The Exhilaration and Despair of the Palin Candidacy

The nomination of Sarah Palin has excited and moved me as no other candidate that John McCain could have picked possibly could have. Her values, her ability and willingness to fight corruption within her own party, her actual experience with energy production, her hard-nosed dealings with the oil companies, her executive experience as a mayor and as governor, and her poise and the delivery of her speeches in Dayton and St. Paul – all have impressed and cheered me for the fall election. Because of her executive experience, she is actually much better qualified for the presidency than is Barack Obama. I took out my credit card and made another contribution to McCain2008 the next day after she was selected.

Then the smears started with the attacks on Sarah, as expected, but then went on to her teenage daughter in a way that can only be called disgraceful and reprehensible. Is there no depth to which the left-wing operatives and their willing accomplices in the press can sink? I monitor both left-wing and right-wing forums. I am well aware that there are morons from both extremes who post slanders on the internet, but very little of the right-wing madness gets into the mainstream press. Every degenerate thought expressed on left-wing blogs and forums makes it into the press, some even into the New York Times and the Atlantic Magazine. Mainstream commentators like Alan Colmes, John Roberts and Andria Mitchell smear Palin and her family and seem to think they are doing something admirable, when what they are doing is depraved.

I am a conservative. I fought the leftists when they took us into Vietnam, and I fought them when they disgraced us by abruptly abandoning our friends there to the tender mercies of the Viet Cong and Pol Pot, and then lied about it. I fought the leftists when they destroyed the Boston school system while putting their own children in private schools. I fought them when they slandered Judge Bork and Justice Thomas with lies and smears, only because these legal scholars had conservative views on how the Constitution should be interpreted. I fought them in the college where I taught, as a conservative practically alone in a sea of liberal draft-dodgers – handing out so many A’s that 50% of the students were on the Dean’s List.

Then I made a discovery that shook me to the core: all those years I thought I was fighting with people who had a different, but wrong-headed view of how to make this great country better, but I was wrong. All those years I was fighting people - some of whom actually HATED this country and wanted to tear it down. And in a sense they are right; there IS something terribly wrong in this country. What’s wrong is that so many on the left hate their country and want to bring us to our knees, and they express that hatred through feckless, almost unhinged lies and smears. That is what is wrong with this country, and the vicious exploitation of a 17 year old girl is just the latest example of where this hatred takes them. Thomas Lifson puts this very well:

Sarah Palin and the Two Americas

By Thomas Lifson September 03, 2008 American Thinker (Excerpt)

“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.” American Thinker

Supporters of Barack Obama, pick on someone your own age!