Tag Archive for ‘Sarah Palin’

The Palin Perplexity

Sarah Palin is the best thing that’s happened lately to the right and the left, both at the same time. Much of the right pays her obeisance for mobilizing the troops and smart-alecking the left—which in turn loves her for splitting (so the left hopes) the right over her personality and track record.

What’s the Mama Grizzly Up To?

Looking over Palin’s endorsements—McCain over J.D., Fiorina over DeVore, Branstad over Bob Vander Plaats and Rod Roberts—the lady is not running for Mrs. Conservative. The one explanation that makes the most sense of all the seeming inconsistencies in endorsements is that Mama Grizzly is thinking about moving the Wasilla brood into the big house.

Mad, Mad, Mad

Heavy weekend snowfall closed down the capital of the United States. Not that many outside the Washington Beltway were sorry about it. Possibly—by their reasoning—the blizzard was God’s gift to decent government, a holiday from the ceaseless commotion, braggadocio and show-offing that have become the capital’s principle pastimes.

Newt, Sarah and a New GOP

“Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” said JFK.

For Sarah Palin, party loyalty in New York’s 23rd congressional district asks too much. Going rogue, Palin endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman over Republican Dede Scozzafava.

Who Can Lead The Republicans?

Sarah Palin wants to run for president? Quick—get the butterfly net. Who in his—or her—right mind would want to strut into the economic Hiroshima that the Democratic Congress and White House seem bent on precipitating? What a fine mess!

Unce Sam’s Harem III

I began this discussion with a promise to elucidate the question of Ms. Palin’s candidacy.  In general, I have been pointing out that by nature, tradition, and revelation, the sexes have been assigned quite different functions.  It has been alleged, without much foundation, that the Catholic Church has abandoned this tradition to champion the “right” of a woman to a career, but whatever “rights” women may hold in this respect are fulfilled, in Catholic thought, by a religious vocation.   I do want to make it clear that I am writing about the natural family and the Christian tradition, not about everyday reality today that may well make it inconvenient or undesirable for women not to pursue a profession or go to work.  God help a poor woman who has to depend on the fidelity, diligence, and maturity of an American male under the age of 75!   In some cases, a woman who has no profession has made herself helpless and deprived herself of the second-best social life that is often the only one available.  As I explained earlier, I do not like automobiles, computers, telephones, television, and air travel, but to live without these things I could not be a writer or editor and could never escape from Rockford, either in thought or in deed.

The Neocons’ Palin Project

Will the neocons who tutored George W. Bush in the ideology he pursued to the ruin of his presidency do the same for Sarah Palin?

Should they succeed, they will destroy her. Yet, they are moving even now to capture this princess of the right and hope of the party.

Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: An Innocent Abroad

Mrs. Palin’s alleged weaknesses are her strengths. Being an innocent abroad, in the dangerous world modelled on Hobbes and Darwin, is preferable to having “experience” in the obsessive attempt to tame and conquer that world. The Weekly Standard cabal and their ilk will be hard-pressed to make President Palin obey a bunch of Manhattanite intellectual pseuds, let alone to internalize their foreign policy schemes that are evil, stupid, and harmful to our troops’ safety: unlike any laptop bombardier, she has a son on his way to Iraq. I’d say that it is at least 50-50 President Palin would act as a foreign policy realist who’d refrain from new “missions,” “engagements” and “force projections.” That translates into 17 percent chance of America conducting a sane foreign policy, for the first time in decades, some time before 2012.

Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: The Palin Moment

Thomas Fleming, Scott Richert, and Aaron Wolf have all offered typically thoughtful pieces raising important points to consider in evaluating Sarah Palin.  But I would like to offer a different perspective, focusing on the speech Palin delivered at the Republican Convention and the reason the speech succeeded, to the point that Palin now enjoys a higher approval rating in the polls than either Barack Obama or John McCain, not to mention the hapless Joe Biden.

Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: Energized—For What?

I will resist the temptation to steal my own thunder for next week’s John Randolph Club meeting in Philadelphia, where I intend to talk about the most important aspect of the Palin Pandemonium: the conservative Christian rejection of the natural order.

There are at least two other aspects of McCain-Palin that are troubling: abortion and Israel.

James Dobson predictably ate his own words, and pro-lifers now, nearly to a man, are “energized.”  George W. Bush’s words are now in the mouth of McCain, and we’ll hear them again and again until the first week of November—”culture of life.”  What conservative doesn’t want a culture of life?  Sarah Palin, we are told, is a sign, a winkie-winkie to the pro-life community that a Roe-reversal is in the cards.  “Change is coming!”