Sarah Works

This is a great piece by Bruce Walker over at American Thinker:

The selection of Sarah Palin works, on many levels and in many ways. McCain knew what he was doing when he picked her. Consider all the ways in which Palin helps the Republican ticket.

Women voters know not only that the election of McCain likely will lead to the nomination of Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee in 2012 or 2016, but the election of McCain-Palin may well mean that the nominee of both major political parties in 2012 will be a woman: Palin, if McCain decides not to seek another term, and Hillary, who would be the presumptive favorite for the Democratic nomination in 2012 if Obama loses in 2008.

In other words, women voters who vote in this election know that they can probably ensure that the next president is a woman, if McCain is elected. That knowledge will pull wavering women away from Obama-Biden and to McCain-Palin.

Sarah may do more than any person in modern history to close the gender gap, not only for Republicans but for conservatives. Unlike Hillary, who rode into Washington on the back of her husband, Sarah Palin created her own career. Unlike Hillary, who dwells within a small family focused on politics, Sarah has a big family and focuses on life. As a conservative, Sarah Palin sees life as more than politics, election campaigns and litigation. Her husband has a real job in the real economy. Sarah is athletic, animated, alive. Her family seems very real to us. She seems very real to us.

Sarah Palin is pro-life, which solidifies McCain's base with conservative voters, but she is pro-life with a vital twist: She has walked the walk. Women who favor the right to abortion love to point out that the male political leaders who want to limit abortion do not know what it is like to give birth, to care for an infant, or to endure the heartache of a child born with serious illnesses. Sarah knows all those things at a very personal level. When Sarah gave birth to Trig, her son with Down Syndrome, she walked the walk in a way that few people ever have had to do on the abortion question. He will grow up in a warm, loving family and his mother can tell the world, with perfect sincerity, that all human life has great worth.

She walks the walk on Iraq as well. Track joined the Army. He is going to Iraq. Sarah and Todd are laying their most precious possession, the life of their child, in harm's way for the sake of freedom. Sarah Palin, like John McCain, can tell the American people that they know precisely what sort of sacrifices we all must be willing to make if America is to be safe and free. The contrast between McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden on the personal sacrifices made for America is profound.

The criticism of her inexperience is already brewing, but Sarah can say that she has more executive experience than Obama and Biden combined. Moreover, she has been a gutsy chief executive of Alaska, which means that she has shown an ability to resist the blandishments of lobbyists which neither Obama nor Biden have demonstrated. McCain and Palin really do represent a resistance to pork exceptional in a presidential ticket.

As gas prices becomes an increasingly pressing personal issue for huge numbers of Americans, and as more and more Americans support drilling for oil as a logical way to bring down gas prices, Palin brings a strong and persuasive perspective on ANWR drilling. She loves the outdoors. Alaska is her home state, the place where her family lives. When Sarah says, as she doubtless will, that no outsider can care more about preserving the beauty of Alaska than she does, it will be hard to contradict that. So when she then says that drilling in ANWR will not damage the loveliness of that Alaskan natural wonder which she loves, then Sarah will be believed by millions of otherwise ambivalent voters. Sarah, moreover, will be able to make a very cogent intellectual argument for drilling. She knows more about this issue than Obama, Biden or even McCain. And it is an issue that becomes more important to Americans by the day.

Sarah Palin on the ticket also creates some serious problems for Democrats in planning their campaign about the Republican ticket. How, for example, will a reflexively arrogant man like Joe Biden act toward Sarah Palin in the Vice Presidential Debate? This is the same man who talked about Obama as well spoken, for a black man. How careful will Biden be when he debates Palin? The debate will be a virtual minefield for someone as callous as Senator Biden. One slip, one impolitic remark, could shift millions of votes.

Governor Palin also lives in a frontier state, a land about as far away from Washington as you can be and still hold political office in our republic. This is a theme that can resonate with voters. Delaware is right next to Washington: Biden commutes home after work. Chicago, the Daley Machine, does not seem to be much of an improvement. But Palin, and for that matter, McCain, come from another part of America completely. Alaska and Arizona are very distant from the capital whose machinations must be curbed. The image of two people from America's frontier cleaning up our nation's capital is potent.

The biggest catch, though, is Palin herself. She seems utterly genuine. Her life story sounds familiar and comforting. Her words come from her heart. Her ideas come from a mind not trapped in Beltway Newspeak. We want change? She is change. More than just change, though, Sarah Palin represents change for the better. She personifies all the goodness in America which we seem to have lost. Her election will be a shot across the bow of every entrenched politician in the federal government. As a nominee, Sarah works.

The Palin Brawl At NRO

Palin [Rick Brookhiser]

I have not had a TV to watch all week, though I have had internet, so I have followed the Palin pick entirely through the medium of the Corner.

I share the initial reservations of David, and to a lesser extent, Jay. The Palin pick shows a low opinion of the vice presidency, and it shows conservatives in a bad light.

1. The Vice Presidency. Either McCain thinks the war on terror isn't serious, or he thinks the vice-presidency isn't. Since the former is obviously untrue, it must be the latter. McCain is certainly following a very old conception of the job. One nineteenth century veep was reputedly so underutilized that he kept a tavern in his home state. But that is not our conception. Vice Presidents have grown in clout and responsibility. In the last fifty years, four former vice presidents have run for president (Nixon, Mondale, elder Bush, Gore), two of them successfully, while since Carter/Mondale, veeps have been given more and more to do. McCain, bless him, intends to do everything himself. Good luck! Perhaps the Palin pick is a sly diss both of Obama/Biden and Bush/Cheney. Palin will go to funerals.

2. Conservatives. Palin will also be assigned to pacify conservatives. On the evidence of the numerous emails reprinted here, that will be easily done. Reader after reader said that the base was now energized. You would have thought the base was energized by being in a war. If not, perhaps we need a new base.

We have shown the same color-by-numbers mindset that liberals did when they rallied to Obama. Liberals love Obama because he is a Numinous Negro. Conservatives love Palin because she has a Downs baby and an M-16. For both sides, that is all on earth ye know and all ye need to know. You might call it mystical and childish.

May I be so wrong that a hundred harpies will pluck my eyeballs.

08/30 06:26 PM

Re: Rick on Palin [Peter Robinson]

Understanding your objections, Rick, which are, as is typical of all your thought, both grounded in American history and elegantly stated, I nevertheless have a question: Who the heck should McCain have picked? The man is a working politician. No fair asking him to clasp his copy of de Toqueville to his breast as he goes down to defeat.

P.S. If my inbox is any indication, don't look up. The harpies are already circling.

08/30 10:26 PM

Re: re: Rick on Palin [Andy McCarthy]

I don't often disagree with Peter, but there is nothing elegant about Rick's assertion that "Conservatives love Palin because she has a Downs baby and an M-16." It's offensive.

It's also flat wrong. Rick's assessment is offered as an analogy to liberal love for Obama as "Numinous Negro." The comparison doesn't come close to the mark. The so-called "numinous Negro" is a story's hero figure for no better reason than complexion. His or her assumed wisdom is the treacly projection of collective, indelible liberal guilt over the dark slavery and segregation chapters in American history; beyond color, we know nothing about the character.

The contrast to Sarah Palin couldn't be more stark. Even if the only things we knew about her really were that she'd rejected the option of aborting her baby and owned guns, those would be concrete indicia of a conservative American life actually lived.

This is a real person: living through the crises and enjoyments that people and families go through, and making choices that tell us a great deal about who she is. It happens that the two facts Rick chooses to highlight provide very advantageous political contrasts to Obama, who has labored to protect a right of infanticide, and the Democrat ticket, which is hopelessly Second Amendment-challenged. But for purposes of Rick's snarky analogy, that's quite beside the point. No one is asking you to assume Palin is wise due to something so irrelevant to wisdom as the color of her skin. You can make a reliable judgment about who she is, though, by the choices she has made when confronted by life's highs and lows.

Of course, there's more. As Mark pointed out yesterday, despite living in the eye of the storm (or, perhaps, because of it) Palin is more modest and mature on "climate change" than McCain and Obama/Biden, who are captives of the green cult. She's actually held executive office — and the Governor may have started as a small-town mayor, but she was already experienced in that position when the guy at the top of the other ticket was a "community organizer" imbibing Jeremiah Wright's Black Liberation Theology and Bill Ayers' radicalism. While Obama has moved seamlessly from Chicago's corrupt political culture to Washington's earmark festival, Palin fought Arizona's Alaska's corrupt political culture and told Washington to keep its Bridge to Nowhere earmarks.

Palin has drastically cut legislative spending sprees. That is a nice contrast to the Democrat legislators on the other ticket — particularly Obama who, as Stanley Kurtz has richly documented, kept pushing for increased spending in Illinois even as an ever widening budget gap pushed the state to fiscal ruin. And Gov. Palin has concretely supported aggressively increasing America's energy resources, pushing for drilling, including in ANWR, and negotiating a $26 billion natural gas pipeline deal with a Canadian company. The opposing ticket is against drilling no matter how high prices go (Sen. Obama is only unhappy about the pace of rising prices, not the fact of them), and Obama's principal dealing with Canada has been secretly to dispatch an emissary to assure the worried government there that all his anti-trade rhetoric is just pandering. Once again, while Palin has taken concrete actions that tell you exactly where she's coming from, we are left to wonder whether Obama is lying to the Canadians or to his base.

Now I could be wrong, but I don't think Rick ever uttered the suggestion that Sen. McCain might be thought unserious about the war when McCain pushed his amendment giving Fifth Amendment rights to captured alien terrorists (during a war in which intelligence gleaned from interrogations is urgently needed); or when McCain pushed to close Guantanamo Bay, which has been an intelligence coup; or when McCain implied that President Bush's warrantless surveillance program — the penetration of enemy communications which has always been a staple of war-fighting — was illegal.

The possibility of unseriousness was not raised until McCain named as a running mate a woman who's instilled in the son she raised a love of country that induced him to enlist voluntarily in the United States Army on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. This September 11th, he'll be deployed to Iraq to fight the war we are winning despite Barack Obama's best efforts to force a pull-out that would have given victory to al Qaeda.

I think Rick's suggestion is extremely unfortunate.

08/31 09:29 AM

Sarah Palin

I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised by John McCain's pick of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska to be his running mate. Palin is exactly the type of conservative woman that will enable women to hold the highest offices in the nation. Just remember which party appointed the first female Supreme Court justice and black female Secretary of State. I also love the fact that McCain has taken the "historical" nature of Obama's candidacy off the table; now whichever ticket eventually wins will be historical.

Yes, Palin's political resume is not exactly overflowing but she has more executive experience than all of the candidates on either ticket. I know many have already said that her nomination removes Obama's inexperience as an issue. But I think the defining difference between them is obvious - Obama wants to be President. And in this season of thin resumes "An interesting angle from (Instapundit) reader Frank Martin:

Question: Which state borders the Former Soviet Union?

Hey, will you look at that?, 2 years of foreign policy experience."

The largest benefit I see from Palin running with McCain is that she is a conservative. If she follows her principles then this will be an inspiring and inspired choice by the McCain campaign.
Update: M'Lady, who only follows politics out of a sense of duty to yours truly, perhaps made the most salient point about the Palin selection when she said "Just exactly how many of these people have been president?"

When the legendary Cleveland sportscaster Casey Coleman was asked about a certain teams chances, when on paper it appeared they didn't have a pray, he said "That's why we play them on grass."

New Music

I get most of my new music from two sources these days; my children and NPR's All Songs Considered. I use All Songs Considered to audition songs. If I don't like the first thirty seconds I'm on to the next tune.

I can also say that I am not a fan of a great deal of the new music I hear because it just doesn't speak to me the way music did back when I became a serious listener. But every once in a while I hear something that just jumps out at me and the most recent example is a song by Jenny Lewis called "Acid Tongue". The song's harmonies, provided by Chris Robinson of The Black Crows among others, and the out front production work took an otherwise plain vanilla folk tune to a completely different level. Give it a listen here and see if you don't agree.

Acid Tongue is the second solo effort for Lewis who is also a member of Rilo Kiley. Her first solo album was Rabbit Fur Coat which garnered a great deal of high praise from the critics.

Can I Get One With A Ball Jar?

I'm sure M'Lady would like one of these; after all 'tis the season.

The Democrat Convention

Here's an idea for a little game to play during Obama's acceptance speech:

"The rules are, every time Obama says the word "change," you take a shot. And every time he says the word "hope," you take a double shot."

As Glenn Reynolds commented "Sounds like fun, but I've only got one liver. And I'm still using it."

Nanny State 101

The mayor of Clayton, CA, Gregg Manning, sent police officers to close down a vegetable stand operated by two young children because it didn't comply with city ordinances. Not only that but the city council, after receiving a petition to re-open the stand, produced a 19 page report that basically said "Follow the rules like everyone else."

Now, I understand the need for certain societal rules and in many cases I am a firm supporter of those rules. But when the power of the state (or in this case a city of 11,000 souls) reaches this invasive a level it might be time to consider reining that power in.

These two sisters were getting a real life experience in capitalism by selling the extra produce from their family's garden. Now they're getting an up-close look at what happens when regulation out runs common sense.

Perhaps their parents should consider teaching them a valuable civics lesson in civil disobedience.

Quote Of The Day

"A rifle without a backhoe is only half a solution."
- Tired John

Sunflowers

The bumble bees really like the sunflowers M'Lady planted in the garden.

The Clean Plate Club

This is interesting:

"For a long time, we were pretty dumb. Humans did little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," he said. Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened — our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion.

To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, Khaitovich and colleagues examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism.

The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich, carefully adding that definitive claims of causation are premature.

The research is detailed in the August 2008 issue of Genome Biology.

The extra calories may not have come from more food, but rather from the emergence of pre-historic "Iron Chefs;" the first hearths also arose about 200,000 years ago.

In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.

Instead of growing even larger (which would have made birth even more problematic), the human brain most likely used the additional calories to grease the wheels of its internal functioning."

Winks

We had a dog that winked too. And, yes, it is a secret code.

CWCID: PostSecret

This Was Just A Matter Of Time

If Obama thinks it's bad now; just wait. Americans love a self-absorbed, pompous ass. We generally end up grabbing the nearest lead pipe and working them over like a pinata.

To paraphrase Lewis Black, "We have a problem with authority".

Dark Days

You know these are dark days for the Republic when Paris Hilton has a more effective energy policy than the two leading presidential candidates.

Quote Of The Day

"Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain carbohydrates, amino acids, or other essential nutrients. Everything fails by irrelevant standards."
- Thomas Sowell

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: December 11, 1918 - August 3, 2008

"A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?"

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises, Thursday, June 8, 1978

Quote Of The Day

“Such is the debt of free spirits to Solzhenitsyn that we owe it to him at least to consider anything he asks us to consider.”
- William F. Buckley

Blackberry Pie Time Again

M'Lady, the young squire and I picked wild blackberries this morning. We have a pie in the oven and one waiting to go in as I type. Hopefully, our blackberries will bear fruit next year so we won't have to go wading through the thorny wild bushes again. And our blackberries are thornless!

Update:

Quote Of The Day

M'Lady and I have taken a few days off to enjoy the high summer weather. Inevitably, we spend time in the garden and that means weeding, of which I am not fond.

"I do not have "weeds" in my garden; I am merely maintaining a high level of biodiversity."
- Country Squire

How To Argue Like A Liberal

From Vox Day:

1. Make an untrue statement, preferably on the subject of something about which you know nothing.

2. Express astonishment that your source could possibly be inaccurate.

3. Demand what motivation your source would have to lie.

4. Assert that the other party’s inability to articulate this motivation is tantamount to proof that your source is not lying.

5. Question the motivation of the contrary source.

6. Argue that all sources are equal and that therefore the contrary source is irrelevant.

7. Change the subject.

Alternatively …

1. Make an untrue statement.

2. Deny that you said what you said.

3. Deny that the other party understood what you said.

4. Deny that the words you used mean what the other party claims they mean.

5. Redefine your definition and hope the other person forgets the previous one. Repeat as needed.

6. Assert that since definitions are irrelevant and subjective, the other person is mean-spirited, racist, sexist, intolerant and obsessive.

7. Change the subject.

The Spoiled Children Of Capitalism

From Jonah Goldberg:

It’s an old story. Loving parents provide a generous environment for their offspring. Kids are given not only ample food, clothing and shelter, but the emotional necessities as well: encouragement, discipline, self-reliance, the ability to work with others and on their own. And yet, in due course, the kids rebel. Some even say their parents never loved them, that they were unfair, indifferent, cruel. Often, such protests are sparked by parents’ refusal to be even more generous. I want a car, demands the child. Work for it, insist the parents. Why do you hate me? asks the ingrate.

Of course, being an old story doesn’t make it a universal one. But the dynamic is universally understood.

We’ve all witnessed the tendency to take a boon for granted. Being accustomed to a provision naturally leads the human heart to consider that provision an entitlement. Hence the not-infrequent lawsuits from prison inmates cruelly denied their rights to cable TV or apple brown betty for desert.

And so it goes, I think, with capitalism generally.

Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.

People ask, “Why is there poverty in the world?” It’s a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil. As individuals and as a species, we are born naked and penniless, bereft of skills or possessions. Likewise, in his civilizational infancy man was poor, in every sense. He lived in ignorance, filth, hunger, and pain, and he died very young, either by violence or disease.

The interesting question isn’t “Why is there poverty?” It’s “Why is there wealth?” Or: “Why is there prosperity here but not there?”

At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.

For generations, many thought prosperity was material stuff: factories and forests, gold mines and gross tons of concrete poured. But we now know that these things are merely the fringe benefits of wealth. Stalin built his factories, Mao paved over the peasants. But all that truly prospered was misery and alienation.

A recent World Bank study found that a nation’s wealth resides in its “intangible capital” — its laws, institutions, skills, smarts and cultural assumptions. “Natural capital” (minerals, croplands, etc.) and “produced capital” (factories, roads, and so on) account for less than a quarter of the planet’s wealth. In America, intangible capital — the stuff in our heads, our hearts, and our books — accounts for 82 percent of our wealth.

Any number of countries in Africa are vastly richer in baubles and soil than Switzerland. But they are poor because they are impoverished in what they value.


In large measure our wealth isn’t the product of capitalism, it is capitalism.

And yet we hate it. Leaving religion out of it, no idea has given more to humanity. The average working-class person today is richer, in real terms, than the average prince or potentate of 300 years ago. His food is better, his life longer, his health better, his menu of entertainments vastly more diverse, his toilette infinitely more civilized. And yet we constantly hear how cruel capitalism is while this collectivism or that is more loving because, unlike capitalism, collectivism is about the group, not the individual.

These complaints grow loudest at times like this: when the loom of capitalism momentarily stutters in spinning its gold. Suddenly, the people ask: What have you done for me lately? Politicians croon about how we need to give in to Causes Larger than Ourselves and peck about like hungry chickens for a New Way to replace dying capitalism.

This is the patient leaping to embrace the disease and reject the cure. Recessions are fewer and weaker thanks in part to trade, yet whenever recessions appear on the horizon, politicians dive into their protectionist bunkers. Not surprising that this week we saw the demise of the Doha round of trade negotiations, and this campaign season we’ve heard the thunder of anti-trade rhetoric move ever closer.

This is the irony of capitalism. It is not zero-sum, but it feels like it is. Capitalism coordinates humanity toward peaceful, productive cooperation, but it feels alienating. Collectivism does the opposite, at least when dreamed up on paper. The communes and collectives imploded in inefficiency, drowned in blood. The kibbutz lives on only as a tourist attraction, a baseball fantasy camp for nostalgic socialists. Meanwhile, billions have ridden capitalism out of poverty.

And yet the children of capitalism still whine.