http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/hentoff052108.php3

Jewish World Review May 21, 2008 / 16 Iyar 5768
John McCain, here is your vice president
By Nat Hentoff

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | In 2006, Sarah Palin became Alaska’s youngest and first woman governor after having earned a reputation as a determined and successful advocate of ethics reform in politics. In the primary, she defeated an incumbent Republican governor and then a former two-term Democratic governor.

During her first year in office, as reported by the Associated Press on May 10, she “distanced herself from the old guard, powerful members of the state GOP (and) stood up to the oil interests that hold great power in Alaska, and with bipartisan support in the statehouse, she won a tax increase on the oil companies’ profits.”

Last December, the mother of four children, Palin, four months pregnant, found she was going to have a child with Down syndrome, a condition characterized by moderate-to-severe mental retardation. A school friend of one of my sons had Down syndrome, and I have known functioning adults with the extra chromosomes of that syndrome….

She would be a decided asset — an independent Republican governor, a woman, a defender of life against the creeping culture of death and a fresh face in national politics, described in “the Almanac of National Politics” as “an avid hunter and fisher with a killer smile who wears designer glasses and heels, and hair like modern sculpture.”...

Still unknown is whether Palin would be as flip-flopping as McCain on the Bush torture policy that has so blighted our reputation in the world. But we’d find out, as — if chosen as his running mate — she would create more interest in this already largely scripted presidential campaign.

And her presence could highlight Obama’s extremist abortion views on whether certain lives are worth living, even a child born after a botched abortion.