Having made reference to Sarah Palin and disparaging the name One Nation, which does have unfortunate connotations and having made a clumsy attempt to point out that her family life doesn’t seem to accord with what she is saying [but nor did Tammy Wynette's], Lord Nazh took me to task on whether her hand should be on the nuclear button:
I would rather see her hand on it than the current hand that’s on it. Damn, do you think she would just push the fucking thing to piss you off?
He’s right and Wolfie then provided this, with:
I have to admit, the extent the American media have gone to against Palin is astonishing – paedophiles get an easier press! Something smells.
Some of that article:
The trove of more than 13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska, released late on Friday, paints a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics.
One can only assume that the Left-leaning editors who dispatched teams of reporters to remote Juneau, the Alaskan capital, to pore over the emails in the hope of digging up a scandal are now viewing the result as a rather poor return on their considerable investment.
If anything, Mrs Palin seems likely to emerge from the scrutiny of the 24,000 pages, contained in six boxes and weighing 275 pounds, with her reputation considerably enhanced. As a blogger at Powerline noted, the whole saga might come to be viewed as “an embarrassment for legacy media”.
Mrs Palin, who suddenly resigned as Alaska governor in July 2009, is no longer a public official. She holds no position in the Republican party. Despite the media hubbub that surrounds her every move, she is unlikely to be a candidate for the White House in 2012.
Just an aside – weighed 275 pounds? Er … who actually weighs reports? Were they posted back? Anyway, this is part of the dirt:
More homelife dirt here. I say “dirt” because this is the sum of what the opposition in both parties throw at her. So where does she stand with the American heartland after that? This article says:
This time around, there’s no stigma, no shame, no sin attached to what Dan Quayle would once have mockingly called Bristol Palin’s “lifestyle” choices. In fact, so cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin’s wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison. “I think a hard-working, well-organized C.E.O. type can handle it very well,” said Phyllis Schlafly, of the Eagle Forum.
People like Schlafly are probably my natural allies, in terms of outlook so it’s puzzling how she would compromise her position over Palin.
Conservative women became a powerful tool for the party, and everyone was willing to overlook the cost to their personal lives. If a conservative Christian mother chose to pursue a full-time career in, say, landscape gardening or the law, she was abandoning her family. But if she chose public service, she was furthering the godly cause. No one discussed the sticky domestic details: Did she have a (gasp!) nanny? Did her husband really rule the roost anymore? Who said prayers with the kids every night? As long as she was seen now and again with her children, she could get away with any amount of power.
The stereotype we associate with evangelicals—intact marriage, wife at home, teenage daughter saves it for marriage—actually applies only to the small minority who attend church weekly.
The rest of the 30 percent of Americans who call themselves evangelical have started to slip in their morals and now actually poll worse than the rest of America on traditional measures of upstanding behavior—they are just as likely to live together and have kids out of wedlock, and their teenage daughters lose their virginities at an earlier age than the girls of most Americans. University of Virginia sociologist* W. Bradford Wilcox blames this partly on class differences and particularly on a lingering “redneck” Appalachian strain in evangelical culture. (I’m a “fucking redneck,” wrote Levi, the father of Bristol’s baby, on his MySpace page, before it was taken down.)
So, let’s bring that back to what once would have been seen as an ordinary person – me – in that I grew up middle-class, basically accepted the Judaeo-Christian heritage, kicked a football around, did what most kids did. No saint but with a certain grasp on right and wrong. How do I see “the new values” of today, such as accepting out of wedlock babies as the norm – just accept it and get over it?
Well no – I won’t accept it and get over it. There are things which are right and things which are wrong. We can choose to do the wrong ones and justify them to ourselves but that still doesn’t make them right. This is what worries me about the Religious Right – willing to compromise on Christian principles for the good of the politicking. Sorry but that’s not Christianity they’re pushing – that’s false propheteering. One thing an actual Christian who’s read the gospels knows is what is right and what is wrong.
The evangelicals, if this is the sort of thing they’re condoning, are wrong. And Sarah Palin? Should she even run? Will she run? One Palin site is strange – it has Sarah Palin for President in 2012 – that’s right, it has a strikethrough in the header:
The Des Moines Register says that the reports of her popularity dropping from 71% to 65% in Des Moines is explainable. While various grassroots people like her:
Humboldt Republican Michelle Ober is among those Iowa Republicans who remains enthusiastically favorable toward Palin. The retired nurse said she appreciates what she describes as Palin’s outspokenness, and hopes she runs for president.
“She’s gutsy and going to do what she thinks is right no matter what other people think,” said Ober, who did not participate in the 2008 caucuses. “She’s not afraid to be straight with anybody.”
… in the world of politicking, she impresses less. The Register:
However, Palin has done very little to cultivate political good will in a state where face-to-face meetings with influential activists, officials and organizers are common. Palin held no private political meetings during any of her four visits. She met briefly with about 50 influential Republican officials and donors during a reception before the fundraiser she headlined in September, but did not discuss mounting an Iowa campaign.
Trying to draw together the threads, she is not doing the sort of groundwork necessary for her to run a successful bid. What she is doing right is appealing to the heartland of America, sick to death of what is going on and thus many in the Tea Party support her. The problem is that the Tea Party is vilified by left and right together. The Tea Partyists are portrayed as wingnuts and unpatriotic and yet it would seem they’re the most patriotic – actually supporting the U.S.A. as an entity and wanting to bring back a culture of decency and respect in the nation, to make America great again.
I’ve no problem with those values. The gravest charge against the Tea Party is a certain naivety but hey – real people are not slick politicians, are they? Currently, I like Michelle Bachmann but note the things said about her. This is Bachmann in
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