As I tweeted earlier today, you don’t have to believe Sarah Palin is “God’s gift” to conservatism to appreciate the content and spirit of her farewell speech as Governor of Alaska — a speech in which, it seems to me, she demonstrates a deep and heartfelt understanding of what it means to be independent and truly free.
Our Frontier spirit is still alive and well in a few places — thank the Founders. As long as there are states whose people understand and value Liberty and are willing to fight for it, there is authentic Hope for the rest of us.
Part 1:
Part 2:
UPDATE: Bill Whittle nails it as usual, with “The Destruction of Sarah Palin”:
Sarah Palin is the anti-Obama. He is urban; she is rural. He preaches dependency on the government and she leads a life of independence. He consistently apologizes for the sins of the country he was elected to lead, and she is unabashedly proud of it. He opposes the war in Iraq; she has skin in the game. And on and on.
And that is why she had to be destroyed, by the Democratic Party, by the New York media elites, and by many of the inside-the-beltway voices of various and sundry GOP “strategists.”
She needs to be destroyed because the one thing that can never be allowed to happen is this: you cannot have a voice in this political debate. You know who I mean. You rubes, you hicks out there in flyover country. Your job is pay taxes, vote for who they have decided over cocktails makes them feel better about themselves, and occasionally provide your inbred idiot sons and daughters for the army or police force or whatever you people without Ivy League educations do with your tawdry little lives.
Meanwhile, the Harvard-educated elitist geniuses will run the country according to their infinitely brighter intellectual and moral lights.
And whatever happens, do not be distracted by inconvenient facts that you might stumble upon as you listen to Faux News, or your hate-filled talk radio, or right-wing nutjob blogs. Pay no attention to the fact that small banks, run by hayseeds like yourselves, were in no financial troubles at all lending money and writing mortgages to people who could afford to pay it back, but who are now are being forced to pay for the failure of genius-level Harvard Business School ideas like Collateralized Debt Obligations which essentially brought down the greatest economy the world has ever seen.
And remember, it’s just a coincidence that Harvard grads John F. Kennedy and Robert S McNamara not only got us into the Vietnam war, they also determined the genius-level rules of engagement that caused inbound Naval aviators to look down at, but not attack, the surface-to-air missiles being unloaded at Haiphong Harbor. They’d see those same missiles again in a few weeks when they were shot down and killed by them.
That’s genius-level, Harvard-quality thinking. Not like that simpering idiot, that commonplace dolt Ronald Reagan. I mean, the man went to EurekaCollege, for God’s sake! Who’s even heard of Eureka College? The fact that he defied forty years of Harvard-educated State Department officials and defeated the Soviet Union with plain speaking and common sense and some antiquated, embarrassing and – one might say tacky – belief in his country and its people… well, that’s surely coincidence as well.
Read the whole blessed thing at PJM.
Josh Strawn writes at PJM:
American exceptionalism gets a new name in a recent New York Times column from Roger Cohen: Palinism. This is a bizarre form of compliment from a detractor of Mrs. Palin — using her name to label a tradition in American ideology that’s been “around since the Founding Fathers,” which he admits is an “inspirational notion, however flawed in execution, that has buttressed the global spread of liberty.” But where Cohen sees antagonism between universalism, embodied by Barack Obama, and the American exceptionalism of Sarah Palin, in reality there is not much.
It sure sounds like that’s more than just blogosphere perception, according to this e-mail Glenn received:
A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: “Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.”
UPDATE 10/1:
Demanding a Sarah Palin press conference:
Only one candidate is being sheltered from tough press questions with the active complicity of the press.
Though I fully realize that — Bill Whittle’s hopeful “cheering her from the rafters” comment notwithstanding — there are plenty of anti-war, or anti-“conservative”-economic-policy, or otherwise differently ideologically disposed feminists who will not be jumping enthusiastically on the Sarah Palin bandwagon, Phyllis Chesler’s point about the dilemma a few feminists face strikes a definite chord with me:
Do we vote to keep abortion legal and to stop the anti-Choice conservatives from taking over the Supreme Court–or do we vote to make sure that the American military is allowed to stop the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in their tracks? Can we really achieve both goals by voting for one candidate? If not, then what is the more pressing priority? For ourselves, for our country, for the world at this moment in history?
If American women retain the right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term–in my view, a prerequisite to female human freedom, what does this mean if the jihadists bomb the country back to the seventh century? If the jihadists triumph, American women will be forced to convert to Islam, to wear veils or burqas (body bags), and risk being stoned to death, hung, or honor murdered if they want to choose their own husbands, attend college, dress like modern American girls do, or convert to another non-Islamic religion.
…
Mind you: Senator Obama’s eloquence is thrilling and the good old laundry list, beginning with abortion, matters a great deal to me. But jihad is here and here to stay and I would need to be persuaded that Obama and Biden really understand that. Also, since anti-Semitism, disguised as anti-Zionism has arisen today on the Left, not the Right, as has the academic feminist betrayal of a universal vision of human rights for everyone, everywhere, including Muslim women and dissidents, I would need to be assured that voting for abortion does not mean that I end up voting against Israel, against the Jews–and against Muslims who are under Islamic seige.
Camille Paglia has plenty of disagreements of her own with Palin’s positions, but is nonetheless cheering her nomination. As something of an apostate myself in relation to contemporary mainstream feminism, with its strong ties to progressive-left ideas about justice, equality, and economics, I for one find it refreshing and heartening to hear from someone who thoughtfully breaks with the regnant orthodoxy, and is inclined to think about individual issues independently of whether her conclusions fit with a particular party’s monolithic, take-it-or-leave-it platform.
On a related note, Neo-neocon made some interesting observations about the anger Sarah Palin’s nomination has provoked in some conventional feminists:
It’s synergistic; something about Palin’s combination of brains, charm, beauty, conservative viewpoints, and proletarian pastimes has brought out an almost unprecedented verbal viciousness in women who by all rights should be proud of her achievements as the second female Vice-Presidential nominee in history. Is this not a goal for which the woman’s movement has labored for so long? Apparently not—if she’s a conservative, and a charming and beautiful one at that.
This seems to be experienced by some as an almost unbearable dilemma, leading a few of Palin’s critics to deny Palin’s very identity as a woman even as they proclaim and deride it. This makes a certain twisted sense: if a feminist defines herself as being for women, and if Palin is a woman with unacceptable views who nevertheless is on the verge of achieving power, then it solves a knotty problem to declare her to be an unwoman.
Thus we get Wilson’s bizarre opening salvo,”Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain’t no woman.” Wilson and her sisters get to define the parameters of womanhood, you see, and to ban those who don’t meet their PC criteria.
A brilliant article at National Review Online, that has managed to capture so much of what I feel and at the same time lift me up in the spectacular way that only Bill Whittle can do.
Read the whole thing by all means (not remotely hard to do once Bill’s writing gets you hooked). There’s some honest, tough-love assessment of the Republican party’s recent self-inflicted failings therein, coupled with an honest-to-gosh celebration of the possibility of a turnaround that now, seemingly against all odds, looms large. I can’t resist quoting a few gems of expression from this great piece:
I’ve seen post after post on Hillary forums about how much they love Sarah, how they are energized and lifted out of depression by her (and the sight of an actual Roll Call made some of them weep). They gush about how she reminds them of their hero, how tough and savvy and unafraid she is. And I have seen these women, hard-core, feminist Democrats for 30 years and more, sit in slack-jawed amazement at Palin and at how fiercely Republicans — Republicans! — are defending her, backing her, and cheering her to the rafters. These Clinton supporters say they don’t know what to think any more: The Republicans are behaving like Democrats and the Democrats are behaving like Republicans!
If you think that’s an insult, you’ve got it exactly backwards. That is not only a huge compliment from these abandoned, centrist Democrats who bemoan the loss of their party to the radicals, it is an early rumbling of a tectonic shift in American politics which we are only dimly beginning to grasp. Who are the real feminists? A significant portion of our former hard-core opposition is now rethinking in a fundamental way who it is that actually does what their former allies only talk about.
…
When John McCain told me what I and untold millions of Americans have always believed, what others tell me to be ashamed of and mock me for — that I live in the greatest country in the world, a force of goodness and justice in dark places, a land of heroism and sacrifice and opportunity and joy — to me that went right to the mystic chords of memory that ultimately binds this country together. Some people don’t know what it is, but there is such a thing as patriotism — pure, unrefined, unapologetic, unconditional, non-nuanced, non-cosmopolitan, white-hot-burning patriotism. John McCain loves this country. I love it too. Not what it might be made into someday — not its promise, always and only its promise — but what it was and what it is, a nation and an idea worth fighting and dying for.
I was lukewarm on McCain Thursday night, but after that close I will follow that man to the ends of the earth with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.
And I don’t know whether or not we will win in November, but for the first time I feel like we deserve to win more than they deserve to lose. And I find myself at peace for the first time in … well, it seems like forever. Because now I know that we will win or lose based on what we love and what we believe in, and that we have managed to find two politicians who have lived those values through good times and bad.
Bill comments on his new gig at NRO over at his usual site, Eject! Eject! Eject!
