Quote of the Day (August 24, 2011)

Lesson from the Iowa State Fair - Mainstream Media Still Fears Sarah Palin
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AWR Hawkins, at Red County:

“People love Palin the way they loved Ronald Reagan, and that just scares the pants off the MSM.”

- JP

AWR Hawkins: Where does Palin end & the Tea Party begin, or vice versa?

"Palin is coming, and the Tea Party is coming with her."
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Today, AWR Hawkins takes up a topic we explored over the weekend (See "Hate Sarah Palin, Hate the TEA Party Movement" here):

No one in recent memory has faced the left’s vitriol like Sarah Palin (not even George W. Bush). The over-the-top, asinine attacks she’s received have been so ubiquitous they need not even be relisted here. Just suffice it to say there is a genuine hatred of Palin throughout the MSM, the leadership of the Democrat Party, and the Republican Party establishment.

And don’t be fooled folks: they don’t hate her because of her convictions – although they despise her convictions – rather, they hate her because they can’t control her.

Fortunately, the hatred the left holds for Palin is more than overcome by the love conservatives and right-leaning Independents have for her. They see in her a refreshing image that dares cast certain issues in the prism of right and wrong, just and unjust, American and un-American, etc.

Perhaps as a group, the Tea Party has come closest to receiving the kind of vindictive normally reserved for Palin alone. There’s no doubt they’re hated as she is hated, and equally no doubt that the hatred is a result of the fact that the MSM, the leadership of the Democrat Party, and the Republican Party establishment can’t control them.

For example, during the push to get Tea Partiers to “compromise” (which is political speak for check your convictions at the door) and support Boehner 3.0, an angry John McCain took to the Senate floor and referred to Tea Party conservatives in the House as “hobbits,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, whom Alaskans foolishly elected over Joe Miller last year, referred to them as “absolutists,” and John Kerry, the haughty one, described them as a group “of extremists, who don’t understand the implications even of what they’re doing.”

[More]

- JP

AWR Hawkins is right on Palin, not so much on Perry

Rick Perry is no Reagan conservative.
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It's only on the rare occasion that we take issue with an AWR Hawkins opinion. After reading his latest Big Government op-ed, we see that this is one of those occasions:

When Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” was released in late 2009, people around the country stood in line for hours to meet her at book signings, and to shake her hand and ask her to run for president in 2012. And this was after the MSM had spent nearly a year and half dragging her and her family through the mud, accusing Palin of every misdeed imaginable, and going out of their way to remind us how unprepared Palin was for the vice presidency (according to MSM standards of course).

[...]

From the release of “Going Rogue” through the November 2010 elections, Palin traveled to Tea Party gatherings around the country and endorsed candidates (43 House candidates, 30 of which won, and 12 Senate candidates, 7 of which won). Following the elections she launched a reality show – “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” – that drew historic levels of viewers and teed liberals off something fierce because it showed Palin using a gun to kill a caribou, a club to kill a fish, and more importantly, using a weekly one-hour program to show liberals how to stand up and fight like a man.

And after the media trashed her for her Tea Party speeches, mocked the candidates she endorsed, and made fun of her reality show, she launched a bus tour that began with a DC motorcycle rally on March 29, 2011, wherein crowds of people gathered round her and begged her to run for president in 2012.

By the way, Palin also endorsed gubernatorial candidates in 2010, one of which was Republican Governor Rick Perry: a true conservative and thus a Tea Party favorite.

Hawkins goes on to praise Perry, citing a Texas economy which is in much better shape than that in the rest of the country and draws employers and job seekers to the land between the Sabine and the Rio Grande like a magnet. Hawkins is so impressed that he says he's hoping for a Palin/Perry 2012 ticket "For 16 Years of Conservative Bliss."

We hate to rain on the man's parade, but the idea of Perry as vice president or, God help us, president is not quite as blissful as it must appear in Hawkins' imagination. First of all, Texas was a low-tax, business-friendly place long before Rick Perry became governor. Also, there are many conservatives down here in the Lone Star State who are less than enamored of our governor right now. Don't get us wrong, Rick Perry is one of the good guys, but there are a few less-than-conservative flies in the Perry ointment. He has dithered on the TSA anti-groping bill, allowing it to die in the Texas legislature, and he rejected the same Arizona immigration legislation which Sarah Palin supported.

But far more troubling are Perry's proclivities for big government and the nanny state. Perry began his push in 2002 for the Trans-Texas Corridor, a super highway one mile wide and 4,000 miles long that was intended to run from Mexico to Canada to facilitate free trade and open borders. For the portion of the route that was to run through Texas, Perry planned to use eminent domain to acquire the right of way for this highway from hell, indicating a disturbing willingness on the governor's part to trample upon public property rights and uproot people from their land. The public outcry over this big government grandiosity was so loud and so prolonged that Perry had to scale it back in 2009 and abandon it entirely in 2010. Also apparently comfortable with being a nanny-stater, Perry did an end run around the Texas Legislature last month and issued a governor's executive order forcing schoolgirls to get vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer. It doesn't help Perry's squeaky clean image much that Merck & Co., the pharma giant that makes the Gardasil vaccine, is well-connected to the governor in multiple ways.

Finally, be aware that there's a big push on now by the GOP establishment for Perry, and this should throw up a big red warning flag for Reagan conservatives. It's all too reminiscent of the way Republicans, like sheep, lined up behind George W. Bush in 1999. Yes, Bush is another one of the good guys, but he proved by being soft on immigration and not willing to reduce either spending or the size of the federal government that he wasn't the one that real conservatives were looking for. Again, our point here isn't to slam Bush or Perry.

In short, Rick Perry is not a politician who can be relied upon to restore the federal government to the smaller, less intrusive entity the founders envisioned and Sarah Palin has been working for. Perry was certainly preferable in 2010 to Kay Baily Hutchison in the gubernatorial primary and Democrat Bill White in the general election, earning Gov. Palin's endorsement practically by default. He may be a conservative, but unlike Sarah Palin, he's no Reagan conservative. Should she become the GOP presidential nominee, the view from here on the Brazos is that she can do much better for her campaign and for the country should she decide to run for president in 2012.

- JP

AWR Hawkins: Think Big, Re-Elect President Palin, 2016

The author sees the way everyday Americans listen when Sarah Palin talks, and how she relates to them
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Military historian and Ph.D. (Texas Tech) AWR Hawkins surveys the political landscape and figures that things don’t look very encouraging for President Obama. Yes, it's the economy, as high unemployment and fuel prices are two things Americans just can't "get used to”, as Obama has decreed we must. As we cut our budgets and do without, the slacker in chief hasn't even tried to feel our pain, as Bill Clinton did, or at least said he did. Ten vacations a year via Air Force one and 70-plus rounds of golf are just two of the signs of his arrogance.

Amazingly, the first lady seems to have forgotten about all those vacations and doesn't seem to know that hubby is sneaking off to the golf course, because she recently said, “This man doesn’t take a day off.” She must not watch the news or read the papers. As for the president, he recently said that he, Michelle and the girls could live with it if he becomes one term president. Hawkins is also okay with that idea:

My point is not simply that Obama is out of touch and beatable, but that he is way out of touch and extremely beatable. Not, of course, by some moderate Republican, but by a conservative Republican: and particularly by Sarah Palin.

Although her bus tour is over, the media still can’t let her go. Now they’re all busy letting us know how her bus tour didn’t help her numbers at all or trying to somehow persuade us that John Ziegler’s opinion matters. I’m sorry, but I see the way people listen when Palin talks, the way they react when she shakes hands with them, and the genuine love for country she displayed in her 24,000 emails the mainstream media thought they could use to bring her down.

In case you missed it, one thing the mainstream media did learn from Palin’s emails was that she agreed to have a baby shower thrown in her son Trig’s honor, with the caveat that all the gifts would be donated to military families. So on August 15, 2008, while Obama was counting up the number of golf courses he could visit if elected president, Palin was in Juneau, Alaska, holding her little boy in her arms and saying “thank you” for gifts that were sent to “the military families of wounded service members deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom.” (I hope Chris Matthews and that Keith guy who used to have a show on MSNBC are reading this.)

In subsequent news, Rasmussen recently released poll results that show “a plurality of Republican primary voters think it would be…bad for the party if…Sarah Palin joined the field.” And I couldn’t agree more if, by “Republicans,” Rasmussen means those folks who gave us presidential candidates Bob Doyle and John McCain, and who probably would have been dumb enough to give us presidential candidate Mike Huckabee if he hadn’t bowed out earlier this year.

Palin is very bad for the Republican establishment. And that’s why the same Rasmussen poll which showed that a plurality of Republicans view her entry into the race as a bad thing also showed that a plurality of Tea Partiers view it as a good thing. And that’s definitely the best thing.

If you don’t believe me, just reflect on the 2010 midterm elections, where 30 of the 43 House candidates endorsed by Palin won and 7 of the 12 Senate candidates endorsed by Palin won. These victories represented both a humiliating defeat of Obama’s party and his policies, as well as a wake-up call to “a plurality” of moderate Republicans who thought the way to win was by moving to the center.

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Hawkins, who sees Obama for what he is and Gov. Palin for what she is, concludes that there's nothing to fear. Declaring that it’s time to "think big," the author is calling for the re-election of President Palin in 2016.

- JP

Let's Cloward-Piven the NYT/WaPo witch hunt

Because their hatred for Sarah Palin is are "just too darn irresistible"
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The Cloward-Piven strategy is a leftist tool which can be turned against them. Developed in the mid-1960s by Columbia University sociologists Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, their strategy owes much to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. The strategy’s original purpose was to bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading government bureaucracy until the wheels grind to a halt.

Some examples of Cloward-Piven are overloading electoral systems with overwhelming numbers of new voter registrations, never mind whether the bogus "voters" are among the living or the deceased; shaking down banks and mortgage houses, politicians in Congress, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development with affirmative-action loan applications; and creating a national financial "crisis" by demanding subprime mortgages for low-income Americans with no feasible means of repaying the loans. Those toxic mortgages helped lead to the financial bailout. Again, the key dynamic of Cloward-Piven involves overloading government with impossible demands until it breaks down under the burden.

But just as the Cloward-Piven strategy has worked for the left, it can be made to work against them. And just as it works when applied to government agencies, it will also work when aimed at other types of institutions. Although he doesn't mention Clward-Piven by name, AWR Hawkins suggests using a form of the strategy against The New York Times and The Washington Post as they enlist their readers' help in sorting through some 24,000 of Governor Palin's emails in search of anything they can use to try to destroy her. Here's how:

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times prove they’ve yet to learn how much the people love Palin. But we can help them learn this lesson after 1 pm by sending a ton of emails that have absolutely nothing to with Palin’s correspondence cache.

In other words, the Washington Post reports they’ll be posting Palin’s emails here, and they’ll include a link whereby readers can respond when they find that “most noteworthy” information. The New York Times has been kind enough to say they’ll post Palin’s emails here, and they will likewise include a link whereby readers can respond when they find that juicy nugget that’s going to prove Palin doesn’t love America after all (or that she really shot her Caribou from a distance of 120 yards instead of 123).

Our job is simple: once the emails post, we need to click the links for each paper (cited in previous paragraph) and send both of them an email (or emails) about the noteworthy information we found. But instead of sending something from Palin’s emails, send them your favorite line from a Charlton Heston speech or movie. Or send them your favorite line from your favorite song or from a piece of classic literature.

Even if both papers figure out what’s happening rather quickly, the knowledge that we’ve sent random information will them force to research and verify every email (and re-open and re-research those which they took for granted upon receiving them). In turn, this will ruin all their fun and shut this little experiment down before it even gets rolling.

Oh yes, and it will do one other thing too: it will teach them once more that America loves Sarah Palin.

Whether she runs for President or not (or whether you plan to vote for her or not), we can all agree that she stands for something the mainstream media ought not drag through the mud.

Spread the word folks. Recruit your friends. At 1 pm, it’s game on.

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Yes, the corrupt media is indeed vulnerable to a Cloward-Piven operation. In the words of Washington Post Ombudsman Patrick Pexton, justifying the witch hunt, "Sarah Palin and her e-mails are just too darn irresistible." Well, the Washington Post, New York Times and their hatred for Sarah Palin are "just too darn irresistible" as well. Sauce for the gander. Any questions? Very well. Carry on.

- JP

AWR Hawkins: WWPD?

What would Palin do?
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In a Pajamas Media commentary, AWR Hawkins counts the ways our republic is headed for the cliff under an Obama presidency which is arguably even more disastrous than that of Jimmy Carter: high gasoline and diesel prices are up, rising food prices, record high foreclosures, an unemployment nearly twice that under Bush, a mountain of debt and a devalued dollar. Meanwhile, the president is clearly in over his head as he apologizes to our enemies, snubs our allies and pursues aself-contradictory foreign policy. None of this has gone without notice from Sarah Palin, and Hawkins figures it's a good time to ask the question: What would Gov. Palin do if she were President Palin?

In addition to an America-first policy toward energy, Palin believes that reducing the size of government and the taxes levied on Americans is a common-sense way to make sure hard-earned dollars stay in the hands that earned them. It’s also the surest way to unleash the creative spirit of America’s best: a spirit currently shackled by the debt and myriad of regulations the Obama administration has placed on the backs of citizens of all walks of life.

[...]

Obama’s current foreign policy missteps and hesitancy in using the military to crush terrorists wherever they hide would also change under Palin’s watch. She has made it clear that she would not hesitate to use the military to keep Americans safe. And as for fighting terrorists, she has expressed her strategy via a simple Cold War maxim: “We win, they lose.”

Those who have paid attention to Palin’s words and deeds as governor of Alaska, Republican vice presidential candidate, and the mother of a combat soldier (her son Track served a tour in Iraq) must have noticed that she has backbone. When she talks about national security she exhibits a decisiveness and determination far removed from the Jimmy Carter-style approach of Obama. She is far more reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher or even Ronald Reagan in this area.

Our country’s relationship with Israel is but another area in which Palin would usher in a complete reversal of the policies we’ve seen under Obama. Whereas the current administration has been markedly anti-Israel, Palin would not only support Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorist threats (like those coming from Hamas), but would encourage Israel to be unapologetic in doing so.

She’s already on record saying Israel apologizes too much.

[...]

I can’t help but think that somewhere, somehow, Reagan is smiling.

[More]

- JP

AWR Hawkins: Huckabee okay with bloated, overweight government

He's no Sarah Palin
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At Andrew Breitbart's Big Government, A.W.R. Hawkins takes a look at Mike Huckabee and doesn't see a tax-cutting, small government conservative:

When former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee ran for President in 2008, he did so in the guise of a conservative. But those of us who listened closely to his speeches heard a message that was far from compatible with the ideals of limited government and expanded liberty: two benchmarks of conservatism by any measure. Instead we heard Huckabee openly support a nationwide, federally mandated smoking ban, and expanding the powers of the federal government to mandate limits on carbon emissions via cap and trade.

Because of the exponential growth things like a national smoking ban and cap and trade legislation would cause in the size of government, Rush Limbaugh often warned that Huckabee was a “populist” rather than a conservative. In other words, Huckabee had a good grasp on how to give speeches in the vernacular of heartland America, but his solutions to the problems faced by those same people rested in an expansion of government for which the constitution made no provision. (Like Clinton, Huckabee could feel our pain, and like Obama, he could ease that pain via government intervention.)

And believe it or not, Huckabee’s record on taxes (and tax increases) is even more dismal than his record on smoking bans and cap and trade legislation. While Governor of Arkansas, he literally begged state legislators to support tax increases on the citizens of that state.

[...]

Not only was Huckabee’s support for any and every tax scheme imaginable antithetical to the conservative mind, but the way he groveled before the legislature was shameful: not at all indicative of a leader.

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Contrast this example with Sarah Palin, who, as governor of Alaska, vetoed hundreds of millions of dollars in state spending and imposed objective criteria on state projects.

- JP

Quote of the Day (December 13, 2010)

"It’s nice to see Palin stand up like a man and tell them to shove it."
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AWR Hawkins at Big Hollywood:

"Everyone who takes time out of their busy schedule to watch Sarah Palin’s Alaska (with an open mind) gets the double benefit of seeing manliness reborn and being reminded that we need not tolerate the incessant whining of the feminized, socialistic portions of Hollywood, journalism, and animal rights groups. For these factions, through their relentless criticism of guns, hunting, and masculinity, have made it clear that they only tolerate that with which they agree. Therefore, it’s nice to see Palin stand up like a man and tell them to shove it."

- JP

AWR Hawkins: Will Palin Run? She Already Is.

And she’s beating Obama and the mainstream media at every turn
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AWR Hawkins, who holds a doctorate in military history from Texas Tech, advises, pay no attention to pundits who go on an on about whether Gov. Palin will run for president:

While I’ve suspected that she was already running for some time, it dawned on me with near certainty after she released her “Thanksgiving Message to All 57 States” last week. Her willingness to mock Obama’s 2008 claim that he’d campaigned in “57 states” proved that she has absolutely no fear of running against him. It also showed that she meant what she said about running against Obama in 2012 when she told Barbara Walters she could beat Obama.

I believe she started running for the office on the first weekend of February 2010, when she stood before the Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tennessee, and asked: “How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff working for you?”(It doesn’t seem a great stretch to reach back to 1980 and juxtapose this with then-candidate Ronald Reagan’s famous question about the Carter years: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”)

[...]

She’s continued to dismantle the assaults of the mainstream media while simultaneously taking Obama to task on point after point.

[...]

America has had over two years to watch Palin speak from the heart, while listening to Obama speak from a teleprompter. They’ve heard her relentless calls for a strong military, while watching Obama try to appease (instead of destroy) terrorists the world over. They’ve heard her defend the free market, while living with the ramifications of Obama’s stimulus package, nationalization of industry, and takeover of health care.

The American people have even seen a microcosm of a Palin-versus-Obama matchup via the 2010 midterm elections in which 30 of 43 of the House candidates she endorsed won, as did 7 of the 12 Senate candidates she supported. Moreover, those elections proved that while rank-and-file citizens largely support Palin’s worldview, they are rejecting Obama’s.

[...]

So while the pundits guess, stabbing blindly into the air in an attempt to come up with proof of whether Palin will or won’t run, the rest of us should just sit back and watch her go, because she’s running for the White House right now.

And if I had to place a bet on who wins in 2012, my money would be on Palin.

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- JP

A.W.R. Hawkins: Liberals Hate Palin Because She’s Beautiful

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Human Events columnist A.W.R. Hawkins offers his perspective on why liberals hate Gov. Palin:

Liberals have never liked former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. They don’t like that she didn’t go to an Ivy League school, that she doesn’t follow the usual protocol of not speaking until a liberal says it’s okay to do so, and that she chose to carry her Down Syndrome baby to term instead of aborting it. (That last one really drives them crazy.)

They dislike her political support for smaller government, tax cuts, and a strong military. They are outraged by her ongoing push for drilling in ANWR, her participation in hunting sports, and the fact that she’s a card-carrying, Life Member of the NRA.

But all these reasons are trumped by the fact that they despise her beauty. It pushes them over the edge to know that she doesn’t just shoot an assault rifle, but makes an assault rifle look good when shooting it.

[...]

The coverage of Palin’s trip to this year’s Belmont Stakes proved the hatred for her beauty all over again as media outlets like the Boston Herald seized on the fact that she wore jeans, a “form-fitting T-shirt,” and a baseball cap to the track. The T-shirt alone caused bitter bloggers to ponder whether the former governor had had some type of cosmetic surgery performed. (To them, it’s just not fair that she looks so good all the time.)

So when a Keith Olbermann-type moron refers to Palin as an “idiot” again, or a Chris Matthews-type repeats his belief that she’s “frightening,” we just need to remember that the left criticizes that which they fear. We also have to keep in mind the fact that all the names they throw at Palin are really code words for “Dang, that woman looks good.”

Hawkins, who earned his doctorate in U.S. Military History from Texas Tech, will be a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center this summer. Read his opinion piece unedited here.

h/t: roy y

- JP