CNN:

Sarah Palin, ending months of speculation, said Wednesday she will not run for president, either as a Republican or third-party candidate.

——————————-

Back last June, a particularly astute commentator observed:

It is too soon to decide whether the Republican Party ought to choose Sarah Palin as its nominee next year. She has not made it clear, so far, whether she actually intends to seek its nomination.

Were she to try to run, I think she has exhibited both potential major strengths and weaknesses that give one hope for her possible success, but leave one also uncertain of her ability to succeed. If Sarah Palin fails to convince most of us that she can perform consistently at a higher level of eloquence, I’d say that she ought not to be the nominee.

Palin has already carved out for herself a useful, practically effective, and very prominent role as a political commentator. It is possible that remaining free to be herself and operating in that capacity would be more congenial to her and more compatible with her talents and inclinations than campaigning for the presidency.

——————————-

Deciding not to run at this time, I think, speaks very, very positively for Sarah Palin’s good judgment. I think this decision, in fact, proves that she is highly intelligent and is operating politically at a level worthy of respect and admiration.

It is obvious enough why she isn’t running.

She clearly has concluded that running in the second position of a losing ticket does not really give one an automatic ticket to the GOP’s nomination and a firm claim on the presidency.

She undoubtedly recognizes that her resume was impaired by her decision to resign the Alaska governorship and write a book and cash in, in order to avoid her family winding up in bankruptcy as a result of the enormous legal expenses piling up as the result of a endless series of left-wing “ethics” attacks.

Sarah Palin is wise enough to realize that she sometimes appeared inarticulate and unprepared during her previous national campaign, and she has concluded that, before running again nationally, she needs to prove herself. She is only 47 years old, and she has plenty of time to run for the presidency.

Since leaving elected office, Sarah Palin has carved out for herself an extremely useful and highy influential role as national spokesperson for conservatism. She was already, in that role, able to have a real impact on the national debate, and she was, in fact, more effective most of the time than any member of Congress or any governor.

There are a lot of people who have doubts about whether she possesses sufficient knowledge and ability to express herself to serve as president. Serving for years as a national leader of the conservative cause, fighting the good fight in the national political wars, is actually the best way to establish anyone as a credible leader and inevitable candidate. Palin isn’t running for president this year, instead she is proposing to occupy the same national role formerly held in years gone by Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.

Looking on, I find myself wondering why on earth that particular role has been vacant for so long. The reflection is inevitable that, if Newt Gingrich had done, some years ago, what Sarah Palin is doing now, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry would not be the front runners.

You often hear people talk about how bright Newt Gingrich is, and how dumb Sarah Palin is. I think all this proves that exactly the reverse is true. Palin has made the right decision, and there is a pretty good likelihood that she will keep on doing the right thing, and will one day go on to greater things.

The other day, Professor Bainbridge asked the philosophical question:

Why has liking Sarah Palin become a litmus test of one’s conservative bona fides?

It seems to me that I have a duty to respond to this one.

Sarah Palin’s unique combination of political star quality with her open and unabashed display of non-U (in the American sense) taste, life-style, and habits of speech; her lack of establishment affiliations and credentials; and her explicit challenge to the regime of political correctness and the national consensus of the community of fashion make Sarah Palin a potent symbolic emotional trigger in America’s contemporary regional and class conflicts and culture wars.

Her very presence on the national political scene constitutes a direct challenge to the hegemony of everything American U: to looking at the world from the 9th Avenue perspective of the New Yorker, to the definitional authority of the mainstream media, to the factual and moral consensus of the elite on everything from Global Warming to Gay Marriage.

The potential nomination for the presidency by a major party of somebody like Sarah Palin, her celebrity status, and her self-appointed role as national political authority constitutes not only a threat to the American establishment’s political power. It represents also a grave social insult.

The typical American haute bourgeoisie of 2012 would be as offended by the election of Sarah Palin as his counterpart in Philadelphia or Boston was in 1828 by the election of Andrew Jackson and as the Southern aristocracy was by the election of the frontier attorney referred to by his adversaries as “the Illinois ape.”

No one doubts the intelligence of President Lincoln today but, at the time, his intellect also was dismissed on the basis of his speaking with a regional accent different from that of the Eastern metropolitan elite.

They sang mockingly, at the time:

Jeff Davis rides a white horse,
And Lincoln rides a mule,
Jeff Davis is a gentleman,
And Lincoln is a fule.

In the American context, the disdain of the formally-educated elites for unpolished leaders with rustic accents is a very old story. And, in the contemporary context, the alleged intellectual inferiority and general unworthiness of political leaders with strongly conservative views is also getting to be an old story.

Ronald Reagan is remembered today as a great president. Some people would argue he was the greatest president of the last century. But the establishment elite held Ronald Reagan in little less contempt during his lifetime than it holds Sarah Palin today. Reagan was stupid, the left remarked constantly. He was a primitive, just a Hollywood actor (and of B movies at that), simplistic, incurious, banal, and naive.

The conservative thing to do is always to ignore the noises of the tribal culture of the establishment. The political and economic positions supported by conservative political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin are well-founded intellectually and are historically supported by considerable empirical evidence.

It is too soon to decide whether the Republican Party ought to choose Sarah Palin as its nominee next year. She has not made it clear, so far, whether she actually intends to seek its nomination.

Were she to try to run, I think she has exhibited both potential major strengths and weaknesses that give one hope for her possible success, but leave one also uncertain of her ability to succeed. If Sarah Palin fails to convince most of us that she can perform consistently at a higher level of eloquence, I’d say that she ought not to be the nominee.

Palin has already carved out for herself a useful, practically effective, and very prominent role as a political commentator. It is possible that remaining free to be herself and operating in that capacity would be more congenial to her and more compatible with her talents and inclinations than campaigning for the presidency.

In the final analysis, of course, if she were to be nominated and run against Barack Obama, she clearly comfortably passes Glenn Reynolds’ test for preferability to Barack Obama. Though I attended an Ivy League school, I grew up in the mountains of Pennsylvania hunting deer, and I retain enough of my native Alabama-of-the-North redneck identity to view the possible discomfiture of the American community of fashion by the election of Sarah Palin to the presidency with relish.

Republicans electing Sarah Palin would be in the position of Conan the Barbarian experiencing the Cimmerian best thing: “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.” Those lamentations would be louder, in the case of the election of Sarah Palin, than in any other case imaginable.

We should not listen to journalists, politicians, or academics who lecture about overpopulation, looming environmental catastrophe, or general unsustainability — if they live in a house over 2,500 square feet and fly more than once a month. Unfortunately that covers most of our alarmists. Otherwise these megaphones simply are medieval grandees seeking indulgences and penances through loud lectures against what they enjoy in the flesh. ...

It is wise to navigate through the news and elite wisdom through two landmarks: anything that Barack Obama says will be airbrushed, improved, or modified to fit facts post facto; anything Sarah Palin says or does will be contextualized in Neanderthal terms. Teams of Post and Times volunteers now sort through Sarah Palin’s email; not a reporter in the world is curious about what Barack Obama once said about Rashid Khalidi or the Columbia University GPA that won him entrance to Harvard Law School. Accept that asymmetry and almost everything not only makes sense about these two cultural guideposts, but can, by extension, explain the 1860-like division in American itself. ...

Go to Europe and see the left-wing desired future for America: dense urban apartment living by design rather than by necessity; one smart car; no backyard or third bedroom; dependence on mass transit; political graffiti everywhere demanding more union benefits or social entitlements; entourages of horn-blaring, police-escorted technocrats racing through the streets on the hour; gated inherited homes of an aristocratic technocracy on the Mediterranean coast, Rhine, Danube, etc., exempt from much socialist and environmental law; $10 a gallon gas; sky-high power bills; racial segregation coupled with elite praise of illegal immigration and diversity; and unexamined groupthink on green issues, entitlements, and the culpability of the U.S. Drink it all in and you have the liberal agenda for an America to be.

Read the whole thing.

Sarah Palin, unfortunately, in her characteristically more extreme version of the politician trying to bloviate for the media who engages mouth without fully engaging brain, made a syntactical hash of Paul Revere’s ride and laid herself open to accusations by the left that she was astonishingly ill-informed on supposed fine points of America history with which every member of the elite community of fashion is naturally intimately familiar.

A bit painful to watch, but short.

All the glee on the left provoked the learned Professor Jacobson to quote Revere’s actual account, which by one of life’s strange coincidences happened to fit Sarah Palin’s garbled narrative very nicely. It was all just more persiflage, of course. Palin really did misspeak, but the good Professor’s factual rejoinder quite effectively disarmed the smug lefties and drove them into full retreat, muttering unhappily to themselves. Bill Jacobson decisively closed down discussion on this particular incident.

The reality is that Sarah Palin obviously knows approximately as much (or as little) as any typical contemporary American adult about Paul Revere’s ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord. What happened is that Palin tried to combine more than one conceptual thread while distracted, and tied her verbiage into knots. When she is not paying attention, Sarah Palin does not express herself coherently and does not necessarily say what she means to say. Instead, she produces some kind of untidy substitute for what she needed and intended to say, and the result is too commonly a very unsatisfactory and naive sounding failure featuring some form of gaping vulnerability.

Palin is not as glib as many politicians, and she is not as careful as most politicians, so she has a well-recognized tendency to expose herself to this kind of unfavorable interpretation and ridicule from the left.

All politicians are fallible and human, and all politicians are capable of misspeaking when not paying attention, tired, or distracted.

Silver-tongued Barack Obama is not immune to the same problem, but you don’t see Brian Williams ridiculing him for campaigning in all 57 states or referring to Navy corpse-men or (just this week) to the “USS Naval Academy.”

Palin is not unusually ill-informed or even uniquely capable of gaffes. She is just not as cautious and characteristically self-protective as most politicians. There is no doubt, though, that her proclivity toward verbal confusion and gaffes is a serious weakness and a great vulnerability. Her credibility as a presidential candidate rests on her successfully making the effort to overcome these kinds of weaknesses. If Palin isn’t willing or able to improve, she is not going to be nominated.

Byron York quotes political professionals who are sure that Sarah Palin isn’t really running.

The bottom line is Sarah Palin is not going to run for president,” says a Republican adviser close to front-runner Mitt Romney. “She’s making money, she’s moved on, she’s kind of an entertainer rather than a politician. She still has some sway with the grass roots, but she is not going to run.”

“I don’t think she’s going to run,” says a Republican close to Tim Pawlenty. “She has faded a lot in the last few months. I look at what she’s doing now and say that she’s found a way to get back in the story.”

Maybe these representatives of rival campaigns are just spinning. But the fact is, some of the most serious people in the 2012 Republican race don’t believe Palin will run. While the press looks at the former Alaska governor’s publicity operation, political pros look at her campaign operation, or, more accurately, her lack of a campaign operation.

“Watch what she has done,” says the Republican close to Romney. “Has she contacted one major donor across the country about putting together an organization? Has she talked to one member of the Republican National Committee about working for a campaign, or one governor, or one former governor about working for a campaign? The answer is no.”

And, as Rodger notes, Palin running will polarize the race and intensify the debate, and those are good things.

I do know not all of you share my enthusiasm for a Palin presidential campaign. But you should be happy as hell that she’ll try, for this reason.

Win or lose, Sarah Palin will define the issues that the 2012 election will hinge on. What the GOP is offering as we speak are the traditional clusterfluck of b-s artists and, you know, McCains. Yeah, a few, well maybe just one, Herman Cain, can electrify a room, but the rest are yawners. Sarah Palin will come out swinging; talking stuff that milquetoasts would never hazard. She, better than any of them, will operate in the firestorm of media hostility with no flapping. Sarah Palin will ignite things. It may be that the GOP still has enough punch left to knock her out, or the anticipated multi-billion dollar (in kind) media attack campaign will succeed, but the man left standing will have embraced her ideas. And that’s a good thing.

Sarah Palin would not be my first choice for GOP nominee.

I think she would have the disadvantage as a candidate of actually helping Obama by intensively mobilizing the community of fashion to come out against her and turning the election into a class warfare contest in which a certain kind of aspirational person would vote against Sarah Palin simply as a way of affirming his class identity.

Her past performances have been sufficiently uneven that the prospect of the Alaskan equivalent of a cockney flower girl attempting to debate the glib Obama is not something one necessarily looks forward to with comfort and assurance.

Yet… Sarah Palin has definite star power, and more importantly she has genuine conservative principles, and she has also distinguished herself by simply refusing to be crushed or dismissed by the most determined efforts of the establishment media. Palin has guts, and as Marine Corps sergeants are wont to observe, guts can be enough. She may quite possibly be able to pull it off.

Palin may not be my first choice for GOP nominee, but I’m not worried about my class credentials. I can vote for her.

Leftwinger Chris Murphy, at Comics Alliance, has suffered a near mortal blow to his political sensibilities in having to review a new comic book featuring a Steampunk version of Sarah Palin as the superhero star. The new comic contains “fifteen pages of story, followed by eight pages of pin-ups of Sarah Palin.” And Murphy does not like it one bit.

The story starts in the near future, in the immediate aftermath of a war that has destroyed all the Earth’s oil. A new power source is needed, and Sarah Palin steps forward to suggest steam power as a replacement. A conglomerate consisting of big oil and nuclear power interests makes a counterproposal by blowing her up with a bomb at the meeting where she suggests this. ...

Six months later Sarah Palin wakes up to find that she now has body more than half made of robot parts. Powered by steam. ... Obama blew up in the explosion too, and is now part machine and called “Robama.” ... They (including John McCain. now equipped with a robot arm) network a bunch of robots that can be controlled by Palin’s robot body and they all go off to save the world from the evil oil/nuke organization. ... [a]nd [from] the Russians, who, as Robama informs us, have assembled a force along their border with Alaska. ... They then defeat the evil organization run by the the oil/nuke conglomerate. Whose soldiers kind of dress like Cobra. And which is led by Al Gore. That’s followed by the aforementioned pages upon pages of pin-ups, which continue the book’s cash-in on the fetishization of Sarah Palin.

The theoretical publication date was January 19th, but Steampunk Palin is not yet available at TFAW or at Mile High Comics.

Via Ka-Ching!

At Talking Points Memo, progressive Josh Marshall engages in some serious navel-gazing on the question of whether all the negative attacks on Sarah Palin by leftist blogs are giving her attention and inadvertently increasing her influence and inflating her importance.

Frequently a reader will write in to say, “Why are you giving her so much attention? You’re just pumping her up. If you and the other places would stop giving her so much oxygen, she and her whole circus would just wither away.”

I don’t know which circle of the hell of myopia you need to be residing in to think like this. But it’s very deep in there, I assure you. Much as I love this thing our team has created, I assure you that Palin’s popularity, notoriety, footprint on the public stage is quite independent of TPM. Indeed, TPM and a dozen other similar or not so similar publications you can find on the web. Palin is such a big deal because she’s got a chunk of the political nation that is very, very into her. She resonates deeply with her core supporters. She’s one of those people who cuts an electric figure on the public stage because she slices right through the society and generates one intense response from one side and a completely opposite but equally intense response from the other. And she says, let’s be honest, a lot of really crazy stuff.

This is actually a real blind spot for liberals in general—the idea that things that are crazy or tawdry or just outrageous are really best ignored. Don’t give them more attention. You’re just giving them what they want. Or maybe it’s not so practical and utilitarian. Maybe, they say, it’s just beneath us. Focus on the important stuff.

On so many levels this represents an alienation from the popular political culture which is not only troubling in itself but actually damages progressive and center-left politics in general no end. It’s almost the fatal flaw. Democrats often console themselves that even when they don’t win elections, usually their individual policies are more popular than those of Republicans. Too bad you can’t elect a policy. It’s true for instance that Health Care Reform—which still has more opponents than supporters—is pretty popular when you ask people about its individual components. But why is that? It’s not random, because that pattern crops up again and again. It’s another one of the examples where liberals—or a certain strain of liberalism—focuses way too much on the libretto of our political life and far too little on the score. It’s like you’re at a Wagner opera reading the libretto with your ear plugs in and think you’ve got the whole thing covered.

It is a lot of fun to see the progressive rats furiously spinning the wheels in their cages over Sarah Palin.

Palin’s ability to cause progressives generally to behave like roaches that have had 100% pure methedrine dropped on their carapaces is really, in my view, her most delightful talent.

Hat tip to Rodger Kamenetz.

Evan Sayet, writing at Front Page, discovers that his liberal interlocutor in a coffee house conversation hates Sarah Palin with a white hot passion, but (surprise, surprise!) on being pressed is unable to identify exactly what Palin political positions she opposes. It must not be positions, he concludes, that drive liberals round the bend. It has to be who she is, her life story.

what is it about Ms. Palin’s life story that generates this blind loathing? The answer is that, at every turn, Ms. Palin’s story debunks the myths of victimization and self-centeredness that is at the heart of the modern liberal ideology.

First, Ms. Palin is married with children. The Democrat Party’s treasured storyline is that women with children – especially those who take care of them themselves – are oppressed, victimized and doomed to a life without personal fulfillment. Ms. Palin’s life proves them wrong and the Democrats hate her for this. If Ms. Palin were a Democrat she would have offed the last child before he was born so that she could have more “me” time to pursue her own wants and pleasures. There is clearly something very “wrong” with this woman who allowed her “special needs” child to live. They hate her for that.

One of the most obvious demographic differences between the Left and the Right is that people without children – those too self-centered and jealous of others stealing “their” attention, angry and hate-filled “feminists,” radical homosexuals and school children too young to have started a family — are just about guaranteed to pull the lever for anyone with a “D” next to their names. Those married with children are just as assured to pull the lever for someone from the Right.

And Sarah Palin ran a small business. Democrats don’t run businesses. In fact, Democrats don’t do anything. If you eliminated from the voting roll everyone who did nothing other than talk – the academic, the newscaster, the actor, the politician – and those who game the system, collecting welfare and years of unemployment benefits and “workman’s compensation” and food stamps, how many people would be left voting Democrat?

Let’s put it this way, if having had a job – having done something that required either physical labor or risking one’s own money – were a prerequisite to work in the White House, Barack Obama would have to fire 94 percent of his top advisers. That’s a real number. Ninety four percent of Obama’s top advisers have never done anything like run a small store, paint a bridge, wire a house for electricity or anything else other than flap their lips.

This is the genesis of the notion that Palin is “stupid.” Liberals are convinced that there’s something “the matter” with people who have jobs. This is what they mean by “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” Kansas being a place where people work – Hollywood, Cambridge Massachusetts, the TV studios in Manhattan are places were people talk. To the liberal, anyone who has a job must be stupid, after all, not everyone is as good a talker as they are, but surely everyone can find one excuse or another to sit at home and collect welfare.

In fact, to the modern liberal, anyone who has a job is not just stupid, he (or she) is dangerous. These people “cling” to their guns and their religion because they toil for their reward. These people are constantly on the verge of violence, whether it’s an attack like the one they caused in Tucson (according to the leftist script) or just by going home and beating their children. Consider the lyrics of “the working man’s troubadour” by Bruce Springsteen:

Early in the morning/factory whistle blows
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes.
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning line
That’s the work, the workin’, that’s the workin’ life.

End of the day/Factory whistle cries Man walks through them gates with death in their eyes. And you just better believe, boy, somebody’s gonna get it tonight.
(Why?) Cause that’s the work, the workin’ that’s that workin’ life!

Sarah Palin is stupid and dangerous because, well, to those who have made their millions by doing nothing other than talking, that’s the work, the workin’ that’s the workin’ life. Just in case you think that’s just one example of Springsteen’s take on anyone who has a job, consider the horrors of his “daddy” who “worked his whole life, for nothing but the pain.” In this song, “Adam Raised a Cain,” daddy, of course, beats his children, “now he walks these empty rooms searching for something to blame.” And, in fact, it gets worse because, clearly, a child who is beaten is going to continue that cycle of violence and beat his child (“you inherit the sins/you inherit the flames”). So, even to the most sympathetic leftist like Springsteen, not one, not two, but three generations are destroyed all because “daddy” had to go to work.

And they hate Sarah Palin because she joined the PTA and made things better. No, no, that’s not supposed to happen. Schools (read: the teachers’ union) need more money, only more money will solve the problems in the schools. Sarah Palin must be destroyed!

And, finally, they hate Sarah Palin because she was a successful mayor and governor. The Democrat Party narrative is that the American people are too stupid to successfully govern themselves and need Harvard and Yale elitists to dictate to them how they should live their lives. If a graduate of the University of Idaho can successfully run the biggest state in the union, then so can a kid who graduated from Texas A & M or even a kid with a degree from Eureka College.

I think he’s on to something.

Read the whole thing.

Recovering liberal was reminded of a scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four by the way the liberal mainstream media devotes a special kind of attention to Sarah Palin.

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Sarah Palin, the Enemy of the Democratic Party and the Main Stream Media and especially leftist bloggers, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. A little red-haired woman journalist gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Palin was the renegade, one of the leading figures of the Republican Party, almost on a level with the near mythological figure “Reagan”, and had engaged in counter-liberal activities, had been condemned to irrelevancy, but had mysteriously escaped from liberal media attacks and gained a mass following. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Palin was not the principal figure. She was the primal enemy, the defiler of the Party’s plans including the Death Panels. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of her teaching. She was still active and hatching her conspiracies: perhaps under the protection of secret paymasters, perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumoured, the mysterious Koch brothers and the equally mysterious Fox Murdoch.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bill Ivers.

Matthew had a nice comment apropos of all the opportunistic leftist whingeing about “vitriolic political speech.”

The First Amendment is the singer on stage in front of everyone whose voice can not be ignored, while the Second Amendment is the individual in front of the stage making sure no one kills the performance.

Obviously, thought the great big leftwing brains, she must mean 1776. After all, nothing of any significance happened in 1773. (Except the original Boston Tea Party, of course.)

Then, as William Jacobsen describes, liberal America was laughing itself sick over Christine O’Donnell ’s ignorance of the First Amendment’s wall of separation between church and state.

[At] Widener Law School …as soon as O’Donnell questioned whether “separation of church and state” was in the First Amendment, the crowd erupted with gasps of disbelief and mocking laughter.

And if O’Donnell’s imperfect—or perhaps nuanced?—understanding of the First Amendment w[as] so outrageous, how about the inability of Chris Coons, a Yale Law School graduate, to identify the other freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and his misquoting the text of the First Amendment in his challenge to O’Donnell:

“Government shall make no establishment of religion,” Coons responded, reciting from memory the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (Coons was off slightly: The first amendment actually reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”)

Ann Althouse has more on how Coons simply was wrong in his quotation of the First Amendment which led to O’Donnell’s supposed major gaffe about the Establishment Clause, and how the press has taken O’Donnell’s comments out of context:

O’Donnell reacts: “That’s in the First Amendment?” And, in fact, it’s not. The First Amendment doesn’t say “government.” It says “Congress.” And since the discussion is about what local school boards can do, the difference is highly significant.

Also, it isn’t “shall make no establishment of religion.” It’s “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” There’s a lot one could say about the difference between those 2 phrases, and I won’t belabor it here. Suffice it to say that it was not stupid for O’Donnell to say “That’s in the First Amendment?” — because it’s not. Coons was presenting a version of what’s in the cases interpreting the text, not the text itself.

A literal reading of O’Donnell’s comments reflects that she was correct, but of course, the press and the blogosphere don’t want a literal reading, they want a living, breathing reading which comports with their preconceived notions.

In an age of an increasingly sophisticated public in which alternative information channels, like Fox News, AM talk radio, and the blogosphere exist, it is becoming more and more difficult to succeed in winning debates on the basis of crude sloganeering and oversimplification of complex issues and the leftwing mob winds up looking stupider and stupider when it tries relying on its traditional tactics.

Just show him this.

From Van Helsing at Moonbattery.

Or guart chascuns que granz colps,
Que malvaise cançun de nus chantet ne seit!
Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit.

Now must we each lay on most hardily,
So songs of shame shall ne’er be sung of us.
Pagans are wrong and Christians are right.

Chanson de Roland, 1013-1015
—————————————————————
Sarah Palin says that burning a copy of the Koran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is “insensitive and an unnecessary provocation” and reminds us of the Golden Rule.

I don’t think Golden Rule applies to foreign enemies in time of war, and I’d say that Sarah Palin is clearly getting too close to Washington and sounds more and more like a conventional politician.

The FBI is warning that a backlash and retaliation is likely.

Pastor Jones may be a crank, and burning the Koran is neither genteel nor the most attractive choice of gestures, but here we are.

We are in a situation in which the obscure minister of an insignificant local congregation proposes an action insulting to Islam, and consequently find ourselves threatened and warned of bloodshed and massive violence if we don’t stop him.

Meanwhile, the leadership class of the country is responding by urging him to cease and desist, openly acknowledging fear of Islamic violence. Mere squeamishness and discomfort with being placed in the position of defending a gesture which is just not nice is additionally at work in rendering the American leadership class hors de combat.

Most of the same people ran, rather than walked, to defend Imam Abdul Rauf’s project constructing and Islamic Cultural Center, originally named for one of Islam’s most prized European conquests, within the zone of impact of the 9/11 attacks.

Personally, I’m completely fed up with the intelligentsia’s culture of utilitarian calculation and its cowardly inclination to shrink from direct opposition and open conflict with a hostile and insolent alien superstition. At this point, Pastor Jones burning that Koran is just like knocking off the chip that the town bully has placed on his shoulder.

Knock it off and then clean his clock for him, or prepare to bow and scrape and cringe in perpetuity is the real choice. We already have the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Yale University Press practicing self censorship in response to Saracen sensibilities with respect to the Danish cartoons featuring Mohammed. We have Harvard University introducing sexual segregation in its gymnasium to accommodate Islam.

Where does accommodating and appeasing of Islam stop? With dhimmitude (subjection of non-Muslims to Islam) and with payment of the Jizyah, the Islamic tax on non-Muslims.

[T]he Jizyah shall be taken from them with belittlement and humiliation. The dhimmi shall come in person, walking not riding. When he pays, he shall stand, while the tax collector sits. The collector shall seize him by the scruff of the neck, shake him, and say “Pay the Jizyah!” and when he pays it he shall be slapped on the nape of the neck.

And some anonymous hatchet-wielder at Wonkette accuses Sarah Palin of surgical enhancement. That’s the left for you. Their mind is always in the gutter and they judge everyone by their own standards.

Watch Andrew Sullivan climb all over this one.
—————————————————————————-

Lori Ziganto notes how the left, as usual, missed the real story while focusing on trivia and spite.

Rachel Larimore, at Slate’s Double X, asked about the primary wins [Tuesday] night, “Where is the rah-rah sisterhood?”

The overriding theme of Tuesday night’s primary coverage was that it was a big night for female politicians. But there is a noticeable dearth of rah-rah sisterhood going on (though the National Review is pretty excited).

She further noted that the only talk amongst the Left, and feminists in particular, regarding this big night for conservative women was rather nasty comments about said women and lamenting that they were conservatives. Icky businesswomen, to boot! One even asked, “Do you still cheer if the ceiling is crashed by two conservative businesswomen?” ...

[A] big part of [the story of ] last night’s primary wins was that Sarah Palin had endorsed most of the winners, indicating that she does, in fact, wield quite a bit of power and has great pull with large segments of the population. Not everyone has to like Sarah Palin, but even those who don’t, should respect her, if only for the fact that she’s changed the national debate at least twice sheerly through her own Facebook postings. She is one of the best spokespeople we have right now. She pulls no punches and talks straight.

So, what is the story circulating among the lefty blogs and now worming its way into traditional media regarding Sarah Palin today? Not the success of the candidates she endorsed, but, rather, her breasts. That’s right. The big question of the day, first promulgated by the always inane Wonkette, is whether or not Sarah Palin had breast implants. I suppose we should just be grateful that it’s not incessant investigation of her uterus again, although I’m sure Andrew “I’ve finally lost my already weak grasp on sanity” Sullivan will work that in somehow.

UPDATE and CORRECTION:

She looks pretty similar to me in this August 2008 issue cover picture

Hmmm. Commenter Funkyphd informs me that the Vogue cover picture I referred to, which is all over the web, is a Photoshop fake. Thanks to Funkyphd.

I fell for it, I expect, because I knew that there really had been a Vogue feature on Palin published about that time.
—————————————————————————-

So what can we find in its place? How about this 1984 Beauty Pageant picture

and the 0:37 video of her apearance in the swimsuit competition?

Bill Hobbs: “If you think Sarah Palin would do better job than Obama re BP and the oil spill, you’re right. In fact she already has.”

As Governor of Alaska, I did everything in my power to hold oil companies accountable in order to prove to the federal government and to the nation that Alaska could be trusted to further develop energy rich land like ANWR and NPR-A. I hired conscientious Democrats and Republicans (because this sure shouldn’t be a partisan issue) to provide me with the best advice on how we could deal with what was a corrupt system of some lawmakers and administrators who were hesitant to play hardball with some in the oil field business. ...

BP’s operation in Alaska would hurt our state and waste public resources if allowed to continue. That’s why my administration created the Petroleum Systems Integrity Office (PSIO) when we saw proof of improper maintenance of oil infrastructure in our state. We had to verify. And that’s why we instituted new oversight and held BP and other oil companies financially accountable for poor maintenance practices. We knew we could partner with them to develop resources without pussyfooting around with them. As a CEO, it was my job to look out for the interests of Alaskans with the same intensity and action as the oil company CEOs looked out for the interests of their shareholders.

They will keep trying.

The big news of the day (from the perspective of the left blogosphere) was the HuffPo photo taken during her speech at the Tea Party Convention revealing some talking points jotted on the palm of Sarah Palin’s left hand.

This one did not impress many people outside the left, but it did provoke derision from Ann Althouse and a humorous response (see photo above) from Sarah Palin herself.

1. They’ve achieved a great deal less in life than she has, even though some are quite a bit older than she is.
2. They don’t want to be called “haters,” although their reaction to her is purely negative and purely emotional; I’m left groping for another word and “bashers,” far from being a perfect fit, ends up being the least-unsuitable. ..

6. They breathe hard and their pulse quickens. I haven’t run into too many people who are ready to calmly explain Sarah Palin’s lack of qualifications. ...

8. Their lofty opinions of the minimal requirements for the offices Palin has sought, or might seek, is selective. When the topic of conversation shifts to Joe Biden, suddenly it seems the Vice Presidency doesn’t demand a whole lot out of anyone.
9. They don’t seem to think it takes a whole lot to govern Alaska, or to even live there. They don’t appear to think very highly of Alaskans. One wonders if they’d back a Constitutional amendment establishing a “geographical litmus test” for future candidates, and if so, how many other states would go in the “No Can Do” column

It seems to me that Palin provokes fury in members of the community of fashion simply by being an outsider. As the Tanenhaus mugging in the New Yorker so effectively demonstrated, to the American elite the possibility that someone from outside their own class and culture and residential regions could possibly aspire to national leadership seems incongruous and insulting.

Sarah Palin, I have noticed, also provokes a special animus on the part of the lavender left. Andrew Sullivan, for example, seems about to tear himself into pieces à la Rumplestiltskin by an excess of negative passion inspired by Sarah Palin’s very existence. My guess is that the authentic femininity of a beautiful woman when associated with traditional cultural values unfriendly to sexual inversion has roughly the kind of impact on the likes of Andrew Sullivan that the crucifix has on vampires. The volume of the hissing and the screeching is directly proportionate to the frustration of the faux female confronted by what he recognizes as his definitive nemesis and rival. For those of us who had Roman Catholic childhoods the image of those ubiquitous statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary treading on the head of the serpent always come to mind when reading Andrew Sullivan on Palin. It’s all very Jungian: the serpent does not like the idea of the feminine principle, the Mother Goddess Creatrix, which can crush him into the earth with ease.

Move fast, Andrew!

Sarah Palin’s memoir Going Rogue has been been sitting on top of best seller lists for weeks, and has been reprinted 13 times for a total of 2.8 million copies... so far.

Palin even attracted a favorable review from liberal Bay Area critic Sandra Tsing Loh, and now, even more remarkably, we find kind words from postmodernist literary critic Stanley Fish.

When I walked into the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan last week, I headed straight for the bright young thing who wore an “Ask Me” button, and asked her to point me to the section of the store where I might find Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” She looked at me as if I had requested a copy of “Mein Kampf” signed in blood by the author, and directed me to the nearest Barnes and Noble, where, presumably, readers of dubious taste and sensibility could find what they wanted.

A few days later, I attended a seminar on political and legal theory where a distinguished scholar observed that every group has its official list of angels and devils. As an example, he offered the fact (of which he was supremely confident) that few, if any, in the room were likely to be Sarah Palin fans. By that time I had begun reading Palin’s book, and while I wouldn’t count myself a fan in the sense of being a supporter, I found it compelling and very well done. ...

For many politicians, family life is sandwiched in between long hours in public service. Palin wants us to know that for her it is the reverse. Political success is an accident that says nothing about you. Success as a wife, mother and citizen says everything.

Do I believe any of this? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she does, and that her readers feel they are hearing an authentic voice. I find the voice undeniably authentic (yes, I know the book was written “with the help” of Lynn Vincent, but many books, including my most recent one, are put together by an editor). It is the voice of small-town America, with its folk wisdom, regional pride, common sense, distrust of rhetoric (itself a rhetorical trope), love of country and instinctive (not doctrinal) piety. It says, here are some of the great things that have happened to me, but they are not what makes my life great and American. (“An American life is an extraordinary life.”) It says, don’t you agree with me that family, freedom and the beauties of nature are what sustain us? And it also says, vote for me next time. For it is the voice of a politician, of the little girl who thought she could fly, tried it, scraped her knees, dusted herself off and “kept walking.”

In the end, perseverance, the ability to absorb defeat without falling into defeatism, is the key to Palin’s character. It’s what makes her run in both senses of the word and it is no accident that the physical act of running is throughout the book the metaphor for joy and real life. Her handlers in the McCain campaign wouldn’t let her run (a mistake, I think, even at the level of photo-op), no doubt because they feared another opportunity to go “off script,” to “go rogue.”

But run she does (and falls, but so what?), and when it is all over and she has lost the vice presidency and resigned the governorship, she goes on a long run and rehearses in her mind the eventful year she has chronicled. And as she runs, she achieves equilibrium and hope: “We’ve been through amazing days, and really, there wasn’t one thing to complain about. I feel such freedom, such hope, such thankfulness for our country, a place where nothing is hopeless.”

The message is clear. America can’t be stopped. I can’t be stopped. I’ve stumbled and fallen, but I always get up and run again. Her political opponents, especially those who dismissed Ronald Reagan before he was elected, should take note. Wherever you are, you better watch out. Sarah Palin is coming to town.

Back in September, Sam Tanenhaus published a slender book titled, in a note of hopeful optimism, The Death of Conservatism.

Alas! Barack Obama is sinking in the polls, populist critics like Glenn Beck have had a field day exposing the controversial aspects of his appointees, the progressive impetus is faltering in the halls of Congress, and prospects for the kinds of champions of “the civic sector” that Tanenhaus admires are looking dim in upcoming elections.

With characteristic even-handedness, the liberal New Yorker turned to Conservatism expert Tanenhaus for its “review” of Sarah Palin’s memoir “Going Rogue.”

What Tanenhaus really delivers is an in-print liberal temper tantrum, trashing Palin up, down, and sideways, sinking frequently to the level of the high school “in crowd” savaging the non-cool kid from the not-rich family who got above herself. Carried away by his indignation at the nerd Palin, from the wrong side of the nation’s geography and class structure, daring to sit down at the lunch table reserved for the cultural equivalent of cheer leaders and football players, Tanenhaus openly reveals what liberals really think (in their most secret little hearts): Sarah Palin represents the erasure of any distinction between the governing and the governed.

Unlike our liberal friends, we conservatives think the American Revolution erased that distinction. In today’s America, the successors to Jefferson and Madison and Jackson, the people who really believe in the equality of the individual before the law, the people who believe that people from outside the ranks of the national Establishment may be worthy and capable of holding high office, are Republicans.

Today’s liberals are a strange combination of the Secret Six, the Narodnaya Volya, and every high school’s ruling clique. Like the 19th century radical Abolitionists with whom they explicitly identify, Liberals believe they are morally and intellectually more enlightened than Americans generally, and perceive grave and fundamental sins (retrospectively, Slavery and segregation and other forms of inequality; contemporaneously, the absence of National Health Care and the profanation of the Natural World) blemishing America, which they feel entitled to correct regardless of what any or all of the rest of us happen to think about it. Like the 19th century underground radical conspirators, and despite the Fall of the Soviet Union, they still consider themselves a Vanguard of the Left, empowered by History to bring society as it currently exists forcibly into a Utopian future, characterized by an enormously expanded Statism benificently presided over by an elite intelligentsia (i.e. themselves).

On a more mundane level, like any high school clique, they feel entitled to rule, and they demand deference, on the basis of status. Tanenhaus refers to “distinction,” which he summarizes as consisting of skill, experience, intellect but, as we saw in the 2008 campaign, in which the record of the most popular and successful governor in the nation was compared disfavorably by every liberal evaluator of “distinction” to a candidate whose only meaningful accomplishments were a (possibly ghost-written) post-Law School memoir and the campaign then still underway, that skill, experience, and intellect tend to be qualities varying greatly in the eye of the beholder. A captious critic could easily observe that the election of Barack Obama proves just how easily the top lunch-table clique can be seduced by such superficialities as glibness and a good announcer’s voice.

Matthew Dowd has some very bad news for liberals. Sarah Palin, he argues, has a real shot at winning the presidency in 2012.

Gallup polls over the past 60 years show that no president with an approval rating under 47 percent has won reelection, and no president with an approval rating above 51 percent has lost reelection. (George W. Bush’s approval rating in the weeks before the 2004 election hovered around 50 percent.) The 2012 election will be primarily about our current president and whether voters are satisfied with the country’s direction.

Who the Republican candidate is, and his or her qualifications and abilities, will matter only if Obama’s approval rating is between 47 and 51 percent going into the fall of 2012. Interestingly, in the latest Gallup poll Obama’s approval rating was at a precarious 49 percent.

Second, America is still (unfortunately) politically divided and polarized, and Palin benefits from this dynamic. While Democrats love Obama, Republicans look on him with real disfavor. The gap between Obama’s approval rating among Democrats and among Republicans is nearly 70 percentage points—a higher partisan divide than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush experienced. Obama’s agenda and actions this year, and some mistakes, have solidified this divide.

Polls show that Palin’s favorability numbers are a mirror image of those of Obama. She is respected and loved by the Republican base, while Democrats despise her. Granted, independent voters have significant reservations about her capability to be president, and this would be a hurdle in the general election. But to win the Republican nomination, Palin needs only to get enough support from the base to win early key states. Already, in nearly every poll today, she has a level of support that makes her a viable primary candidate. Just look at the crowds and the buzz her book tour is drawing. ...

Like it or not, if Sarah Palin decides to seek our nation’s highest office, she has a shot.

Hold on to your hats. Sarah Palin’s book has actually garnered a positive review from San Francisco liberal democrat Sandra Tsing Loh, and in Salon no less. Tsing Loh concedes that Palin’s opus has “surprising charms.”

Now hold your horses, you snarky, lefty, NPR-listening, New York Times-subscribing readers of Salon. I haven’t jumped ship to declare Sarah Palin herself “great.” I’m from California, after all; I am not a creationist, I am not pro-life, I have never shot a moose. Nor is my culinary specialty an Alaskan dish called “moose chili.” Here on the Left Coast, along with our hummus, we prefer “turkey chili,” which is perhaps less gamey and lower in fat but in the end, I ask you, is it really more humane? (Who killed the turkey? Was it a person or a corporation? This Trader Joe’s we speak of—is he union? Is his name actually “Joe”? And what is his relation to Big Oil’s manipulation of the rising price of Bristol Bay canned fishery salmon to 27 cents a pound?) These are the complexities one ponders at night while falling asleep under the gristly if at times oddly tasty caribou stew that is Sarah Palin’s new 400-plus-page memoir….

(W)hat’s refreshing is that Palin seems unafraid to express herself, warts and all—informal campaign motto: “Heels on! Gloves off!”—and the book just goes where it goes. Much has already been made of her freewheeling critiques, not just of Democrats but also of Republican Party insiders and McCain 2008 campaign managers, particularly in the gloomy waning days of the run. (“Schmidt leveled his eyes at me. ‘We don’t have the money Obama does and the numbers don’t look good. We’ve got to change things up.’ I AGREE. I was eager to hear a new strategy. ‘So,’ he continued, ‘headquarters is flying in a nutritionist.’” Ba-dump-bump!) She is forthcoming enough about her personal failings. Belying her shellacked outer shell, more reminiscent to me of Anita Bryant than Tina Fey, Palin confesses a not-ready-for-prime-time horror at Trig’s Down syndrome diagnosis and relates at least one fairly satisfying campaign trail fight with husband Todd. As opposed to Bush’s post-Yale reinvention of himself as a Texas cowboy, Palin doesn’t seem to be making this folksy stuff up. And really, who would want to? While courting Palin as a teen, Todd gave her “gold nugget earrings”; with only one phone line in the house, she and Todd yapped at night on their back porches on fishing boat radios, until they realized every commercial trucker trundling through town could hear them; the wedding rings were each $35, the post-nuptial dinner was at Wendy’s. All this in the town of Wasilla, which, due to stratospheric sales of this particular product, Wal-Mart has deemed “the Duct Tape capital of the world.”

In Palin’s “Little House on the Tundra” (her own coinage), the very state of Alaska seems to have its own sound, its own language, its own quaint patois. There are so many more colorful sayings than that “pit bull with lipstick” quip! Things grow “faster than fireweed in July”; bench warming during sports games is known as “riding the pine.”

There is the truly startling tale of their neighbor Doc. A private bush pilot, he was electrocuted and fell off a ladder while hand-draping fluorescent flagging over power lines so he could more safely land his Citabria at home. Never one to give up, after the accident Doc “retrained himself to be a left-handed, one-armed dentist”! Writes Palin of her huntin’ dad (who is known for palming balmy, just-removed moose eyeballs and warming fish eggs in his mouth), “So a lot of what Alaskans ate, we raised or hunted: moose, caribou, ptarmigan, and ducks. Dad and his friends became their own small-game taxidermists. Even today, my parents’ living room looks like a natural history museum. And when an earthquake hits, Dad can tell the magnitude by how fast the tail wags on the stuffed cougar.” As Frontier literature, I believe “Going Rogue” compares favorably to the Natty Bumpo stories of James Fenimore Cooper. And who wants to argue with me?

Indeed, by the end of this book, I thought, Never mind the hundreds of thousands of reasons the fiery Republican femme fatale is hated in, for instance, my oh-so-blue state of California. Honestly, a fair amount of what makes Sarah Palin weird is the very same stuff that makes Alaska weird.

Read the whole thing.

I can think of one prominent blogger who is going to have a cow when he reads this.

Heaven knows, Andrew Sullivan is a prolific and occasionally intelligent blogger. Andrew combines a rather wide ranging curiosity with a penchant for enthusiastic argument. But… Andrew has turned into a textbook case demonstrating how sexual deviants, though often extraordinarily talented, are too frequently irrational, irresponsible, and abusive of positions of authority and trust.

A number of prominent bloggers marveled back in 2005 and 2006 as Andrew Sullivan magically transformed himself from a fervent supporter of the invasion of Iraq into a constant complainer about detainee treatment and enhanced interrogations. Frankly, it was impossible to fail to notice that Andrew Sullivan’s emotionalism on the subject of harsh treatment of jihadist detainees had the intensely subjective character of a hysterical sissy mentally projecting a grotesquely exaggerated version of detainee sufferings upon himself and then protesting accordingly. I believe it was Micky Kaus, around that time, who dubbed him “Excitable Andrew.”

Unfortunately, the psychosexual perversity just keeps happening.

Beyond the big salty tears that pour down Andrew’s hirsute cheeks over the sufferings of those poor little Jihadi terrorists, his next major insanity focuses on Sarah Palin, and Andrew’s behavior in relation to Palin is not a pretty sight.

It’s not easy to understand exactly why, but it is clear that an attractive, charismatic woman with conservative views has an enormous emotional impact on Andrew Sullivan. He has been blogging about crazed theories of his own about her family and publishing an endless series of attacks and accusations directed at Sarah Palin ever since she first appeared on the national political stage last year. The appearance of Sarah Palin’s book recently drove Andrew right around the bend. He published a lengthy list of alleged inaccuracies, and had to take a day off from blogging in order to obsess over how much he hates Sarah Palin.

It is more than a little unseemly for a major magazine like the Atlantic to offer a platform for Andrew Sullivan to use to throw the homosexual tantrums in which he lashes out so viciously and unrelentingly at Sarah Palin. The reader becomes uncomfortable, reluctantly recognizing in Sullivan’s rants the bitter jealousy of the pansy for the beauty and sexual attractiveness of the real woman, the obsessive hatred of the inverted and the sexually diseased for someone so conspicuously normal and healthy.

When you come right down to it, we Americans do not need the political advice of a non-citizen British subject, endless lectures on morality from a sexual pervert, or disquisitions of the proper limits of violence from a sissy. We also do not need Sullivan’s exhibitions of sexual hostility toward Sarah Palin.

He was recently arrested for drug law violations in Massachusetts. He is HIV positive, and consequently ineligible for naturalization. He has apparently admitted that accusations of attempts on his part to expose US residents to potentially fatal sexually transmitted disease are true.

Robert Stacy McCain is perfectly correct in his suggestion that the US should DEPORT ANDREW SULLIVAN! Do it.

Andrew Malcolm, at the LA Times, sits on the sidelines, marveling at the enormous avalanche of leftwing abuse prompted by the publisher’s release of Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue.

Wow, for somebody who’s supposed to be such a political joke, an Arctic ditz and eminently dismissable as a serious anything except maybe a stay-at-home hockey mom, Sarah Palin is sure drawing an awful lot of attention from Democrats and eager critics.

The launch of her “Going Rogue” interviews Monday on “Oprah,” of her book today, of her on-air chat today with Rush Limbaugh at 10 a.m. Pacific and of her mid-America bus book tour Wednesday ignited a surprisingly large blizzard of derogatory Democrat dis-missives.

Every few minutes another note from Democratic National Committee operatives and others dropped into electronic mailboxes across the media-verse, helpfully passing on even the tiniest tidbit of negative news about Palin.

You know how sometimes a friend tells you how much he/she doesn’t really care about….

...someone else. Really doesn’t! And repeats it a sufficient number of times that you become convinced of precisely the opposite?

So maybe she does matter after all.

Sarah Palin’s new book Going Rogue will not be released by its publisher until November 17, but it is already the Number 1 best selling title on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

A hit piece in the New York Post sneers over the fact that Sarah Palin had the assistance of a collaborator (Lynn Vincent) in producing her book. The press never talks that way about books (all written with—or by—collaborators) published by democrats like the Clintons.

I suppose the difference is that Palin identified her collaborator publicly, rather than denying one existed.

JWF reports that Palin is having the last laugh over the Post attack piece’s “blithering idiot” insult. Apparently, she is getting hundreds of speech requests at her new $100,000 speaking fee. On top of her $7 million book advance, those speeches will quickly pay off the legal expenses that caused her to relinquish the Alaska governorship, and will give her a platform to use to make an impact on the political issues of the day.

Leftists characteristically avoid openly advocating their goals. They don’t call themselves Marxists or socialists. These days they even avoid the label of liberal, and prefer to speak of themselves as “progressives.” Their reliance on deception, their preference for seeking power not via an open fight, but rather by a gradual process of subversion, have made traditionally the favored zoological metaphors for leftists, not major predators like wolves, but small and sneaky vermin like rats or roaches. Winston Churchill once even described Lenin (being transported to Russia from Switzerland in a sealed train by Germany) as resembling a plague bacillus.

This morning, however, Maureen Dowd is a bit more denunciatory than usual, accusing Sarah Palin of turning back country Alaska major predator control tactics on Rahm Emanuel’s brother, medical ethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.

At the moment, what she wants to do is tap into her visceral talent for aerial-shooting her favorite human prey: cerebral Ivy League Democrats.

Just as she was able to stir up the mob against Barack Obama on the trail, now she is fanning the flames against another Harvard smarty-pants — Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a White House health care adviser and the older brother of Rahmbo.

She took a forum, Facebook, more commonly used by kids hooking up and cyberstalking, and with one catchy phrase, several footnotes and a zesty disregard for facts, managed to hijack the health care debate from Mr. Obama.

Sarahcuda knows, from her brush with Barry on the campaign trail, that he is vulnerable on matters that demand a visceral and muscular response rather than a logical and book-learned one. Mr. Obama was charming and informed at his town hall in Montana on Friday, but he’s going to need some sustained passion, a clear plan and a narrative as gripping as Palin’s I-see-dead-people scenario.

She has successfully caricatured the White House health care effort, making it sound like the plot of the 1976 sci-fi movie “Logan’s Run,” about a post-apocalyptic society with limited resources where you can live only until age 30, when you must take part in an extermination ceremony called “Carousel” or flee the city.

Painting the Giacometti-esque Emanuel as a creepy Dr. Death, Palin attacked him on her Facebook page a week ago, complaining that his “Orwellian thinking” could lead to a “death panel” with bureaucrats deciding whether to pull the plug on less hardy Americans.

When democrats go ballistic like this, and pull out all the stops on denial, you can tell that someone has struck a nerve. For several days now, democrats everywhere have been screaming in pain over this one. Even my liberal classmates have been faithfully repeating the Gospel According to Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos: “Palin is lying about ‘Death Panels.’”

Was Palin lying? Let’s see.
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Sarah Palin’s Facebook entry said:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Palin was repeating a point made in a House speech, Monday, July 27, 2009 (5:18 video), by Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-6th district Minn.)
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Much of Michelle Bachmann’s speech consisted of her reading a July 24th column from the New York Post by Betsey McCaughey. McCaughey quoted Dr. Emanuel repeatedly:

Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts (produced by democrat so-called health care reform) will not be pain-free. “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change,” he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).

Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008). ...

Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ‘96).

Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.

He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years” (Lancet, Jan. 31).

Cornell Law Professor William A. Jacobson observes that the argument Sarah Palin quoted from Rep. Bachman certainly is important and central to the debate of proposed health care reform.

The article in which Dr. Emanuel puts forth his approach is “Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions,” published on January 31, 2009. A full copy is embedded below. Read it, particularly the section beginning at page 6 of the embed (page 428 in the original) at which Dr. Emanuel sets forth the principles of “The Complete Lives System.”

While Emanuel does not use the term “death panel,” Palin put that term in quotation marks to signify the concept of medical decisions based on the perceived societal worth of an individual, not literally a “death panel.” And in so doing, Palin was true to Dr. Emanuel’s concept of a system which

considers prognosis, since its aim is to achieve complete lives. A young person with a poor prognosis has had a few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern the disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognoses. When the worst-off can benefit only slightly while better-off people could benefit greatly, allocating to the better-off is often justifiable….

When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.

Put together the concepts of prognosis and age, and Dr. Emanuel’s proposal reasonably could be construed as advocating the withholding of some level of medical treatment (probably not basic care, but likely expensive advanced care) to a baby born with Down Syndrome. You may not like this implication, but it is Dr. Emanuel’s implication not Palin’s.

The next question is, whether Dr. Emanuel’s proposal bears any connection to current Democratic proposals. There is no single Democratic proposal at this point, only a series of proposals and concepts. To that extent, Palin’s comments properly are viewed as a warning shot not to move to Dr. Emanuel’s concept of health care rationing based on societal worth, rather than a critique of a specific bill ready for vote.

Certainly, no Democrat is proposing a “death panel,” or withholding care to the young or infirm. To say such a thing would be political suicide.

But one interesting concept which is central to the concepts being discussed is the creation of a panel of “experts” to make the politically unpopular decisions on allocating health care resources. In a letter to the Senate, Barack Obama expressed support for such a commission:

I am committed to working with the Congress to fully offset the cost of health care reform by reducing Medicare and Medicaid spending by another $200 to $300 billion over the next 10 years, and by enacting appropriate proposals to generate additional revenues. These savings will come not only by adopting new technologies and addressing the vastly different costs of care, but from going after the key drivers of skyrocketing health care costs, including unmanaged chronic diseases, duplicated tests, and unnecessary hospital readmissions. To identify and achieve additional savings, I am also open to your ideas about giving special consideration to the recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created by a Republican Congress. Under this approach, MedPAC’s recommendations on cost reductions would be adopted unless opposed by a joint resolution of the Congress. This is similar to a process that has been used effectively by a commission charged with closing military bases, and could be a valuable tool to help achieve health care reform in a fiscally responsible way.

Will such a commission decide to curtail allocation of resources to those who are not deemed capable of “complete lives” based on prognosis and age, as proposed by Dr. Emanuel? There is no way to tell at this point since we do not have a final Democratic proposal, or know who would be appointed to such a commission.

Ezekiel Emanuel’s paper: Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions

Just how much trouble Obamacare and the democrat party are in can be seen by the fact that they have actually managed to lose the confidence, and the support for their health care reform bill, of not only a majority of the public, but of even such an icon of the intellectual left as Camille Paglia.

In Salon, right now, today, (in addition to praising a topless photo of the 50-year-old Sharon Stone) avante-garde cultural commentator Paglia is agreeing with Sarah Palin and calling for Nancy Pelosi’s head. I love it.

(W)ho would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises—or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama’s aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you’re happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn’t conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it’s the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan—it’s the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves. ...

...(W)hat do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the “mob”—a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a “death panel” under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin’s shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.

Not only were we offended at the sheer effrontery of McCain’s pick: How dare the Republicans proffer this déclassée piece of Wasilla trailer trash whose only claim to fame was that she didn’t exercise her right to choose? Where were her degrees from Smith or Barnard, her internships at PETA, the Brookings Institution, or the Young Pioneers? We were also outraged that the Stupid Party had just nominated a completely unqualified candidate nobody had ever heard of, a first-term governor of Alaska whose previous experience consisted of a small-town mayoralty. As opposed to our guy, Barry Soetoro of Mombasa, Djakarta, and Honolulu, a first-term senator nobody had ever heard of, whose previous experience had been as a state senator (D., Daley Machine) in Illinois. After eight long, illegitimate, lawless years of &*^%BUSH$#@! tyranny, how dare you contest this election?

And so the word went out, from that time and place: Eviscerate Sarah Palin like one of her field-dressed moose. Turn her life upside down. Attack her politics, her background, her educational history. Attack her family. Make fun of her husband, her children. Unleash the noted gynecologist Andrew Sullivan to prove that Palin’s fifth child was really her grandchild. Hit her with everything we have: Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, taking a beer-run break from her quixotic search for Mr. Right to drip venom on Sister Sarah; post-funny comic David Letterman, to joke about her and her daughters on national television; Katie Couric, the anchor nobody watches, to give this Alaskan interloper a taste of life in the big leagues; former New York Times hack Todd “Mr. Dee Dee Myers” Purdum, to act as an instrument of Graydon Carter’s wrath at Vanity Fair. Heck, we even burned her church down. Even after the teleological triumph of The One, the assault had to continue, each blow delivered with our Lefty SneerTM (viz.: Donny Deutsch yesterday on Morning Joe), until Sarah was finished.

You know what? It worked! McCain finally succumbed to his long-standing case of Stockholm Syndrome (“My friends, you have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency”), Tina Fey turned Palin into a see-Russia-from-my-house joke, “conservative” useful idiots like Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker hatched her, and finally Sarah cried No más and walked away. If we could, we’d cut off her head and mount it on a wall at Tammany Hall, except there is no more Tammany Hall unless you count Obama’s Tony Rezko–financed home in Chicago. And it took only eight months — heck, Sarah couldn’t even have another kid in the time it took us to destroy her. That’s the Chicago way!

Read the whole thing.

Jay Valentine offers a likely sounding explanation and a prophecy which matches my own thinking very well.

There is a point in tournament poker where one player doesn’t have the chips to play out the next raise, but they have great cards, so they call “all in.” At that point, nobody can raise them and the hand gets played out—either to a game changing win or a total loss for the person who made the call.

It appears Sarah Palin decided she and her family could no longer deal with the thousand cuts, so she is “all in.”

Palin may well decide to stay home and make macaroni and cheese for the kids, but history may not let her. She has already established herself as a major player—candidate or not. More importantly, the wildly critical left has put her in a financial position where she has no choice but to speak out, perhaps do a book, and make the money she needs to pay legal bills for 15 unwarranted “ethics” investigations, all of which she handily won. The legal bills remain.

One doubts that when she speaks out, it will be about how to field dress a moose. Rather, she will take positions in speaking and writing about her core beliefs. That is a problem for the radical left of their own creation.

Palin enters the arena where the fight is not between liberal and conservative; nor is it between Republican and Democrat. The fight is between elite and the common person who works every day and continually asks how Washington D.C., under both parties, is so out of control.

It is very amusing today reading leftwing blogs spinning the news of Sarah Palin’s resignation like an old Victrola revolving a hot jazz 78rpm disk.

Brad Friedman has a big scoop, he claims. He just knows that it was an impending financial scandal driving her from office. It’s ugly opposing the left. Manufactured scandals come the way of someone like Sarah Palin like the moths attracted by your headlights when you drive through swampy woods at night. A lot of leftie blogs are hugging this theory to their chests and swaying side to side as they coo over it.

Josh Marshall can’t make up his mind if she’s leaving because she’s sulking or if it’s because of recent revelations (apparently different from Brad’s), not about anything she’s allegedly actually done, but somehow nonetheless proving her bad character. Whew!

The democrat national committee is adopting the ever popular “one more example of a pattern of bizarre behavior” throwing-up-their-hands-and-giving-up non-explanation. “We knew all along she was barking mad. She’s conservative”

On the whole, I think Mark Halperin’s last suggestion seems the most likely.

If she wants to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, she needs to spend more time raising money, establishing her international and national expertise, and traveling the Lower 48. And she needs to start now.

The governorship was tying her down, and using up her limited time and resources battling a basically trivial shit storm of frivolous, petty, and partisan smears that no one nationally cares very much about, but which the establishment media may be relied upon to report loudly.

Leaving office allows her to cash in on a book deal and make speeches repairing her family’s finances, and to fund raise in earnest for the 2012 race while operating outside of elected office as a conservative leader addressing national rather than provincial state issues.

Yesterday, news of Sarah Palin’s action swept discussion of other events right off the aggregating pages. The left should tremble. They don’t like Sarah Palin, but they too recognize that she has the most important element in political success in the bubble-headed media-driven culture of today’s America. Sarah Palin has star power. Combine the power of celebrity charisma with conservative ideas, and you have an irresistible combination. Sarah Palin could potentially bury Barack Obama and today’s ascendant left.