Free Sarah Palin.
Now that Ronald Reagan has been installed as a conservative deity and immune from all criticism, few remember his disastrous first debate in 1984 with former vice president Walter F. Mondale. Reagan was 73…one year older than John McCain is now…and rumors dogged him that he was losing it because of advancing age. He validated some of those rumors by putting on the worst debacle of his acting-political career…veering away with controversy…even saying at one point (responding to a bland journalistic question why he didn’t go to church regularly) that the reason was he didn’t want to interrupt church services for everyone else by having the Secret Service tag along. The line was so absurd that it quickly became a staple on late-night monologues.
Years later both Mike Deaver and Ed Meese who were my guests when I taught political science at DePaul gave the identical answers as to the reason. A hugely protective White House staff of handlers had surrounded Reagan…and so worried were they that the Old Actor would make a mistake...they thoroughly drowned him not just with statistics but with admonitions on what not to say. For the next debate with Mondale, it was Nancy Reagan, Deaver said, who finally took matters in hand, had the handlers dismissed and instead mandated that Reagan make a list of a few central points he wanted…starting with the joke that won the day—that he would not make an issue of his opponent’s age (Mondale was 56)!
There is no doubt that a few days after her nomination, Sarah Palen was surrounded by well-meaning but entirely prissy and over-cautious former aides of George W. Bush who cautioned her….cautioned her…gave her verbal lists of what not to say…which thoroughly watered down her refreshing spontaneity. For example, they set as a goal not going to conservative talk radio and Fox television news but to do well on…of all vehicles…Katie Couric’s CBS Evening News! Katie Couric is an articulate instrument of the liberal cause in the media. Palen should not have gotten near Couric until well in the lineup…long after she had got her feet wet on the more acceptable vehicles of the media.
It is obvious Palen behaved like a performer on a high-wire with Couric, refusing even to enumerate the newspapers she reads or doesn’t read. Couric is the national version…although far better skilled in politics…than our local liberal dilettante in politics, Carol Marin who is so cross-eyedly lefty (her idol is Studs Terkel the ancient wealthy lakefront socialist) she cannot judge up from down.
I predicted here after the nomination of Palen which I enthusiastically endorsed the campaign by the Democrats and the allied mainstream media to make her appear dumb…the same people who believe all Republican conservatives are dumb—Eisenhower was over the hill and senile when he was president…Goldwater was dumb (until in his dotage he renounced social conservatism and then he was courageous)…Ford was dumb…Reagan was ultra-dumb…G. H. W. Bush was a closeted elitist and hence dumbly isolated from the average guy…his son with a master’s in business administration from Harvard is ultra-dumb…on and on.
So on the eve of the Palen debate, I say Free Sarah Palin. Kick the “moderate” handlers out and let her consult with some people from Alaska who helped her in the first place. Have her go to the debate determined to put Barack Obama…not necessarily Joe Biden…on the defensive. Her reward for winning the debate will be heightened media animosity—but so what? She is probably the only one who can save the election right now for McCain. She and the emergence of Events My Dear Boy serve as the only bastion against defeat which is endemic because of the unpopularity of this president and the economic meltdown.
“Axis Sally” Buchanan.
In his last gasp effort to assuage the hotly anti-British shade of his late father by re-writing world history for his own personal benefit, batty Pat Buchanan (who has called Adolf Hitler “courageous,” defended a Holocaust camp guard against deportation, termed Winston Churchill a disaster, the U.S. and the West losers although they won the Cold War…and forecasts terminal decline for the U.S., agreeing with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on this nation’s bleak future)…this same reincarnated Axis Sally, a remnant of the original who serenaded captured U.S. troops in Germany with broadcasts saying Hitler’s future was at hand …has now extolled Neville Chamberlain for his appeasement of the Nazis at Munich in 1938. It would now be appropriate for him to launch a preservation campaign to save the old Munich beer hall from which the “courageous” Hitler launched his putsch.
This insanity needs no labored refutation since history has been written—but just to let you know how a once good man has moved from eccentric to erratic and now irredeemably idiotic-wacko. Look for him next to justify George Lincoln Rockwell and his followers’ march on Skokie a generation ago…or announce he’s writing a biography of the late Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith who has been terribly wronged by history. No, there should not be a campaign to silence him: Just remember when you see him on McLaughlin or MSNBC, he’s called a conservative but is serving the new and alien god of revisionism.
Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One.
What were we to expect when we were told Gwen Ifill of PBS would “moderate” the vice presidential debate? That the debate would be skewed to the left, favoring Joe Biden, obviously. Now we find that she has written a book extolling the rising of a new black political class that is indebted to Barack Obama’s meteoric ascension. And it is to be released to the bookstores on Jan. 20, 2009, the presidential inauguration day. Now here are the counts against Ifill doing a fair job in running the debate. (1) She’s a “mainstream journalist” which means, according to the odds, it’s 87% she’s for Obama. (2) She’s black which means it’s 97% sure she’s for Obama. (3). She has a heavy financial interest in the election outcome with her book: you guess the odds. (4) She somehow neglected to inform the Presidential Debate Commission she had the book—now you guess the odds.
Oh, Sir, Just One More Thing.
I’m indebted to Jim Bowman, the former “Daily News” religion editor, inveterate blogger and sometime “Chicago Daily Observer” contributor for this one. News about Barack Obama is drowning the senses but Obama staff stonewalling prevents us from knowing what should be commonplace stuff. Jim reproduces a photo of the detective Colombo asking, “oh, wait—just one more thing” and wanting material any presidential candidate should be willing to produce.
For example, we don’t have his Occidental College records…no Columbia College records…his Columbia thesis paper…his Harvard records…his Selective Service registration…his medical records…his Illinois State Senate schedule…his law practice client list…not to forget the certified copy of his original birth certificate…nor the embossed, signed paper certification of his birth. Of course there is no record of his Harvard Law Review articles (well, there obviously are none), his University of Chicago scholarly articles (again: none, evidently), his record of baptism.
What are they hiding? Of course the…ahem…mainstream press here in Chicago and elsewhere wouldn’t dream of embarrassing the candidate by requesting this stuff—or writing it up when they are turned away. That would be racist.
The Cook GOP-IVI Coalition.
I wrote yesterday about my experience with the Cook county GOP-Independent Voters of Illinois coalition that succeeded in electing a fair number of people opposed to the original Richard J. Daley machine…using the issues of vote-fraud, patronage abuse, intimidation, dirty tricks as pretext. I was chairman of Project LEAP (Legal Elections in All Precincts) that mobilized many hundreds of honest judges of election starting in 1974. We estimated that one honest judge of election working in a high-incidence of vote fraud precinct could save up to 500 otherwise fraudulently cast ballots. When I served as LEAP chairman, Hyde Park was truly a hotbed of anti-Daley and anti-vote fraud leadership. They helped Republicans elect Bernard Carey as Cook county states attorney, defeating for reelection Ed Hanrahan…a former U. S. attorney here…who was certifiably a logical top successor to Mayor Richard J. Daley himself. Hanrahan’s defeat came as result of a major scandal where as states attorney he cooperated with J. Edgar Hoover and Nixon AG John Mitchell in trying to wipe out the Black Panther leadership by conducting illegal raids on them. They DID raid Fred Hampton’s apartment and riddled him into sausage with a flurry of machine gun bullets.
IVI particularly worked the precincts doggedly to elect Carey. Once he got in, I was in attendance at a closed-door session of the IVI board (on which I served). I was astounded…shocked I tell you…SHOCKED…to sit there and see stalwart ultra-liberal IVIers stand up and shout “where is my job? Where is my job?” in tried-and-true patronage style of Democratic regulars, demanding the same county jobs they had so piously denounced their regular Democratic brothers for parceling out in return for political work in the precincts. To be sure, Carey hired a good many of the IVIers and stayed in several terms. But when the Democratic regulars wised up and opened the gates to hiring IVIers…and under Richie embraced the liberal agenda of the national Democrats (pro-abort, pro gay rights) the “revolt for clean government” died.
The shouting and pietistic orations were ended because the liberals got their share of the swag—which is what it was all about anyhow. So when people tell you Barack Obama matriculated in the pure and pristine precincts of Hyde Park and thus couldn’t have become the darling of the Daley machine, don’t ever believe them.
It's PalIn.
ReplyDeleteI thought one of the reasons Palin was selected was to shore up support of social and religious conservatives who have been lukewarm to McCain. Not having Palin do the conservative talk radio circuit to "enegize the base" seems to be the height of stupidity.
ReplyDeleteI sometimes wonder if Republicans really want to win elections.