Click on WORD or PDF below for full content
Palin’s speech brought Mark Steyn out of his hidey hole for a Corner post.
I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations by portraying Governor Palin – whoops, I mean Hick-Burg Mayor Palin – as a hillbilly know-nothing permapregnant ditz, half of whose 27 kids are the spawn of a stump-toothed uncle who hasn’t worked since he was an extra in Deliverance.
How’s that narrative holding up, geniuses? Almost as good as your “devoted husband John Edwards” routine?
I trust even now Maureen Dowd is working on a hilarious new column mocking proposed names for the Governor’s first grandchild. Perhaps Richard Cohen can just take the week off and they can rerun his insightful analysis comparing the Palin nomination to Caligula making his horse a consul. Whereas we sophisticates all know that if McCain were as smart as Obama he’d have nominated a dead horse to be his consul. No wait…
Andy McCarthy Corner post with excerpts from NY Times editorial gushing over Geraldine Ferraro’s pick for VP in 1984. The same NY Times that can’t stop trashing Sarah Palin.
… What a splendid system, we say to ourselves, that takes little-known men, tests them in high office and permits them to grow into statesmen…. Why shouldn’t a little-known woman have the same opportunity to grow?…
Here’s Sarah (excerpts from her speech)
… I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.
We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco. …
… And there is much to like and admire about our opponent.
But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform – not even in the state senate.
This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word “victory” except when he’s talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed … when the roar of the crowd fades away … when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot – what exactly is our opponent’s plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger … take more of your money … give you more orders from Washington … and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. …
… Our nominee doesn’t run with the Washington herd.
He’s a man who’s there to serve his country, and not just his party.
A leader who’s not looking for a fight, but is not afraid of one either. Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of the current do-nothing Senate, not long ago summed up his feelings about our nominee.
He said, quote, “I can’t stand John McCain.” Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps no accolade we hear this week is better proof that we’ve chosen the right man. Clearly what the Majority Leader was driving at is that he can’t stand up to John McCain. That is only one more reason to take the maverick of the Senate and put him in the White House. My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of “personal discovery.” This world of threats and dangers is not just a community, and it doesn’t just need an organizer.
And though both Senator Obama and Senator Biden have been going on lately about how they are always, quote, “fighting for you,” let us face the matter squarely.
There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you … in places where winning means survival and defeat means death … and that man is John McCain. …
John Fund was there.
Twenty years after Ronald Reagan left office, Republicans who have long missed him may have found a future Margaret Thatcher. If John McCain wins, conservatives may find one of the most enduring accomplishments of his term will have been what he did before it started: helping to fill the Republican Party’s future talent bench with such a fresh and compelling figure.
Sarah Palin is a conviction politician, a naturally compelling speaker and someone who can relate to her audience on very human terms. America has just learned why Mrs. Palin enjoys the highest approval ratings of any governor in America. …
How was the speech received abroad? Daily Telegraph has a sample.
… Like Margaret Thatcher before her, Mrs Palin is coming in for both barrels of Left-wing contempt: misogyny and snobbery. Where Lady Thatcher was dismissed as a “grocer’s daughter” by people who called themselves egalitarian, Mrs Palin is regarded as a small-town nobody by those who claim to represent “ordinary people”.
What the metropolitan sophisticates failed to understand in the 1980s when Thatcher won election after election is even more the case in the US: most (and I do mean most) ordinary people actually believe in the basic decencies, the “small-town values”, of family, marital fidelity, and personal responsibility. They believe in and honour them – even if they do not manage to uphold them.
Middle America – of which Alaska is spiritually, if not geographically, a part – builds its life around those ideals and regards commonplace moral lapses as part of the eternal struggle to be good. …
And the London Sun.
A WEEK ago nobody had ever heard of her.
Today she is the most talked-about woman in the world. And with good reason.
Sarah Palin’s sensational performance at the Republican Party Convention may turn out to be the tipping point of this rollercoaster American election.
Obama fans hoping she would fluff her big night were in for a nasty shock.
This speech has turned the election upside down. It was simply stunning.
Democrats and their Lefty media backers had been sneering that she was a small town nobody, a hick from the Alaskan sticks put into a job way beyond an inexperienced woman.
Believe me, you will not be hearing that again.
Palin turned out to be an electrifying mix of intelligence, passion, energy, optimism and plain speaking.
Full of self-assurance and aggression, she popped Barack’s balloon big-time. …
Now a collection from some of our favorites.
Okay, it’s almost three in the morning here in Minneapolis and I am about as dog tired as I have ever been, but I couldn’t resist putting in my two cents on Sarah Palin’s performance tonight, since I saw it live. In all my years writing movies, going to drama school, etc., I have almost never seen anything so dramatic. It was the rebirth of Frank Capra for our times – Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington. …
Perhaps the media and Democrats would have been better advised to set expectations high for Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech tonight at the Republican convention. After ridiculing her as a small-town yokel for the better part of three days, Palin would have looked good if she managed to avoid drooling during her speech. In the event, though, they could have set expectations as high as a Barack Obama acceptance speech, and Palin would still have exceeded them in a tremendous debut on the national stage.
Palin made it clear to the condescending media and her Democratic critics that she is no pushover, no cream puff. Her nickname, “Sarah Barracuda”, seems a lot more fitting after tonight. Not only did she defend her small-town upbringing, she attacked Barack Obama on almost every possible front, and for good measure went after Joe Biden and the mainstream media as well. …
I plan to write something substantive about Gov. Palin’s speech as soon as I stop laughing. That could be a few days.
I disagree with those who said Giuliani and/or Palin struck a note that was too mocking of the young Obama. Nope. The right cure for the grotesque idolatry that has grown up around Obama is to be every bit as mocking as they all were. He deserves it and the various Obots deserve it too. The way you beat somebody up is to beat them up. In the immortal words of Sean Connery, do you feel better now, or worse? Sorry — I get a little incoherent when I’m laughing my head off. …
Contentions’ folks; Wehner, Rubin, and Podhoretz