The hostess with the moosest [Mark Steyn]

Over in the Frumistan province of the NR caliphate, our pal David is not happy about the Palin pick. I am – for several reasons.

First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, “all-American”, but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I’m not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin’ Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who’s done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of “community organizer” and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.

Second, it can’t be in Senator Obama’s interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans’ vice-presidential pick is “even more” inexperienced than the Democrats’ presidential one.

Third, real people don’t define “experience” as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain’t run nothin’ but his mouth. She’s done the stuff he’s merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party’s corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign’s thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night).

Fourth, Governor Palin has what the British Labour Party politician Denis Healy likes to call a “hinterland” – a life beyond politics. Whenever Senator Obama attempts anything non-political (such as bowling), he comes over like a visiting dignitary to a foreign country getting shanghaied into some impenetrable local folk ritual. Sarah Palin isn’t just on the right side of the issues intellectually. She won’t need the usual stage-managed “hunting” trip to reassure gun owners: she’s lived the Second Amendment all her life. Likewise, on abortion, we’re often told it’s easy to be against it in principle but what if you were a woman facing a difficult birth or a handicapped child? Been there, done that.

Fifth, she complicates all the laziest Democrat pieties. Energy? Unlike Biden and Obama, she’s been to ANWR and, like most Alaskans, supports drilling there.

Sixth (see Kathleen’s link to Craig Ferguson below), I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.

Gov. Palin said that discussion of alternative views should be allowed to arise in classrooms. The quote from Gov. Palin that I’m thinking of is…

“I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.”

She maintained that she would not push any school to add creationism into the curriculum. This was a widely covered interview, with some making it seem one way and others making it seem another. I filtered what I read from several sources and have decided that she’s sincere in not wanting to teach creationism, but allowing it to be debated as an alternative theory in class, just as she said.

As for telling me to shut the F up because I’m not helping, thanks but I stand by my freedom of speech. I don’t mind being told I’m wrong. I do mind being told I’m stupid. Point to where I can read and learn a new viewpoint instead of trying to create an illusion that you’re smarter because you can make others seem less intelligent.

In short, sir, why attack me when you could simply discuss and exchange ideas? Who is it, exactly, that you are helping in that way?

Actually, he won’t release his grades from Columbia and Harvard law, so we don’t know how “eddukated” he might be. He didn’t write much of anything for Harvard law review of much of anything when he was teaching in Chicago.

Thoughtful ? practical ? Geez, for the nearly 2 years he’s been actively running, he has been all over the map on everything. Most of his waffling view changes and attempts to rationalize (guns, abortion, Iraq, meeting with jackass foreign “leaders”, going into Pakistan w/o Pakistanis agreeing et al. and etc.) seem to have been for simple pragmatic purposes. He has taken different policy positions (see esp. NAFTA) before different audiences. I have no idea where Obama actually stands on any of this stuff.

He told rich San Franciscans in July that poor little pathetic you cling to guns and religion in your pathetic-ness.

I’m reasonably sure, however, that Barack Obama completely distorts and misconstrues the job of President of the US in his apparent desire to use the Bully Pulpit for redistribution of income, you know, in his own off guard words, “spread the wealth around.”

Uh, uh, uh uh…articulate ?

Oh wait, although Joe Biden said September 2007 that Barack Obama was too inexperienced to be leader of the free world, Biden also noted around that time that Obama was “clean and articulate.”

Maybe that’s what you mean.

I want someone who I could drink a beer with as my president. You know, someone like me–someone totally incapable of running a country. — AlanNYC

AlanNYC for President! — AlanNYC

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Reason and judgment are the qualities of leadership. -- Tacitus]

P.S. I’m certain that AlanNYC could drink a beer with himself. He seems the perfect narcissist. And he obviously has neither of the qualities Tacitus mentions. Therefore, he’d be his own perfect president.

Well, my passport is Canadian, my birth certificate shows that I was born in Canada.

Other than that, we are agreed that Nancy Pelosi
is a greater threat to the United States, because
she is in the number 3 slot when it comes to Executive Power.