[Swiftwater Gazette] Sarah Speaks!

Mon Nov 9 10:36:40 EST 2009

Elle,

As everyone knows by now, I'm hardly objective about "all things
Sarah" - you can count me in as a die-hard Palinista. That attitude
predates her pick as the 2008 GOP VP candidate. She has created a
cottage industry amongst the political punditry, bloggers, and gossip
columnists predicting her eventual demise. My favorite label is that
of "quitter".  Those who continue with the quitter meme either aren't
aware, or choose to forget, that indeed she is a quitter.  She quit
the Alaska Oil & Gas Commission (a 6-figure job her family depended
on) out of protest to ethics violations and the firing of seven Oil &
Gas employees. When this so-called quitter returned to power as the
Governor of Alaska, she reinstated the seven employees, as well as
blew-up her own party. The other stream of constant criticism we  hear
about Palin is her hardcore right wing social views.  Again, few are
aware of a couple of telling incidents during her term as Guv.  The
Alaska Legislature chooses a panel of potential AK Supreme Court Judge
candidates for the Governor to choose from.  In an attempt to box
Palin into a dilemma, they gave her only two candidates to choose
from; one, a stellar jurist that was pro-choice, and a second that was
a mediocre legal talent but strongly pro-life.  We all know Sarah's
personal beliefs on the issue.  Palin spent a weekend reviewing the
professional work of both candidates and chose the better talent. A
second revealing action she took was this; the AK Legislature passed a
bill that would deny domestic partners of gay state employees
benefits. Palin openly stated her opposition to gay marriage, then
vetoed the bill because she said it was unconstitutional.
Unconstitutional?  You mean there's politicians that pay attention to
those documents? I took a copy of "Sarah Takes On Big Oil" with me to
read on the airplane to DC.  It is a great book for anyone who enjoys
"David v Goliath" stories and I recommend it as a primer on Mrs.
Palin. I can't wait for her book to come in the mail and the series of
interviews that follow, starting with Oprah!  There is just something
wickedly funny about a housewife and mother posting opinions on a
Facebook page whilst wearing pajamas and slippers, and everytime she
does, veins start popping out all over leftist world.

Brad
-----------------------------------
Sarah Palin and the Dysfunctional Political Class

Posted By James V. DeLong On November 8, 2009 @ 12:10 am In . Column2
06, Elections 2008, Media, Opinion, Politics, US News |

The frenetic hostility to Sarah Palin, even by many on the Republican
side, is unnerving, because her qualifications to be president are
objectively better than those of almost anyone who has been on the
national ticket over the past decade.

A reasonable conclusion is that these qualifications are precisely the
cause of the hostility. To admit to the reality that the dominant
political class, including the MSM and the punditocracy of both
parties, has been giving us abysmal presidential candidates, to accept
that a hockey mom plucked from small-town Alaska is better than the
best that the political class can come up with, would require
recognition of the terrible truth that the system has become deeply
dysfunctional. Doing this would force our political elites to look
into an abyss of serious questions about the functioning of our
democracy. Palin creates a cognitive dissonance so intense that it
simply cannot be accepted.

To start, compare her experience as a person, mayor, and state leader
with George W. Bush’s pre-presidential career as an alcoholic,
baseball executive, and ornamental governor. Whatever one thinks of
his performance as president — and like most conservatives my views
are complex — he was not promising material as of 2000.

Al Gore would be disqualified by knowledge of his academic career and
by a reading of Earth in the Balance [1], an exercise in messianic
ignorance. His subsequent career getting rich from climate change
subsidies would reinforce this opinion. John Kerry had a Senate career
of unbroken mediocrity, compounded by his unapologized-for Winter
Soldier exercise [2] and the still-unanswered Swift Boat questions
[3].

John Edwards had no shadow of a qualification, and again the judgment
is confirmed by subsequent events.

Obama’s qualifications were will-o-the-wisp. His supporters cited his
“potential,” as they had to, because his only actual feat was his
first book — and the claims that this was ghosted have been met by
non-denial. The Asia Times characterizes these rumors [4] as
“well-established,” which tells one something about current foreign
assessments of Obama. The president’s long-standing ties to the
radical left should have tipped the balance to the negative.

Vice President Joe Biden has a long history of blurring the line
between fantasy and reality to a degree that one wonders if he sees
any distinction, but 36 years of this is enough to make him
“qualified.” This, too, tells a lot about the mental processes of the
dominant political class.

One can deeply respect John McCain’s courage and service. But he is an
erratic senator, with a tendency to reach decisions on a whim and then
excoriate anyone who disagrees. As demonstrated by McCain-Feingold [5]
— which hamstrings the middle-class base of the Republicans while
leaving intact the power of unions and public employees, the media,
the rich, and Native American tribes — McCain does not, or cannot,
think even two moves ahead.

This leaves Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney as the only candidates with
any weight, and Palin’s executive experience gives her an edge over
Lieberman.

The list may not be impressive, but being number two is not bad.

The biases of the political class also explain why Palin got
sandbagged at the outset. Anyone familiar with the world of Washington
private schools knows that they are experts at resume building —
creating scads of extracurricular activities and awards so that every
student can shine for the college of his or her choice. Well, the kids
learned it from their parents, who are also experts at blowing air
into the CV.

Palin was called inexperienced because she had never gone on a
five-photo-ops-with-foreign-leaders-in-four-days tour, held show
hearings on the topic du jour, introduced meaningless legislation, or
had her staff give her a list of the publications she should say she
was currently reading.

In fact — and of course — negotiating with Exxon is better preparation
for negotiating with Putin than is a foreign photo op. And running a
town is a miles-better education than warming a Senate seat. But
again, it is not in the interests of the political class to
acknowledge this.

So her handlers tried to cram her into a D.C. frame of reference by
stuffing her with facts on national and international issues that
could withstand grilling from a gotcha! press, something that was
neither possible nor the right game.

Palin should instead have conceded that of course she would not be
ready to be president on day one, but that:

    1. What she had turned her hand to, she had quickly learned to do
successfully — and this ability, based on her solid grounding in the
realities of American life, was and is the real test.

    2. If she were called upon on day one, she would be the head of a
government, not a lone individual, and she had the experience in
handling people that would be necessary to tap into the collective
intelligence of the nation.

Those are called real qualifications!

Since the election, Palin has learned her lesson about the political
handlers and she has followed Mao’s advice, as channeled through Anita
Dunn — “you fight your war and I’ll fight mine.”

Her resignation from the governorship, which was mostly condemned by
the pundits, was dead-on shrewd. Why let herself be tied down
defending perjured ethics charges from people with infinite money,
whose only desire is to shut her up or bankrupt her? Her willingness
to be herself and pursue her own ideas without regard to whether or
not they could lead to future office is a source of great political
strength. Her public pronouncements, such as the Hong Kong speech [6],
are serious and adult, unlike most of the vapidity produced by
politicians, especially Obama. And Palin is mastering the art of
short, sharp statements.

None of this is winning over the political class. Indeed, Palin’s
refusal to fulfill their desires that she be a clown or take a proper
role in the kabuki theater of Washington is making them angrier than
ever and more determined to marginalize her. But the disillusionment
with government among the tea-partying middle class is so great that
every attack on her builds her stature on Main Street.

Is Palin going to be nominated? Hard to tell, even assuming she wants
it. The unrelenting hostility of the media does have an insidious
effect. She also needs to achieve the discipline in speaking that she
displays with her written pronouncements — more brevity and less
nattering — but this is doable.

The cultural issues are more important. There is a middle ground of
people who are against the increasing bipartisan kleptocracy but not
conservative on cultural matters — personally, I am pro-choice (but
with reasonable caveats about the exercise of that choice), utterly
indifferent to gay marriage, pro-gun, pro-decriminalization of
marijuana, in favor of a forward strategy towards the terrorist wing
of Islam and with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sympathetic to
China’s extraordinary effort to remake itself economically and
politically.

Ultimately, this may or may not make me into a Palin supporter. But
either way, our most fundamental current crisis is the inability of
the political class to produce plausible leaders, and its hostility to
anyone, such as Palin, who threatens the system. The election of Obama
was a symptom of our current dysfunctional politics, not a cause.

We need more Palins, not fewer.

James V. DeLong is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law
School, and a former Book Review Editor of the Harvard Law Review.

---------------------------------------

On 11/8/09, elle <ragdollelle at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Wow..if that's not a call to action....
>
> elle
>
> --- On Sun, 11/8/09, Brad Haslett <flybrad at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> From: Brad Haslett <flybrad at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Swiftwater Gazette] Sarah Speaks!
> To: "Letters to the Editor"
> <swiftwatergazette at mailman.theswiftwatergazette.com>
> Date: Sunday, November 8, 2009, 12:38 PM
>
>
> The Pelosi Bill Was Rammed Through on Saturday, But Sunday’s Coming
> Yesterday at 10:34pm
>
> We’ve got to hold on to hope, and we’ve got to fight hard because
> Congressional action tonight just put America on a path toward an
> unrecognizable country.
>
> The same government leaders that got us into the mortgage business and
> the car business are now getting us into the health care business.
>
> Despite Americans’ decisive message last Tuesday that they reject the
> troubling path this country has been taking, Speaker Pelosi has broken
> her own promises of transparency to ram a health “care” bill through
> the House of Representatives just before midnight. Why did she push
> the 2,000 page bill this weekend? Was she perhaps afraid to give her
> peers and the constituents for whom she works the chance to actually
> read this monstrous bill carefully, if at all? Was she concerned that
> Americans might really digest the details of a bill that the Wall
> Street Journal has called “the worst piece of post-New Deal
> legislation ever introduced”?
>
> This out-of-control bureaucratic mess will be disastrous for our
> economy, our small businesses, and our personal liberty. It will slam
> businesses at a time when we are at double-digit unemployment rates –
> the highest we’ve seen in a quarter of a century. This massive new
> bureaucracy will cost us and our children money we don’t have. It will
> rob Americans of more of our freedom and further hamper the free
> market.
>
> Make no mistake: we’re on course to have government commandeer
> one-sixth of our economy. The people who gave us Fannie Mae and
> Freddie Mac now want to run our health care. Think about that.
>
> All of us who value the sanctity of life are grateful for the success
> of the pro-life majority in the House this evening in its battle
> against federal funding of abortion in this bill, but it’s ironic
> because we were promised that abortion wasn’t covered in the bill to
> begin with. Our healthy distrust of these government leaders made us
> look deeper into the bill because unfortunately we knew better than to
> trust what they were saying. The victory tonight to amend the bill and
> eliminate that federal funding for abortion was great – because
> abortion is not health care. Now we can only hope that Rep. Stupak’s
> amendment will hold in the final bill, though the Democratic
> leadership has already refused to promise that it won’t be scrapped
> later.
>
> We had been told there were no “death panels” in the bill either. But
> look closely at the provision mandating bureaucratic panels that will
> be calling the shots regarding who will receive government health
> care.
>
> Look closely at provisions addressing illegal aliens’ health care coverage
> too.
>
> Those of us who love freedom and believe in open and transparent
> government can only be dismayed by midnight action on a Saturday.
> Speaker Pelosi’s promise that Americans would have 72 hours to read
> the final bill before the vote was just another one of the D.C.
> establishment’s too-common political ploys. It’s broken promises like
> this that turn people off to politics and leave them disillusioned
> about the future of their country.
>
> But despite this late-night maneuvering, many of us were paying close
> attention tonight. We’ll keep paying close attention. We need to let
> our legislators in Washington know that they still represent us, and
> that the majority of Americans are not in favor of the “reform” they
> are pushing. After all, this is still a country “of the people, by the
> people, and for the people.” We will make our voices heard. It’s on to
> the Senate now. Our legislators can listen now, or they can hear us in
> 2010. It’s their choice.
>
> - Sarah Palin
>
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