"There is no issue about her that can't turn into a fight immediately... It's really not fair to slam Palin for having not made this ideological commitment to strict libertarian non-intervention before most of us made it ourselves."- JP
Well, she endorsed it"Last week, or two weeks ago, when I was arguing about Palin in the comments, I thought about writing, "Well, if Palin wants to convince me she's serious-minded, she can endorse Ryan's roadmap on entitlements/spending; but that's not really a fair bar for me to set, because she almost certainly won't do that. Too risky, too big."Getting behind Ryan's Roadmap, Ace says, was "The One Thing She Could Have Done To Get Me On Board With Her Candidacy."
Well, she endorsed it.
Out: Opposing Palin
In: Open to Palin
"Sarah Palin is attractive partly because she lives such a dangerous life -- flying solo, taking fire. Female liberals can't ever live dangerous lives like this in their cushy think-tanks and nicely taken care of by the still-mostly-male establishment that will see to it they always have a job, somewhere... The establishment -- both wings of it -- attacked Palin ferociously and drove her as far as possible out of any sort of safe career trajectory. Ironically, though, this now puts Palin in the position of an Amelia Earhart... someone living the vigorous, dangerous life. Which makes her all the more attractive to a public which can't help but notice that most of the vitality, most of the blood seems drained from public life and public ambition."
Now, that's the way he wrote it -- "the Dutch," in sneer-quotes.But 53 days after it was offered and would have been much more effective, Obama finally decided to do as Gov. Palin suggested and accept "the Dutch" offer. The leftists just can't stop making fools out of themselves over The Arctic Fox.Don't miss Sarah Palin's take: She faults the Obama administration for not soliciting the help of "the Dutch," who are "known for dikes and for cleaning up water and for dealing with spills"Bwah-hah-hah-ha! "The Dutch!" Have you ever heard something so crazy?
Well, actually, dude, we have. From a "Dutch" "minister," in fact.
What does this mean? It means that Sarah Palin was talking about something he'd never heard before and was using sneer-quotes to indicate what an absurd idea he thought it was.
In other words, he was ignorant, and used his own ignorance against Sarah Palin.
I find that happens a lot with the left...
“What's wrong with accepting outside help?” Visser asked. “If there's a country that's experienced with building dikes and managing water, it's the Netherlands.”Unfortunately, "expertise" is a concept beyond the comprehension of liberals, who in their childish ignorance, mock that which they fail to understand.
Even if, three days after the rig exploded, it seemed as if the Dutch equipment and expertise wasn't needed, wouldn't it have been better to accept it, to err on the side of having too many resources available rather than not enough?
BP has been inundated with well-intentioned cleanup suggestions, but the Dutch offer was different. It came through official channels, from a government offering to share its demonstrated expertise.
"Anyone who has run for the vice presidency, and has published a monster bestseller, and appears regularly on television, and will run for the presidency is a member in good standing of the American elite."Although his rebuttal includes no flaming skull (dang!), Ace shreds the ridiculous charge:
This is a common practice of the left. Take the right's complaints about you and argue, ludicrously, that they actually apply more to the right itself.Those are just a few excerpts from Ace's complete deconstruction of Wieseltier's howler of an argument. Read the full evisceration here.
[...]
And now, as Sarah Palin [h]as been riding the anti-elitist horse for a while, it becomes the new stupid meme that it's really Sarah Palin who's the elitist. Google it! Notice they have no problem at all abandoning their previous trope (elitism is good and only an imbecile would argue differently) and sliding into the complete opposite notion (Sarah Palin is the real elistist; the lefties are in fact... I don't know, the Common Man being grinded down under her chic heel).
[...]
Essentially this guy... is angry. He and his cronies have repeatedly insisted on the special privileges of what his buddy David Brooks proudly calls The Educated Class; Palin is refusing to extend that privilege to them, and he's whining about it, basically arguing that if he and his buddies are not given their special privilege to rule the plebians then Sarah Palin is being "elitist" by refusing to admit they are entitled to their asserted public-policy psuedo-intellectual droit de seigneur.
So what did Palin do? Well, what she did here was toss a rhetorical bone to the 25-30% of the country which is very much interested in this birth certificate question, while not nearly embracing the theory itself. She offered, in other words, a sort of vague stab at consensus -- let's agree that these questions are fair game and punt on the more divisive question of whether the theory has any merit -- which is what what people like David Frum are always urging when it comes to appeasing moderates.Ace has a lot more to say on this, and it's worth the read... here.
[...]
If you didn't like Sarah Palin's answer -- because it wasn't strong enough in either direction -- get ready for a lot of disappointment, because Sarah Palin's answer is going to be the basic default generic answer for almost all politicians on the right.
Althouse argues that Sarah Palin's "passivity" and reluctance to stand up for herself vis a vis the McCain campaign's determination that she should start her interviews with Katie Couric and the like proves she's kinda dumb.Read Ace's full lesson here.
She seems to be making some feminist point about women being just as capable of men and therefore, her thinking goes, needing to act in that fashion, and not whine later that their opinions were overlooked.Why didn't you have a say [about what media you were interviewed by]? There's that "really" hedging: You didn't really have a say. You're pleading passivity and impotence but you want us to think you have what it takes to be President of the United States?As a general proposition about women's need to assert themselves, maybe she has a point, but here, I think her Sisters Gotta Do It For Themselves analysis overlooks a major point: Sarah Palin did not act as a subordinate to John McCain due to her sex, or her gender's desire to avoid conflict, or anything at all like that.
She acted as a subordinate to John McCain because she really was [a] subordinate to John McCain. Althouse's analysis seems to easily gloss over the fact that John McCain really was the boss here, and Sarah Palin really was the underling.
I don't know if Althouse, being a tenured (I assume) professor, really has a "boss" anymore, or if her status means that she's essentially the Boss of Herself. So perhaps she has forgotten: Whether you are male or female, and whether your boss is male or female, the boss gets his way.
The underling may offer suggestions. The underling may protest. But at the end of the day, the boss gets his way.
So I don't view this as some kind of "Sarah Palin is too weak to stand up for herself" thing. I view it instead as "Sarah Palin joined a team, with the express (and historically well-founded) understanding that all choices about the campaign are ultimately made by the actual captain of the team -- the presidential candidate -- and conducted herself accordingly, despite the fact that she thought the boss was erring badly."
As of 3:15pm EDT there's still no statement on the White House website about the death of a US soldier by a Muslim terrorist. Contrast that to the rapidity with which the Obama administration had something to say about the Tiller murder.And hers.
There's nothing on Andrew Sullivan's website nor did Keith Olbermann manage to take a second away from blaming Fox for Tiller's death to mention Private Long or Private Ezeagwula.
I guess we know what their priorities are.
Remember Cheney's famous "undisclosed location"?- JP
Somehow he managed to keep it undisclosed.
Joe Biden, who I am assured is much smarter than that idiot Sarah Palin, decided to disclose it, apparently.
