“Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” said JFK.
For Sarah Palin, party loyalty in New York’s 23rd congressional district asks too much. Going rogue, Palin endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman over Republican Dede Scozzafava.
“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”
Of Sarah Palin it may be said: The lady knows how to frame an issue.
And while she has been fairly criticized for hyperbole about the end-of-life counselors in the House bill, she drew such attention to the provision that Democrats chose to dump it rather than debate it
Reports of the death of the Republican Party appear to have been premature.
Not since Sen. Bob Griffin derailed LBJ’s scheme to replace Chief Justice Earl Warren with crony Abe Fortas, before Nixon got to the Oval Office, has the GOP defied this city and voted to reject a liberal judicial activist for the court.
In 1970, after revelations of scandal forced Fortas to resign, Rep. Gerald Ford moved to impeach “Wild Bill” Douglas on similar grounds. Then the fire went out — for 40 years.
For conservatives fretful over the future of the party to which they have given allegiance, “How Barack Obama Won: A State by State Guide to the Historic 2008 Election” reads like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.
Co-authored by NBC’s Chuck Todd, it is a grim tale of what happened to the GOP in 2008, and what the future may hold.
Yet, on second and third reads, one discerns, as did Gen. Wolfe’s scouts 250 years ago, a narrow path leading up the cliff to the Plains of Abraham — and perhaps victory in 2012. First, the bad news:
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.
Two weeks after the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., John McCain and Sarah Palin were striding forward toward victory.
They had erased the eight-point lead Barack Obama had opened up in Denver and watched as one blue state after another moved into the toss-up category.
That is ancient history now.
Since mid-September, the stock market has cratered, losing half of the $8 trillion that has vanished since October 2007. All five of America’s great investment banks — Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill-Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — have either ceased to be independent or ceased to be.
To: Gov. Sarah Palin
From: The American Conservative Editors
Re: What Your Tutors Aren’t Telling You
Congratulations on being chosen as John McCain’s running mate. It’s an honor, if a dubious one. As you know, conservatives have reservations about McCain. To your credit, they have few such concerns about you.
You’ve given new life to a party whose brand was bankrupt. You’ve energized a campaign that was embarrassing its own partisans. Across America, crowds flock to see you—not that old man who barely wheezed his way through the primaries. If John McCain wins, he will owe you, as the guy in the undisclosed location says, “Big time.”
By Steve Sailer
The American Conservative Magazine
Why, in one uproarious week of American politicking that not even H.L. Mencken would have expected, has the obscure governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, outraged roughly one half of the country and overjoyed the other?
What intrigues people about elections aren’t the platform planks. Deep down, political contests are about picking symbolic champions. Just as Barack Obama, recently of the Illinois legislature, has excited tens of millions by his emphasis on his bloodlines, by his implication that national racial reconciliation is “in my DNA,” the overstuffed life story of the caribou huntress and mother of five (and soon to be grandmother at age 44) embodies the oldest boast Americans have made about their homeland: the fecundity of the frontier.
Will the neocons who tutored George W. Bush in the ideology he pursued to the ruin of his presidency do the same for Sarah Palin?
Should they succeed, they will destroy her. Yet, they are moving even now to capture this princess of the right and hope of the party.
In St. Paul, Palin was told to cancel a meeting with Phyllis Schlafly and pro-life conservatives. McCain’s operatives said Palin had to rest for her Wednesday convention speech.
Did they hypnotize her, or was that unnecessary?
by Justin Raimondo – AntiWar.com
I have to laugh at the brouhaha Sarah Palin’s ascension to national prominence has stirred, especially the consternation in the Obama camp and the media (or do I repeat myself?). One can only imagine the spittle-flecked computer monitors of the anti-Palinistas – especially Andrew Sullivan, whose hatred of the caribou-shooting gal from up north has even surpassed his once-infamous hatred of the peace movement, which he habitually smeared as a “fifth column” secretly working on behalf of Osama bin Laden. I get to laugh, because, being a right-wing antiwar type, I don’t have a dog in this fight.
It’s a good thing Pat Buchanan’s not dead. He’d be rolling over in his grave.
At the Republican convention, Buchanan was taken in by the mass hysteria surrounding Sarah Palin. But even as he cheered, Pat inserted a caveat. He feared that Palin would be brainwashed by the nutty neoconservatives whom Buchanan has dedicated his recent life to debunking.
Sure enough. On Thursday we heard Palin telling Charlie Gibson that “perhaps” it might be a good idea to go to war with Russia over Georgia and the Ukraine.
Near the end of a town hall meeting in Johnstown, Pa., a woman arose to offer a passionate plea to Barack Obama to “stop these abortions.”
Obama’s response was cool, direct, unequivocal.
“Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old. … I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
“Punished with a baby.”
Obama sees an unwanted pregnancy as a cruel and punitive sanction for a teenager who has made a mistake, and abortion as the way out, the road to absolution and redemption.
Budget cuts, book banning, and support for an Alaskan secessionist movement are among the most popular Internet rumors swirling around her head.
And while that does not include her reported association with Pat Buchanan and her alleged push to put creationism in the schools, it is clear Sarah Palin has received a political baptism by fire.
Though she catapulted onto the national stage just under two weeks ago, the Alaskan governor has come under siege, especially by bloggers and cable media outlets, with fiction quickly replacing fact.
One wonders: What did Sarah Palin ever do to inspire the rage and bile that exploded on her selection by John McCain? What is there either in this woman’s record or resume to elicit such feline ferocity?
What did we know of her when she was introduced?
That she was a mother of five who had brought into this world a baby boy with Down syndrome, thus living her Christian beliefs. That she was a small-town conservative who had risen from mayor of Wasilla (Pop. 9,700) to be governor of a state twice the size of Texas.
ST. PAUL, Minn. — The American Right has just died and gone to heaven.
Last night’s convention address by Sarah Palin here in St. Paul has confirmed the bold decision of John McCain to choose the Alaska governor as his co-pilot and united the Republican Party as it has not been since the second term of Ronald Reagan.
A wild enthusiasm for Sarah Palin has brought conservatives home to John McCain, and GOP leaders of all hues — from Fred Thompson to Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee to Rudy Giuliani — to the rostrum to lacerate the liberal media for their five days of feral assaults on Sister Sarah.
The Obama camp has raised the eyebrows of the media and scorn of the GOP by supporting the comments uttered by Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., in which he alleges Sarah Palin is a “Nazi sympathizer.”
“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,” Mr. Wexler said.
“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.”
The risk John McCain took last Friday is comparable to the 72-year-old ex-fighter pilot knocking back two shots and flying his F-16 under the Golden Gate Bridge.
McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his co-pilot was the biggest gamble in presidential history. As of now, it is paying off, big-time.
The sensational selection in Dayton, Ohio, stepped all over the big story from Denver — Barack Obama’s powerful address to 85,000 cheering folks in Mile High Stadium, and 35 million nationally, a speech that vaulted him from a 2-point deficit early in the week to an 8-point margin. Barack had never before reached 49 percent against McCain.
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