From The Washington Post:

A 'Little Book' Bursting With The Write Ideas
By Jonathan Yardley

Saturday, September 6, 2008

An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.

One of the never-ending frustrations of my otherwise enjoyable half-century newspaper career has been what newspapers call "style." Newspapers have many good qualities, but "style" most certainly is not among them. Newspaper "style" consists mainly of ungrammatical, unlovely attempts to compress as much information as possible into as little space as possible. Thus instead of the elegant "Senator Nonesuch, Republican of Transylvania," we are required to write, "Sen. Nonesuch (R-Tr.)"; instead of "Rockville, Maryland," we must suffer with "Rockville, Md."; and poor "William Strunk, Jr.," must sacrifice his comma and become "William Strunk Jr."

That, believe you me, would not have sat well with William Strunk, Jr., who on Page 3 of his immortal "The Elements of Style" writes: "The abbreviations etc. and jr. are parenthetic and are always to be so regarded," as in (the example is his), "James Wright, Jr." This is the same William Strunk, Jr., who two pages earlier writes, "In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last," as in "red, white, and blue," this second comma being "often referred to as the 'serial' comma," except in newspaper offices, where it is often referred to as the "space-eating" comma.

I have been a Strunkaholic for almost as long as I have been a journalist, though no doubt there have been times when one would never have known it from my prose. "The Elements of Style, With Revisions, an Introduction, and a New Chapter on Writing by E.B. White," was published in 1959, two years after White had written an article in the New Yorker about this privately published (in 1918) textbook "I had used when I was a student at Cornell." Editors at Macmillan immediately decided they wanted to publish it, and contracted with White "to make revisions in the text and write a chapter on style," not newspaper style, needless to say, but real style, of which White was a master.

When what Strunk "sardonically and with secret pride" called "the little book" made its public appearance, I was at Chapel Hill, pretending to be a college student but actually working full time on the university newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel. I must have rushed out to get a copy, because my heavily worn little hardcover is a first edition with a price of (!) one dollar. The book has accompanied me to Washington, New York, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Florida, Baltimore and finally back to Washington, and has been what White probably would not have called my vade mecum, since in his "Approach to Style" he counsels, "Avoid foreign languages. . . . It is a bad habit. Write in English." So: For half a century "The Elements of Style" has been my constant companion, vade mecum being Latin (O lost!) for "go with me."

It is that to this day, and if someone wants to toss it in the box with me when I go six feet under, that would be fine; it might actually assure my passage through the Pearly Gates, since Saint Peter no doubt is a gentleman of impeccable grammatical taste, not to mention style. In the half-century of its public life "the little book" has been a constant companion for millions of people, most of whom know it simply as "Strunk and White." It is scarcely so encyclopedic as H.W. Fowler's "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" (1926, revised 1965 by Sir Ernest Gowers) but it is distinctly and distinctively American, and its brevity renders it both portable and accessible.

Strunk (1869-1946) spent his entire teaching career at Cornell and was little known beyond the campus. White describes him as "a memorable man, friendly and funny." He "scorned the vague, the tame, the colorless, the irresolute. He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong." In his 46 years at Cornell he seems to have been widely respected, even loved, yet his book "passed into disuse" not long after his death and probably would have vanished for good had not someone purloined one of two copies in the Cornell library and mailed it to White, who "had not laid eyes on it in thirty-eight years, and . . . was delighted to study it again and rediscover its rich deposits of gold."

Of Strunk's many emphatic grammatical dicta, the most famous and surely the most frequently violated is, "Omit needless words." Strunk eschewed an exclamation point therein, but it cries out for one, for the exclamation point "is to be reserved for use after true exclamations or commands," which "Omit needless words!" most certainly is. The command is followed by what White calls "the masterly Strunkian elaboration of this noble theme," to wit:

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

Thus in Strunk's hands "the question as to whether" mercifully becomes simply "whether" and "he is a man who" becomes "he." Then follows the stricture to which almost no one pays attention: "An expression that is especially debilitating is the fact that. It should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs." Expunge "owing to the fact that" and use "since," ditto for "I was unaware of the fact that," because "I was unaware that" is so much better. I am pleased (and relieved) that a search of The Post's electronic library for "Yardley" and "the fact that" yields, on its first page, no appearance in my own prose of "the fact that" but several in quotations from books under review, including ones by William Styron, Toni Morrison and Joan Didion.

The point isn't that I'm a grammatical paragon but that even the best writers can fall into sloppy habits. The price of being a Strunkaholic is eternal vigilance, for it is easy to let participial phrases dangle (my favorite, from Strunk, is, "Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house very cheap"), to use "disinterested" when you mean "uninterested," to ignore the difference between "farther" ("distance") and "further" ("time or quantity"), to use "less" when you mean "fewer," to use a plural verb with "none," which "takes the singular verb," to confuse "that" and "which." A particular bugaboo of my own is the use of "like" for "as," which is now near-universal and is almost always wrong:

"The use of like for as has its defenders; they argue that any usage that achieves currency becomes valid automatically. This, they say, is the way the language is formed. It is and it isn't. An expression sometimes merely enjoys a vogue, much as an article of apparel does. Like has always been widely misused by the illiterate; lately it has been taken up by the knowing and the well-informed, who find it catchy, or liberating, and who use it as though they were slumming. If every word or device that achieved currency were immediately authenticated, simply on the grounds of popularity, the language would be as chaotic as a ball game with no foul lines. For the student, perhaps the most useful thing to know about like is that most carefully edited publications regard its use, before phrases and clauses, as simple error."

It was, of course, an advertisement that nailed the coffin on proper usage -- "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" -- and, as White says in his essay, "the language of advertising enjoys an enormous circulation," hardly to the betterment of us all. This isn't to argue that the language shouldn't change. To the contrary, many new words that enter common usage from unlikely sources are useful and uniquely describe specific meanings; think, for example, of "geek" and "dis" and "spam," all of which I use with pleasure because they are, quite simply, good words. I shudder to think, though, of what Strunk and White would say about "author" and "reference" used as verbs, of "presently" used as a synonym for "currently" or "now," of "interface," a word with a specific technological meaning, used as a synonym for "meet," as in: "Let's interface in the conference room at noon." Perhaps the day is not far off when it will become a synonym for "kiss," as in: "Interface me, baby!"

Et cetera. The language takes a daily beating, often from people who, as both Strunk and White point out, are more interested in appearing elegant and erudite than in actually being so, people who believe that pompous, inaccurate language is evidence of deep thought and noble purpose. The truth is the opposite. As White writes: "Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able." As both Strunk and White were aware, this is hard advice to follow, for it is much more difficult to be concise than to be verbose. Consider, if you will, the Gettysburg Address on the one hand and the rhetoric of William Jefferson Clinton (or, to be bipartisan, George W. Bush) on the other. It is the difference between eloquence and bloviation, but as Warren Gamaliel Harding well knew, bloviation is a presidential prerogative.

"The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White is available in a hardcover edition with an additional introduction by Roger Angell (Allyn & Bacon, $15.95). Strunk's original version, minus the additions by White and Angell, is available in several paperback editions and is free online at http://www.bartleby.com/141/. There is also an edition with illustrations by Maira Kalman (Penguin paperback, $15).

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.

Distant Drums at Sarah’s Party
by Patrick J. Buchanan

ST. PAUL, Minn.—The American Right has just died and gone to heaven.

Wednesday night’s convention address by Sarah Palin here in St. Paul has confirmed the bold decision of John McCain to choose the Alaska governor as his co-pilot and united the Republican Party as it has not been since the second term of Ronald Reagan.

A wild enthusiasm for Sarah Palin has brought conservatives home to John McCain, and GOP leaders of all hues—from Fred Thompson to Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee to Rudy Giuliani—to the rostrum to lacerate the liberal media for their five days of feral assaults on Sister Sarah.

The war the right lives for, against the people the right truly loathes—the liberal media elite who savagely “Bork” every true conservative who gets on the path to national power—has been reignited.

Positive polarization has been achieved. The Republican Party has been united and invigorated. The enthusiasm gap with the Democratic ticket has been closed. And the issues upon which the base loves to fight—the Culture War and Right to Life—are back on the table.

Palin’s beautifully crafted and delivered acceptance speech, after Rudy’s gleeful excoriations of the pretensions of Obama, will rank as a night to remember in convention history.

Yet, as the familiar battle lines form up for the delicious eight-week war that lies ahead, one hears a distant thunder. And the seriousness of the hour we are in comes home.

U.S. troops have crossed into Pakistan to attack Taliban and al-Qaida units in the privileged sanctuary of the tribal areas just across the border from Afghanistan. Have we just thrown a rock into the biggest hornet’s nest on earth?

How will the Pakistani government and people react to this U.S. incursion into their country to fight a war their own army has been reluctant to wage? How will the tribal peoples react? Will the weak new democratic regime, united only in its hatred of deposed President Musharraf, fall?

What is the future of this Islamic nation of 170 million, with its five-dozen nuclear weapons, that was once America’s great ally in South Asia, but is now seething with anti-Americanism?

In Afghanistan, the Taliban move closer to the capital Kabul as hardly a day goes by without U.S. armed forces being charged with the accidental killing of Afghan women and children. Is this even a winnable war, after seven years of fighting? And, if so, at what cost?

While the convention hears claims of victory in Iraq and an early return of U.S. troops, there are reports the Nouri al-Maliki regime, in collusion with Iran, wants the Americans out to settle accounts with the U.S.-sponsored Sunni militias and the Kurds over who rules in Baghdad and Kirkut.

Is the end of America’s long and costly war in Mesopotamia to be an Iraq incorporated into a Shia crescent led by Tehran?

Arnaud de Borchgrave reports that Israel, having supplied Mikheil Saakashvili’s army with weapons and training prior to his invasion of South Ossetia, had hoped to use Georgian airfields to fly strikes against Iran. The Russians are said to be furious and considering new military aid to Syria.

Now one reads of Dutch intelligence agents, who had infiltrated Iran’s nuclear program to sabotage it, being withdrawn, as the Dutch believe a U.S. strike on Iran may be imminent.

Vice President Cheney is in Tbilisi promising $1 billion in new aid, as Prime Minister Putin of Russia is asking why, if this aid is humanitarian, it is being brought into the Black Sea in U.S. warships.

In Moscow, President Medvedev and his foreign minister are talking of a Russian sphere of influence like the one the United States has demanded for two centuries with its Monroe Doctrine—a sphere from which all foreign military blocs and foreign troops are to be excluded.

This is a direct challenge to administration and neocon plans to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. John McCain may declare, “We are all Georgians now!”—but, are Americans, or Europeans, truly willing to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia to keep Joseph Stalin’s birthplace under a regime led by an erratic hothead who launched what may be the dumbest war in history, which he lost within 24 hours?

In June of 1914, a powerful flotilla of the Royal Navy was anchored in the German port of Kiel on a friendly visit where British naval officers visited German warships on the invitation of Adm. Von Tirpitz, and the Kaiser himself inspected the great new British battleship George V, in the uniform of a British admiral.

The festive occasion was interrupted and ended by news of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in the Balkans, where neither British nor Germans had vital interests.

Six weeks later, the two nations had plunged into the bloodiest war in history. Today, as Republicans celebrate the last hours of a hugely successful convention, and Democrats seethe at the hiding they took, are we as a nation drifting inexorably for new confrontations and larger and wider wars?

Who is minding the store, as we party in St. Paul?

From National Review Online: A profoundly moving account...
John McCain's Acceptance Speech (Excerpt)

"I’ve been an imperfect servant of my country for many years. But I have been her servant first, last and always. And I’ve never lived a day, in good times or bad, that I didn’t thank God for the privilege.

Long ago, something unusual happened to me that taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. I was blessed by misfortune. I mean that sincerely. I was blessed because I served in the company of heroes, and I witnessed a thousand acts of courage, compassion and love.

On an October morning, in the Gulf of Tonkin, I prepared for my 23rd mission over North Vietnam. I hadn’t any worry I wouldn’t come back safe and sound. I thought I was tougher than anyone. I was pretty independent then, too. I liked to bend a few rules, and pick a few fights for the fun of it. But I did it for my own pleasure; my own pride. I didn’t think there was a cause more important than me.

Then I found myself falling toward the middle of a small lake in the city of Hanoi, with two broken arms, a broken leg, and an angry crowd waiting to greet me. I was dumped in a dark cell, and left to die. I didn’t feel so tough anymore. When they discovered my father was an admiral, they took me to a hospital. They couldn’t set my bones properly, so they just slapped a cast on me. When I didn’t get better, and was down to about a hundred pounds, they put me in a cell with two other Americans. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even feed myself. They did it for me. I was beginning to learn the limits of my selfish independence. Those men saved my life.

I was in solitary confinement when my captors offered to release me. I knew why. If I went home, they would use it as propaganda to demoralize my fellow prisoners. Our Code said we could only go home in the order of our capture, and there were men who had been shot down before me. I thought about it, though. I wasn’t in great shape, and I missed everything about America. But I turned it down.

A lot of prisoners had it worse than I did. I’d been mistreated before, but not as badly as others. I always liked to strut a little after I’d been roughed up to show the other guys I was tough enough to take it. But after I turned down their offer, they worked me over harder than they ever had before. For a long time. And they broke me.

When they brought me back to my cell, I was hurt and ashamed, and I didn’t know how I could face my fellow prisoners. The good man in the cell next door, my friend, Bob Craner, saved me. Through taps on a wall he told me I had fought as hard as I could. No man can always stand alone. And then he told me to get back up and fight again for our country and for the men I had the honor to serve with. Because every day they fought for me.

I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency; for its faith in the wisdom, justice and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again. I wasn’t my own man anymore. I was my country’s.

I’m not running for president because I think I’m blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need. My country saved me. My country saved me, and I cannot forget it. And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath, so help me God."

From National Review Online:
Sob Story
Tears from the Xcel press stand.
By Kathryn Jean Lopez

St. Paul — I cried Wednesday night at the Xcel Center.

I didn’t just tear up when Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, talked about her son, Track, who will deploy to Iraq next week. I didn’t just tear up when she talked about her beautiful daughters — including one who has to suffer seeing her most intimate mistake and challenge in the public eye. I teared up when this 44-year-old woman, with her proverbial hair down, felt completely comfortable and confident talking about her love for her husband in a packed arena: “We met in high school, and two decades and five children later, he’s still my guy.”

And, yes, when she spoke of her son, Trig, and about special-needs children, I cried. She said:

And in April, my husband Todd and I welcomed our littlest one into the world, a perfectly beautiful baby boy named Trig. From the inside, no family ever seems typical.

That’s how it is with us.

Our family has the same ups and downs as any other . . . the same challenges and the same joys.

Sometimes even the greatest joys bring challenge.

And children with special needs inspire a special love.

When you look at that beautiful boy and realize that in America, some 90 percent of parents would not have let him live, how can you not be both terrified for us and filled with joy for the love this little boy has? How can you help but be excited by the prospect that Americans might become more aware of the silent elimination of such blessings?

Without pandering, without sounding like a politician, Palin was able to say, essentially, I am one of you. I work hard. Love my family. Love God (“a servant’s heart”). We struggle, just like you. But we know what is right and what is wrong. And I am here today to make sure you can make the choices you need to do right by your family.

She didn’t have to spell it all out, she showed it to us Wednesday night. She showed us that even a small-town gal from Alaska can be successful and be a leader.

And she laid the groundwork for invigorating a movement. Immediately after her speech, National Review Online readers e-mailed me to tell me they had just watched the next Ronald Reagan, the long-awaited successor. What I think we’re seeing is a new generation of conservatism. As Mitt Romney laid out clearly in his speech earlier in the night, there are some real differences between liberals and conservatives, and with a passionate energy this young woman is on the road to leading the Right into the future, with great respect for those who have laid the groundwork before us.

Other readers asked me why Palin didn’t talk about “life.” Her entire speech was about it. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. American exceptionalism. With love and spirit and good humor.

I’ve not cried during a political speech since the pope and George W. Bush met on the South Lawn of the White House earlier this year. There they talked freely about good and evil, truth and falsehood, God and man, love and hate. They talked about defending what is important and essential — most essential: our very lives and liberty. They talked about the special opportunity that is American life. This is what Sarah Palin presented to Americans watching her, probably meeting her for the first time, Wednesday night.

There are miles to go yet in this election. But Sarah Palin has gotten off to an excellent start. And Americans — men and women reminded of what’s important, boys and girls inspired by her energy and accomplishments — are better people for having met her, this woman in love with her country, her family, her God, and this gift of life in America.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.

From The Corner:
Papers of Record

From The Corner:
Credit where it's due
Mark Steyn

I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations by portraying Governor Palin - whoops, I mean Hick-Burg Mayor Palin - as a hillbilly know-nothing permapregnant ditz, half of whose 27 kids are the spawn of a stump-toothed uncle who hasn't worked since he was an extra in Deliverance.

How's that narrative holding up, geniuses? Almost as good as your "devoted husband John Edwards" routine?

I trust even now Maureen Dowd is working on a hilarious new column mocking proposed names for the Governor's first grandchild. Perhaps Richard Cohen can just take the week off and they can rerun his insightful analysis comparing the Palin nomination to Caligula making his horse a consul. Whereas we sophisticates all know that if McCain were as smart as Obama he'd have nominated a dead horse to be his consul. No wait...

From FirstThings.com:
A Vote for Sarah Palin
By Suann Therese Maier

Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 7:51 AM

Three memories have shaped my approach to this year’s general
election.

Here’s the first. In the late 1970s, during a two-year break from
teaching to raise our second son, an adopted child, I found myself at
a Los Angeles dinner party filled with DINKs, the “double income, no
kids” crowd who were just emerging as a self-aware and upwardly mobile
social group. I fell to talking—or more accurately, listening—to a
chatty young female attorney who said she was putting in eighty hours
a week as a junior associate on a variety of important cases.

After twenty minutes or so, she finally noticed my silence and asked
me what I did with my own time. So I told her. I told her about the
young couple that had asked my husband and me to adopt their baby if
we covered their hospital expenses. I told her about waiting outside
the delivery room for our son to be born. I told her about the
bureaucratic maze that came with finalizing the adoption of a newborn.
I told her about borrowing money from friends so we’d look more
solvent than we actually were to Social Service inspectors who checked
our accounts.

“That’s wonderful dear,” she said. “You’re so lucky not to have a real
job.”

Here’s the second memory. I remember my fourth child, our son Dan,
being born one winter evening, purple and struggling for breath. I
remember my husband pouring water over his head as we baptized him in
my arms. I remember the young Filipina doctor rushing Dan to intensive
care. I remember the ten days of his fighting for life. And I remember
Dan’s diagnosis, when it finally came in: Down syndrome.

Here’s the third memory. I remember my father, a successful young
Chicago attorney, telling me why the Democratic party was the party of
“our people,” and why so many Catholics were Democrats, and why the
party stood for the little guy, the poor and the defenseless. I
remember listening as a young girl in our kitchen as Saul Alinsky
organized my parents’ Catholic friends on racial and economic issues
in our Chicago living room. And I remember the night in 1992 when
Pennsylvania’s governor, Robert Casey, was denied a chance to talk
against abortion at the Democratic national convention.

As I draw on those memories now, I reach certain conclusions. As a
woman, mother, wife, and lifetime professional educator, I will vote,
enthusiastically, for Sarah Palin as vice president this November.
Even if the media pressure forces her from the ticket, I will vote
against the Democratic party—partly because I respect John McCain and
believe him to be the better candidate, but equally because I’m tired
of the intransigence and condescension of the Democratic leadership on
the abortion issue.

I will vote for Sarah Palin because I don’t need the Democratic
platform’s belated affirmation of motherhood. Thanks, but I already
know that motherhood is good, several times over. Moreover, the
party’s rediscovery of motherhood seems rather cynical in the current
news cycle, while Democratic-friendly bloggers and media types bash
Palin about her daughter’s pregnancy and her own busy schedule while
bringing up children. How can a real sympathy for motherhood come from
the same people who wrote a platform that hardens the party’s
addiction to a phony right to kill the unborn?

I will vote for Sarah Palin because she has guts. We’ve never met, but
I suspect I know something about her life, and so do a great many
other women. I know what it means to have a son with Down syndrome. I
know what it means to talk a good line about religious faith and then
be asked to prove it. I know what it means to have a daughter pregnant
and unmarried.

In fact, while we’re on the subject, I also know what it means to have
two grandchildren born out of wedlock, a son struggling with alcohol,
two grandchildren with serious disabilities, putting myself through
graduate school while simultaneously caring for a husband and children
and teaching full time—and a whole lot more. This is the stuff of real
human love; this is the raw material of family life. And those who
think that Palin’s beliefs and family struggles are funny or worth
jeering at, simply reveal the venality of their own hearts.

I will vote for Sarah Palin because she is intelligent, tenacious and
talented. Nobody made her rise easy, and no one is making it easy now.
And—is it only moms who notice this?—unlike Senator Biden, she does
seem to act consistently on her beliefs about the sanctity of life, at
considerable personal cost.

I will vote for Sarah Palin because she doesn’t come from Washington
or New York or Chicago or anywhere else the political and media
aristoi like to hang out. In fact, I especially like the idea that the
state she governs actually produces something—like some of the oil
that powers the hair dryers and klieg lights at MSNBC.

I will vote for Sarah Palin because Roe v. Wade is bad law, and it
needs to fall. I don’t doubt the intelligence and character of men
like Doug Kmiec, the younger Bob Casey, and others who sympathize with
the Obama campaign. But I do doubt their judgment. At the end of the
day, the Democratic party in 2008 has conceded nothing to pro-life
Democrats. The fact that Sen. Obama listens respectfully to pro-lifers
without calling them reactionary dunces does not constitute progress.
Results and behavior are what matter. On both those counts, the party
has again failed to show any real sensitivity to pro-life concerns. In
that light, high profile Catholics who support Obama are simply
rationalizing their surrender on Roe.

Finally, I will vote for Sarah Palin, not because I’ve left the
Democratic party of my youth and young adulthood, but because that
party has left me. In fact, it no longer exists. And no amount of
elegant speaking, exciting choreography, and moral alibis will bring
it back.

That’s the real tragedy of this election.

-- Suann Therese Maier, the mother of four and former director of
non-profit support organizations for pregnant women and children with
disabilities, is a teacher in Colorado.

'Stunning' ... Sarah Palin gives her speech

From The Sun (UK):
Palin strikes back at critics
From FERGUS SHANAHAN
in Minnesota

A WEEK ago nobody had ever heard of her.

Today she is the most talked-about woman in the world. And with good reason.

Sarah Palin's sensational performance at the Republican Party Convention may turn out to be the tipping point of this rollercoaster American election.

Obama fans hoping she would fluff her big night were in for a nasty shock.

This speech has turned the election upside down. It was simply stunning.

Democrats and their Lefty media backers had been sneering that she was a small town nobody, a hick from the Alaskan sticks put into a job way beyond an inexperienced woman.

Believe me, you will not be hearing that again.

Palin turned out to be an electrifying mix of intelligence, passion, energy, optimism and plain speaking.

Full of self-assurance and aggression, she popped Barack's balloon big-time.

From the moment she walked on stage in this cavernous bear pit, bandbox smart in cream jacket, trim black skirt and black heels, she proved that John McCain knew exactly what he was doing when he picked her as running mate.

Hair piled into a slight beehive – more Sarah White House than Amy Winehouse – she blinked and smiled behind her geeky spectacles as the vast crowd went ballistic.

For an unpopular party divided over Iraq and struggling to compete with Obama's Messianic glamour, the choice of Palin looks absolutely inspired.

Main Street America will have loved her performance.

And it was seen by 30million voters – the greatest number ever to watch a candidate for the much-derided VP post.

She is popular with voters for the very reason America's snooty political establishment despises her: She isn't one of the Washington gang.

She's a moose-hunting mum of five with a sledge-load of problems behind her own front door that workaday Americans can relate to.

A child with special needs. A daughter of 17 pregnant. A constant juggle between family and career.

As she said, her family has had its ups and downs like any other.

Last night her first task was to introduce herself and her family to an American public incredulous that the unknown Alaska governor could within weeks be a heartbeat away from being their commander in chief.

Compared to the journeyman career politicians dominating both parties here she seemed fresh, natural, one of us and not one of them.

She spoke to America as one mum to another. She cracked good jokes.

What's the difference between a hockey mum and a pit bull?, she asked.

Answer: One wears lipstick.

What will have scared the enemy camp most is the devastating series of prime-time punches she landed on the jutting Obama jaw.

Showing steel beneath her magnolia jacket, she slaughtered his lack of experience, his vanity, his emptiness beneath the windy waffle.

It was the most powerful demolition of the Democrat hero I have heard in two weeks on the US election trail.

The St Paul audience adored her.

When she duffed up the Lefty media commentators for their sexist sneers, the vast crowd roared approval and pointed in anger at the titans of the American press aloof in their special enclosure.

And quite right too: who ever asked whether Obama could still be a good dad if he became president?

The irony, as Palin pointed out, is that liberal media sniping has only succeeded in uniting Republicans behind her.

The wagons have been drawn up and the Republicans are ready for battle.

The McCain-Palin ticket now looks in exciting shape.

A war hero and a heroic mum. Experience and optimism. A man and a woman.

And when McCain joined the Palin gang – babies and boyfriends and all – on stage after her speech there was a sense of cheeky fun absent from last week's solemn Obama coronation.

How the Democrats must be regretting Hillary isn't running with Obama. Barack's sidekick Joe Biden looks a dull old dog compared with the ball of fire that is Palin.

But most fascinating of all, consider this: If Obama loses, Hillary Clinton will run in 2012. Opposing her is sure to be Sarah Palin.

That would guarantee America its first woman president.

And my fistful of dollars, having seen both in action here, would be on Palin.

From The Weekly Standard:
The Speech
What Palin wrought.
by William Kristol

09/04/2008 2:00:00 AM

NOW WE SEE why the liberal establishment has been trying for the last few days to destroy Sarah Palin. She is a threat to their hopes to take the White House this year, a threat to their broader claims to speak for youth, for women, and for the future, and a threat to their attempt to control the high ground in the culture war. After her stunning success last night, some in the liberal media may retire from the ring for a while. Others, with the threat now even more evident, may redouble their assaults and become even more desperate and vicious. Surely they'll fail. A star was born last night--but I won't belabor that fact, especially since it was the title of my New York Times column Monday. Nor will I analyze the whole speech, which I'm sure will be ably done by others. I'll just make three points. 1. I've heard one or two Palin skeptics acknowledge that it was a good speech, but then say--well, another nominee could have given a similarly good speech. Actually, no. The speech was so effective because it was given by someone who is, at once: a relative unknown, an executive not a legislator, a real reformer, a middle American who made it on her own, an outsider who was greeted with hostility by the D.C. establishment--and, yes, a woman. Obviously, another nominee could have given a good if different speech. But what made last night's speech special--what may have made last night an inflection point in this campaign, and even in American politics beyond Nov. 4--depended on the peculiar combination of qualities Sarah Palin brought to the table. Her speech was as far as a speech could be from being a generic one. Only Sarah Palin could have given it. The fact that she had the help of an excellent speechwriter, Matthew Scully, doesn't change the fact that this was in a precise way, and I'd almost say a profound way, Sarah Palin's speech. 2. The attack on Obama was very deft. Palin went right for Obama's fundamental weakness--that he's never done anything impressive. (And by giving such a good speech, she partly undermined his claim to be the only one who could speak impressively.) For example, consider this line--which I predict will be remembered two months from now: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities." This deflates all the sanctimonious praise of Obama at the Democratic convention for all his selfless years as a community organizer. And if you take away the community organizing, Obama's just a career politician, one "who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform," one of those who has used "change to promote their careers." What's left of Obama's résumé, and his claim to deserve the presidency? Not much. 3. Don't underestimate the power of this statement: "To the families of special needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House." The McCain campaign should flesh this out in policy terms, should not get worried by the inevitable attacks on McCain for voting (as he must have) for some budget resolution or other that would have cut (or not increased as much as some wanted) some special-needs programs, and just keep on emphasizing that Palin will take the lead on these issues, and McCain will see to it she gets the support, budgetary and otherwise, she needs. This would be real compassionate conservatism, and would be good both for conservatism and for the country. William Kristol is editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

From The New York Post:
BARACK, MEET YOUR NIGHTMARE
By RICH LOWRY

September 4, 2008 --

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Last night, the question about Sarah Palin wasn't if she's risen too fast, but where she's been for so long.

She may have given the best speech of either political convention. She delivered a brilliantly written text flawlessly. Politicians who've been on the national stage for decades could do no better, and usually do worse.

It is widely remarked that Joe Biden is an ideal No. 2 on a national ticket because he's a "happy warrior." Maybe. But Sarah Palin is a pretty, charismatic, winsome warrior, with a to-die-for smile, radiant upswept hair - and a steely toughness.

Sarah Barracuda, indeed.

Newsrooms across America must be in abject despair. The unlikely VP nominee the media hoped to crush out of the gate is unaffected by their condescension and scorn - and is bent on giving better than she takes.

Miss Congeniality isn't afraid to administer an old-fashioned beat-down. Annie Oakley brought a gun to a knife fight and made like the Obama-Biden ticket was a moose lazily meandering into her gun sights.

She started with an introduction of her family that is so all-American it could have been crafted by a political consultant - if it weren't so real, as demonstrated by 17-year-old Bristol's pregnancy.

Palin quickly established her credibility as a genuine representative of small-town America in a way few politicians can - and then used it to wheel on Barack Obama as a gasbag and a fraud in a witheringly sarcastic assault.

In her introduction, she said the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom is "lipstick." It wasn't just a cute line. She immediately began to prove it, starting with her killer line that being mayor of a small town is just like being a community organizer - except you have actual responsibilities.

She was merciless on Obama's elitism, scoring him for saying one thing about working-class voters in Scranton and another in San Francisco. By the end, you began to feel sorry for him for having been so thoroughly eviscerated by a woman and to wonder - how are Obama and Biden possibly going to handle her?

Palin was obviously comfortable laying body checks on Obama. In fact, she seemed to enjoy it.

Throughout, she never lost that ineffable quality that is literally priceless - her likability.

There's no substitute in politics for being liked, and it's not something that can be faked or synthesized. Together with her poise, it could - assuming no terrible gaffes or revelations in the days ahead - make her a national force for years to come.

On substance, she spent the most time in her comfort zone, talking about energy and casting it in terms of national security. Her challenge, of course, will be proving that she can be as fluid and confident in nonscripted interviews. But after last night, can anyone bet against her with the same confidence?

Already, it's possible to see the new orientation she could bring to the Republican Party - fresher, with more of a blue-collar sensibility and more feeling.

Citing Trig, her son with Down syndrome, she said that, with her in the White House, parents with children with special needs will have a friend and advocate - and got applause from the crowd.

John McCain may have found himself the ideal wingman. And she's a hockey mom named Sarah.

comments.lowry@nationalreview.com

From AnnCoulter.com: Post-speech quote: "SARAH PALIN KICKED ASS!
- I guess that ended the "vetting" questions."
THE BEST MAN TURNED OUT TO BE A WOMAN
by Ann Coulter

September 3, 2008

John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, as his running mate finally gave Republicans a reason to vote for him -- a reason, that is, other than B. Hussein Obama.

The media are hopping mad about McCain's vice presidential selection, but they're really furious over at MSNBC. After drawing "Keith + Obama" hearts on their denim notebooks, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews stayed up all night last Thursday, writing jokes about Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the presumed vice presidential pick. Now they can't use any of them.

So the media are taking it out on our brave Sarah and her 17-year-old daughter.

They claimed Palin was chosen only because she's a woman. In fact, Palin was chosen because she's pro-life, pro-gun, pro-drilling and pro-tax cuts. She's fought both Republicans and Democrats on public corruption and does not have hair plugs like some other vice presidential candidate I could mention. In other words, she's a "Republican."

As a right-winger, Palin will appeal to the narrow 59 percent of Americans who voted for another former small-market sportscaster: Ronald Reagan. Our motto: Sarah Palin is only a heartbeat away!

If you're going to say Palin was chosen because she's a woman, you're going to have to demonstrate that the runners-up were more qualified. Gov. Tim Pawlenty seems like a terrific fellow and fine governor, but he is not obviously more qualified than Palin.

As for former governor of Pennsylvania Tom Ridge and Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, the other also-rans, I can think of at least 40 million unborn reasons she's better than either of them.

Within the first few hours after Palin's name was announced, McCain raised $4 million in campaign donations online, reaching $10 million within the next two days. Which shortlist vice presidential pick could have beaten that?

The media hysterically denounced Palin as "inexperienced." But then people started to notice that she has more executive experience than B. Hussein Obama -- the guy at the top of the Democrats' ticket.

They tried to create a "Troopergate" for Palin, indignantly demanding to know why she wanted to get her ex-brother-in-law removed as a state trooper. Again, public corruption is not a good issue for someone like Obama, Chicago pol and noted friend of Syrian National/convicted felon Antonin Rezko.

For the cherry on top, then we found out Palin's ex-brother-in-law had Tasered his own 10-year-old stepson. Defend that, Democrats.

The bien-pensant criticized Palin, saying it's irresponsible for a woman with five children to run for vice president. Liberals' new talking point: Sarah Palin: Only five abortions away from the presidency.

They claimed her newborn wasn't her child, but the child of her 17-year-old daughter. That turned out to be a lie.

Then they attacked her daughter, who actually is pregnant now, for being unmarried. When liberals start acting like they're opposed to pre-marital sex and mothers having careers, you know McCain's vice presidential choice has knocked them back on their heels.

But at least liberal reporters had finally found someone their own size to pick on: a 17-year-old girl.

Speaking of Democrats with newborn children, the media weren't particularly concerned about John Edwards running for president despite his having a mistress with a newborn child.

While the difficult circumstances of Palin's pregnant daughter are being covered like a terrorist attack on the nation, with leering accounts of the 18-year-old father, the media remain resolutely uninterested in the parentage of Edwards' mistress's love child. Except, that is, the hardworking reporters at the National Enquirer, who say Edwards is the father.

As this goes to press, the latest media-invented scandal about Palin is that McCain didn't know her well before choosing her as his running mate. He knew her well enough, though admittedly, not as well as Obama knows William Ayers.

John F. Kennedy, who was -- from what the media tell me -- America's most beloved president, detested his vice president, Lyndon Johnson.

Until Clinton interviewed Al Gore one time before choosing him as his vice presidential candidate, he had met Gore only one other time: when Gore was running for president in 1988 and flew to Little Rock seeking Clinton's endorsement. Clinton turned him down.

To this day, there's no proof that Bill Clinton ever met one-on-one with his CIA director, James Woolsey, other than a brief chat after midnight the night before Woolsey's nomination was announced.

Barring some all-new, trivial and probably false story about Palin -- her former hairdresser got a parking ticket in 1978! -- the media apparently intend to keep being hysterical about McCain's alleged failure to "vet" Palin properly. The problem with this argument is that it presupposes that everyone is asking: "HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?"

No one's saying that.

Attacks on McCain's "vetting" process require the media to keep claiming that Palin has a lot of problems. But she doesn't have any problems. Remember? Those were all blind alleys.

Unfortunately, for the ordinary TV viewer hearing nonstop hysteria about nonspecific "problems," it takes a lot of effort to figure out that every attack liberals have launched against Palin turned out to be a lie.

It's as if a basketball player made the winning shot in the last three seconds of the game and liberals demand that we have a week-long discussion about whether the player should have taken that shot. WHAT IF HE MISSED?

With Palin, McCain didn't miss.

COPYRIGHT 2008 ANN COULTER

From The Boston Globe:
A stark choice on abortion
By Jeff Jacoby

September 3, 2008

DURING a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania last March, Senator Barack Obama was asked about teenagers and sexually transmitted diseases.

He replied that "the most important prevention is education," including "information about contraception." Then he added: "Look, I've got two daughters - 9 years old and 6 years old. I'm going to teach them first of all about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at the age of 16."

If Obama had deliberately set out to appall antiabortion voters, he couldn't have uttered four words more jarring than "punished with a baby." The equation of any new child with punishment set teeth on edge, and Obama's campaign quickly issued a clarification. The candidate, a loving father of two, believes that "children are miracles," it said; he only meant to underscore the importance of reducing teen pregnancy. But Obama's unscripted words needed no clarifying. They tartly encapsulated the extreme position on "choice" he has staked out in his career.

What brings Obama's revealing turn of phrase to mind, of course, is the pregnancy of Governor Sarah Palin's unmarried 17-year-old daughter.

"Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned," Palin and her husband announced in a statement. "We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support. Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family."

Granted, Obama was engaging in a hypothetical speculation, while the Palins were dealing with a real-life family challenge. Still, what a contrast! To the Democratic nominee, a teenage daughter's unforeseen baby is a punishment to be prevented; to the Republican Veep-designee, it is a blessing to be embraced.

The polarity of the candidates' reactions would be arresting even if these incidents stood alone. But in both cases they reinforce the record each campaign brings to the emotional question of life in the womb. This is hardly the first presidential campaign to pit an antiabortion Republican ticket against pro-choice Democrats. Never before, however, has the difference been so stark.

Obama advocates abortion rights even more sweeping than those enacted under Roe v. Wade. "The first thing I'd do as president," he assured the Planned Parenthood Action Fund last year, "is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." The measure would not only codify Roe, it would eliminate even restrictions on abortion that the Supreme Court has allowed - the federal ban on government funding of abortion, for example, or the law prohibiting partial-birth abortion.

During last month's forum at the Saddleback Church, Obama was asked when "a baby gets human rights." He fudged: "Answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade." But there is nothing hesitant about Obama's abortion stance. As an Illinois lawmaker, he opposed a bill making it clear that premature babies born alive after surviving a failed abortion must be protected and cannot be killed or simply left to die. Even after virtually identical legislation passed unanimously in the US House and Senate, Obama continued to oppose the state version. On abortion, no presidential candidate has ever been so extreme.

And when has a Republican ticket ever been so unabashedly antiabortion? Senator John McCain, long one of the Senate's reliably antiabortion votes, is a father of seven, including an adopted orphan from Bangladesh. His running mate lacks McCain's voting record, yet her bona fides are even more impressive: When Palin and her husband learned last winter that she was carrying a baby with Down syndrome, they never considered not having him. More than 90 percent of pregnant American women in the same position choose abortion. Palin chose life.

"We understand that every innocent life has wonderful potential," she said a few days after Trig Paxson Van Palin was born in April. "I'm looking at him right now, and I see perfection."

Ambiguities may muddle the 2008 campaign, but not when it comes to abortion. The next president and vice president will be the most pro-choice in US history. Or the most pro-life.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Why the Media is Sneering at Sarah Palin
The Beltway Boys

Even as the Obama camp ponders how best to handle John McCain's veep pick of Sarah Palin, the high priests and priestesses of the media have marked her as an apostate. The Beltway class is in full-throated rebellion against a nondomesticated conservative who might pose a threat to their coronation of Barack Obama and the return of Camelot-on-the-Potomac.

Here is a sampler of media comment on Governor Palin this week:

- Eleanor Clift, the McLaughlin Group: "If the media reaction is anything, it's been literally laughter in many places across newsrooms."

- Sally Quinn, Newsweek: "It is a political gimmick . . . I find it insulting to women, to the Republican party, and to the country."

- E.J. Dionne, Washington Post: "Palin is, if anything, less qualified for the vice presidency (and the presidency) than [Harriet] Miers was for the court. But there is one big difference: Palin passes all the right-wing litmus tests."

- Maureen Dowd, New York Times: "They have a tradition of nominating fun, bantamweight cheerleaders from the West."

- Ruth Marcus, Washington Post: "But as a parent in the media, I also know that the Palins assumed this risk. Anyone who watched coverage of the Bush twins' barroom exploits knew that the avert-your-eyes stance toward candidates' children has its limits."

- Charlie Cook, Beltway pundit, on PBS's "Charlie Rose": "I had a friend that had a young person tell them that they had three interviews to get a job as a server at Ruby Tuesday! So this is like putting a whole -- for someone that hasn't played on a national -- Geraldine Ferraro had more -- Dan Quayle had undergone more scrutiny, had played on a bigger stage than this. This is putting an enormous risk on someone he didn't know. And he has to just pray that it works!"

This is the same media whose chant for weeks -- no, months -- has been "let McCain be McCain." If we know anything about John McCain, it is that he is by instinct a reformer, sometimes to a fault. Yet when he acts like McCain and picks a maverick reformer in his own mold, his former media cheering squad turns on him for not conforming to Beltway mores and picking someone they've all met 10 times in the CNN green room.

They want a VP to be a kind of parliamentary choice, someone they have already vetted, someone who's made them laugh with insider jokes at the Gridiron dinner. The Beltway class whines constantly about how it wants fresh voices in politics, but we guess this means a first-term Democratic Senator rather than a first-term Republican Governor from some godforsaken U.S. state few of them have ever been to.

We are instructed that Mrs. Palin isn't qualified, because she lacks Washington experience. But until recently that was said to be a virtue in Mr. Obama, who is at the top of his ticket. Meanwhile, there's hardly a peep of media notice that the Obama campaign is preposterously trying to remake Joe Biden into a poor scrapper from Scranton when he's been in the Senate for 36 years. They all know Joe. But when Mr. McCain picks an authentic middle-class mother who is also a Governor, we are told she's not up to the job.

The spin du jour is that her choice reflects poorly on Candidate McCain because she wasn't properly vetted. Yet this seems to be false. Campaign vetter A.B. Culvahouse, White House counsel under Ronald Reagan, says Mrs. Palin told the campaign about her pregnant daughter and her husband's DUI at the age of 22. On Monday, Time magazine's Nathan Thornburgh wrote from Wasilla, Alaska, that Bristol Palin's pregnancy had been known by virtually everyone there, with little made of it. But what do these private family matters have to do with Mrs. Palin's credentials to be Vice President in any case?

The press in 2000 ignored marijuana use by Al Gore's son, as it should have. But now we are told a teenage pregnancy is going to raise second thoughts among evangelicals and "family values voters" about Mrs. Palin's ability to be both a mother and a public official. This is also false.

Leaving aside the embarrassing reality that the Beltway press corps barely knows any evangelicals, religious leaders this week greeted the pregnancy news with support for the Palins. Offering support for unwed pregnant women and their families is a primary activity of these churches from one end of America to the other. That might even make a good story for someone this weekend.

What's really going on here is that the Beltway class can see how popular the Palin pick is with Republicans outside Washington, and especially with middle-class conservatives. As Richard Land, a leader with the Southern Baptist Convention, said Monday, John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin closed the "enthusiasm gap" between the two parties.

There is nothing more dangerous to entrenched Washington power than a populist conservative who looks unlikely to buy into Washington's creature comforts. Take a close look at Governor Palin's record on ethics and energy in Alaska, and it becomes clear what this Beltway outburst is actually about. The irony is that while Senator Obama is running on change, his acceptance speech made explicit that he's promising only more power and money for Washington. Sarah Palin's history of taking on the career politicians of a corrupt Alaskan GOP machine -- her own party -- shows that she's the more authentic change agent.

* * *

If Sarah Palin succeeds as a national candidate, she could help John McCain proceed to a reform Presidency. Even if he loses while she does well, she could emerge as a major figure in GOP politics for years to come. This is why the media and political classes are so eager to discredit her. They can't let it happen.

We hope Mr. McCain and the GOP are prepared to fight back. On the evidence this week, it looks like an army of volunteers is forming up to help them.

From Real Clear Politics:
Sarah Palin and the Two Americas
By Thomas Lifson

Liberals have long lamented the existence of two nations in America. They are right to do so today, but in a way they never meant. It is not the divide between rich and poor which soon will be causing serious pain on the left. Sarah Palin's pending nomination for Vice President is exposing the depth of the cultural divide between Middle America and the leftists who have taken over the education, media, and cultural establishment of our country.

The announcement of Palin's selection by Senator McCain last Saturday reportedly triggered outright laughter in newsrooms across the land, a nearly unanimous opinion that she would be a disaster for McCain. To the sort of people who believe themselves sophisticated citizens of the world and feel a sense of pride at saving the planet by purchasing carbon offsets, a woman who has borne five children is incomprehensible. Add in moose-hunting, a champion snowmobiler husband and a pregnant 17 year old daughter, and the phrases "white trash" and "trailer trash" are deployed.

A desperate race is underway, with the liberal media scampering to define Sarah Palin to the public as a dangerous religious fanatic and naïve hick, some kind of back woods primitive incapable of effectively discharging the awesome job of president, soon to be thrust upon her as John McCain expires right after his inauguration. Tonight, Governor Palin will have her opportunity to speak directly to the American people, and thanks to the blizzard of critical coverage, she will be no doubt attract an enormous audience.

She has the rarest of qualities: authenticity. Media and Beltway types can't fathom what that is. It goes right over their heads. Not even on the radar screen. Her multiple facets -- beauty queen, moose hunter, mother, member of an Assembly of God Church, and ferocious reformer of corrupt politics may baffle sophisticates, but ordinary Americans see all the pieces fitting together, and they recognize a type of person they know and love.

Think of Marge Gunderson, the fictional chief of police of Brainerd, Minnesota in the Oscar®-winning movie Fargo, taken as a comic send-up by the swells in New York and Hollywood, with her Midwestern twang (shared by Sarah Palin), funny hat, and kitsch-artist husband. The kind of woman who probably rides snowmobiles with her husband, for crying out loud. Yet in the end, Marge Gunderson solved the murder despite the sneers of her betters in the Big City (Minneapolis), and won the hearts of movie audiences. Americans like their heroines full of common sense and spunk.

Sarah Palin is the ultimate All-American Girl, beautiful but not glamorous, powerful but unpretentious, high-powered but down-to-earth, a reformer who speaks up while others cower in fear of rocking the boat. Like Ronald Reagan, she can reach right through the television camera into people's minds and hearts. We recognize one of us.

The left, so wrapped in artifice and fakery, are driven crazy by this. Her behavior appears bizarre, inexplicable. In their minds, she is a disaster and they pretend to be gleeful, asking when McCain will dump her. All while panicking, because they can see the energized GOP base and the failure of Barack Obama to garner the ten-to-fifteen point post-convention bounce to be expected after his speech before the multimillion-dollar Greek temple set and fireworks at Invesco Field only 5 days ago. Those who planned the classical Greek theatrical stage never for second contemplated the possibility of a deus ex machina named Sarah.

So now they hurl ridiculous, self-discrediting accusations (the fantasy that Palin was not the mother of her baby Trig and was covering for her daughter was published by The Atlantic) and cannot understand that they won't work on a mom who's about to become a grandma while caring for a Down syndrome baby. They regard the public as fools to be manipulated, and know that with the MSM megaphone, they can sell practically anything. They turned Ken Starr from a vigorous prosecutor into a sex-obsessed fanatic, didn't they? The Chicago Annenberg Challenge remains unknown to the vast majority of voters.

Sarah Palin, a woman who took down the corrupt politicians dominating her state, may be a tougher nut to crack. She simply doesn't know her place, at least as others have constructed it. She does what's right and tells people what's on her mind. When you believe in the founding principles of the land and see yourself answerable to God, it reinforces an already steely will. If you happen to be gifted with brains, beauty, energy, health, and the charisma of a star, you might just pull off genuine reform.

Republicans are thrilled by what they see in Sarah Palin. Reform Republicanism with a younger generation in charge could knock the left out of power for a generation. Bobby Jindal, out to reform Louisiana as Palin reformed Alaska, awaits the 2012 VP nomination with Sarah at the top of the ticket, if McCain wins this election. Suddenly the Republicans have a claim on being the vote for change.

Despite having been written off as a hopeless cause by political insiders and media know-it-alls, the Grand Old Party is about to renew itself amidst catcalls from the opposition. The same sort of swells who laugh at Sarah Palin as trailer trash categorized Ronald Reagan as an amiable dunce when in a charitable mood, spelled his name Ray-Gun, and felt ashamed to have a graduate of Eureka College, not some Ivy League campus, representing America on the world stage.

Ronald Reagan never let the contempt of the cultural, literary and journalistic elites bother him. He simply spoke over their heads directly to the American people. And changed the world. In Sarah Palin, we may well have a figure able to do the same. All eyes will be on her tonight.

Thomas Lifson is the editor and publisher of American Thinker.

From Asia Times: If there was ever an instance of "from his
mouth to God's ears" let this be the one....
How Obama lost the election
By Spengler

DENVER - Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech last week seemed vastly different from the stands of this city's Invesco Stadium than it did to the 40 million who saw it on television. Melancholy hung like think smog over the reserved seats where I sat with Democratic Party staffers. The crowd, of course, cheered mechanically at the tag lines, flourished placards, and even rose for the obligatory wave around the stadium. But its mood was sour. The air carried the acrid smell of defeat, and the crowd took shallow breaths. Even the appearance of R&B great Stevie Wonder failed to get the blood pumping.

The speech itself dragged on for three-quarters of an hour. As David S Broder wrote in the Washington Post: "[Obama's] recital of a long list of domestic promises could have been delivered by
any Democratic nominee from Walter Mondale to John Kerry. There was no theme music to the speech and really no phrase or sentence that is likely to linger in the memory of any listener. The thing I never expected did in fact occur: Al Gore, the famously wooden former vice president, gave a more lively and convincing speech than Obama did."

On television, Obama's spectacle might have looked like The Ten Commandments, but inside the stadium it felt like Night of the Living Dead. The longer the candidate spoke, and the more money he promised to spend on alternative energy, preschool education, universal health care, and other components of the Democratic pinata, the lower the party professionals slouched into their seats. The professionals I sat with were Hillary Clinton people, to be sure, and had reason to sulk, for an Obama victory might do them little good in any event.

The Democrats were watching the brightest and most articulate presidential candidate they have fielded since John F Kennedy snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And this was before John McCain, in a maneuver worthy of Admiral Chester Nimitz at the Battle of Midway, turned tables on the Democrats' strategy with the choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Speaking to Obama supporters on the periphery of the big event, I was startled by the rapturous devotion elicited by the junior senator from Illinois. He is no symbol for identity politics, no sacrifice on the altar of white guilt, but the most gifted persuader of individuals that I have encountered in any country's politics, as well as a powerful orator on the grand stage. This is not a crowd phenomenon nor a fad, but the response of hundreds of people to an individual.

I sat in on a session with three leaders of Veterans for Obama, a group of retired young officers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, courtesy of the New Republic's writer on the scene, David Samuels. With passion and enthusiasm, these young people spoke of their hopes for nation-building in Iraq. The George W Bush administration should have put twice the resources into the beleaguered country, they harangued me - not just soldiers, but agronomists, traffic cops, lawyers, judges, and physicians. The Department of Agriculture should have mobilized, along with the Department of Justice.

Nation-building? Doubling down on the US commitment to Iraq? Isn't that trying to out-Bush the Bush administration, while Obama campaigned on getting out of Iraq and spending the money on programs at home? Unblinking, one of the soldiers said, "That's what we think Barack will do." They believed in a more expensive version of the administration's program, and faulted Bush for half measures - and somehow they believed that Obama really agreed with them, all the public evidence to the contrary. And they believed in Barack with perfect faith.

Gandalf's warnings about the irresistible voice of the wizard Saruman in J R R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings come to mind. If these battle-hardened veterans of America's wars fell so easily under the spell of Obama's voice, who can withstand it? Obama's persuasive powers, though, are strongest when channeled through the empathy of his interlocutor. Everyone believes that Obama feels his pain, shares his dream, and will fight his fight and heal his ills. But that is everyone as an individual. Add all the individuals up into a campaign platform, and it turns into three-quarters of an hour worth of promises that echo all the ghosts of conventions past.

Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. However reluctantly, Clinton would have had to accept. McCain's choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain's selection was a statement of strength. America's voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.

That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event. Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama's prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory.

Biden, who won 3% of the popular vote in the Democratic presidential primary in his home state of Delaware, and 1% or less in every other contest he entered, is ballot-box poison. Obama evidently chose him to assuage critics who point to his lack of foreign policy credentials. That was a deadly error, for by appearing to concede the critics' claim that he knows little about foreign policy, Obama raised questions about whether he is qualified to be president in the first place. He had a winning alternative, which was to pick Clinton. That would have sent a double message: first, that Obama is tough enough to make the slippery Clintons into his subordinates, and second, that he is generous enough to extend a hand to his toughest adversary in the cause of unity.

Why didn't Obama choose Hillary? The most credible explanation came from veteran columnist Robert Novak May 10, who reports that Michelle Obama vetoed Hillary's candidacy. "The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility," Novak wrote. If that is true, then Obama succumbed to the character weakness I described in a February 26 profile of (Obama's women reveal his secret). His peculiar dependency on an assertive and often rancorous spouse, I argued, made him vulnerable, and predicted that Obama "will destroy himself before he destroys the country".

Alternately, Obama might have chosen a rising Democratic star like Virginia's 50-year-old governor Tim Kaine. A weaker choice than Hillary, Kaine (or someone like him) would have made a bold statement of self-confidence. Obama could have said with credibility that he would bring to Washington a new generation of outsiders who would change the old system. Instead, Obama saddled an old and unpopular Washington warhorse.

Curiously, Obama ignored the rising stars of his own party, offering the prime time speaking slots to familiar faces, including Senator Edward Kennedy and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as his own wife, the first prospective First Lady to take the keynote spot in the history of American party conventions.

McCain doesn't have a tenth of Obama's synaptic fire-power, but he is a nasty old sailor who knows when to come about for a broadside. Given Obama's defensive, even wimpy selection of a running-mate, McCain's choice was obvious. He picked the available candidate most like himself: a maverick with impeccable reform credentials, a risk-seeking commercial fisherwoman and huntress married to a marathon snowmobile racer who carries a steelworkers union card. The Democratic order of battle was to tie McCain to the Bush administration and attack McCain by attacking Bush. With Palin on the ticket, McCain has re-emerged as the maverick he really is.

The young Alaskan governor, to be sure, hasn't any business running for vice president of the United States with her thin resume. McCain and his people know this perfectly well, and that is precisely why they put her on the ticket. If Palin is unqualified to be vice president, all the less so is Obama qualified to be president.

McCain has certified his authenticity for the voters. He's now the outsider, the reformer, the maverick, the war hero running next to the Alaskan amazon with a union steelworker spouse. Obama, who styled himself an agent of change, took his image for granted, and attempted to ensure himself victory by doing the cautious thing. He is trapped in a losing position, and there is nothing he can do to get out of it.

Obama, in short, is long on brains and short on guts. A Shibboleth of American politics holds that different tactics are required to win the party primaries as opposed to the general election, that is, by pandering to fringe groups with disproportionate influence in the primaries. But Obama did not compromise himself with extreme positions. He did not have to, for younger voters who greeted him with near-religious fervor did not require that he take any position other than his promise to change everything. Obama could have allied with the old guard, through an Obama-Clinton ticket, or he could have rejected the old guard by choosing the closest thing the Democrats had to a Sarah Palin. But fear paralyzed him, and he did neither.

In my February 26 profile, I called Obama "the political equivalent of a sociopath", without any derogatory intent. A sociopath seeks the empathy of all around him while empathizing with no one. Obama has an almost magical ability to gain the confidence of those around him. Perhaps it was the adaptation of a bright and sensitive young boy who was abandoned by three parents - his Kenyan father Barack Obama Sr, who left his pregnant young bride; his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetero; and by his mother, Ann Dunham, who sent her 10-year-old son to live with her grandparents while she pursued her career as an anthropologist.

Combine a child's response to serial abandonment with the perspective of an outsider, and Obama became an alien species against which American politics had no natural defenses. He is a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans, in but not of the American system. No country's politics depends more openly on friendships than America's, yet Obama has not a single real friend, for he rose so fast that all his acquaintances become rungs on the ladder of his ascent. One human relationship crowds the others out of his life, his marriage to Michelle, a strong, assertive and very angry woman.

If Novak's report is accurate, then Michelle's anger will have lost the election for Obama, as Achilles' anger nearly killed the Greek cause in the Trojan War. But the responsibility rests not with Michelle, but with Obama. Obama's failure of nerve at the cusp of his success is consistent with my profile of the candidate, in which I predicted that he would self-destruct. It's happening faster than I expected. As I wrote last February:

It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama ... Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals.

By all rights, the Democrats should win this election. They will lose, I predict, because of the flawed character of their candidate.

From National Review Online:
Talk vs. Action
Obama vs. Palin.
By Dinesh D'Souza

So let’s compare. Sarah Palin has a 17-year-old daughter who is pregnant. Does this mean that Sarah Palin is a hypocrite for championing family values? Does this make her a bad parent?

Here is what Palin has to say about the matter: “We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart. . . . Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of love and adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional support.”

This to me is the true humble and Christian response. No one is perfect. And there are consequences for actions which each person has to live with. Even so, parents can admire the young girl’s decision not to take the easy way out and have an abortion. The Palins love their daughter unconditionally, and accept the grandchild unreservedly. I predict that this will strengthen Palin’s support both with evangelical Christians and with the American people.

Now let’s contrast Palin’s behavior with that of Barack Obama. Here is Obama, from his speech at the Democratic National Convention. “It’s not because John McCain doesn’t care. It’s because John McCain doesn’t get it.” Obama faulted McCain for his cruel and insensitive philosophy, which he defined this way: “Out of work? Tough luck. No health care. The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your boot straps, even if you don’t have boots. You’re on your own.”

Obama regularly distances himself from this philosophy. In his interview with pastor Rick Warren, Obama said his favorite passage in the Bible is the one where Jesus says: whatever you do to the least of my brethren, that you do unto me. Obama insisted that these are the ideals that have guided his life and the ones that he would bring to the Oval Office.

Now how can Obama’s self-description be reconciled with news reports that Obama’s youngest half-brother lives in a hut in a shanty town on the outskirts of Nairobi? Twenty-six-year-old George Hussein Onyango Obama told Vanity Fair, “No one knows who I am. I live here on less than a dollar a month.” George Obama’s shack measures six feet by ten feet, and yet he says that Barack Obama has done nothing to reach out to him or to help him. “I live like a recluse. If anyone says something about my surname, I say we are not related. I am ashamed.”


So far what has Barack Obama said about his half-brother? Absolutely nothing. Obama’s supporters, in attempting to cover for Obama, have basically accused the young half-brother of trying to benefit from Obama’s success. They say Obama doesn’t owe his sibling a thing. In other words, the Obama camp has a message for George Obama: “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, even if you don’t have boots. You’re on your own.”

Could there be a more striking contrast between Palin’s loving approach to her family and Obama’s callous rejection of his own brother? The media seems to be implying that Palin is hypocritical because she stands for “family values” while her daughter is pregnant out of wedlock. But parents don’t have full control over their teenagers’ actions.

Moreover, isn’t Obama an even bigger hypocrite for championing aid to the down-and-out while his own sibling lives in an African hut on pennies a day? By the way, the Obamas made several million dollars last year. They are certainly in a position to relieve George Obama’s condition if they cared enough.

The major newspapers and networks know about George, and they seem to recognize how damaging this story is for their favorite presidential candidate. So they are not reporting it, even though it is one of the most revealing stories about the candidate’s character. And thus, as the GOP convention gets under way, we have the ridiculous spectacle of Obama getting credit for talking about compassion while Palin gets criticized for practicing it.

— Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book is What’s So Great About Christianity. He can be reached at dineshjdsouza@aol.com.

Dinesh D'Souza, the Rishwain fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author most recently of The Enemy at Home.

Johnny's got a new girl
McCain's choice of Palin could shape
future of U.S. for years to come
By Patrick J. Buchanan

The risk John McCain took last Friday is comparable to the 72-year-old ex-fighter pilot knocking back two shots and flying his F-16 under the Golden Gate Bridge.

McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his co-pilot was the biggest gamble in presidential history. As of now, it is paying off, big-time.

The sensational selection in Dayton, Ohio, stepped all over the big story from Denver – Barack Obama's powerful address to 85,000 cheering folks in Mile High Stadium, and 35 million nationally, a speech that vaulted him from a 2-point deficit early in the week to an 8-point margin. Barack had never before reached 49 percent against McCain.

As the Democrats were being rudely stepped on, however, Palin ignited an explosion of enthusiasm among conservatives, evangelicals, traditional Catholics, gun owners and Right to Lifers not seen in decades.

By passing over his friends Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, and picking Palin, McCain has given himself a fighting chance of winning the White House that, before Friday morning, seemed to be slipping away. Indeed, the bristling reaction on the left testifies to Democratic fears that the choice of Palin could indeed be a game-changer in 2008.

(Column continues below)

Liberals howl that Palin has no experience, no qualifications to be president of the United States. But the lady has more executive experience than McCain, Joe Biden and Obama put together.

None of them has ever started or run a business as Palin did. None of them has run a giant state like Alaska, which is larger than California and Texas put together. And though Alaska is not populous, Gov. Palin has as many constituents as Nancy Pelosi or Biden.

She has no foreign policy experience, we are told. And though Alaska's neighbors are Canada and Russia, the point is valid. But from the day she takes office, Palin will get daily briefings and sit on the National Security Council with the president and secretaries of state, treasury and defense.

She will be up to speed in her first year.

And her experience as governor of Alaska, dealing with the oil industry and pipeline agreements with Canada, certainly compares favorably with that of Barack Obama, a community organizer who dealt in the mommy issues of food stamps and rent subsidies.

Where Obama has poodled along with the Daley Machine, Palin routed the Republican establishment, challenging and ousting a sitting GOP governor before defeating a former Democratic governor to become the first female and youngest governor in state history.

For his boldness in choosing Palin, McCain deserves enormous credit. He has made an extraordinary gesture to conservatives and the party base, offering his old antagonists a partner's share in his presidency. And his decision is likely to be rewarded with a massive and enthusiastic turnout for the McCain-Palin ticket. Rarely has this writer encountered such an outburst of enthusiasm on the right.

In choosing Palin, McCain may also have changed the course of history as much as Ike did with his choice of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan did with his choice of George H.W. Bush. For should this ticket win, Palin will eclipse every other Republican as heir apparent to the presidency and will have her own power base among Lifers, evangelicals, gun folks and conservatives – wholly independent of President McCain.

A traditional conservative on social issues, Palin has become, overnight, the most priceless political asset the movement has. Look for the neocons to move with all deliberate speed to take her into their camp by pressing upon her advisers and staff, and steering her into the AEI-Weekly Standard-War Party orbit.

Indeed, if McCain defeats Barack, 2012 could see women on both national tickets, and given McCain's age and the possibility he intends to serve a single term, women at the top of both – Sarah vs. Hillary.

The arrival of Palin on the national scene, with her youth, charisma and vitality, probably also portends a changing of the guard in Washington.

With Republicans having zero chance of capturing either House, and but a slim chance of avoiding losses in both, a Vice President Palin, with her reputation as a rebel and reformer, would surely inspire similar revolts in the Republican caucuses.

As Thomas Jefferson said, from time to time, a little rebellion in the political world is as necessary as storms in the physical.

The Palin nomination could backfire, but it is hard to see how. She has passed her first test, her introduction to the nation, with wit and grace. And the Obama-Biden ticket, having already alienated millions of women with the disrespecting of Hillary, is unlikely to start attacking another woman whose sole offense is that she had just been given the chance to break the glass ceiling at the national level.

Her nomination, which will bring the Republican right home, also frees up McCain to appeal to moderates and liberals, which has long been his stock in trade.

With his selection of Sarah Palin, John McCain has not only shaken up this election, he may have helped shape the future of the United States – and much for the better.