palin?

My pick? Gov. Palin, surely the most grounded, common-sense person on that list of prime-time politicians.

The established political pros let the selection process come to this. Presidential candidates such as John McCain and Barack Obama have become untethered from the discipline of party institutions, largely because the parties have lost coherence. So we get celebrity candidates made famous, fundable and electable by dint of their access to the Beltway media. For voters, this election is a national Hail Mary.

For nearly two years, all the major candidates have rotated through our lives as solitary personalities attended by careerist campaign professionals. Barack, Hillary, Rudy, Mitt, Mike, McCain. When the moment arrived to pick a running mate, input from the parties was minimal. That famous party boss, Caroline Kennedy, advised Barack Obama. They picked a three-decade denizen of the Senate. John McCain's obligation was himself and his endless slog to this big chance.

The quick surge of party-wide excitement and campaign contributions after his selection of Sarah Palin made clear that the McCain candidacy was moribund and headed for a low-turnout debacle. If he had picked any of the plain-vanilla men on his veep short list -- Pawlenty, Sanford, Romney or Lieberman -- they'd have won approval from the media's college of cardinals, and killed his campaign.

The stoning of Sarah Palin has exposed enough cultural fissures in American politics to occupy strategists full-time until 2012. We now see there is a left-to-right elite centered in New York, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley who hand down judgments of the nation's mortals from their perch atop the Bell Curve.

It seems only yesterday that the most critical skill in presidential politics was being able to connect to people in places like Bronko's bar or Saddleback Church. When Gov. Palin showed she excelled at that, the goal posts suddenly moved and the new game was being able to talk the talk in London, Paris, Tehran or Moscow. She looks about a half-step behind Sen. Obama on that learning curve.

Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of "Saturday Night Live," lives on the forward wave of American life. This week he gave his view of Sarah Palin to EW.com: "I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she's powerful. Her politics aren't my politics. But you can see that she's a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she's had a huge impact. People connect to her."

Uh-oh. Sounds like the cancer could be in remission.

The Increasingly Erratic, Super-Gaffetastic Joe Biden

By Michelle Malkin
http://www.vdare.com/
October 21, 2008

If the prospect of Joe Biden sitting a heartbeat away from the presidency doesn't give you palpitations, you are not paying attention.

Hysterical Sarah Palin-bashers on the unhinged left and elitist right have dominated campaign press coverage and pop culture. They've ridiculed her family, her appearance and her speech patterns. They've derided her character, her parenting skills, her readiness and her intellect.

Meanwhile, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden gets a pass. What does the guy have to do to earn the relentless scrutiny and merciless mockery he deserves? Answer: wear high heels, shoot caribou and change the "D" next to his name to an "R."

Team Obama is hammering John McCain as "erratic" in the closing days of the election campaign. There are now 615,000 Google hits and counting using the search terms "erratic McCain." Last week, The New York Times devoted an entire article to the Obama-Biden line of attack, titled "In Friendly Region, Biden Cites McCain as Erratic."

Who's erratic? Throughout the primary and general election cycles, Biden has lurched from attacking Obama as not ready for prime time ("The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training."—September 2007) to ready to lead ("Barack Obama is ready. This is his time."—August 2008) and back again.

This week, Biden warned America that an Obama victory would invite a dangerous global showdown between tyrants and the naif Obama. "Mark my words," Biden said Sunday at a Democratic fundraiser. "It will not be six months [after the inauguration] before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy." In a follow-up appearance, he told supporters to brace for the worst and "gird your loins."

Out of Biden's mouth, this is called candor. Out of anyone else's mouth, it would be "fear-mongering," "negative campaigning" and a "distraction."

Tooting his own horn while vandalizing his running mate's, Biden bragged: "I've forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know." Yeah. Colleagues like that guy who had a mere 143 days of Senate experience before launching his presidential bid and choosing you to shore up his meager credibility, Joe.

In fact, Biden has spent the entire campaign questioning his running mate's judgment. Last month, he mused out loud: "Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. … She is easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America, and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me." Biden assailed the campaign's position on clean coal, openly criticized the campaign's idiotic ad attacking McCain for not using e-mail and warned the pro-gun control Obama that "if he tries to fool with my Beretta, he's got a problem."

Dan Quayle will have "POTATOE" etched on his gravestone. But how many times have late-night comedians and cable shows replayed the video of senior statesman and six-term Sen. Biden's own spelling mishap last week while attacking McCain's economic plan?

"Look, John's last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the No. 1 job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S."

No, Joe. "D'-O-H" is a three-letter word.

Nightly news shows still haven't tired of replaying Palin's infamous interview with Katie Couric. But how many times have they replayed Biden's botched interview with Couric last month—in which he cluelessly claimed: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"

Er, here's what really happened: Roosevelt wasn't president when the market crashed in 1929. As for appearing on TV, it was still in its infant stages and wasn't available to the general public until at least 10 years later.

During the lone VP debate earlier this month, the increasingly erratic, super-affetastic Biden demonstrated more historical ignorance that Palin would never be allowed to get away with: "Vice President Cheney's been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history," he said. "He has the idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the executive—he works in the executive branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that."

Article 1 of the Constitution defines the role of the legislative branch, not the executive branch. You would think someone who has served 36 years in government—the same someone who is quick to remind others of his high IQ and longtime Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship—would know better.

Biden's erratic and gaffetastic behavior is the least of America's worries. He's worse than a blunderbuss. He's an incurable narcissist with chronic diarrhea of the mouth. He's a phony and a pretender who fashions himself a foreign policy expert, constitutional scholar and worldly wise man. He's a man who can't control his impulses.

And he could be a heartbeat away.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled Palin-says-"You Betcha" skit.

- Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin's latest book is Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.