Amused Cynic

A lot of people have been asking me about this.  After careful research, I’ve decided on this one .

Also….a guy named Bill Whittle has a fantastic piece up at NRO, although I’d never have known it if I hadn’t found it first at Rachel Lucas’ blog.  Hey NRO people—how about giving Bill his own headline or something?  This is the best thing I’ve seen there in a while.

She is so absolutely, remarkably, spectacularly ordinary. I think the magic of Sarah Palin speaks to a belief that so many of us share: the sense that we personally know five people in our immediate circle who would make a better president than the menagerie of candidates the major parties routinely offer. Sarah Palin has erupted from this collective American Dream — the idea that, given nothing but classic American values like hard work, integrity, and tough-minded optimism you can actually do what happens in the movies: become Leader of the Free World, the President of the United States of America. (Or, well, you know, vice president.)

Sarah Palin has done more than unify and electrify the base. She’s done something I would not have thought possible, were it not happening in front of my nose: Sarah Palin has stolen Barack Obama’s glamour. She’s stolen his excitement, robbed his electricity, burgled his charisma, purloined his star power, and taken his Hope and Change mantra, woven it into a cold-weather fashion accessory, and wrapped it around her neck.

A candidate who is young, funny, well-spoken, intelligent, charming, drop-dead gorgeous — and one of ours? Is this actually happening?

*H/T to The Anchoress for the phrase… 

I’ve never seen the Oprah Winfrey Show….true fact.  So, I don’t really understand the hold she has on people, but I guess she recognizes a kindred soul in Barack Obama (and no, “soul” is not a veiled racial reference, so don’t go there, girlfriend).  She knows damn well what would happen if Sarah came on the Oprah show and was introduced to all of Oprah’s “girlfriends.”

So, she’s decided that her show is not going to be used to promote political candidates, and any interview with Sarah Palin will have to wait until “after the election.” Fine, it’s her show, but I wonder how she feels about the “Fairness Doctrine” that her Democratic overlords (underlords, actually) are so hot to implement?   I would note here that Bill O’Reilly (at the dastardly FOX News) had no such qualms about interviewing Obama on his show, and that Obama (at long last) had enough gonads to go on with him.

Why this Oprah hypocrisy?  Because Oprah is scared to death that her secular liberal Messiah could be defeated electorally by the conservative she-devil.  In fact, I’m sure that Oprah’s TV instincts are good enough that she’s positive that that will be the outcome, if the electorate gets to meet an un-slimed Sarah Palin.

Rich Lowry was on top of Oprah’s game a long time ago, with a NY Post piece titled “Oprah the Apostle:  Why the Obama Cult is Creepy“.

December 11, 2007 — Barack Obama found the perfect booster in Oprah Winfrey. Not only can she fill a football stadium with 30,000 adoring people and put a hammerlock on a news cycle, she specializes in the warm-and-fuzzy uplift that is the very foundation of Obama’s candidacy.This was the pontiff of daytime TV bestowing secular sainthood on the golden child of latter-day liberalism. “For there is born to you this day a savior.” The Oprah-Obama match is made not quite in heaven, but in a haze of inspirational piety with heavy religious overtones.

People had “Oprah for VP” buttons at this past weekend’s rallies. The Queen of All Media surely would never accept such a demotion. But Obama-Winfrey would make a natural ticket: They’re both African-Americans with major racial crossover appeal; they’re arguably the nation’s biggest celebrities in their respective fields of media and politics - and they offer affirming messages of hope and self-help.

In her stump speeches on Obama’s behalf, Oprah zeroed in on the heart of the matter: Obama’s post-political messianism. In South Carolina, she declared that it isn’t enough for candidates to tell the truth, “We need politicians who know how to be the truth.” One wonders if it were merely a transcription error in the news reports that “the truth” wasn’t rendered in divinized capital letters.

[...]

Is he really? It’s hard enough for a presidential candidate to have a plan to save Social Security and stabilize Iraq, let alone embody the truth and touch our souls. Obama plays into this messianism because it’s what gives his candidacy its unique appeal. Otherwise, he has a collection of pedestrian Democratic positions. It’s the promise to redeem our politics, “to create a kingdom right here on earth” - as he put it at a church event in South Carolina a few weeks ago - that accentuates his status as a different kind of candidate.{…]

Obama is attempting to counter the Sarah “Hail Mary-Pass” problem with a Flying-V-formation of tough women who are supposed to protect his delicate messianic body from the ferocious Alaskan “Alpha-female grizzly.”

I don’t think it will work.  I think the alpha-female grizzly is going to smack him out of the water like a Coho salmon.

I love, love love this NRO piece by Andrew McCarthy.

So Sarah Palin was sarcastic and biting. That’s how a happy warrior deals with absurdity. That’s how a happy warrior rallies the troops.
[...]
Well, they’ve been rallied now. And rallied, at long last, in a way that resonates: By an attractive winner with a smile on her face and steel in her spine. By a proud woman living the ups and downs of an American life — a woman the other side spent a week trying to destroy by coming after those she loves most. With grit and good humor, she brushed those critics aside like so many Styrofoam columns.

It wasn’t snide. Sarah Palin was grace personified. And now, finally, even we American Taliban have hope.

Just kidding, but this is very funny.

I blurted out loud at one point to Rupert, “Oh my god! I’m naming all of my children after her!” Which is quite a thing to say for someone who never plans on making any children. That’s how much I like this woman.

I hate to be crude, but every political partisan in America who watched Sarah’s speech last night had wet pants at the end…just for different reasons.

Came across this great piece by Jan Crawford Greenburg over at Patterico…..Check ‘em both out, y’all.

The picture of Palin was painted last night: She’s a small-town rebel with a cause, a pit bull of a hockey mom who believes America is great, no matter what the New York Times says. And Palin’s message was unlike anything we’ve seen in this campaign—or in the past decade or so, for that matter.

She delivered it directly to all those people she said make the country what it is–the people in those small towns “who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our own food, run our factories and fight our wars.”

“They love their country, in good times and bad,” said this small-town gal from Wasilla. “And they’re always proud of America.”

That was the best moment of her compelling speech last night, and it captured the message John McCain has consistently failed to deliver in this campaign. So far, it’s been a campaign about change, and we’ve seen this narrative emerge and almost become conventional wisdom: America overstepped its bounds, disgraced itself on the world stage and must repent for its ills.

But that’s not a narrative a large swath of this country believes or accepts. Go to a place like rural Alabama, where I grew up. Or, I suspect, many small towns in Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida. There are a lot of Americans who don’t particularly care what the New York Times thinks, much less the Europeans.

Yet McCain, inexplicably in this campaign, has never stirringly delivered a Reagan-esque defense of America as a shining city upon the hill, with lights blazing as brightly as ever. That may be because McCain, after all those years in Washington, doesn’t get it. He wasn’t raised a common man, but an officer’s son, and he’s been a US Senator for 20 years now.

But he’s got a running mate, we saw last night, who can say “hell yeah” and “yee haw” with the best of them. (I’d love to ask McCain if he’d ever heard “Redneck Woman,” made wildly popular by the singer, Gretchen Wilson, who was on the stage after Palin last night.) He’s got a running mate who proudly clings to her guns and her religion—and can disparage Barack Obama for “talking about us one way in Scranton and another in way San Francisco.”

Palin showed last night she can talk to all those people who want to believe in their country’s greatness as they struggle to pay their bills. They may not like George Bush–but they want to believe America is the best country in the world, and they want to sing Toby Keith loud and proud. [My emphasis added]

Hell, Yeah! This is truly a great day.

“Some people look down on me, but I don’t give a rip….I’ll stand barefoot in my own front yard, with a baby on my hip…”

“In my neck of the woods, I’m still the girl next door….”

I’ve always thought that Ann Coulter’s nickname (whatever you think of her)—”The Human Uzi”—was very clever.   And after Sarah Palin’s stunningly effective speech at the Republican National Convention last night, I thought we needed a similarly appropriate nickname for Sarah.

I was born and raised on the New York City-New Jersey-Philadelphia-Washington D.C. axis.  Live there still.  That is original, old-time Bruce Springsteen country, and as I watched Sarah Palin  “come out tonight” I was thinking of my early college days in Boston, when I was telling my new friends about this guy from the Jersey shore who was so great, but no one had ever heard of him outside of my home turf.  Nobody really got it, at that time.

Bruce was “our guy” back then.  You could see him in “little seaside bars,” you could see him in little venues in Philly and environs (famously at the old Main Point in Bryn Mawr, or Atlantic County Community College).  We felt like Bruce was one of us, sang about us, etc.  He was OUR guy, and if you hadn’t  heard of him, that was one of your shortcomings, not his.  We felt very protective of him (this was before he became Tom Joad with a big bank account donating to the Democratic party).

Then, one day, I was shopping over at the Harvard Co-op (don’t worry, I didn’t attend Harvard myself), and I noticed stacks of albums packed into every nook and cranny of the store.  They weren’t for sale yet.  The stacks were neck-high, still encased in plastic wrap, and on pallets, obviously brought in by forklifts. It was Bruce’s third album, “Born to Run.” It was his “break-out” album, but the general public still didn’t know a thing about it….or him.

I went back to the dorm and told my friends:  “You’re going to find out that I was right about Bruce very soon, suckers.”  Within a day or two Bruce was on the cover of Time and Newsweek, Jon Landau’s famous remark was in the  headlines  (”I have seen the future of rock’n'roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen”), and the rest is history.  All of my new college friends wanted to know how I knew about Bruce before everyone else did.   I looked like a rock’n'roll genius.

I’m feeling the same vibe again about Sarah.  I have seen the future of American politics, and her name is Sarah Palin.

The Anchoress has a roundup of reactions here.

Heh!  Chris Muir is having his own 1970’s musical flashback regarding Sarah Barracuda….remember the band “Heart”…the fabulous Wilson sisters?   Boy, that would make a great campaign theme song…

I always find Peggy Noonan at her best when she’s doing these staccato diary-like pieces.  This reminds me of her best post 9/11 writing…filled with a huge variety of insights and pithy phrasing.  Beautiful!  There’s a lot more to it conceptually than this little excerpt, but I liked this part especially for what it says about the chattering class that for so long has felt entitled to control and manipulate the national agenda:

Let me say of myself and almost everyone I know in the press, all the chattering classes and political strategists and inside dopesters of the Amtrak Acela Line: We live in a bubble and have around us bubble people. We are Bubbleheads. We know this and try to compensate for it by taking road trips through the continent — we’re on one now, in Minneapolis — where we talk to normal people. But we soon forget the pithy, knowing thing the garage mechanic said in the diner, and anyway we weren’t there long enough in the continent to KNOW, to absorb. We view through a prism of hyper-sophistication, and judge by the rules of Chevy Chase and Greenwich, of Cleveland Park and McLean, of Bronxville and Manhattan.

[...]

And when you forget you’re a Bubblehead you get in trouble, you misjudge things. For one thing, you assume evangelical Christians will be appalled and left agitated by the circumstances of Mrs. Palin’s daughter. But modern American evangelicals are among the last people who’d judge her harshly. It is the left that is about to go crazy with Puritan judgments; it is the right that is about to show what mellow looks like. Religious conservatives know something’s wrong with us, that man’s a mess. They are not left dazed by the latest applications of this fact. “This just in – there’s a lot of sinning going on out there” is not a headline they’d understand to be news.

So the media’s going to wait for the Christian right to rise up and condemn Mrs. Palin, and they’re not going to do it because it’s not their way, and in any case her problems are their problems. Christians lived through the second half of the 20th century, and the first years of the 21st. They weren’t immune from the culture, they just eventually broke from it, or came to hold themselves in some ways apart from it. I think the media will explain the lack of condemnation as “Republican loyalty” and “talking points.” But that’s not what it will be.

[...]

The mainstream media, which has been holding endless symposia here on the future of media in the 21st century, is in danger of missing a central fact of that future: If they appear, once again, as they have in the past, to be people not reporting the battle but engaged in the battle, if they allow themselves to be tagged by that old tag, which so tarnished them in the past, they will do more to imperil their own future than the Internet has.

This is true: fact is king. Information is king. Great reporting is what every honest person wants now, it’s the one ironic thing we have less of in journalism than we need. But reporting that carries an agenda, that carries Bubblehead assumptions and puts them forth as obvious truths? Well, some people want that. But if I were doing a business model for broadsheets and broadcast networks I’d say: Fact and data are our product, we’re putting everything into reporting, that’s what we’re selling, interpretation is the reader’s job, and think pieces are for the edit page where we put the hardy, blabby hacks.

That was a long way of saying: Dig deep into Sarah Palin, get all you can, talk to everybody, get every vote, every quote, tell us of her career and life, she may be the next vice president. But don’t play games. And leave her kid alone, bitch.

I’m sure you’ve already seen this, but just in case you hadn’t, here is the latest work of Jann Wenner, best known for a formerly great rock’n'roll mag.

Also, I had meant to point out MoDo’s new low earlier…

Palin, the governor of Alaska, has already accrued two gates (Troopergate and Broken-watergate)

Get it??  You know, like when a pregnant woman’s water breaks??? Ha.  Ha.  She gets paid for this stuff?

Dr. Melissa Clouthier has much more on this magazine cover stuff.

The Anchoress is running a sort of Palininsanity-athon….think of it as one of those long, countdown shows on the day of the Superbowl–which I think is an appropriate analogy in this remarkable campaign.

Let’s get this straight.  Marge Simpson wears a beehive…

Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson of the B-52’s used to wear their hair in beehives:

THIS IS NOT a Beehive hairdo, folks….

It’s a woman wearing her beautiful long hair “up” with a few bobby pins.  Let’s everyone, on both sides of the fence, get our retro-hair identification skills up to speed, shall we?…