Sunday Morning Thought

Watching the Sunday Morning chat fests, I have to wonder....if resigning from her position as governor was such a bad idea - why are we still A WEEK LATER talking about Sarah Palin and her prospects for 2012? She couldn't BUY the amount of time on the air that she is getting from the media as result of this.

Mommy Wars

I really have tried to bite my tongue on a lot of this. After all, if you are going to play politics, you have to be able to endure the "slings and arrows". However, the crescendo has reached such a fever pitch that something must be said.

Since August 29, the liberal/progressive side of the political debate started trying to find the "dirt" on Sarah Palin. The attacks have ranged from juvenile to vile. Rather than address the ones that have come out so far, I will point you to these two websites as they have done all the hard work so far.

But the arguments that have really stuck in my craw are the statements that Governor Palin can't run for office and take good care of her son Trig and the converse (that came out yesterday) complaining that Governor Palin is (gasp) taking her children with her on the campaign trail! These are the kinds of attacks (you can't work and be a good mom) that women have been fighting for half a decade. What is worse is that this is coming out of supporters of the party that supposedly gives a fig about womens rights! While I don't find this surprising (after all they used these tactics against Senator Clinton in the primaries) the sexist comments coming out of Senator Obama's supporters are growing in their histrionics.

Senator Obama and his surrogates in the media are worried. They understand that Sarah Barracuda is "the real deal" and they are trying their darnedest to smear her. It got to the point where Democrat Kersten Powers (HT Gary at LFR) took the feminist movement and the media to task over their reaction.

Last night, "Sarah Barracuda" more than lived up to that slogan as she fought back at the media and Washington naysayers who've ridiculed her as a bimbo bumpkin interloper and showed she isn't going to be pushed around.

Had the media not been viciously attacking her family for the last few days, the speech might've seemed too tough. With that backdrop, it was more than appropriate.

The Obama camp also gave her the perfect chance to smack it around for being elitists - since its first response to John McCain picking her was to ridicule the size of her home town.

On that stage last night, Sarah Palin represented everything the feminist movement claims to strive for: a successful working woman with a happy family life and a husband who helps raise the children. Yet, rather than hailing her accomplishment, the feminist establishment has sat by silently as she's savaged for being a working mother.

Turns out old feminism is really just a bunch of good 'ole girls telling you what to think.

The latest offense came from Senator Obama himself when he turned Governor Palin's "pitbull/hockey mom joke" around saying that even if you put "lipstick on a pig it's still a pig". Imagine the righteous howls of indignation if someone referred to either Senator Obama (and his policies) or Senator Biden - I don't care HOW jokingingly - as a "pig". The left and the media would be apoplectic!

It is obvious that the Obama campaign is scared to death of Governor Palin. If not why would they have sent an army of lawyers and opposition researchers to Juneau and Wasilla to try to dig up dirt of Sarah Palin. (HT Ed) . It is also obvious that supporters of Senator Obama only care about feminist "ideals" when the feminist is one of theirs. I just heard an Obama supporter call into Rush Limbaugh's program and on national radio call Governor Palin a "smelly pig"!

And that could very well be the tale of the campaign as this site indicates:

We keep saying this — and no one seems to listen — but over the course of this campaign, we’ve met about 50 people who worked on McGovern-72, and every one of them said to us, without quivocation, that the main reason McGovern lost to Nixon was McGOVERN’S SUPPORTERS. The way McGovern’s “youth army” behaved, and the terrible things they did in McGovern’s name, worked against their candidate and every day drove more people who would have never voted Republican over to Nixon.

We’ll try to spell this out even more clearly: when people see things like this anti-Palin Ebay stunt, it makes normal people wonder why they would support SoetorObama, if this is what his followers are up to. It makes people who might have pulled the lever for this man question the very act of putting someone like this into office, when these are the types of followers he attracts.

People do not want to be associated with this sort of filth – and the fact that SoetorObama’s campaign doesn’t clamp down hard and stop this sort of daily, vulgar, nastiness says A GREAT DEAL about the person Oprah calls “The One”.

They are correct - the more "The One" and his followers stoop into the gutter to attack Sarah, Bristol and Trig Palin, the more they are going to turn off voters that only get their news in 30 second sound bytes on the nightly news. They are going to remember Senator Obama's pledge not to engage in this kind of cynical personal attack and they are going to reject him just as certainly as the electorate rejected Senator McGovern back in 1972.

Did You Hear The One About...

One of the stories that I had hoped to rant at length on was the absolutely shoddy treatment that Senator McCains’s VP pick, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, had gotten in the media and by Obama surrogates. However, I am very glad that I didn’t get a chance to do so and you shall soon see why.

I won’t go into all of the rumors that were spread about Governor Palin, nor will I rebut all of them since there is a website already devoted to doing so. In addition, FactCheck.org debunked the vast majority of them and is working on the rest. Rather, I would like to make a couple of observations in general and then relay an anecdotal story of a very unscientific survey that I took while here in Chicago.

One of the stories that really appeared to get legs was he slime that Trig is not really Sarah’s baby…that is her 17 year old daughter’s baby. When the campaign announced that Bristol was already 5 months pregnant so she could in no way be 5 month old Trig’s mom the scandal mongers (like the folks at US Magazine) were still not satisfied. The campaign is lying about how far along Bristol is, the conspiracy goes…she is really only 3 months along….I have to think that the people spreading this rumor are childless because if they did have children they would know how hard it is (although not totally impossible) to get pregnant while you are nursing an infant.

Then there is “Troopergate”. What is frustrating about this particular quasi scandal is that the “respectable media” isn’t telling a third of the story – much less half of it. As has been reported in Alaska (but not here in the lower 48), Governor Palin’s former brother in law had been caught drinking on duty, had a DUI that was much more current than the one her husband Todd had 20 years ago and that the trooper in question had used his taser on his 11 year old step son! Governor Palin's former brother in law's excuse for tasering the kid was that "he asked for it". Now as the adult in that situation would you taser a 10 or 11 year old because he "asked for it"? Most reasonable adults would not. Do you want someone carrying a gun or a taser that thinks it is ok to use a taser on an 11 year old child? They also don’t tell you that the Public Safety Commissioner is an “at will” employee which means that he can be fired for any reason or no reason at all. Just ask all of the assistant Attorneys General in Lori Swanson’s office!

But the thing that frustrates me the most is the fact that here we are in 2008 fighting the “Mommy Wars” yet again. I thought that we fought the “Women’s Rights Movement” so that we did not have debates like this going forward. Although I have to be grateful to Gloria Steinem for finally admitting that her organization is only for a right to choose if it is the right to choose abortion. She came flat out and said last week that the only thing she had in common with Governor Palin was one chromosome and that was not enough. I mean here I thought that NOW was all about rights for ALL people who shared a common chromosome with her and Governor Palin. Now all of a sudden that chromosome is not so important…..

While I was here in Chicago, I had the opportunity to talk to many women about the Sarah Palin nomination. Some were Republicans, some were Democrats and some were very apolitical and ALL of them were appalled at the treatment that Governor Palin had received at the hands of the press and at the hands of the Obama surrogates. Almost all of them (my very Demoractic mother being the sole exception) were talking about voting for the McCain Palin ticket in large part because of the way that the Democrats had treated both Senator Hillary Clinton and Governor Palin.

Good work guys! Keep it up.

What Is The Difference Between.....

I heard Bill Kristol relay this story on the news this morning.

McCain aides whose judgment I trust are impressed by Sarah Palin. One was particularly amused by this exchange: A nervous young McCain staffer took it upon himself to explain to Palin the facts of life in a national campaign, the intense scrutiny she'd be under from the media, the viciousness of the assault that she'd be facing, etc.:

Palin: "Thanks for the warning. By the way, do you know what they say the difference is between a hockey mom and a Pit Bull?"

McCain aide: "No, Governor."

Palin: "A hockey mom wears lipstick."

Yep - that about says it all.