Another class act from Huffington Post: the screenwriter of the preachy agitprop box-office bomb North Country*, Michael Seiztman heard Sarah Palin in her ABC interview choose the George W. Bush-preferred pronunciation of nuclear, and proceeded to go ballistic on all you Americans who fail to measure up to his personal standards of pronunciation, deportment, and political correctness.

*Budget $30,000,000—Gross revenue $23,624,242

Repent immediately, or else!

I realized three things tonight. For one, if you are a McCain/Palin/Bush voter, you and I do not have a difference of opinion. We have a difference in brain power. Two, she really is as ignorant as I feared. And, three, she really is kinda hot. Basically, I want to have sex with her on my Barack Obama sheets while my wife reads aloud from the Constitution. (My wife is cool with this if I promise to “first wipe off Palin’s tranny makeup.” I married well.)

Now, I want to be clear and speak directly to those of you who LOVED that Palin interview. You’re an idiot. I mean that. This is not one of those cases where we’re going to agree to disagree. This isn’t one of those situations where we debate it passionately and then walk away thinking that the other guy is wrong but argued well. I’m not going to think of you as a thoughtful but misguided person with different ideas who still really cares about the country and the world. No, sorry, not this time. This time, if you watched those interview excerpts and weren’t scared out of your freakin’ mind, then you’re mentally ill, mentally disabled, or mentally disturbed. What you are NOT is responsible, informed, curious, thoughtful, mature, educated, empathetic, or remotely serious. I mean it.

But I like to think that anyone can change.

Stop voting for people you want to have a beer with. Stop voting for folksy. Stop voting for people who remind you of your neighbor. Stop voting for the ideologically intransigent, the staggeringly ignorant, and the blazingly incompetent.

Vote for someone smarter than you. Vote for someone who inspires you. Vote for someone who has not only traveled the world but who has also shown a deep understanding and compassion for it. The stakes are real and they’re terrifyingly high. This election matters. It matters. It really matters. Let me say that one more time. This. Really. Matters.

Face it, Seitzman, George W. Bush graduated from three better schools than you did.

We live in a tragic age, in which control of far too great a portion of the arts is in the hands of witless vulgarians, like Seitzman, who respond to the quirks of fate allowing pseudo-intellectual clods like themselves too near the center of the stage with complacent self-infatuation and Neronian fantasies of the exercise of political power.

I’ve rarely seen a blog post which demonstrated, so definitively, its author’s complete lack of the supposed superiority which forms the entire basis of his diatribe.

Carel Brest van Kempen and friend

An August 25 WSJ article blamed a management plan by outside environmentalists which prevented feeding of komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis) by residents of Kampang Komodo for the large monitor lizard’s increased opportunism and aggression, and for occasional incidents of human predation.

We don’t want the Komodo dragon to be domesticated. It’s against natural balance,” says Widodo Ramono, policy director of the Nature Conservancy’s Indonesian branch and a former director of the country’s national park service. “We have to keep this conservation area for the purpose of wildlife. It is not for human beings.”

This sounded like a good story to me and I blogged it here.

On the other hand, I have since found via Steve Bodio, that Carel Brest van Kempen, a Nature artist who knows his Oras as well as the local area, has a very different perspective, and makes a persuasive case contradicting the WSJ.

Mr. van Kempen says the village traces its origin to a penal colony, was settled by piratical Bugis fisherman from Sulawesi (whose ancestors were so naughty, he alleges, they inspired the English term “bogeymen”). The village has grown to 1600 residents, and Mr. van Kempen disapproves. “An unchecked human explosion will doom the dragons, ” he believes. Drastic measures were imposed by a 25-year plan drafted by outside experts. Mr. van Kempen endorses that plan, considering it “a thoughtful and practical attempt at a rather Sisyphean task.”

That Sisyphean task is obviously keeping the ora habitat free of local settlements.

The Management Plan bans a number of destructive and effective fishing methods, including explosives and poisons, reef gleaning, long lines, gill nets and demersal (bottom) traps, effectively restricting fishermen to using hook and line and traditional light nets. It also imposes catch limits and denies access to grouper and Napoleon Wrasse spawning grounds. A long list of fish species is proscribed, as are all marine invertebrates except squid. Some rather Draconian measures have been taken on land. All immigration has been disallowed; not even marriage confers a right to residency in the Park. Dogs and cats have been banned, as have most other domestic animals save goats and chickens, and restrictions have been put on use of fresh water. The gathering of firewood is no longer allowed and the laws prohibiting hunting of deer, pigs and buffalo are being strictly enforced. It’s the fishing restrictions, though, that have impacted the already struggling villagers the hardest, and they’ve caused considerable anger. There have been shootouts between rangers and fishermen, resulting in several deaths. Balancing the needs of the burgeoning villagers and those of the finite ecosystem is difficult, and the fact that it’s being imposed from outside causes real resentments.

If one actually reads the plan, one is obliged to conclude that the poor ignorant villagers, persons of low education who thoughtlessly reproduce themselves and get in the way of ecological progress are being first prevented from fishing by the most effective techniques and for the most marketable catch. Meanwhile, a totalitarian regime regulating intimate details of daily life (Don’t spray pesticides! How much water are you using? No dogs or cats, or wives from off-island, either!) must make things unpleasant indeed for residents, who are clearly being not all that subtly nudged to pack up and go away.

Once they’re gone, in comes the multi-million-dollar beach resort for eco-tourism, offering reef snorkling and dragon watching for beaucoup dollars per diem.

Steve Bodio and Matt Mullinex were dazzled by the details that van Kempen throws around, and by his obvious personal acquaintance with the neighborhood. I’m not persuaded. I remain permanently suspicious of Sarastro and all his expert planners, and on the basis of habitual preference for underdogs, I remain on the side of those local fishermen who are clearly getting pushed around.

The oras will clearly make out. The Indonesian government can make a good buck selling glimpses of this kind of unique wildlife to tourists, so they’ll be well protected.

No retraction from me.

Bruce Heiden, who teaches Classics at Ohio State and is blogging as PostLiberal, explains how the McCain campaign’s fuss over the Obama “lipstick on a pig” remark wasn’t simply whining, but a kind of tactical campaign parody designed to highlight political correctness in general to the disadvantage of the democrat candidate.

The reason Team McCain went whiny this week, I believe, is that they saw in Obama’s “pig” remark an opportunity to smoke out an issue that is very important to the Obama campaign and indeed to the nation at this time. The issue is neither sexism nor offensive speech. The issue is Political Correctness. Political Correctness is the Donkey In The Room in the 2008 Presidential campaign, because Political Correctness is both the sole rationale for Barack Obama’s candidacy (as an alternative to, say, Hillary Clinton’s) and an issue that he alone of the candidates can claim. ...

All throughout the spring, as political operatives and experts who had declared Obama inevitable tried to deny that Hillary Clinton had put him on the ropes, we heard in interviews about the supposed “difficulty” of running against Barack Obama. For most citizens this commentary was “analysis,” but for John McCain it was business of the most practical sort, because unlike the rest of us John McCain is in the unique position of actually running against Obama, and if there is a difficulty involved in running against Obama one of McCain’s fundamental tasks is to overcome it. If he doesn’t, he will lose.

So what was the difficulty of running against Obama supposed to be? What it amounted to was this: the public, or anyway all of it living in cafes instead of caves, allegedly felt a certain adoration of Obama that had nothing in particular to do with “issues”; and therefore the public did not want to hear Obama criticized on the issues, not to mention on other grounds. The basis for the public’s alleged love affair with Obama was not exclusively his ethnicity, but more importantly his charm, seriousness, and potential to inaugurate an era of racial harmony devoutly to be wished. Obama was, in short, No Ordinary Candidate, and an ordinary opponent foolish enough to treat Obama like an ordinary candidate would find—or so the experts predicted—that all arguments against Obama would rebound fatally upon the opponents, because the public did not want to hear Obama brought down to the level of ordinary politicians. If anyone tried it, the public would think—indeed, the public would realize—that the opponent was opposing not just a candidate but the bright future of racial harmony itself. And anyone who would do that might well be a racist, especially since the candidate they were so unfairly opposing was African-American.

Hence, according to the commentators, campaigning against Obama would be “difficult” for a politician to do. What they really meant is that it would be impossible, and that they would make it so, because in “doing their jobs” as journalists and expert commentators they would have the solemn responsibility of enforcing rules of discourse that would fix the campaigning in Obama’s favor and deprive the American voters of an open democratic discussion and freely made decision.

The fundamental task confronting a candidate running against Obama, therefore, is simply that of asserting the people’s right to have a campaign, instead of the parade the Obamacrats had concluded was their entitlement. Obama’s opponent must establish the democratic right to say out loud that the Emperor has no clothes, and to establish the right of the people to hear it, whether they want to or not; because that, Norman Lear, is the American Way. Moreover some voters do want to hear it, and others who think they don’t will be glad to have the alternative perspective once they have the chance. McCain has already changed minds in this election, but to do it he had to violate the speech code. The offensive words that sounded like drills in the ears of liberals were these: “Sarah Palin.” Among the other things liberals said about her, they said that McCain had offended women merely by putting her on the ticket. Now that’s what I would call hypersensitivity, if I didn’t know how disingenuous it really was.

Yes, Team McCain is disingenuous in slamming Obama over sexism, but precisely this transparent disingenuousnesss makes their real charge against Obama stronger instead of weaker, because the charge is that of trying to win the Presidency by imposing upon the campaigns a speech code that would shield Obama from legitimate and tough criticism. McCain’s issue here is not sexism but Political Correctess, and disingenuousness is constitutive of Political Correctness, which could be defined as disingenuous allegations that feelings have been injured by insensitive (i.e. unintentionally offensive) speech or conduct. Team McCain’s whining is a caricature of PC, but it will stick to Obama and not McCain, because everybody already knows that Obama’s campaign has been powered by PC since day one and would ride it to the White House if allowed. The Obamacrats don’t like finger pointing? Look who’s talking!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Daniel Lowenstein.

Financial Times:

Democratic jitters about the US presidential race have spread to Capitol Hill, where some members of Congress are worried that Barack Obama’s faltering campaign could hurt their chances of re-election.

Party leaders have been hoping to strengthen Democratic control of the House and Senate in November, but John McCain’s jump in the polls has stoked fears of a Republican resurgence.

A Democratic fundraiser for Congressional candidates said some planned to distance themselves from Mr Obama and not attack Mr McCain.

“If people are voting for McCain it could help Republicans all the way down the ticket, even in a year when the Democrats should be sweeping all before us,” said the fundraiser, a former Hillary Clinton supporter.

“There is a growing sense of doom among Democrats I have spoken to . . . People are going crazy, telling the campaign ‘you’ve got to do something’.”

Concern was greatest among first-term representatives who won seats in traditionally Republican districts in the landslide of 2006. “Several of them face a real fight to hold on to those seats,” the fundraiser said.

Tony Podesta, a senior Democratic lobbyist, said members of Congress were “a little nervous” after Mr McCain shook up the race with his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate and intensified attacks on Mr Obama.

“Republicans have been on the offensive for the past two weeks . . . You don’t win elections on the defensive.”

The campaign manager for a first-term Democratic congressman from a blue-collar district in the north-east rejected suggestions that Mr Obama had become a liability. He said his candidate would reach out to Republicans and avoid attacks on Mr McCain.

There is this rumbling in the ground, cracks can be seen on the surface of the hillside, is it possible? Can democrats who nominated the most leftwing member of the Senate be facing yet another massive public rejection and Republican landslide?

CBS News interviews former Hillary campaign strategist Mark Penn:

CBSNews.com: Your former colleague Howard Wolfson argued that you all unintentionally paved the way for Palin by exposing some of the unfair media coverage that Hillary Clinton received. And, therefore, a lot of the media may now be treating Sarah Palin with kid gloves. Do you agree with that?

Mark Penn: Well, no, I think the people themselves saw unfair media coverage of Senator Clinton. I think if you go back, the polls reflected very clearly what “Saturday Night Live” crystallized in one of their mock debates about what was happening with the press.

I think here the media is on very dangerous ground. I think that when you see them going through every single expense report that Governor Palin ever filed, if they don’t do that for all four of the candidates, they’re on very dangerous ground. I think the media so far has been the biggest loser in this race. And they continue to have growing credibility problems.

And I think that that’s a real problem growing out of this election. The media now, all of the media — not just Fox News, that was perceived as highly partisan — but all of the media is now being viewed as partisan in one way or another. And that is an unfortunate development.

CBSNews.com: So you think the media is being uniquely tough on Palin now?

Mark Penn: Well, I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they’re not doing on the other candidates. And that’s going to subject them to people concluding that they’re giving her a tougher time. Now, the media defense would be, “Yeah, we looked at these other candidates who have been in public life at an earlier time.”

What happened here very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans tuning into a vice-presidential speech, something that is unprecedented, because they wanted to see for themselves. This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them.

Can they possibly lose any more credibility than they have already?

Those loveable clowns Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld are back. This time intruding on a suburban family in order “to connect with real people.” Our heroes, as Seinfeld explains to Gates, have a problem with being “a little out of it. You’re living in some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the mother ship. I got so many cars I get stuck in my own traffic.”

4:30 video

Mildly amusing, at least in parts, but still completely and utterly irrelevant to competition from Mac and Linux, or the merits of Vista as an operating system (or the lack thereof). The complacent condescension of the great men’s self-referential exercise is beginning to wear thin.

———————————
Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Attacking John McCain as so 1980s with the 0:31 ad accusing him of being unable to send an email.

If I were Rick Davis and managing John McCain’s campaign, I’d whip up an ad showing McCain beating a couple of youthful geeks in a computer game. Hint: Spore just came out.

This McCain 0:31 campaign ad uses Obama campaign attacks on Sarah Palin as its theme.

Not tightly focused or pointed enough, in my opinion, but it glances over some effective memes.

According to the New York Times, last July, President Bush for the first time authorized US special forces ground incursions into Pakistan without the authorization of the Pakistani government.

PressTV reports big talk from the turban-wearing set:

The Pakistani Army has been given orders to retaliate against any unilateral strike by the Afghanistan-based US troops inside the country.

Army Spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas confirmed the orders in a brief interview with Geo News on late Thursday night.

The decision was made on the first day of the two-day meeting of Pakistan’s top military commanders to discuss the US coalition’s ground and air assault in Waziristan region which killed dozens of civilians.

Army Chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani chaired the meeting which began in Rawalpindi on Thursday at the Army General Headquarters.

Pakistan’s military commanders expressed their determination to defend the country’s borders without allowing any external forces to conduct operations inside the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, sources said. ...

The development also brought into the open the increasing mistrust between the Americans and the Pakistanis over how to handle the Taliban and al-Qaeda linked militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Some political expert predict the break out of an all-out war between the United States troops and Pakistani army following the Bush administration’s approval of ground and air assaults inside the country.

They’ll be sorry if they try.

Legendary White Crane-style Kung Fu Master Pei Mei, it is said, killed twelve fully-armed Shaolin monks using only the blade from his broken pencil sharpener.

South Carolina Low Country Island Packet has a story indicating that the Zero Common Sense policies associated with America’s bed-wetting, nincompoop haute bourgeoisie have spread even to within a stone’s throw of the US Marine Corps’s recruit training depot at Parris Island.

A 10-year-old Hilton Head Island boy has been suspended from school for having something most students carry in their supply boxes: a pencil sharpener.

The problem was his sharpener had broken, but he decided to use it anyway.

A teacher at Hilton Head Island International Baccalaureate Elementary School noticed the boy had what appeared to be a small razor blade during class on Tuesday, according to a Beaufort County sheriff’s report.

It was obvious that the blade was the metal insert commonly found in a child’s small, plastic pencil sharpener, the deputy noted.

The boy—a fourth-grader described as a well-behaved and good student—cried during the meeting with his mom, the deputy and the school’s assistant principal.

He had no criminal intent in having the blade at school, the sheriff’s report stated, but was suspended for at least two days and could face further disciplinary action.

District spokesman Randy Wall said school administrators are stuck in the precarious position between the district’s zero tolerance policy against having weapons at school and common sense.

“We’re always going to do something to make sure the child understands the seriousness of having something that could potentially harm another student, but we’re going to be reasonable,” he said.

Pious blithering letter to parents from school dated 9/11.

Police report (!). These idiots actually called the police over this!

Principal McAden “clarified” today, defending the school’s insanity and asserting that the child was “not suspended for having a pencil sharpener. He had an exposed blade which created a dangerous setting for the student and other children. The student was suspended for one day for inappropriate behavior in the classroom.”

Dangerous? Maybe a legendary martial artist could do something effective with a weapon of the sort (especially in the Hong Kong cinema), but an elementary school kid is going to do what with a marginally-edged one inch piece of metal?

David From explains that Americans are still concerned about a president’s ability to protect the United States in a dangerous world, and that the public has not failed to recognize the democtrats’ record of insincerity and opportunism.

Democratic populism is destroying Democratic credibility on national security.

Let’s go to the numbers.

Republicans have owned the national security issue since the late 1960s. After 9/11, the Republican advantage on poll questions spread to an astounding 30 points.

But since 2005, the Republican advantage has dwindled. By the fall of 2007, the two parties had reached near parity on the issue, only 3 points apart—the best Democratic result since Barry Goldwater led the Republican party!

That parity did not last. Over the past year, Republican standing on the issue has revived while Democratic credibility has tumbled. In Greenberg’s latest polling, the Republicans now hold a 14-point lead, 49-35, a return to the kind of advantage they held in the 1980s.

What’s going on?

Greenberg advances three reasons, but here is the most important and provocative:

When asked to choose why they think Democrats are weak on security, the number one reason—picked by 33% of all respondents—is that Democrats” change positions depending on public opinion.”

“Moreover, when we ask respondents to compare the two parties, likely voters choose Democrats over Republicans as the party “too focused on public opinion” by a 27-point margin. Even Democratic base voters agree: liberal Democrats point to their own party as the one “too focused on public opinion” by an 18-point margin, and moderate/ conservative Democrats say this by 25 points.

In 2001-2002, Democrats chased public opinion in a hawkish direction. In 2004-2007, they chased public opinion in a dovish direction. In 2006, when the war seemed hopeless, that reversal paid off for Democrats. But as conditions have improved in Iraq, Republicans have been vindicated—and Democrats look weak and opportunistic.

Now when Bob Shrum talks of “populism,” he has something very specific and highly ideological in mind. But most Americans—and most working politicians—use the word “populism” in a more general sense. They use it to mean, “doing what is popular.”

You might think that doing what is popular is always good politics. That would seem true almost by definition!

And in the very short term, it has been true for Democrats.

But there is a longer term too. Voters remember. They compare results. They recall who stayed firm in the moment of decision and who flinched. And if the person who stood firm is also proven right—voters reward it.

Don’t misunderstand. There are prizes for the vacillating and the time-serving. John Kerry is still senator from Massachusetts after all. But there is a price to be paid too for too obvious vote-catching—and on national security, the Democrats have already begun to pay it. Just how high that price will go, we must wait until November to know.

Pat Buchanan talks a little about class warfare.

If one would wish to see the famous liberal double standard on naked display, consider.

Palin’s daughter was fair game for a media that refused to look into reports that John Edwards, a Democratic candidate for president, was conducting an illicit affair with a woman said to be carrying his child and cheating on his faithful wife Elizabeth, who has incurable cancer. That was not a legitimate story, but Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is?

Why did the selection of Palin cause a suspension of all standards and a near riot among a media that has been so in the tank for Barack even “Saturday Night Live” has satirized the infatuation?

Because she is one of us — and he is one of them.

Barack and Michelle are affirmative action, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard Law. She is public schools and Idaho State. Barack was a Saul Alinsky social worker who rustled up food stamps. Sarah kills her own food.

Michelle has a $300,000-a-year sinecure doing PR for a Chicago hospital. Todd Palin is a union steelworker who augments his income working vacations on the North Slope. Sarah has always been proud to be an American. Michelle was never proud of America — until Barack started winning.

Barack has zero experience as an executive. Sarah ran her own fishing fleet, was mayor for six years and runs the largest state in the union. She belongs to a mainstream Christian church. Barack was, for 15 years, a parishioner at Trinity United and had his daughters baptized by Pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons are saturated in black-power, anti-white racism and anti-Americanism.

Sarah is a rebel. Obama has been a go-along, get-along cog in the Daley machine. She is Middle America. Barack, behind closed doors in San Francisco, mocked Middle Americans as folks left behind by the global economy who cling bitterly to their Bibles, bigotries and guns.

Barack, says the National Journal, has the most left-wing voting record in the Senate, besting Socialist Bernie Sanders. Palin’s stances read as though they were lifted from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 “no pale pastels” platform. And this is what this media firestorm is all about.

Michael Graham, at the Boston Herald, addresses democrats denying the obvious.

Let’s start with the obvious and inarguable: Of course Sen. Barack Obama’s comment about “lipstick on a pig” was a reference to Supergirl Sarah Palin.

You know it, I know it and the partisan crowd that literally rose to their feet and cheered when they heard it knew it.

And it’s nothing new. Democrats shot the lipstick line at Gov. Palin on their official Web site last week with a posting entitled “McCain’s Selection of Palin is Lipstick on a Pig” – accompanied by what I’m sure was intended to be a flattering photo of the Alaska outdoorswoman.

And – coincidence or something more? – the same day Obama made his crack, a Democratic congressman introducing Joe Biden said of Sarah Palin, “There’s no way you can dress up her record, even with a lot of lipstick.”

If there was anyone in the audience still too dense to get it – say, an employee of CNN, perhaps – Obama immediately followed up with a reference to the McCain/Palin campaign wrapping “an old fish in a piece of paper called ‘change.’ ”

A lipstick-wearing pig and an old fish? Gee, who could he possibly be talking about?

So please, my Obama-supporting friends, let’s stop the nonsense about how Obama’s lipstick talk was, as he put it yesterday, an “innocent comment,” or that the reaction is “phony outrage.” ...

Smart people are asking why Obama would do something so dumb. He couldn’t have meant to say it, they argue, because he had to know it would exacerbate his biggest political problem – women voters abandoning the Democratic ticket.

I agree. This wasn’t a political plot. It was a Barack Obama point of personal privilege.

What we’re seeing is how Barack Obama performs under pressure. And so far, it isn’t pretty.

I believe Obama knows it, which is why I believe he indulged that moment of unbecoming snarkiness on Tuesday. He did the same thing back in April when, during a speech about Hillary’s attacks, he carefully “scratched” his face with his middle finger. And, then as now, the crowd picked up on his digital communications.

Obama is frustrated. He’s cranky. He was on his way to a coronation and now finds himself in a catfight that, so far, he’s losing.

And so the Obama team is lashing out. The same day they started the “lipstick” meme, Democrats sent out 12 press releases attacking the bottom of the GOP ticket.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama campaign has “airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers” into Alaska, all to deal with the Palin problem.

Obama’s poll numbers keep sinking, his fundraising is flat. And there isn’t a Swift Boat in sight.

Just a hockey mom with a bachelor’s degree, who has brought the great and powerful Obama to his knees.

Mark Cunningham thinks he knows why Obama’s collapse is so sudden and so complete: Obama has no real experience of a fighting a really contested election. He has only run as the machine candidate in unmeaningfully contested races.

Barack Obama has never run a campaign against a real Republican. And his main strategist, David Axelrod, is way out of his areas of expertise.

Axelrod specializes in urban politics. He’s run a bunch of mayoral races (usually in cities with lots of blacks), plus contests in true-blue states like Massachusetts and New York.

And his favorite guns may well misfire now.

New Yorkers may recall that he was on the Freddy Ferrer team – and how the class-warfare theme of “the Two New Yorks” managed to lose the 2005 mayoral race in a city that’s overwhelmingly Democratic. (Yes, Bloomberg had his billions – but he was beatable.)

Nor did the same shtick do much for Axelrod client John Edwards, who didn’t exactly score big with “the Two Americas” in the Democrats’ 2004 presidential primaries. ...

Axelrod is also known for playing the race card, but that can backfire, big-time – especially when neither he nor Obama really has much feel for the political and cultural landscape of most of the nation.

Obama has lived a lot of places, but his adult life has been overwhelming “anti-Palin country” – urban and/or elite: here in New York as a Columbia undergrad, and later with NYPIRG; Cambridge, Mass., for Harvard; Chicago.

You start to see why he couldn’t name a single right-wing friend when Bill O’Reilly asked. And how he unleashed that idiotic comment about how small-town people “cling to guns or religion.”

A race against a serious Republican might have awakened him to this weakness – but he’s never been in one before. In Illinois, he was the surprise winner of the 2004 primary for the Senate, in part because two white candidates split the vote.

In the general, he basically had it won once a Chicago paper took down the GOP nominee by getting a court to unseal unseemly divorce papers, and the local Republicans then tapped Alan Keyes – a carpet-bagging right-wing performance artist – as their standard-bearer.

So it’s not such a mystery that the mean machine of the Democratic primaries, which stole the nomination away from Sen. Hillary Clinton, is sputtering so badly now.

What was that the democrats were saying about Sarah Palin’s lack of experience?

—————————————
Hat tip to David Wagner.

The McCain Campaign produced a web-ad response to Senator Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” remark.

The ad used to be linked by Real Clear Politics to YouTube, but clicking on the button or the actual link will only get you this message:

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by CBS Interactive Inc.

CBS actually is so in the tank for Obama that it would stoop to interfere with a 30 second video rebuttal. Pathetic.
—————————————————————-

UPDATE

Ben Smith quotes CBS’s explanation for its censoring the McCain ad:

Asked about the ad, CBS spokeswoman Leigh Farris said, “CBS News does not endorse any candidate in the Presidential race. Any use of CBS personnel in political advertising that suggests the contrary is misleading.”

You can’t see the ad right now, but the McCain Campaign did publish its script here. It goes:

CHYRON: Sarah Palin On: Sarah Palin

GOVERNOR PALIN: Do you know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick.

CHYRON: Barack Obama On: Sarah Palin

BARACK OBAMA: Well, you know, you can, you know you can…put…uh…lipstick on a pig…it’s still a pig.

CHYRON: Katie Couric On: The Election

CBS’ KATIE COURIC: One of the great lessons of that campaign is the continued and accepted role of sexism in American life.

CHYRON: Ready To Lead? No

Ready To Smear? Yes

(This, of course, is really a recycled missive to the liberals of my college class list, in case anyone can’t tell.)

Don’t you liberals recognize that you’re wasting your time? Barring some remarkable unexpected development, we’re headed for another democrat debacle.

Face it. People who think like you have wildly different opinions, perspectives, life-styles, and values from the great majority of ordinary Americans, whom you don’t like very much anyway. The democrat party identifies with all sorts of craziness, so it shouldn’t really be surprising, I suppose, that it has internalized some of that craziness. Your party’s primary system is fatally flawed. The democrat party’s method of picking candidates is not democratic. (Obama won, though Hillary had a larger total of popular votes.) And it’s strongly biased to favor selection by your nutroots base of birdwatchers, tree huggers, malcontent pseudo-intellectual slackers, trustafarian bolsheviks, granola-crunching enviro whackjobs, and communists. The people who pick your presidential candidates don’t look like America. They look like the crowd at a midnight showing of Rocky Horror Show. Is it any wonder that you keep getting hosed?

Last time, you nominated an extremely liberal Eastern senator, who was a St. Paul’s nose-in-the-air snob, and a traitor, who proceeded to try running as a war hero. He managed to provoke every single officer he ever served under to come out publicly to denounce him, and an overwhelming majority of the men from his former naval unit collaborated on producing a book and a series of television commercials opposing his candidacy. He’s so lovable that, if John Kerry’s mother had still been alive, she’d might have been making Bush commercials, too. Frankly, I’m not sure my cat couldn’t have beaten John Kerry.

So, it’s back to the old drawing board. And, with a bit of aid from Hurricane Katrina, GOP Congressional scandals, and the MSM, you’re sitting pretty. It’s your year. And what do you do? You run out and nominate an exotic ultra-left Senator, the single most leftwing member of the Senate, who has not even served a single full term, because he’s pretty and gave one good speech. How could someone like that possibly lose?

Hillary tried nationalizing the health care system back in the 1990s, and the result was the first Republican Congressional Majority since the Korean War. You people are convinced Americans want another New Deal. It keeps coming as a shock every time we vote you down. You think Americans want their guns confiscated, and their kids taught political correctness and instructed on how to put condoms on cucumbers. You think America should lose in Iraq, and that our government should apologize and suck up to foreign countries. The vast majority of Americans want none of the above. The democrat minority thinks that people like themselves are wiser and better than everybody else, when the truth is they are still the weirdos, a minority of obnoxious egotistical misfits that nobody liked during high school, and nobody likes now.

Any man who’d stoop to insult a lady is a male chauvinist you know what

Sarah Palin’s pit bull-hockey mom quip was one of the memorable moments at the GOP convention. And, sure enough, the artful wordsmiths at the Obama campaign primed their candidate to respond with a folksy down home put-down, the old “You can put put lipstick on a pig, but…” line.

0:47 video

Well, he made the news, alright.

Predictably enough, I’d say, a tsunami of analysis, feminism, PC indignation, navel-gazing, and commentary broke out all over both sides of the commentariat.

It’s silly, but one is more or less obliged to register an opinion about these kinds of stories, so here’s mine. I think the reference is too artful, too contrived, too long a reach to succeed in effectively scoring a hit. If he’d been taking a poke at Hillary, well…. Hillary is d’une certain âge and not so well-favored, so it would be an unchivalrous and an unkind thing to say, but it would have scored a hit on an opponent’s vulnerable point.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, face it, Barack, old boy, is a babe.

Alluding to a pig in a context in which an uncharitable listener might just happen to interpret the reference as applicable to Mrs. Palin, as in the Hillary case, is unchivalrous, but it isn’t really unkind, because it doesn’t work. The allusion fails, being merely inappropos, so Obama must be considered to lose points for trying.

His quip seems to have already done him some harm with people who take this kind of thing too seriously, and I think Obama was quite unwise to be so provocative and to initiate a battle of wit. Sarah Palin is a girl. She has a sharp tongue (and her own room full of clever guys), and she can get away with a lot more. I would expect that Obama’s little jibe will result in a much more memorable response, and that, before too very long, there will be democrat pork chops in the tree tops, as another folksy old saying goes, with a much bigger laugh at Obama’s expense.

——————————————————————-

Why, we don’t have to wait for Sarah Palin’s response. Jennifer Rubin, at Commentary, has already responded with a little comment, titled Lipstick on A Trainwreck:

Obama appears to be crumbling under pressure, reduced to swinging away at the person who has supplanted him as the political star of the Election.

Ouch!

The LA Times notes that the foreclosure market is working for some home-seekers.

A family of bobcats (Lynx rufus) has taken up occupancy in an empty (bank-owned) house in the Tuscany Hills development of Lake Elsinore, California.
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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Old Cars Weekly:

A classic Ferrari stolen from a warehouse in Spain 15 years ago surfaced recently in Connecticut.

The man who had it apparently did not know the car was stolen, state police said. He bought the car in 2000 for $550,000 and added it to his collection of exotic cars, state police said.

According to local news sources, the man in possession of the stolen car could not be reached for comment.

In spite of the seemingly hefty price tag of $550,000 paid by the enthusiast, on the open market, the car would have fetched more than four-times that amount, according to current Ferrari pricing.

The car was seized late last week after troopers with the motor vehicle and auto theft task forces obtained a search warrant for property of the man in possession of the car.

The 1957/58 Ferrari 250 GT Cabriolet Series 1 Pinin Farina was one of only 40 built.

According to authorities, the car was among four Ferraris stolen from a warehouse in Marbella, Spain, in 1993. It was sold in Spain, Portugal and Italy before arriving in the U.S. in 1994.

The car is owned by Dr. Andreas Gerber of Switzerland, who purchased the vehicle in 1989. State police said their investigation showed that the car was smuggled into the United States through New Jersey in 1994 and was registered with a phony vehicle identification number. It then changed hands several times before ending up in Connecticut.

The Connecticut man in possession of the “hot” Ferrari, apparently unaware that the car was reported stolen, drove the Ferrari and entered it in car shows, such as the 2005 Greenwich Concours D’Elegance, where it won the award for “most outstanding Ferrari,” presented by Ferrari North America.

Andrew Lawler describes an interesting approach to linguistic archaeology.

Measuring teeth from dead horses in upstate New York seems an unlikely way to get at the truth behind some of the most controversial questions about the Old World. But David Anthony, a historian and archaeologist at Hartwick College, discovered that by comparing the teeth of modern horses with their Eurasian ancestors, he could determine where and when the ancient ones were ridden. And answering that seemingly arcane question is important if you want to explain why nearly half the world today speaks an Indo-European language.

The origin of Indo-European tongues has roiled scholarship since a British judge in eighteenth-century Calcutta noticed that Sanskrit and English were related. Generations of linguists have labored to reconstruct the mother from which sprang dozens of languages spoken from Wales to China. Their bitter disputes about who used proto-Indo-European, where they lived, and their impact on the budding civilizations of Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Indus River Valley are legion.

That contentious debate, says Anthony, has been “alternately dryly academic, comically absurd, and brutally political.” To advance their own goals, Nazi racists, American skinheads, Russian nationalists, and Hindu fundamentalists have all latched on to the idea of light-skinned and chariot-driving Aryans as bold purveyors of an early Indo-European culture, which came to dominate Eurasia. So the search for an Indo-European homeland is now the third rail of archaeology and linguistics. Anthony compares it to the Lost Dutchman’s mine—“discovered almost everywhere but confirmed nowhere.”

Read the whole thing.
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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

During time of war, the Ancient Romans closed the doors of the Temple of Janus, symbolizing the cessation of normal operation of of the Law during war-time.

Barack Obama fought back against Sarah Palin’s convention speech attack yesterday, but just look at Obama’s idea of an effective counter-offense.

Jake Tapper:

“I have said repeatedly that there should be no contradiction between keeping America safe and secure and respecting our Constitution,” Obama said. “During the Republican convention, you remember during the Republican convention, one of them, I don’t know if it was Rudy or Palin … they said, ‘Well, ya know, Sen. Obama is less interested in protecting you from terrorists than … reading them their rights.’”

(It was Palin, who said “Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America—he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights?”)

“Now, let me say this,” Obama continued, “first of all, you don’t even get to read them their rights until you catch them. So, I don’t know what, they should spend more time trying to catch Osama bin Laden and we can worry about the next steps later. Hah! I mean, seriously! These folks.

“Catch ‘em first!”

Obama said his position on this “has always been clear. It has always been clear. If you’ve got a terrorist, take ‘em out. Take ‘em out. Anybody who was involved in 9/11 –- take ‘em out.”

But, the former constitutional law professor argued, “What I have also said is this: that when you suspend habeas corpus—which has been a principle, dating before even our country, it’s the foundation of Anglo-American law—which says, very simply, if the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ and say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.’

“The reason you have that safeguard,” he said, “is because we don’t always have the right person. We don’t always catch the right person. We may think this is Mohammed the terrorist, it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You may think it’s Barack the bomb thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.

“The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism, it’s because that’s who we are,” Obama said as the crowd rose to its feet, applauding. “That’s what we’re protecting. Don’t mock the Constitution! Don’t make fun of it! Don’t suggest that it’s un-American to abide by what the founding fathers set up! It’s worked pretty well for over 200 years!

Rather than demonstrating Obama’s appreciation of the American Constitution and its roots in Magna Carta and the English Common Law, Barack Obama is really proving the incapacity of the American liberal establishment, including most conspicuously himself, to understand the most elementary distinctions in law, or to remember as far back in time as Vietnam, Korea, or WWII.

Being liberal means having so little respect for tradition and the past that the current armed conflict must be treated by liberals as if it was the first such crisis in human history. From the liberal perspective (which is shared, I must admit, to a very large extent by the current administration), we must invent new policies and procedures for functioning in time of war. Never before, it seems, in the history of the United States have US forces actually dealt with enemy prisoners or illegal combatants.

Obama, and the rest of the American intelligentsia, is oblivious to the fundamental chasm between domestic civilian life and the very different and distinct regime of war. As the engraving above illustrates, the same distinction long predates habeas corpus, Magna Carta, and the Common Law of England. In the time of the Roman Republic, the principle of Inter arma, silent leges (“The laws are silent during the clash of arms.”) was well understood. The Romans closed the doors of the Temple of Janus during war-time to signal the inaccessibility of divine justice when Roman soldiers were fighting for their fatherland in the field.

No contradiction in supposing that habeas corpus, all the rights and immunities of American citizenship, all the protections of our system of laws, attorney representation and jury trials pertain to enemies of the United States captured overseas bearing arms against US forces and operating in open and flagrant violation of the customs and usages of war?

The notion that latrunculi. armed criminals taken prisoner in the course of their attempting to kill US soldiers, persons representing no country, wearing no uniform, and operating under no lawful authority or command, and routinely violating the laws and customs of war should be considered to have the same rights as a US citizen charged domestically with a crime is completely impractical and totally insane.

Obama’s position is intrinsically self-contradictory. On the one hand, we are apparently perfectly entitled to “take out” Osama bin Laden and persons involved in 9/11. But if US forces reduce to possession alive a bearded jhadi with AK-47 in hand, who moments earlier hurled a grenade at them, it’s time to Mirandize him and give him the phone number of Ron Kubbe. Are we to assume that issues of possible error and uncertainty and all the necessity for proof and assurance required in the case of ordinary illegal combatants vanishes in relation to persons believed to have been “involved” with 9/11?

The University of Chicago Law School should never have hired Obama. His understanding of the limits of the Law is defective, and he is not even sensitive to the grossest sorts of contradiction in his own theory.

McCain winning Independent voters by 52-37% margin.

Gallup

Compare Clive Crook (below) to Adam McKay, a comedy-writer and novelist, so fond of America that he resides in Morocco (well, now, I guess, we know what his hobby is), publishing (but not getting much editing) at HuffPo.

McKay is starting to panic. He titles his “analysis” as a loud tocsin of alarm: We’re Gonna Frickin’ Lose this Thing.

Something is not right. We have a terrific candidate and a terrific VP candidate. We’re coming off the worst eight years in our country’s history. Six of those eight years the Congress, White House and even the Supreme Court were controlled by the Republicans and the last two years the R’s have filibustered like tantrum throwing 4-year-olds, yet we’re going to elect a Republican who voted with that leadership 90% of the time and a former sportscaster who wants to teach Adam and Eve as science? That’s not odd as a difference of opinion, that’s logically and mathematically queer.

It reminds me of playing blackjack (a losers game). You make all the right moves, play the right hands but basically the House always wins.

Democrats are losing. Republicans are winning. How can such a thing be possible? The latter must be cheating. Now there’s some useful insight! One can only advise Mr. McKay to appeal to the referee.

And how do we do it? Well, we win, you see, because we control the MSM (!).

McKay:

What is this house advantage the Republicans have? It’s the press. There is no more fourth estate. Wait, hold on…I’m not going down some esoteric path with theories on the deregulation of the media and corporate bias and CNN versus Fox…I mean it: there is no more functioning press in this country. And without a real press the corporate and religious Republicans can lie all they want and get away with it. And that’s the 51% advantage.

Those of us the Right, of course, will certainly be startled to learn that all the television networks (except Fox), all major newspapers and news magazines, National Public Radio, the major news agencies, all the mainstream media, the same voices which have done nothing but attack the Bush Administration and the War, which recently turned upon Sarah Palin like a pack of angry hyenas, are really all a bunch of capitalist puppets operating as a wholly-owned GOP subsidiary.

When you are as confused and self-deluded as Mr. McKay, you should not be surprised that you are losing in any competition.

McKay rapidly degenerates into near incoherence, and one unsupported charge comes tumbling out after another.

They’re losing because Republicans commit electoral fraud. All would-be democrat voters are obviously entitled to vote early and often, and scrutinizing residency and registration and identity must be “voter caging” aimed at subtracting those crucial few votes that make all the difference. Mr. McKay obviously never heard of democrat party electoral fraud, which seems strange to me, as it has been historically a lot more wide-spread, prevalent, and famous.

And we have another particular unfair advantage, according to McKay:

The religious right teaches closed mindedness so it’s almost impossible to gain new voters from their pool because people who disagree with them are agents of the devil.

And how can these terrible disadvantages, Republican control of the MSM, GOP electoral fraud, and Religious Right brainwashing, possibly be overcome? McKay suggests the Josef Goebbels approach, repeating the same simple message loudly, again and again, plus using the Internet, and (!) regulating the media. “You will publish only leftist thoughts!”

His goal?

This race should be about whether the Republican Party is going to be dismantled or not after the borderline treason of the past eight years.

How can we possibly lose, when this is the opposition?

Clive Crook explains that rejection of American values and contempt for ordinary Americans really does place candidates representing America’s urban elites at a serious disadvantage in national elections.

He doesn’t exhaustively address the subject, but he’s certainly identified a major part of the left’s problem.

This article is not the first to note the cultural contradiction in American liberalism, but just now the point bears restating. The election may turn on it.

Democrats speak up for the less prosperous; they have well-intentioned policies to help them; they are disturbed by inequality, and want to do something about it. Their concern is real and admirable. The trouble is, they lack respect for the objects of their solicitude. Their sympathy comes mixed with disdain, and even contempt.

Democrats regard their policies as self-evidently in the interests of the US working and middle classes. Yet those wide segments of US society keep helping to elect Republican presidents. How is one to account for this? Are those people idiots? Frankly, yes – or so many liberals are driven to conclude. Either that or bigots, clinging to guns, God and white supremacy; or else pathetic dupes, ever at the disposal of Republican strategists. If they only had the brains to vote in their interests, Democrats think, the party would never be out of power. But again and again, the Republicans tell their lies, and those stupid damned voters buy it.

It is an attitude that a good part of the US media share. The country has conservative media (Fox News, talk radio) as well as liberal media (most of the rest). Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.

Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.

Because it was so unexpected, Sarah Palin’s nomination for the vice-presidency jolted these attitudes to the surface. Ms Palin is a small-town American. It is said that she has only recently acquired a passport. Her husband is a fisherman and production worker. She represents a great slice of the country that the Democrats say they care about – yet her selection induced an apoplectic fit.

For days, the derision poured down from Democratic party talking heads and much of the media too. The idea that “this woman” might be vice-president or even president was literally incomprehensible. The popular liberal comedian Bill Maher, whose act is an endless sneer at the Republican party, noted that John McCain’s case for the presidency was that only he was capable of standing between the US and its enemies, but that should he die he had chosen “this stewardess” to take over. This joke was not – or not only – a complaint about lack of experience. It was also an expression of class disgust. I give Mr Maher credit for daring to say what many Democrats would only insinuate.

Little was known about Ms Palin, but it sufficed for her nomination to be regarded as a kind of insult. Even after her triumph at the Republican convention in St Paul last week, the put-downs continued. Yes, the delivery was all right, but the speech was written by somebody else – as though that is unusual, as though the speechwriter is not the junior partner in the preparation of a speech, and as though just anybody could have raised the roof with that text. Voters in small towns and suburbs, forever mocked and condescended to by metropolitan liberals, are attuned to this disdain. Every four years, many take their revenge. ...

If only the Democrats could contain their sense of entitlement to govern in a rational world, and their consequent distaste for wide swathes of the US electorate, they might gain the unshakeable grip on power they feel they deserve. Winning elections would certainly be easier – and Republicans would have to address themselves more seriously to economic insecurity. But the fathomless cultural complacency of the metropolitan liberal rules this out.

The attitude that expressed itself in response to the Palin nomination is the best weapon in the Republican armoury. Rely on the Democrats to keep it primed. You just have to laugh.

The Palin nomination could still misfire for Mr McCain, but the liberal reaction has made it a huge success so far. To avoid endlessly repeating this mistake, Democrats need to learn some respect.

It will be hard. They will have to develop some regard for the values that the middle of the country expresses when it votes Republican. Religion. Unembarrassed flag-waving patriotism. Freedom to succeed or fail through one’s own efforts. Refusal to be pitied, bossed around or talked down to. And all those other laughable redneck notions that made the United States what it is.

The Anchoress pictures the scene in which a poll-sinking prodigy comes hat-in-hand asking for the aid of the man he disrespected.

That silver-tongued Obama went on the defensive complaining Republicans were picking on him, but, at least, he gave John McCain credit for not talking about his “Muslim faith.”

Contextually, Obama seems to be referring to his “alleged Muslim faith,” but he panics his liberal interlocutor, George Stephanopoulos, who hastily interjects “Christian faith.”

Obama is not panicked, and prattles on contentedly, giving some assurance thereby that, aw, shucks! he wasn’t really fessing up to being the Hidden Imam after all.

But, in Obama’s parlous position of being a candidate with both a Muslim name and a (deliberately minimized) Muslim background, running for the presidency in time of war with radical Islam, maladroit, slightly ambiguous references to “My Muslim faith” are high-risk pinball. I feel sure we’ll see YouTube videos with those words in Obama’s voice superposed over the pictures of Obama in traditional Somali dress sooner or later.

Obama is a gaffe machine.

TRANSCRIPT

STEPHANOPOULOS: You mention your Christian faith. Yesterday you took off after the Republicans for suggesting you have Muslim connections. Just a few minutes ago, Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager, said they’ve never done that. This is a false and cynical attempt to play victim.

OBAMA: You know what? I mean, these guys love to throw a rock and hide their hand. The…

STEPHANOPOULOS: The McCain campaign has never suggested you have Muslim connections.

OBAMA: No, no, no. But the—I don’t think that when you look at what is being promulgated on Fox News, let’s say, and Republican commentators who are closely allied to these folks—
STEPHANOPOULOS: But John McCain said that’s wrong.

OBAMA: Now, well, look. Listen. You and I both know that the minute that Governor Palin was forced to talk about her daughter, I immediately said that’s off limits. And—
STEPHANOPOULOS: But John McCain said the same thing about questioning your faith.

OBAMA: And what was the first thing the McCain?s campaign went out and did? They said, look, these liberal blogs that support Obama are out there attacking Governor Palin.

Let’s not play games. What I was suggesting—you’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. And you’re absolutely right that that has not come—
STEPHANOPOULOS: Christian faith.

OBAMA:—my Christian faith. Well, what I’m saying is that he hasn’t suggested—
STEPHANOPOULOS: Has connections, right.

OBAMA:—that I’m a Muslim. And I think that his campaign’s upper echelons have not, either.

1:59 video

Palin Nomination Impacts Obama Campaign

USATODAY:

In the new poll, taken Friday through Sunday, McCain leads Obama by 54%-44% among those seen as most likely to vote.

Before the convention, Republicans by 47%-39% were less enthusiastic than usual about voting. Now, they are more enthusiastic by 60%-24%, a sweeping change that narrows a key Democratic advantage. Democrats report being more enthusiastic by 67%-19%.

Nick Cohen of the British Observer thinks so.

My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week. Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll. George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to the Republican convention. Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs. During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.

For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was ‘the other’ – the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against. They might have soberly examined her reputation as an opponent of political corruption to see if she was truly the reformer she claimed to be. They might have gently mocked her idiotic creationism, while carefully avoiding all discussion of the racist conspiracy theories of Barack Obama’s church.

But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor’s office.

On the other, liberal journalists turned her family into an object of sexual disgust: inbred rednecks who had stumbled out of Deliverance. Palin was meant to be pretending that a handicapped baby girl was her child when really it was her wanton teenage daughter’s. When that turned out to be a lie, the media replaced it with prurient coverage of her teenage daughter, who was, after all, pregnant, even though her mother was not going to do a quick handover at the maternity ward and act as if the child was hers.

Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right. ...

When a hate campaign goes wrong, however, disaster follows. And everything that could go wrong with the campaign against Palin did. American liberals forgot that the public did not know her. By the time she spoke at the Republican convention, journalists had so lowered expectations that a run-of-the-mill speech would have been enough to win the evening.

As it was, her family appeared on stage without a goitre or a club foot between them, and Palin made a fighting speech that appealed over the heads of reporters to the public we claim to represent. ‘I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion,’ she said as she deftly detached journalists from their readers and viewers. ‘I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.’ ...

In an age when politics is choreographed, voters watch out for the moments when the public-relations facade breaks down and venom pours through the cracks. Their judgment is rarely favourable when it does. Barack Obama knows it. All last week, he was warning American liberals to stay away from the Palin family. He understands better than his supporters that it is not a politician’s enemies who lose elections, but his friends.

The Telegraph reports that al-Qaeda’s American-born propaganda chief has been silent for so long that Western intelligence sources are concluding he’s gone to ask Allah for his virgins.

Months of attacks by unmanned US predator aircraft have caused carnage among the middle ranks of terrorist leaders in the lawless lands along the border with Afghanistan, where al-Qa’eda remains dangerous despite suffering a serious defeat in Iraq.

Their victims have included experienced Arab leaders and, it is now thought, Adam Gadahn, a former heavy-metal fan and so-called “killer computer nerd” originally from California. Nothing has been heard from him for months, leading intelligence experts to conclude that he may be dead.

Mr Gadahn has been credited with helping transform al-Qa’eda’s al-Sahab propaganda wing into a slick operation which communicates in fluent English and produces professional quality DVDs, including one for Osama bin Laden last year.

But he may have fallen victim to an expanded programme of predator assassinations which in the last year has targeted and killed many of al-Qa’eda’s military commanders, terrorist trainers and facilitators.

Jihadists around the world will be watching as closely as intelligence officials this week to see whether Mr Gadahn – also known as Azzam al-Ameriki – produces a new video message to mark September 11, as he has done every year since 2003.

If there is no message it will be taken as near certain confirmation that he is dead – killed either in a strike by Hellfire missiles, or perhaps by jihadi colleagues who have grown jealous of his success.

Mr Gadahn is now thought to have been killed in an attack launched from a remotely piloted aircraft in January which killed al-Qaeda’s then military commander, Abu Laith al-Libi, in Mir Ali, Waziristan. ...

Gadahn has taken on real importance as al-Qa’eda’s best known Westerner. He also became the poster boy of would-be jihadis around the world who are radicalised on the internet – and identify with a former Orange County teenager who once reviewed heavy metal bands before finding radical Islam and travelling to Pakistan in 1998.

Charles Martin has built a reference list-cum-fact-check of Sarah Palin rumors aka smears.

The latest Zogby Poll puts McCain-Palin ahead 49.7% to 45.9%. Looks like the liberal democrat ticket is beginning to describe their traditional Fall trajectory.

Jeffrey Bell explains why the left hates Sarah Palin.

From the instant of Palin’s designation on Friday, August 29, the American left went into a collective mass seizure from which it shows no sign of emerging. The left blogosphere and elite media have, for the moment, joined forces and become indistinguishable from each other, and from the supermarket tabloids, in their desire to find and use anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her family. In sharp contrast to the yearlong restraint shown toward truthful reports about John Edwards’s affair, bizarre rumors have been reported as news, and, according to McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt, nationally known members of the elite media have besieged him with preposterous demands.

The most striking thing in purely political terms about this hurricane of elite rage is the built-in likelihood that it will backfire.

Read the whole thing.

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And Bill Kristol think it has already backfired.

A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing—but well-received—presentation the following evening.

The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media’s prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.

By the end of the week, after Palin’s tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren’t being narrow-minded enough. Thus, Hanna Rosin—who has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post, and has also written for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times—lamented in a piece for Slate: “So cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin’s wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison.” I suppose it was ungenerous of conservatives, in our broad-mindedness and tolerance of human frailty, to have let Ms. Rosin down, just when she was counting on us to bring out the tar and feathers. But she gives us too much credit when she suggests we make the liberal media look stuffy and slow-witted. They do that all by themselves.

The Obama Campaign thinks it has the answer to the Sarah Palin threat. AC360:

McCain has a strong woman? Well, the Obama campaign wants voters to know they’ve got one, too, and they’re going to deploy her to crush the moose hunting hockey mom from Alaska. In a strange twist of logic, the Obama campaign is touting the woman they passed over as the woman they need to beat the woman the other guy picked.

The New York Times reports that “Mrs. Clinton’s campaign event in Florida, her first for Mr. Obama since the Democratic convention, will serve as a counterpoint to the searing attacks and fresh burst of energy that Ms. Palin injected into the race with her convention speech on Wednesday, Obama aides said.”

Future News via Patriot Room and Category 5 Hurricane Sarah Makes Landfall at Daily Kos.
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New Sarah Palin Facts:

TWylite: Sarah Palin shot a moose in Juneau, just to watch him die.

Chuck: Sarah Palin saved Obama’s butt by finding eight missing states.

Roger Kimball savors Sarah Palin’s arrival on the political scene as a kind of Joan of Arc of the culture wars.

Sarah’s lucky that the establishment left is so thoroughly secularist, or they’d be preparing her stake now.

In the early 1960s, Bill Buckley famously observed that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Bill, a Yale man, was not singling out the Harvard faculty for special opprobrium. Harvard was merely a synecdoche. .. It was the smug, “progressive” liberal consensus that our elite academic institutions inculcated, even back then, that Bill objected to, not Harvard per se. ...

It’s only from the eyrie of the “Harvard” Weltanschauung that a largish random sampling of citizens is found culturally deficient. And this leads me to a crucial point about “Harvard” and the “progressive” consensus it represents: it is sophisticated about everything except its own naïveté. It champions cultural relativism–absolutely. It is suspicious when someone shows up peddling “the truth,” especially about moral matters; but it embraces its perspective on the world as inarguable. According to the gospel of “Harvard,” all right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) people agree with the various positions set forth in the catechism of liberalism. To champion the various dogmas set forth in that catechism, says “Harvard,” is simply to exhibit one’s contact with reality. To dissent from them is to exhibit one’s ignorance, bad faith, or malevolence. Nice work if you can get it!

If you can get it? The amazing thing is that there is nothing easier. The liberal consensus has tenure. I mean, it is thoroughly institutionalized, and not only in academia. It has metastasized throughout elite culture. It’s what you are likely to uphold if you were graduated from an Ivy League college, went to law school, or work for The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc. It explains the little frisson Chris Matthews felt travelling up his leg as Obama spoke last winter. It also explains the incredulous, spluttering rage that Sarah Palin has provoked in purlieus of liberal self-satisfaction. I call it “Palin Hysteria Syndrome.” Just this morning, for example, I received this email from an acquaintance (I preserve the original orthography and diction: he is a careful writer as a rule, but clearly his emotion got the better of him here):

i read you blog posting on Sarah Palin. Quite a suprise. Never would I have thought you suceptible to trailer trash. More suprising were the comments about Palin’s “executive experience” and being governor of the country’s “largest state.” Once upon a time, those were the sort of sphistries against which you waged glorious battle. The strange bedfellows induced by politics are not integrity and compromise.

“Trailer trash,” eh? Clearly, as Victor Davis Hanson put it yesterday, “Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia” are acting “as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.” “Cruise missile” is good: it suggests the unexpectedness and deadly accuracy of the blow. But I like to think that Boston phone book–or maybe it’s the Juneau phone book–is finally getting some of its own back. Bill Buckley would be pleased.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

OK, you’ve seen those amusing Apple commercials in which the cool and complacent Mac patronizes the hapless and stuffy PC. Well, here’s the first salvo of Microsoft’s counterattack, for which they paid Jerry Seinfeld $10 million. It even features Bill Gates himself.

I’m not sure Apple shouldn’t offer to pay to run it themselves, demonstrating as it does that Microsoft’s clueless obliviousness runs all the way to the top.

1:30 video

New Rasmussen Poll:

Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters.

51% of Americans believe that most reporters are trying to hurt Palin’s campaign.

The Palin pick has also improved perceptions of John McCain. A week ago, just before he introduced his running mate, just 42% of Republicans had a Very Favorable opinion of their party’s nominee. That figure jumped to 54% by this Friday morning. Among unaffiliated voters, favorable opinions of McCain have increased by eleven percentage points in a week—from 54% before the Palin announcement to 65% today.

Fifty-one percent (51%) of all voters now believe that McCain made the right choice when he picked Palin to be his running mate.

Presumptive democrat looker tells Q&O in a comment:

Jesus was a community organizer. Pilate was a governor.

To which Treacher responds:

And last night was the crucifixion.

And in a later moment of l’esprit de l’escalier, the same Treacher adds:

You know who else was a community organizer? Don Corleone.
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Via Instapundit.

link

I wonder if this program is as obtrusive and controlling as Vista.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

John McCain is clearly not a gifted rhetorician. His voice is high and reedy. Unlike Barack Obama, he could never make a living as an advertising announcer. Last night’s speech demonstrated that McCain is no Churchill either. Listening to John McCain is a lot like listening to the president of one’s local American Legion chapter deliver the annual Veteran’s Day address.

McCain’s speech was different from our standard political fare. It made no attempt at grandeur. It failed to compete for a place in the roll of great American political speeches. But it was unusual with respect to being obviously both entirely sincere and deeply personal.

The beginning section was particularly Rotarian, featuring a long series of expressions of gratitude toward, and affection for, his wife and other family members, including (remarkably) his 96-year-old mother. Maybe America is not so much in danger of being governed by Sarah Palin anytime soon, I reflected, noting McCain’s mother’s remarkable preservation.

From the personal tributes, McCain advanced remorselessly on to the inevitable platitudes and promises. To my displeasure, he demonstrated that he is dumb enough to subscribe to the nonsense about Anthropogenic climate change and conformist enough to offer to assume the responsibility of producing new energy technologies. The market seems to some of us to be already providing very ample cash incentives to anyone who can produce those.

Only in the final six minutes of so of McCain’s speech did he proceed beyond conventionalities and become genuinely moving. John McCain turned suddenly to address the subject of his experiences as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Rather than “reporting for duty,” as some have done, and trying to claim the presidency on the basis of his war-time heroism and service, McCain depicted his capture and subsequent ordeal as a personal conversion experience.

Before being captured, he described himself as proud and arrogant, eager to break rules and have fun, his focus of attention and admiration being John McCain. Injured and reduced to helplessness with two broken arms, and unable to feed himself, McCain described how two of his fellow prisoners did everything for him. One could hear both the shame of his own helplessness and his humble gratitude in his voice.

McCain described ultimately being broken and degraded by the Vietnamese communists by extreme and prolonged torture (and I don’t mean pouring water over saran wrap on his face), and being lifted from despair by the code of honor and brotherhood faithfully maintained through the worst adversity by his fellow prisoners.

It was McCain’s experience of the American character, of the operation of American values in the worst possible circumstance, the daily manifestations of courage, decency, and goodness, that made John McCain genuinely love his country, and yearn to serve it unselfishly, he told us. That experience made him into a new man.

“I won’t let you down.’ John McCain promised. And his deep sincerity was perfectly obvious. John McCain did not convince me that he was going to make the greatest political speeches, or that he was going to suddenly develop 50 more IQ points, become an intellectual, and adopt firm and reliable conservative principles, alas! But, he did convince me that he does mean to do his best, according to such lights as he possesses.

I wish those lights had a bit higher wattage, but I have no doubt his lights are better than Obama’s, his values and his experience are better than Obama’s, and Lord knows! his vice presidential choice is a lot better than Obama’s.

I went into a public-’ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here.
—Kipling.

The Metro Hotel in Woking recently brought Rudyard Kipling’s 1892 poem Tommy back to life when it refused a room to a British Army corporal, his wrist in a cast, back from service in Afghanistan, (variously reported as) in order to attend the funeral of a fallen comrade or to visit a wounded comrade.

My own view is that angry mobs of patriotic Britons should burn every Metro Hotel to the ground. The management weasels who tried shifting responsibility to the desk clerk should be tarred and feathered.

London Times

Washington Post

A lot of my liberal classmates were going on, in their snobbish Ivy League way, about how the great Obamessiah wrote his own speeches, but that dumb Sarah Palin, who went to an infra dig school that wasn’t Yale or Harvard, needed to have her acceptance speech written for her.

Well, as Erick Erickson reports:

Halfway through Sarah Palin’s speech tonight at the RNC, people following the speech noticed she was deviating from the prepared text.

According to sources close to the McCain campaign, the teleprompter continued scrolling during applause breaks. As a result, half way through the speech, the speech had scrolled significantly from where Governor Palin was in the speech. The malfunction also occurred during Rudy Giuliani’s speech, explaining his significant deviations from his speech.

Unfazed, Governor Palin continued, from memory, to deliver her speech without the teleprompter cued to the appropriate point in her speech.

Palin did just fine.

But look how well that really, really smart Obama did when placed in the same inconvenient situation.

1:13 video
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Also today, Jonathan Martin disagrees about Palin winging it.

Perhaps there were moments where it scrolled slightly past her exact point in the speech. But I was sitting in the press section next to the stage, within easy eyeshot of the Teleprompter. I frequently looked up at the machine, and there was no serious malfunction. A top convention planner confirms this morning that there were no major problems.

Is he merely quibbling? I don’t know how common it is for teleprompters to run past the point speakers have reached myself, and I don’t think it’s possible to determine which of the witnesses is correct on this one.

Donald Ward aka “Khalid Al Mansour”

Kenneth R. Timmerman describes the latest skeleton to fall out of Barak Obama’s personal closet.

When Obama was applying to Harvard, Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton was asked to write a letter of recommendation for him by Donald Warden aka Khalid Al Mansour, a radical Black Nationalist, once mentor to Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panthers, later an Islamicist extremist and antisemite.

YouTube has numerous videos of this gentleman’s rants.

New evidence has emerged that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was closely associated as early as age 25 to a key adviser to a Saudi billionaire who had mentored the founding members of the Black Panthers.

In a videotaped interview this year on New York’s all news cable channel NY1, a prominent African-American businessman and political figure made the curious disclosures about Obama.

Percy Sutton, the former borough president of Manhattan, off-handedly revealed the unusual circumstances about his first encounter with the young Obama.

“I was introduced to (Obama) by a friend who was raising money for him,” Sutton told NY1 city hall reporter Dominic Carter.

“The friend’s name is Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, from Texas,” Sutton said. “He is the principal adviser to one of the world’s richest men. He told me about Obama.”

Sutton, the founder of Inner City Broadcasting, said al-Mansour contacted him to ask a favor: Would Sutton write a letter in support of Obama’s application to Harvard Law School?

“He wrote to me about him,” Sutton recalled. “And his introduction was there is a young man that has applied to Harvard. I know that you have a few friends up there because you used to go up there to speak. Would you please write a letter in support of him?”

Sutton said he acted on his friend al-Mansour’s advice.

“I wrote a letter of support of him to my friends at Harvard, saying to them I thought there was a genius that was going to be available and I certainly hoped they would treat him kindly,” Sutton told NY1.

3:07 video
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Suppose the New York Times were to discover that the mentor of one of the founders of the American Nazi Party, an extremist with ties to foreign radicals who was still delivering antisemitic diatribes today, had persuaded a prominent Republican politician to write a letter of recommendation to McCain’s Congressman supporting his appointment to the Naval Academy at Annapolis? Would liberals consider this evidence of unsavory radical connections in MCain’s life history significant?

The London Times quotes a local resident of Sarah Palin’s hometown listening to last night’s speech:

She’s like a moose going after a cabbage.
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The Sun:

Sarah Palin’s sensational performance at the Republican Party Convention may turn out to be the tipping point of this rollercoaster American election.

Obama fans hoping she would fluff her big night were in for a nasty shock.

This speech has turned the election upside down. It was simply stunning.

Democrats and their Lefty media backers had been sneering that she was a small town nobody, a hick from the Alaskan sticks put into a job way beyond an inexperienced woman.

Believe me, you will not be hearing that again.

Palin turned out to be an electrifying mix of intelligence, passion, energy, optimism and plain speaking.

Full of self-assurance and aggression, she popped Barack’s balloon big-time.

Several moderate-Democrat friends of mine have been emailing—few if any would ever vote for McCain—but all agree that Palin was very strong. The more liberal among them are a little panicked.

I completely misjudged how negative she would be. Her lines about Obama were brutally cutting and possibly over the top in places. But she’s a far better messenger than an angry white man. (Note, by the way, how both Rudy and Huckabee employed a tone that was more bemused than angry. That’s the modern GOP’s favorite trick—comedic ridicule in place of outright nastiness.)

As predicted, Sarah Palin delivered a star performance at the GOP Convention last night. She, with some help from Rudolph Giuliani, succeeded in turning the tables on the democrat punditocracy and making Obama’s lack of achievements, inexperience, and empty rhetoric the main issue of the campaign right now.

Giuliani’s line about how the democrat candidate talks about fighting for you, but there’s only one man in this race who has really fought for you was particularly a killer, as was his elaborate act of astonishment as he pretended to scrutinize Obama’s resume, and did a double-take over “community organizer.” Americans know what a “community organizer” is. A
community organizer is some upper middle class kid from an elite college who shows up in town to make trouble on behalf of the bums, because he understands that they are really victims of society and he is nobler and more sensitive than the rest of us.

Sarah Palin’s speech, personality, and amusing background seem likely to prove irresistible to the press. It’s her turn to be flavor-of-the-month. Her selection by McCain was nothing short of political genius, striking directly at the Obama phenomenon with what amounts to the perfect anti-Obama, an equally extraordinary personality able to come from nowhere directly to the center of the national political stage, who is also very articulate and charismatic, but female, authentically blue-collar, and (as Mark Steyn aptly put it) not only American, but hyper-American. She is the perfect foil to Obama. As a woman, she is breaking the glass ceiling Obama kept intact over Hillary’s head. She represents precisely the working class Americans essential for there to be any hope of democrats winning a presidential election, and she is not a Punahoa-cum-Harvard missionary come to save them, she is one of them. She is strongly associated with a series of diametrically opposite positions from the democrat party’s and Obama’s, with powerful blue-collar appeal: Right-to-Life, Gun Ownership, Hunting, Drilling for Oil.

How was it Karl Rove described Joe Biden? “Blowhard doofus,” wasn’t it? Biden is a self-congratulatory imbecile, with a conspicuous mean streak, who has a serious habit of putting his foot in his mouth. Sarah Palin debating Joe Biden? I wouldn’t want to be the democrat campaign guru trying to prep Biden for that one. It’s likely to get very ugly for Biden.

Democrats, in the final analysis, have nobody to blame but themselves. The US is a Center-Right country, featuring (let me whisper it to you, liberals) a predominantly average population which pays taxes and works for a living. You guys keep nominating the most liberal guy you can find, an elitist representing your own base of birkenstock-wearing socialists, tree-huggers, and Hollywood do-gooders. You think America vitally needs to be made a great deal more like France. You think we need to punish those hicks, rubes, and bitter gun-owners for their lack of fashion sense, and we need to make this a kinder, better world by taking money from the ignorant yahoos who worked for it and giving it to the needy at home and abroad. All of this seems as obvious to you as your own moral and cultural superiority to the uncouth primitives with whom an unkind Providence has condemned you to share the country. After all, they stole America from the Indians and they are guilty of the crime of Slavery, the central issue of human history, which invalidates their institutions, their way of life, and everything they stand for. Only through your leadership, by a series of essential sacrifices to the appropriate causes, can this wardrobe-and-cuisine-challenged, morally-disastrous nation possibly be saved.

All in all, for some mysterious reason, this particular viewpoint is less than attractive to ordinary Americans, and you keep losing elections.

This year, we have a war hero and beauty queen governor (who hunts) and you have a community organizer novice Senator with a record of two autobiographies and a speech running with the vainest and most arrogant airhead in the same body by his side. Your Crow Indian scouts are already painting their faces and singing their death songs, General Custer.

Newt Gingrich reduces Ron Allen to helpless silence.

Tuesday evening on the convention floor in St. Paul… MSNBC’s Ron Allen said to the former Speaker, “But to be fair, her resume is not something we’re familiar seeing with presidential candidates.”

This didn’t sit well with Gingrich who strongly replied:

It’s stronger than Barack Obama’s. I don’t know why you guys walk around saying this baloney. She has a stronger resume than Obama. She’s been a real mayor, he hasn’t. She has been a real governor, he hasn’t. She’s been in charge of the Alaskan National Guard, he hasn’t. She was a whistleblower who defeated an incumbent mayor. He has never once shown that kind of courage. She’s a whistleblower who turned in the chairman of her own party and got him fined $12,000. I’ve never seen Obama do one thing like that. She took on the incumbent governor of her own party and beat him, and then she beat a former Democratic governor in the general election. I don’t know of a single thing Obama’s done except talk and write.

Newt then challenged Allen:

I’d like you to tell me one thing Sen. Obama’s done.

With that, Allen retreated, and said:

Thanks very much, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to leave it there. I’m not going to argue the case. Thanks very much.

1:05 video

Adriaan Lanni and Wesley Kelman note that Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running-mate works beautifully to undermine the democrat’s favorite campaign themes of working class economic stagnation and class envy.

(Palin’s husband) Todd’s two jobs—commercial fisherman and oil production manager on the North Slope—required little formal education and provide ample time off. Yet they pay extremely well. If you include the permanent fund dividend that Alaska distributes to its residents as a way of sharing oil tax revenues, the family made about $100,000 last year, not counting Sarah’s $125,000 salary as governor.

Mr. Palin’s income alone would put the Palins at about the same level as many well-educated, white-collar workers we knew in Anchorage. It is also enough money to enjoy a quality of life that is, at least to a certain taste, superior to what is enjoyed almost anywhere else, either in cities or in the countryside. Like the bricklayer, the Palins can hunt and fish in a place of legendary abundance. Their hometown may be a dingy Anchorage exurb, but it has cheap, plentiful land bordering a vast and beautiful wilderness, which is crisscrossed by Todd (the “Iron Dog” champion) and the Palin children all winter. (By comparison, in the Northeast many leisure activities are brutally segregated by income: Martha’s Vineyard vs. the Poconos, the Jersey Shore vs. the Hamptons.)

This free and easy life is radically different from the desperate existences depicted in Barack Obama’s speeches. The main policy thrust of Obama’s acceptance speech (and of both Clinton speeches) was that middle-class families, and particularly blue-collar families like the Palins, are in crisis because of stagnant wages, unemployment, foreign competition, and growing inequality. But these problems, which are a statistical fact, seem a world away from the Palin family.

This disjunction between the good life for many Alaskans and the not-so-good life for working-class families elsewhere suggests several strategies for the McCain campaign. Palin certainly has more credibility than McCain to attack Democrats’ economic policies. More subtly, Palin embodies a notion that Republicans can create a society like Alaska—where the culture has a heavy working-class influence, state taxes are nonexistent, economic prospects are good for people regardless of formal education, and bricklayers can make the same money as urban lawyers (and have more fun in their spare time).

While Democratic policy tries to help blue-collar workers by making it easier for them to attend college and get office jobs—that is, by encouraging them to cease to be blue-collar—Palin’s Alaskan story offers hope from within the blue-collar culture. She validates the goodness of life in rural America because she has embraced a particularly exotic, turbocharged version of this life. Her biography, bound to be emphasized by Republicans, thus makes a powerful appeal to one of the country’s most decisive constituencies.

The rub, of course, is that however genuine it may be, Palin’s family life may not be possible outside Alaska.

Does this 67 year old author look dangerous?

Jerome Tuccile reports how the arcane complexities of state firearm regulations can be selectively enforced by local officials to punish a critic.

Prolific writer Peter Manso, author of, among other books, biographies of Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando, has been indicted on a dozen firearms charges by a Massachusetts grand jury and faces years in prison.

Did he brandish a gun in public? Threaten a neighbor with a drive-by shooting?

No, the guns were all stored, quite securely, in his locked and alarmed home. In fact, police discovered the weapons only when they responded to a burglar alarm while the writer was away. Either the guns were in plain view—evidence that Manso expected no legal trouble for their possession—or else, as Manso’s attorney alleges, “Truro police searched Manso’s house illegally while responding to the alarm.” ...

The main problem seems to be that Manso’s Firearms Identification Card expired after the passage of new legislation in 1998—previously, FIDs lasted a lifetime; now they expire every six years. The new law has caused endless problems in the Bay State, since authorities have not been very effective about informing gun owners of the change. ...

Manso claims that he’s been maliciously targeted by the police because of his controversial work on a new book that casts a skeptical look at the work of local authorities in investigating the murder of a writer named Christa Worthington.

Boston Globe

And it isn’t going to work.

Time Magazine’s Nathan Thornburg finds he likes Sarah Palin’s hometown, and agrees with its residents on the irrelevance of yesterday’s pregnancy story. So will the voters.

I just got off the phone with a longtime Wasilla resident. She had urged me to find time today to go up to Hatcher Pass—”the most beautiful place in the valley!”—when I mentioned that the story on Bristol’s baby is now national news. Her voice slowed. “Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry. That’s so unfair.”

Wasilla seems at times to be utterly without guile. It’s a large part of the town’s charm, and it’s exactly the quality that could make an unorthodox pick like Palin pay off. Don’t get me wrong — she’s a tough politician with sharp enough elbows on her own. But still, she appears to be more steeped in the values of her hometown than any politician I’ve ever come across.

Maybe that means Palin is a little too much Northern Exposure for America—after all, her father’s good friend Curt Menard happily showed me a picture of the governor as a high schooler in 1981, in a root cellar with family and friends, helping skin and cube and cure a whole moose. It’s enough to make you almost miss fake hunters like John Kerry and Mitt Romney.

People in Wasilla are Alaskan tough, so not only does a thing like teen pregnancy not seem like anyone’s damn business, but it’s also not seen as the calamity so many people in the lower 48 might think it is. This is dangerous country — it’s not just the roughneck jobs on cable reality shows. It’s real life here. I listened to the absolutely heartbreaking story of how the godfather of Track Palin, Sarah’s oldest son, died in small plane crash just minutes after having dropped off four kids. Another family invited me into their home and told their incredible story; with one son in Iraq, their other son was working on a conveyor line in Anchorage, got caught in the belt and had his head partially crushed. He lived to stand across the kitchen table from me and his parents, looking fully healed just three months later, grinning at his dumb luck and wondering what comes next in life. “It makes you realize that a thing like a little teenage pregnancy isn’t such a big deal,” his mom said. “Bristol—and lots of other girl like her out there — are going to be just fine.”

If you haven’t guessed yet, the people here are genuinely friendly. Even those in Palin’s inner sanctum who have been told since Friday not to talk to reporters by McCain’s media team, are almost apologetic that they can’t be neighborly and chat, since you came all this way to little Wasilla. And those who can talk, do. All weekend they had the decency not to pretend that they didn’t know the governor’s eldest daughter was pregnant. But they also expected decency in return, that I wouldn’t be the kind of person to make sport out of a young girl’s slip.

The fact is, regardless of what you will hear over the next few days, Bristol’s pregnancy is not a legitimate political issue. Sarah Palin is a longterm member of a group called Feminists for Life, which is not opposed to birth control. So you probably can’t tag her for consigning young people to unwanted pregnancies.

The attempt by the dirtbags of the left to whip this into a scandal will only backfire on them.

Leftwinger Larry Johnson, a former Hillary supporter, has a few apt comments on when family members are and are not appropriately made into political issues. He’s right about the clowns at Kos and the turncoat poofter Andrew Sullivan, too.

Did you catch Barack Obama threatening to fire “his” people if they are helping fan the flames about the preganancy of the Republican Vice Presidential candidate’s 17 year old daughter? Families, so he says, are not fair game.

So, why do you think Barack came out on this? Because immediate internal polling is running very negative against the Obama campaign, which is perceived as pushing the Bristol pregnancy story. They are being painted as bullies and hypocrites. Most Americans, especially those bitter white folks clinging to God and guns, view this as a private matter and none of the media’s business.

For starters, anyone who is 21 years of age or less should not be a target of any campaign. Attacking a 17 year old girl and spreading vicious lies, as have the clowns at Kos and Andrew Sullivan (just to name two of the more prominent offenders) is beyond the pale. Family members who are over 21 are fair game if they are using the fame of their parent, spouse, or relative to make a buck or get an advantage. I think the views and actions of a spouse also are relevant if the man or woman has engaged in conduct such as hurling racial epithets or promoting policies that most Americans reject.

I think it is noteworthy that Sarah Palin’s husband resigned his job in the Oil and Gas industry in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety while Michelle Obama used her husband’s position to enrich herself. She got a job she would not have if her husband had not been a player in the Chicago political machine. To that extent I think the actions and words of spouses are relevant and potentially important.

Charles Krauthammer explains that it isn’t just lack of executive experience that makes Obama’s resume look thin.

Eerily missing at the Democratic convention this year were people of stature who were seriously involved at some point in Obama’s life standing up to say: I know Barack Obama. I’ve been with Barack Obama. We’ve toiled/endured together. You can trust him. I do.

Hillary Clinton could have said something like that. She and Obama had, after all, engaged in a historic, utterly compelling contest for the nomination. During her convention speech, you kept waiting for her to offer just one line of testimony: I have come to know this man, to admire this man, to see his character, his courage, his wisdom, his judgment. Whatever. Anything.

Instead, nothing. She of course endorsed him. But the endorsement was entirely programmatic: We’re all Democrats. He’s a Democrat. He believes what you believe. So we must elect him — I am currently unavailable — to get Democratic things done. God bless America.

Clinton’s withholding the “I’ve come to know this man” was vindictive and supremely self-serving — but jarring, too, because you realize that if she didn’t do it, no one else would. Not because of any inherent deficiency in Obama’s character. But simply as a reflection of a young life with a biography remarkably thin by the standard of presidential candidates.

Who was there to speak about the real Barack Obama? His wife. She could tell you about Barack the father, the husband, the family man in a winning and perfectly sincere way. But that only takes you so far. It doesn’t take you to the public man, the national leader.

Who is to testify to that? Hillary’s husband on night three did aver that Obama is “ready to lead.” However, he offered not a shred of evidence, let alone personal experience with Obama. And although he pulled it off charmingly, everyone knew that, having been suggesting precisely the opposite for months, he meant not a word of it.

Obama’s vice-presidential selection, Joe Biden, naturally advertised his patron’s virtues, such as the fact that he had “reached across party lines to … keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists.” But securing loose nukes is as bipartisan as motherhood and as uncontroversial as apple pie. The measure was so minimal that it passed by voice vote and received near zero media coverage.

Thought experiment. Assume John McCain had retired from politics. Would he have testified to Obama’s political courage in reaching across the aisle to work with him on ethics reform, a collaboration Obama boasted about in the Saddleback debate? “In fact,” reports the Annenberg Political Fact Check, “the two worked together for barely a week, after which McCain accused Obama of ‘partisan posturing’ ” — and launched a volcanic missive charging him with double cross.

So where are the colleagues? The buddies? The political or spiritual soul mates? His most important spiritual adviser and mentor was Jeremiah Wright. But he’s out. Then there’s William Ayers, with whom he served on a board. He’s out. Where are the others?

The oddity of this convention is that its central figure is the ultimate self-made man, a dazzling mysterious Gatsby. The palpable apprehension is that the anointed is a stranger — a deeply engaging, elegant, brilliant stranger with whom the Democrats had a torrid affair. Having slowly waked up, they see the ring and wonder who exactly they married last night.

Read the whole thing.