Charlie Gibson's Gaffe---by Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer reveals Charlie Gibson's ignorance of the 'Bush Doctrine', with which he tried to intimidate Sarah Palin.

"...Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage." Read the whole article.

Can a Mom Be a President?

Dave Barry has an opinion:

"....So I think it's time for the voters, Republicans and Democrats alike, to set this whole ''Mommy Wars'' issue aside and agree that what qualifies a person to be president of the United States is NOT that person's gender or domestic situation. What qualifies a person to be president of the United States is whether or not that person is my wife....." Read More.

Yes, women can do everything. I've always thought so. :-)

Pit Bull with Lipstick

I don't know about you, but I like the image of women who are scary tough. My youngest Jack paid me a great compliment recently, without realizing it. He was acting up and getting wild as always, and I was talking to him about it wondering how on earth I'm ever going to rein in this indomitably male little dervish, when he said, "Mom, you're using your scary eyes. I hate when you do that." And he calmed down.

Ha! Scary eyes! Maybe if I live right, when I'm old I'll be one of those formidable, intimidating old ladies that everyone takes very seriously. I'll show them my soft side only when I want to.

Thanks, Sarah, for being such a charming and disarming pit bull! I love the idea of John McCain, the senior statesman, sending her out there to be an attack dog. She completely set Obama on his heels with that speech. I wonder if he'll ever recover?

Maggie Gallagher on Palin

"A New Kind of Political Woman"

"...What we need here is a new sexual archetype for female achievement. And in Gov. Palin, I think we have an extraordinary one: pioneer woman.
A pioneer woman is a traditional figure. She stands beside her man, not at war with him. She takes care of her home and her community. If her man is around, maybe she
lets him kill the bear. But if he falls, or fails, she picks up the rifle and gets the job done - whatever job needs to be done. ..." Read more.

Way to go Maggie!

Bowyer: Long Knives Out for Sarah Palin

Bowyer on CNBC.com: Long Knives Out for Sarah Palin

by Jerry Bowyer, Kudlow & Co. Contributor

The angry left: Daily Kos, Atlantic Magazine; Maureen Dowd have their long knives (and claws) bared and ready for Alaska Governor and McCain V.P. pick, Sarah Palin. Faked pregnancies, hair criticism; breast pump references…ugly, ugly, ugly. They had plenty of practice slapping Hillary around, so it got nasty rather quickly. Apparently, beating up on a woman comes easier with practice.

Barack issued words of restraint to the army of left commentary that constitutes a kind of isolated-from-the-chain-of command militia for his campaign. That’s a gimme. He had no other options. However he blew it comparing his CAMPAIGN staff to Sarah’s mayoral staff. Dumb. He had to jump to her previous job in order to get his resume to surpass hers in experience. He has a campaign staff of 2,500 in his current job, he told CNN, while she ran a mayoral staff of 50. The problem is that she currently runs a state with a payroll of 15,000 state government employees. And state government is a far tougher management environment too: civil service and unions. I’m quite sure all of Barack’s employees are ‘at will’, so no lawsuits alleging improprieties every time you let someone go. Her employees make life and death decisions: arrest bad guys; fight floods; put out fires. His employees issue press releases; call donors; put up banners.

There’s a big difference between a Senator and a Governor. Senators go to Washington. They breathe DC air and drink in the DC mindset. They take a Chevy Suburban a couple of blocks down the street to enter a studio and be on a national talk show like Meet the Press. Governors are farther away, in Sarah’s case, much farther away, in fly-over territory. There’s a visibility gap.

There’s also an authority gap, in the other direction. Governors are more important than Senators: there are only 50 governors, but 100 Senators. It’s automatically a more elite position. Senators (like John Corzine) run for governor, generally, not the other way around. Senate is stepping stone to Governor; Governor is a stepping stone to President. Under normal circumstances he would be getting ready to run for her job, governor, in Illinois. Four of our last five presidents were governors; the fifth was the chief executive of the CIA.

Yes, Sarah is still in her first term as governor, but my friend, Larry Kudlow made a great point on CNBC this week about glass ceilings and experience. There’s no way you get women at the top if you make ‘experience’ the summum bonum of leadership. You need merit, not time-served to break racial and gender boundaries. Seniority is the oldest discriminatory trick in the book. When black workers started migrating north in the early 20th century, unions pushed the ‘seniority’ issue as a way of
protecting white workers from harder working black new entrants. Irish, blacks, Jews, women and other leadership newcomers have been barred using the ‘experience’ excuse from the very beginning. Liberals used to know things like this, but the now seem to suffer from some kind of mass amnesia. The voters, however, are not.

Well said, baby.

Why We Should Be Glad When Boys are Rebellious

Did you hear Fred Thompson's speech at the convention last night? He said this about John McCain:

"...Now, John's father was a bit of a rebel, too. In his first two semesters at the Naval Academy, he managed to earn 333 demerits. Unfortunately, John later saw that as a record to be beaten. A rebellious mother and a rebellious father - I guess you can see where this is going. In high school and the Naval Academy, he earned a reputation as a troublemaker. But as John points out, he wasn't just a troublemaker. He was the leader of the troublemakers. Although loaded with demerits like his father, John was principled even in rebellion. He never violated the honor code. However, in flight school in Pensacola, he did drive a Corvette and date a girl who worked in a bar as an exotic dancer under the name of Marie, the Flame of Florida. And the reason I'm telling you these things, is that, apparently, this mixture of rebellion and honor helped John McCain survive the next chapter of his life:..."

You all have heard something at least about McCain's heroism in Viet Nam, but if you're like me, you never heard many details, so read or watch Thompson's speech.

"That mixture of rebellion and honor" ---remember that the next time you want to dress your little boy up all nice and neat and part his hair on the side and make him sit still in class and just do what you say without question.

If you want heroic men, you need rebellious young men.

Palin Hits Too Close to Home

As our daughter Gracie remarked today, the Left are getting so very ugly in their sexist attacks against Palin because she has hit home. If only she were a pro-abortion Democrat, she'd be their political dream! She has everything they would want in a candidate and symbol of a woman's achievement, except, oops, she's conservative. They did this to Condie, too. They are not really pro-woman at all. They are pro-their-own-power, and won't hesitate to stoop to hateful, sexist mudslinging to get it and keep it.

What Are 'Womens' Issues' Anyway?

I'd like to take these apart one by one in future blogs, but let me just say now that I am tired of the media and feminist establishment telling me what 'womens' issues are. They haven't got a clue what real women living in the real world care about.

I am against abortion. I do not feel that government-sponsored healthcare is the answer, but instead I believe that a free market is the only way to have affordable, quality healthcare. I care about the environment, but am not fond of the ethanol/bureaucracy complex and am not nearly gullible enough to swallow the global warming orthodoxy or to believe that recycling and wind power will solve any of our problems. I am a business owner and very concerned about anti-business tax policies--in other words, I want tax cuts for the 'rich'. I care about the strenth of the dollar. I want a strong national defense. I do not want equal pay for equivalent work. I want to weaken the strangle-hold that public education has on our children and our tax dollars.

I'm a woman so I guess that makes all these women's issues, doesn't it?

Sarah Palin and the Old Girls' Club

Sarah Palin’s nomination this week did more than just energize the Republican base and draw all the media attention away from Barack Obama. What her nomination did was to call the old-guard feminists out and make them prove that they’re really not pro-woman at all. She’s supposed to be a feminist’s dream—a smart, athletic, intelligent woman who’s beauty did not tempt her to be satisfied with “traditional” female roles. (Remember the sanctity of Title IX funding of girls’ sports and how we were told we should revere and encourage the young woman athlete?) She rose through the tough, intimidating male world of frontier Alaska politics, taking on big oil, political corruption and a deeply entrenched Old Boys Network and won! Her career accomplishments overshadow her husband but neither she nor he seems to mind. With infant in tow, she governs a state and then hits the campaign trail and does it all with grace and poise. This story is every feminist’s dream. In fact, feminists did dream it up into a television drama which they had hoped would rival West Wing. Remember Geena Davis in Commander in Chief, a young, smart, inexperienced vice-president whose baby threw up on her blouse right before her inauguration as President after her predecessor died in office unexpectedly? That’s Sarah Palin!—with one big glaring difference: Palin is a conservative.

This one fact alone is enough to make Maureen Dowd and the entire Old Girls’ Club seethe with sarcasm, contempt and ridicule of Palin’s femininity. Dowd’s Labor Day column pulled no punches, sneering at Palin’s motherhood, wifehood, her husband whom she called a “hunky Eskimo”, her children’s names, her good looks, her state and all of her professional accomplishments. Palin has shown that what feminists really want is not what we thought. They don’t really want to encourage women to succeed in a man’s world; they just want to make sure that the only women who do succeed are the ones who have kissed the ring of the feminist establishment. Since Plain didn’t come up through the ranks of the Club, didn’t get approvals and endorsements from the New York Times and Meet the Press, isn’t pro-abortion, isn’t demanding equal pay for similar work and hasn’t eschewed marriage, she is to be laughed off the public stage. Their vehemence is understandable. If someone succeeds without their aid and approval, they’ve lost their power. They’re shown to be ineffectual, irrelevant and out of touch with the bulk of America who seem to love Palin all the more for her being hated by the feminists.

We shouldn’t be discouraged by this; we should take all this vitriol and all the shrieking hatred by the establishment as a sign that America is still working the way it’s supposed to. Way back when we began, we decided that Americans would not be ruled by an aristocracy, but that each man or woman could sink or swim according to his own merits. Although aristocracies have non-the-less arisen in America in the form of the establishment press and party machines, once in a while someone breaks the machine apart and makes it to the top by her own merit, and reminds us how America was meant to be. The establishment screams and cries foul but there’s nothing they can do about it. We’re the voters and we get to choose for ourselves who we find admirable and who we find empty. As for me, I admire Sarah Palin.

Bristol's Baby

You may have seen this from the Washington Post, but I think it’s beautiful. It’s a new world now. Babies are beautiful.

Palin: "Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents.
As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support."

This makes me think about the hypocrisy of the Religious Right which makes such a grand fuss about their love for unborn babies when they’re talking about abortion, but treats the unborn babies of their teenagers as a shameful thing. Palin is a real mom who seems to care more about real people like Bristol and her baby than she does about ‘issues’. That’s real wisdom.

Andrew Sullivan Thinks Women are Insulted by the Palin Nod

Here's what he wrote, if you care: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/feminism-and-pa.html#trackback.

But I couldn’t disagree with him more. I’m tired of the Left telling me what my issues should be, and I am bemused by their claim that since she didn’t ‘climb the greasy pole of politics’ she’s somehow not a serious candidate. I think her not having tromped through that cesspool is one of the best things she has going for her.

This appointment isn’t just about gender—it’s about energy, which she can speak on with more authority than any of the others and which is front-and-center this election. It’s about reform, which is the true coin of which Obama’s empty ‘change’ slogan is just a cheap counterfeit, and which her amazing record has shown us is still possible. Dare we hope for Washington to be cleaned up like Alaska was? And yes, it’s about gender. It’s about recognizing (thank goodness that someone recognized at last) that the Left does not have the moral authority to tell ‘women’ what they should care about. Most of us are not pro-choice. We’re moms for goodness sake! And we start more small businesses than men, so we care a whole lot more about a healthy business environment than the Left or Washington in general, for that matter, would dare to think. We’re tired of being used as a front group for the Democrats. And since Obama chose to thumb his nose at women and tell us “we men will take care of things, girls, so don’t trouble your pretty little heads about your issues”, I think it is right and fitting that the R’s should be able to step in and give us the nod we’ve been expecting since 1984.

Palin resonates with me. I have hoped for this nomination ever since I first heard about her a few months ago, and I feel anything but insulted.