Conservatism unchained!

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt, I ran across a blog a couple of days ago written by Seamus O’Shansky called Red State Reconstruction and have added it to the blog roll. I really liked his tag line:

Dedicated to the reconstruction and rebirth of the Conservative Movement. A blog of analysis, plans and actions designed to restore the values of Ronald Reagan and Reagan’s Conservatism to a place of prominence in Our National Political Conversation.

Conservatism, not to be confused with the religion called Environmentalism, is the basis for the Republican party. However, the party has strayed from conservationism to the detriment of us conservatives.

O’Shansky’s post this morning is well worth the read. He has expanded on my post yesterday, stating far more clearly the disdain we should all hold for the McCain staffers attacking Sara Palin.

Palin’s Critics … Debunked

Sarah Palin, the Republican’s 2008 VP nominee, underwent a trial by fire after being chosen by John McCain as his Vice Presidential running mate in August (I’ve written before about my support of her nomination.) The Democrats, lead by their publicity arm (the MSM). pummeled her unceasingly throughout the remainder of the race.

There is nothing new in such behavior; political races have engendered animosity and attacks since … probably the first humans organized the ownership of their caves.  Partisan efforts to demean their opponents is as old as dirt. The main thing that changed in this race is the main stream media’s blatant bias for Obama’s candidacy.

Really there is nothing new in their actions. They have been developing their skills since their self-proclaimed crowing achievement … the end of the Vietnam war and America’s first defeat in a foreign war.They honed their skills, following the likes of Castro, Mao, even Joseph  Gobbels (in a speech  on 9 January ,1928 to an audience of party members at the so-called “Hochschule für Politik”, a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin):

Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.

The traditional maxim is “if you repeat a lie often enough, people accept as fact” …

“Palin is a joke candidate only on the ticket as a sop to pro-lifers. End of story.” Frank Schaeffer, the Huffington Post

“Sorry if you’re republican, but I get embarrassed [sic] when I watch Sarah Palin.” The John Stewart Show

I could go on, but do your own damn search

What transpired before the election was expected, though I started getting miffed by Republicans clamoring for attacks on Palin to stop. MSM attacks on her were actually rallying cries for those of us supporting her … the more vile the attack … the greater our support for her.

I could also understand the negative picture of her by several “staunch Republicans.” Some never were (at least in my mind) Republicans (i.e. Christopher Hitchens). Some were just plain snippy, such as Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker (I read both columnists regularly and almost always enjoy their viewpoint, so I was very disappointed by their vitriol against Palin … was it just jealousy’s ugly head showing itself?). Other conservatives were not supportive of her nomination from early on, as written about here and here.

What really surprised me was the vile attacks on her by so-called ‘Republicans’ after the election! Anonymous ‘leaks’ from McCain staffers have painted a picture of a woman that didn’t know, for instance, there were individual states on the African continent! Outlandish pronouncement became even more outlandish … and petty:

Newsweek also reported that Palin may have spent “tens of thousands” of dollars more on wardrobe expenses than the $150,000 that was reported in the days before Election Day. The money allegedly went toward clothes for her and her family from high-end stores, even though she was originally told to buy just three suits and hire a stylist for the Republican National Convention.

One aide called the spree “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,” according to the magazine. Palin also reportedly asked to speak at McCain’s concession speech Tuesday, and was denied.

First … why would the McCain staff lash out at someone in their charge for the last two-pulse months of the campaign, and second, why is every single statement by those staff members front page news?

To the first:

“McCain and Palin lost the election! Finished second! Bad news! Somebody’s to blame! Where can the blame for the loss be placed? How about that dumb, hick outsider? After all, we Washington campaign  insiders have to protect our positions for the next election cycle in two years!”

It’s called CYA. The only difference is that we get to see it on the front page of our newspaper (actually I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in years … how about on our browser when we pull up Fox News) or in glorious color on our 1080p as we tune in to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, CBS, ABC, CBS. This is nothing more than small people trying to shift the blame of their failure to someone they never respected from the get-go! This is also an issue that is core to the problems haunting the Republican party, and I’ll post more on this soon.

On the second point:

The MSM has been perfecting the art of targeted personal destruction for years. As mentioned earlier, if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes a fact. “Bush lied.” … “America is a racist society.” …”Bush is the stupidest President in history.” I was sucked in by this tactic years ago when the MSM pilloried Dan Quail, George H. W. Bush’s VP.  Dan Quail was no more or less of an intellect than any other national politician on either side of the aisle (with the possible exception of Newt Gingrich, the brightest thinker to have passed through Washington for the past three decades). However, if every gaff is the lead story on the six o’clock news and repeated in every major newspaper across the country, you eventually begin to look pretty stupid. Especially when there is never a similar story on the gaffs made by a Democrat politician.

Sarah Palin, along with the likes of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, are people we conservatives will be looking to for leadership over the next several years. What is important is our need to learn how to better counter the personal attacks perpetrated by the MSM and denounce those in our own party when they adopt the slimeball tactics of the Liberia Left and the MSM … but then I repeat myself.

Gotcha didn’t Get’er

Sarah Palin’s first trial by fire interview with Charlie Gibson ended with her demonstrating she is intelligent, quick, and shouldn’t fall for the ‘gotcha’ tactics the MSM is attempting to use to destroy her. Gibson fell down:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.” Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don’t know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

Allahpundit points out what Palin actually said was:

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God,” she exhorted the congregants. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”

Bright, bright woman … and she doesn’t come across as some intelect that loves to make sure onlookers see her brilliance. She is strengthening her’s and McCain’s lead every time she takes the opposition down a peg. I love it!!!!!!

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan wrote a great peice on how Palin is impacting the race.

After the past 10 days, it is not remarkable that Mr. McCain has caught up with Mr. Obama. It is amazing that Mr. Obama is still roughly even with Mr. McCain.

There is no denying that Mr. Obama is in a bad place, that he must now be considered the underdog, that he’s wearing Loser-Glo. The slide started with the Rick Warren interviews in August, just as America was starting to pay attention. Verdict? McCain: normal. Obama: odd.

Then Mrs. Palin, and the catastrophe of the Democratic and media response to her. Books will be written about this, but because it’s so recent, and so known, we’re almost not absorbing how huge it was, and is. Here was the central liberal mistake: They used the atom bomb just a few days in. They used it so brutally, and yet so ineptly, in a way so oblivious to the true contours of the field, that the radiation blew back over their own lines. They used it without preliminary diplomatic talks, multilateral meetings or Security Council debate. They just went boom. And it boomeranged.

The atom bomb was personal and sexual perfidy, backwoods knuckle-draggin’ ma and pa saying, Tell the neighbors the baby’s ours. Then the ritual abuse of the 17-year-old girl. Then the rest of it—bad mother, religious weirdo. (On this latter it must be noted that Mrs. Palin never told a church that the Iraq war was God’s will; she asked them to pray that it was God’s will. It wasn’t the sound of Republican hubris, it was the sound of Christian humility: We can’t know the mind of God, we can only pray we are in accord with it.)

I highly recommend you read the whole peice.

Waitin’ for the ‘Gotcha’

I ran across a post by Jim Teacher this evening that provides some great advice for Sarah Palin when … not if … the drive-by media tries to trap her during an interview with a question for which she doesn’t know the answer.

… her answer to hostile interviewers who want to play Pop Quiz — which is pretty much all of them — should be along these lines: “You do realize that presidents and vice presidents have support staffs, don’t you? When a vice president needs an answer to something like that, she gets it almost before she finishes the question. I can send you a box set of The West Wing if you need a refresher. What a great show. It also portrayed the importance of speechwriters in presidential politics, which apparently our distinguished opponents thought everyone had forgotten the other night. Maybe because real-life speechwriters don’t tend to look like Rob Lowe? Or maybe only Democrats are allowed to have them.

I’ll love seeing her in action these next few weeks and months!

Overcoming the “Inevitable?”

Inevitable outcomes have a habit of not being inevitable. When 2007 opened, Hillary Clinton was inevitably the Democratic party’s candidate for President in 2008.

The main stream media (MSM) has been declaring for the past few months (even before Mrs. Clinton was ‘defeated’ by her rival) that Barak Obama was slated to be our next President … the Republican’s candidate, John McCain, couldn’t win as he was just an extension of Bush’s term … McCain was an old white man and the public wanted young, new, fresh … the American public was becoming more Democrat, moving away from the old, backwards Republicans … and other changes declared inevitable by the elite political class.

What a difference a week makes!

McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate began changing the inevitable a week ago,  and has exploded following her speech on Wednesday evening at the RNC convention in St. Paul, MI. The conservative Republican base has seen in Palin their new torch bearer; someone who is from them, like them, of them.

I’ve been a proponent of Palin as McCain’s running mate for a while, though I didn’t hold out much hope for it coming to fruition. I have looked at McCain as someone who was more interested in what the power brokers said of him than in how he was serving his Arizona constituents and the people of the United States. I expected him to choose a more traditional running mate, such as Gov. Pawlenty of Minnesota or former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (I didn’t figure Mitt Rommney would be selected because of the amenity between the two during the primaries).

While his speech on Thursday night was not of the caliber of Palin’s the night before, it was much more introspective and reveled to me at least,  more of John McCain than I had ever known before. His character is what drives him, not any external desire for approval or

In his closing remark Thursday evening, he said (emphasis mine);

I was in solitary confinement when my captors offered to release me. I knew why. If I went home, they would use it as propaganda to demoralize my fellow prisoners.

Our code said we could only go home in the order of our capture, and there were men who had been shot down long before me. I thought about it, though. I wasn’t in great shape, and I missed everything about America, but I turned it down.

A lot of prisoners had it much worse…

(APPLAUSE)

A lot of — a lot of prisoners had it a lot worse than I did. I’d been mistreated before, but not as badly as many others. I always liked to strut a little after I’d been roughed up to show the other guys I was tough enough to take it. But after I turned down their offer, they worked me over harder than they ever had before, for a long time, and they broke me.

When they brought me back to my cell, I was hurt and ashamed, and I didn’t know how I could face my fellow prisoners. The good man in the cell next door to me, my friend, Bob Craner, saved me.

Through taps on a wall, he told me I had fought as hard as I could. No man can always stand alone. And then he told me to get back up and fight again for my country and for the men I had the honor to serve
with, because every day they fought for me.

(APPLAUSE)

I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency, for its faith in the wisdom, justice, and  goodness of its people.

I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again; I wasn’t my own man anymore; I was my country’s.

(APPLAUSE)

I’m not running for president because I think I’m blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need.

(APPLAUSE)

My country saved me. My country saved me, and I cannot forget it. And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath, so help me God.

Like Muhammad Ali and his infamous pre-match chest-thumping, John McCain wasn’t talking to his audience … he was talking to his own mind. McCain’s sense of honor is such a strong component of his character that he hadn’t (hasn’t?) yet forgiven himself for allowing himself to be ‘broken.’ I’ve heard the story of his imprisonment in Hanoi before, but I’ve never heard him or anyone else mention his being broken. I can’t imagine having to carry such a burden around for 30 years!

My admiration for John McCain shot off the chart after that remark. I think I now understand what drives him. While I recognize that he will still enact policies that I will profondly disagree with (such as McCain-Feingold and Comprehensive Immigration Reform), I can now walk into the voting booth on November 4th and proudly pull the lever for him.

Sarah Palin …

Just finished listening to Sarah Palin’s speech to the RNC Convention …

“Some politicians use change to promote their careers. Then there is John McCain, who uses his career to promote change.”

“Harry Reid said of John McCain, “I can’t stand the man” … I can’t think of a better reason to vote for John McCain than that endorsement.”

Update 9/4 – Seems I got the quote a bit wrong. It was actually:

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.

She was brilliant, funny, knowledgeable, down-home … her jabs at Obama and Biden were witty, sometimes deep and always on point … what else can be said?

As I said a few days ago, John McCain was brilliant selecting Sarah as his running mate!!!

Did he get bounce?

Seems that the DNC Convention didn’t do much for Obama in terms of increasing his lead over McCain in the polls. Kerry didn’t get much of a bonce after the ’04 convention. Many speculated as to why no bounce then, similar to what is going on now whit about as many conclusions.

This year, was it because of McCain’s anouancement of the selection of Palin the day after Obama’s speech, which I talked about here, or was it because the candidates have been campaigning for so many months most who intend on voting have already made up their minds? Or …. ?

I suspect it is a bit of both reasons … but I personnally like the Palin reason better!