James Taranto is noticing some peculiar things about the way the Associated Press discusses the federal crime that is the hacking of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s e-mail account.

The Secret Service contacted The Associated Press on Wednesday and asked for copies of the leaked e-mails, which circulated widely on the Internet. The AP did not comply.

The disclosure Wednesday raises new questions about the propriety of the Palin administration’s use of nongovernment e-mail accounts to conduct state business. The practice was revealed months ago—prior to Palin’s selection as a vice presidential candidate—after political critics obtained internal e-mails documenting the practice by some aides.

Taranto observes:

Let’s step back for a moment and consider what this says about the press’s attitude toward privacy. A few years ago, the New York Times revealed the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, a theretofore-secret effort to prevent attacks by listening in on overseas terrorists’ phone conversations. In defense of the Times’s action, we heard a lot of pious proclamations about privacy: George Bush might want to snoop on your phone conversations or emails, and the press was merely being vigilant in protecting your privacy.

Yes, it’s still fresh in my mind. I’m hard pressed to recall a more egregious euphemism than the label of “Ordinary Americans” slapped onto terrorists who’d never been anywhere near, or held anything close to citizenship in, the America they intended to destroy. The democrat party threw it out there, over and over again, as if waiting to be called on it and questioned about it…something that never took place. Ordinary Americans, Ordinary Americans, Ordinary Americans.

Yet the AP, in reporting on its own role in the current story, tells us that it refuses to cooperate with the Secret Service’s investigation of the privacy breach. Granted, the AP probably doesn’t have that much to contribute to the investigation. But the symbolism is telling, and surely deliberate. It suggests the press places a far lower premium on privacy than on its own privileges and its adversarial attitude toward government (or perhaps toward Republicans).

Can’t remember where I saw this, but someone else was comparing this to the Watergate break-in. What a difference 37 years makes, huh? Now perhaps someone older than me and with a better-working memory, or someone with more ambition in the research department, can take on the task of figuring out what the Watergate burglars found. I haven’t got a clue. I heard it was said to be “a portrait of Harry S Truman and a stack of unpaid bills.” But I can guaran-damn-tee you this: It’s going to be mighty tough to find any AP stories that say “The disclosure raises new questions about the DNC’s use of the Watergate building to secure their sensitive records.”

But it really doesn’t matter what the Watergate burglars did or didn’t find, if you’re going to compare it to the Palin e-mail hack, for the latter of these was an epic fail. The hackers wanted to find something juicy, and they did not.

The AP’s “questions” are, therefore, rather short-lived. Go out and find something else spooky and ominous to question, AP.

Taranto continues:

Especially telling in this regard is the AP’s reference to the emails as “leaked.” (The Boston Globe uses the verb leak in its headline for the AP report.) Usually this term refers to a government agency or other organization’s failure to keep a secret. A leaker is someone who is authorized to possess information but not to disclose it.

These emails were not leaked, they were stolen. Here we have an actual invasion of an American citizen’s privacy, and what is the press’s attitude? If the AP is representative (and given its organizational structure, it should be), it is to regard “questions about the propriety” of the victim as more important than the invasion of privacy itself.

This is no different than blaming Sarah Palin for walking around the Memorial Pool after dark wearing a bikini and getting raped.

Actually, to make that analogy work, the rapist would have to suffer a sudden attack of erectile dysfunction. But the point stands. Liberal democrats demand the status of aggrieved victim, with truckloads of authority and little or no responsibility — nobody else really knows what to say in response to that, so our tendency is to go ahead and let ’em have it. Conservative Republicans, on the other hand, are treated as aggressors (or practitioners of negligence) in situations in which they really are victims. And that’s not whining, there’s really just no other way to describe it. You can mutter from sun-up to sundown how Palin’s use of Yahoo “raises questions” but if these hackers were so obviously interested in finding dirt while they were snooping around in violation of federal law, and never did find anything, then it simply isn’t a valid concern.

Palin ankle-biters, you are now finishing up your third week trying to find some good dirt. When you finished up your first week, you already looked like the coyote trying to cath the road runner. Now, it’s just getting monotonous. Meep, meep.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

First, I’d just like to say “A group hacked into her Yahoo” has got to be the most unintentionally hilarious tagline of the year.

Second, I’m inspired to recall a rather lengthy discussion that took place, of all places, here at The Blog That Nobody Reads. The subject was Barack Obama’s less-than-inspired comments about lipsticks and pigs and newspapers and fish and I had the feeling at the time it would be revisited. Blogger friend Buck’s scolding comments looked reasonable, in their own way, to me from the very beginning:

The Republicans, OTOH, make me frickin’ SICK by assuming the mantle of The Perpetually Offended. That’s the LEFT’S schtik… and a sorry one it is and always has been. To watch the McCain campaign play this game turns my stomach. Besides that… Palin has ZERO need for a frickin brigade of White Knights riding to her defense…damsel-in-distress style. That woman can more than take care of herself, so let her do it. If she chooses to.

The Left was doing a wonderful job of imploding, and then WE come along and help them recover with this idiotic and dumbass move.

Way to go, McCain campaign. And shame on all you that have bought into it.

I steered the discussion away from this, because I was not (and am not) familiar with whatever righteous indignation might have been radiating from McCain HQ. I don’t give a rat’s ass, because I don’t believe in noble, decent public servants. I think they’re all scumbags.

Well, I don’t think that. But I think that’s what we should be presuming, when we cast votes. Trying to figure out who’s pure-of-heart is a Dickensian game…a sucker’s game. It’s Washington, DC. I believe in the power of the beltway crowd to go to bed on Sunday Night as Dr. Henry Jekyll and wake up on Monday as Edward freakin’ Hyde.

But Buck’s sentiments do have merit in places. Like right here. I’m humming his tune, as the right-wing blogomaniacs go into meltdown and “How *dare* you pry into her e-mail??” It’s probably technically illegal. But if she’s transacting state business on a Yahoo account, in violation of policy and in an effort to get around an investigation, that’s much worse.

And that brings me to the third point. And on this point, rubico speaks for me (although I’m inclined to believe the fellow is a likable dumbass):

I read though the emails… ALL OF THEM… before I posted, and what I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped, all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor…. And pictures of her family

The most incriminating thing I saw was something where she was bitching at somebody about some guy. I’ve spent a few years in network security, getting my career more firmly wrapped around policy & procedure stuff than around my technical stock-in-trade…which is a completely different story entirely…

…but the point of it is, I do have some understanding of company policies about using business e-mail for business stuff and personal e-mail for personal stuff. I’ve written and edited those policies. This most incriminating tidbit selected from all the Palin e-mail evidence pile I was shown — would fall squarely into the “personal” category (so long as it kept a lid on confidential information, which certainly seemed to be the case). In a nutshell, based on the information that came my way, and I did open Pandora’s box and inspect the contents as best I could…she’s clean.

I have invited left-wingers to float me some examples. They are the “reality based community,” after all. And you haven’t long to wait, when you go looking for some of them to fling their spittle around about what an OUTRAGE!!!! it is that the Governor of Alaska is using Yahoo for government business. I’ve been challenging them to choose, for me, the one single most glaring example of Palin using personal e-mail for business. Preferably, with the effect, intentional or otherwise, of getting around this investigation I keep hearing about.

So far, they haven’t given me squat. It isn’t hard to figure out why. They don’t have it.

That’s not hard to guess. That’s usually the case when lefties are acting OUTRAGED!!!! about something. If the facts are on your side, pound the facts, if the law’s on your side, pound the law. If neither one is on your side, pound the table.

Fourth: Why do I think Rubico is a likable dumbass? Because of this:

…and it finally set in, THIS internet was serious business, yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this shit ever got to the FBI I was fucked, I panicked, i still wanted the stuff out there but I didn’t know how to rapidshit all that stuff, so I posted the pass on /b/, and then promptly deleted everything, and unplugged my internet and just sat there in a comatose state

Fifth: This “white knight fucker,” likable or not, is an even bigger dumbass.

The “white knight fucker” was the /b/tard who thought that going through Sarah Palin’s email wasn’t cool. He logged in, changed the password, and sent an email to a friend of Palin’s warning her and letting her know the new password. Unfortunately, he then posted a screenshot of this email to let the other /b/tards know their fun was over. He failed to blank the password, and they all tried to log in and change the password — which tripped the automated Yahoo! freeze.

I LOL’d. Really, I did.

Sixth: I must give high marks to the link you find above, from which these excerpts are taken. It’s Michelle Malkin’s site, and it lays to rest an awful lot of rumors that have been floating around about this, which never did make too much sense, with some rational explanations that do.

Here’s the short version: there is a site called 4chan.org. It is an image posting site based on a popular Japanese site. The site contains multiple boards, each of which is dedicated to a particular subject. The most notorious of these boards is called /b/. /b/ is the board dedicated to random images. /b/tards, as its denizens are called, are interested only in their own amusement. Their sense of humor runs the gamut from sick to cruel to merely strange. Lolcats, as made famous by http://www.icanhascheezburger.com, originated on /b/. A lot of memes start there. There is a lot of racist humor — pictures of excited and happy black people in proximity to fried chicken abound. There is a lot of pornography. Sometimes it’s child pornography, although posting that is moderator grounds for banning — no, it’s not a pedophile ring; /b/tards post it because they think doing so is funny.

4chan does not log participants. Most people don’t use or have usernames, and post instead as “Anonymous.” And every so often, a number of /b/’s anonymous denizens decide to make somebody’s life hell. Sometimes it’s a random person who offends /b/’s sense of propriety. Sometimes it’s a forum dedicated to a serious topic. Sometimes it’s Scientology. And Tuesday, it was Sarah Palin. Or it would have been.

Sarah Palin’s email account was hacked by one person. Not a group.

This person read her emails, then posted the username and password on /b/. This happened at about 4 in the morning on Tuesday. The idea was that the sea of Anonymous /b/tards would download the emails, upload porn, and cause all manner of mischief. Anonymous is not a group of hackers. Anonymous is more like gremlins. They are hyperactive adolescents in search of amusement and joy, which they often get by upsetting people and making messes. That’s what was happening here. Anonymous did not hack the account. A hacker tried to throw Sarah Palin to Anonymous. Not all of Anonymous was having it. One person threw a crowbar in the works. Other /b/tards were displeased to miss a chance at the lulz. The moderators stepped in. The thread was deleted.

Later, other individuals created threads reposting screencaps of emails and the inbox, and put together a collection of these files. All mentions of these were purged by the moderators. So then some bright /b/tards decided to email what little stuff they had to the media.

That’s pretty much it.

Two hundred twenty-one years, and a little bit of muddled, underdeveloped thinking from our leftist-secular super-duper-activist types, and…we go from no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States…to exactly that.

GIBSON: Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: The reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said — first he suggested never presume to know what God’s will is. And I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words. But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that’s a repeat in my comments, was let’s not pray that God is on our side in a war or in any other time. But let us pray that we are on God’s side. That’s what that comment was all about, Charlie.

GIBSON: But you went on and said there is a plan and it is God’s plan. [emphasis mine]

PALIN: I believe that there is a plan for this world, and that plan for this world is for good.

We could quibble about whether fine hairs are being split here, are whether the distinction has disappeared altogether. But let there be no mistake about it: Gov. Palin was grilled by our Fourth Estate for seeking a high office without properly embracing a virtual state-sponsored religion of atheism.

Methinks, if you’re cool with that — the object of the entire exercise must have escaped you at some point here. The country’s supposed to be all about freedom to worship as an individual and not be barred from public office by doing so, and we seem to have a lot of enthusiastic individuals working extremely hard to jettison that most cherished of individual freedoms.

“[A]ll men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.” — Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779.

Lynda Carter, the former TV Wonder Woman, is the latest celeb nitwit to confirm for us that this whole thing about empowering women had very little to do with the women.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, you see, even though she’s doing exactly what the womens’ libbists told us women should be able to do…is the anti-Wonder-Woman.

Don’t get me started. She’s the anti-Wonder Woman. She’s judgmental and dictatorial, telling people how they’ve got to live their lives. And a superior religious self-righteousness … that’s just not what Wonder Woman is about. Hillary Clinton is a lot more like Wonder Woman than Mrs. Palin. She did it all, didn’t she?

No one has the right to dictate, particularly in this country, to force your own personal views upon the populace — religious views. I think that is suppressive, oppressive, and anti-American. We are the loyal opposition. That’s the whole point of this country: freedom of speech, personal rights, personal freedom. Nor would Wonder Woman be the person to tell people how to live their lives. Worry about your own life! Worry about your own family! Don’t be telling me what I want to do with mine.

I like John McCain. But this woman — it’s anathema to me what she stands for. I think America should be very afraid. Very afraid. Separation of church and state is the one thing the creators of the Constitution did agree on — that it wasn’t to be a religious government. People should feel free to speak their minds about religion but not dictate it or put it into law.

What I don’t understand, honestly, is how anyone can even begin to say they know the mind of God. Who do they think they are? I think that’s ridiculous. I know what God is in my life. Now I am sure that she’s not all just that. But it’s enough to me. It’s enough for me to have a visceral reaction. And it makes me mad.

People need to speak up. Doesn’t mean that I’m godless. Doesn’t mean that I am a murderer. What I hate is this demonization of everybody but one position. You’re un-American because you’re against the war. It’s such bullshit. Fear. It’s really such a finite way of thinking about God to think that your measley little mind can know the mind of God. It’s a very little God that way. I think that God’s bigger. I don’t presume to know his mind. Or her mind.

Let’s review. Gov. Palin is “judgmental and dictatorial, telling people how to live their lives.” She’s all about a “superior religious self-righteousness.” She hasn’t done it all, like Hillary has. She forces her personal religious views on the populace. She’s opposed to separation of church and state. She wants to put religion into law. She thinks she knows the mind of God.

Sources, please, Lynda?

One wonders how Ms. Carter feels about the cheesehead doc who lashed out at Gov. Palin, in that cute way media-connected docs do, by expressing “concern” over her decision to carry Trig to term.

As a vocal opponent of abortion, Ms. Palin’s widely discussed decision to keep her baby, knowing he would be born with the condition, may inadvertently influence other women who may lack the necessary emotional and financial support to do the same, according to André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada.

Dr. Lalonde said that above all else, women must be free to choose, and that popular messages to the contrary could have detrimental effects on women and their families.

“The worry is that this will have an implication for abortion issues in Canada,” he said. [emphasis Sister Toldjah’s]

I would suggest that anyone who fails to see the bullying and bludgeoning in that little news-bit, doesn’t know enough to recognize controlling behavior when it’s right in front of ’em. So that’s my piece of evidence to bring to the table — people are trying to control Gov. Palin, whether or not she’s trying to control other people. That’s my hand. What’s Lynda Carter’s?

I mean, her whole argument is based on this image she has of Palin. So where’s the proof?

A 1970’s feminist icon has run into a real flesh-and-blood functional feminist in 2008…and doesn’t know what to make of ‘er. Can’t see real feminism when it’s staring her right in the face. How sad. It never was about rights, opportunities, responsibilities or power for women. That never had anything to do with it. It’s about a political agenda, to which Real Feminist Sarah Palin is less than friendly. She’s shattering a ceiling alright. It’s like a giant Cone of Dumb that has encased us all these decades, pretending to be something it isn’t. It never was about the chicks. It was just a cynical tool to promote liberalism.

I think the comment I left in the Philly News sums up the balance of my thoughts on it…

We have a need here to turn WW’s golden truth-lasso around on her. Central to her argument is that Gov. Palin wants to control how other people live. Source, please?

Take the Obama/Biden position on any issue…any issue at all…and within that position, there is a desire to define a class of person (usually rich people) and destroy everyone in that class, or at least hurt them. It may be veiled. But it’s always there. There’s always a Snidely Whiplash due for a come-uppins’. Always. I can’t even say the same thing about every old WW episode.

So who’s really more controlling?

Prairie-doggin’ gadfly Mike R., who occasionally sticks his head out of his burrow over at Rick’s place Brutally Honest, suggests a change to the media meme about baby-boomers & younger gentlemen being smart and brilliant if they’re liberal, and dense and stupid if they’re conservative. Actually he’s trying like the dickens not to look like he’s “suggesting” anything at all…just bludgeoning and brow-beating with his opinion that Sarah Palin is a dimwit. But suggestion is the core of his offering. That’s the way trial balloons work.

[T]he pig with lipstick didn’t even know what the Bush Doctrine was.
Ready to lead?
[S]he wasn’t even ready for the interview.

I’d dare say that (and don’t let this go to your pin-head) even Rick Rice is smarter that [sic] Palin!

Someone’s already let something go to his pin-head, for I doubt like the dickens that Rick’s lying awake at nights trying to think of ways to convince Mike R. of his smartness.

Here’s the clip of which Mike R. speaks.

This is fueling a recent effort to portray Gov. Palin as a lightweight sort of chucklehead. See, you could interpret this as meaning she’s never heard of the Bush Doctrine before, and therefore she’s a complete stranger to the arguments that have been raging back and forth about the invasion of Iraq, and whether that’s proper. Where the hell’s she been living? Well the trouble with that is, that’s a little ambiguous — you could interpret it to mean she couldn’t recite the four pillars identified by Norman Podhoretz, or maybe she could but she expected to be drawn into some kind of “gotcha” over whether Podhoretz’ reinterpretation was correct. Her demeanor clearly indicates, to me anyway, that she expects this to be a line of questioning that is not only hostile, but unproductive.

For that, we have this cute little sound bite flying around to day that she’s a “moose in the headlights.”

So she doesn’t immediately identify the idea of pre-emptive military action. Huh. I wonder if Obama and Biden, between the two of them, can lay down the distinction between the nuances of pre-emptive action between the Bush Doctrine and the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Nobody’s wondering about it. They just call Palin stupid.

Interesting times. For twenty years, this has been working for our lefties whenever a hero rises on the right side of the fence, who happens to have been born sometime after Pearl Harbor. Say he’s a dimwit a few times, people will believe he’s a dimwit. Pre-Palin, however, the dumb idjit had to be a dude for this to work. Maybe that’s still the case. Maybe our young conservative ladies can, if the Big Lie technique works well enough, stop being slutty and bitchy like Ann Coulter and start being dense paste-eaters like the fellas. That’s the drawback with the Big Lie technique. The only way to tell if something works is to give ‘er a try.

Our most high-profile public officials born before Pearl, however, never were stupid (Reagan could be regarded as an exception, since he was supposedly senile and dim). Dick Cheney is Darth Vader. Strom Thurmond was a hick, but his enemies didn’t often comment on how stupid he was. He was just evil. Lauch Faircloth was evil. Jesse Helms was evil.

Don’t worry, conservative Baby Boomer men. Our moonbats won’t smear you as being evil, no matter how strong and effective you become. You’ll just be slandered as a moron. And if things go alright this year that’ll become an equal opportunity smear — it’ll work for the ladies too.

You know, the older I get, the more I see human brains as batteries; they can be used by themselves, or coupled up with other batteries. With one critical exception — batteries are designed for interachangeable use. A TV remote might take one, a flashlight might take six or eight. You may move one battery from one to the other, and back again. The battery doesn’t care.

Brains are a little different. People condition themselves their entire lives to think independently, or to think as part of a crowd. Wouldn’t this be living proof? It doesn’t make sufficient sense, to pass the high threshold of demand imposed by the individual thinker, to suppose that prominent, promising conservative women are dimwits…and are starting to be dimwits in 2008. To suppose, up until Gov. Palin came along, conservative women were God-worshipping gun-carrying hicks who were bitchy and wore short skirts and spewed racial epithets but at least had some respectable intellect…and all of a sudden, after Labor Day of this election year, they’re as stupid as the conservative men. As if an asteroid came crashing to earth and somehow made things that way. No, you need group-think to accept an idea like that.

Well, I understand. Desperate people have to do what they have to do. And it seems we have an awful lot of people running around who can do only that. The meme is how they do their thinking. All the time. About anything. There is no other kind of idea worth pondering. You could say their battery can be used only when clipped in to a common device with other batteries.

Welcome, new political meme, new “idiotic right-wing woman” meme. The first step to your surviving the exigencies of infancy, is that Gov. Palin actually has to show herself to be a dimwit. Not just once or twice, but a few times. Good luck on that. If reality confounds this, and it surely will, you can always bullshit your way through. We’ll just see if you’re still around next year. You read about it here first, folks.

Not that it’s likely to count for much in the broader picture of history. My money says by the time Sarah Palin removes her hand from the Bible in January, we’ll be back to the competing talking point of “Stepford Wife.”

Update 9/13/08: Via NewsBusters: Mark Levin got hold of a copy of the complete interview transcript, and underlined & bolded the parts that were edited out. Give it a read.

She’s not quite so much a dimbulb now, is she?

…seems to be the underlying sentiment of Women Against Sarah Palin. “No Redneck, No How.” Yeah, now yer talkin’. Maybe we should prove permit numbers to proper blue-blood New Englanders who see fit to run for important seats in our nation’s capital…makin’ big important decisions and junk. The rednecks think they’re up to it. How dare they!

I got the link off of Dr. Casino’s page, which you should really check out if you get the chance. The Blog That Nobody Reads has been getting a little bit more traffic from there as of late, even though it’s only mentioned there one time.

Dr. Casino has taken steps to register legal protection on his original image. It’s still okay with him that the photoshopped version fly around far and wide, though. He uses words designed to imply, but will not categorically state, that “Elizabeth” is on board with those of those wishes. This will be interesting to watch — lots of folks would like to discuss the origins of the ‘shopped image that (Palin-bashing) Dr. Casino would love to see repeated ad-nauseum, and when they do, displaying a reduced version of the original just seems natural. But Dr. Casino says no. Don’t. Dr. Casino’s lawyer’s pager is about to explode.

By the way, the discussion blogger friend Phil and I have been having about the word “uppity” is a rather interesting one. We pretty much see eye-to-eye on it so there’s not much of a debate to be had. But furthermore, I think it fits in well with the headline of this post, because the consensus-driven definition of the adjective seems to include –

1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance;
2. Said exaggerated sense rises to the level of simple significance;
3. The norm, against which this sense is contrasted, descends to the level of insignificance;
4. Therefore — the implication is, people are uppity when they think they matter, even though they belong to a class which should preclude this from happening.

I don’t think this all necessarily follows from a simple use of the word “uppity.”

But I do think it all necessarily follows from the “Women Against Sarah Palin” website’s criticism of Gov. Palin. I don’t see how you can get around it. She thinks she should count. How dare she??

Blogger friend Duffy brings to our attention the lamentations of a principled progressive, wondering where all those high-minded progressive principles went, and whether they were ever really there. He says you have to read this if you don’t read another thing. I’m a-gonna go ahead and agree with that…

The battle cry of liberals used to be “tolerance, diversity, and freedom of speech for all, and if anyone says anything to the contrary we will crush them.”

In the third quarter of ’08 it’s more like “nobody gets to pick on women except us.”

The Huffington Post, already in full blown Palin Derangement Syndrome, ran every possible rumor, variation and invented more lies to compliment the original. And the main stream media, who for a solid month refused (absolutely refused) to reprint or broadcast a single word of the John Edward’s affair, ran with the verifiably fake Palin story within hours of it’s publication.

All of a sudden, “Did you hear what they wrote in The Kos” became an acceptable substitute for fact checking. Of course, since one single phone call could disprove the story, nobody in the mainstream media could be bothered to pick up a phone.

Finally, Governor Palin was forced to issue a statement. She had no choice. She advised the salivating media of her teen daughter’s pregnancy. And that’s when we finally surrendered our all of our most cherished principles.

Armed with an official statement, nothing could possibly hold the main stream media back and the liberal blogosphere went berserk. The full fledged gang rape of Bristol Palin was underway. Any shred of decency that remained in the liberal blogosphere was gone.

Author the WIZARD, fkap further adds, in comment #3,

I don’t think Sarah Palin is the loser here. It’s the liberals and progressives who have lost. We have lost our integrity.

We are not honorable opponents…. not today at least.

Which earns this retort in comment #4 from dicentra63,

Hate to break it to ya, wiz, but y’all haven’t been honorable since the Florida recount.

Zing. That-un’s gonna leave a mark.

The situation makes me think of a comment RobCase left here over the weekend, because I’m thinking this is the genesis of the conflict heartfelt by today’s liberals —

The idea of angels taking care of everything for those of the superior heart is a recurrent theme in the novels of one of the most popular liberals of all time – Charles Dickens. It always amused me reading his heroes, how often characters like Oliver Twist, Pip and Esther – those who had the correct conscience – invariably relied on the easy money flowing from wealthy benefactors and inheritances. Somehow he had trouble connecting purity of thought with the practical business of housing and feeding oneself.

That’s the paradox that ultimately defeats that ideological camp. It’s about coming together and building a utopian society which functions day to day for the benefit of “everyone.” But within this utopia, conflict is supposed to have become a thing of the past. Many pieces of the dream depend, completely and utterly, on banishing conflict to history’s ash bin. How do you banish conflict? You banish conflict, not by “talking things out” as liberals like to tell us we need to do, but acting like someone to the political right of Genghis Kahn; by waiting for someone to say something out of line, and giving ’em a good rap across the knuckles.

And making sure all the other subjects see you doing it. That’s what you have to do. Get the message out that this egalitarian society we’re building that works every day for the needs, requirements and demands of “everyone,” is not ever going to be friendly with this jackhole over here. Or anyone like him.

In flinging about their superlatives that concern universality, liberals are particularly exuberant in discussing universality of ideas, especially ideas expressed. Freedom of speech for the least among us; don’t you dare question my patriotism; chill wind; dictatorship; blah, blah, blah. dicentra63 is correct — this kind of hypocrisy precedes Sarah Palin by a good stretch. Throughout my lifetime, liberals have told us “anybody ought to be able to say anything they want to, and if anyone dares to suggest otherwise we’ll make ’em sorry.” What is new with Gov. Palin, is that the story is told. Broadcast far and wide, within a narrow scope of time, in such a way that you can’t escape the message unless you put a lot of effort into your attempts to remain ignorant.

And even that doesn’t work. They’re telling us to lash back at sexist white males who spread lies about women who don’t deserve such treatment, to keep their white male power — and to get the message across, they send out a bunch of powerful liberal white males to do exactly the same thing to Bristol Palin.

Update: dicentra63 is a chick. A chick with a blog. And what a worthy blog it is. Don’t be fooled by all the flower artwork and girly crap, there is some hard-headed reality-type stuff and good meaty substance at this corner. I like.

Via Little Green Footballs, we learn of the latest Rasmussen:

A week ago, most Americans had never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Now, following a Vice Presidential acceptance speech viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters.
:
The new data also shows significant increases in the number who say McCain made the right choice and the number who say Palin is ready to be President. Generally, John McCain’s choice of Palin earns slightly better reviews than Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden.

Perhaps most stunning is the fact that Palin’s favorable ratings are now a point higher than either man at the top of the Presidential tickets this year. As of Friday morning, Obama and McCain are each viewed favorably by 57% of voters. Biden is viewed favorably by 48%.

What methods have been used by the “leftist attack squads” to achieve such stellar levels of ineffectuality? Blogger friend Phil has a great round-up. Traitor…holy warrior…connected to Jack Abramoff…pregnant daughter…and a lot of others.

He forgot one, though. Palin is inexperienced. You’ve heard that one, right? It just goes to show how desperate John McCain is, because if he wants to pander to the female vote there are a whole lot of other women he could have named who are far more experienced.

A couple days after hearing this, I noticed this is one of the few anti-Palin talking-points on which the left is not being sexist. Or creative. It’s the “Dan Quayle” rule, twenty years old this year, and it goes something like this: Born after Pearl Habor, got it goin’ on upstairs, conservative — you may have two out of those three. No baby-boomer Republican who achieves national importance is allowed to be smart.

This particular talking point crashed and burned with Palin, because experience counts in just two different ways: It suggests you learned how to do your job by doing it; and it suggests others have had the opportunity to learn something about you. Neither one of those can be pondered, with regard to Gov. Palin, and diverted toward a conclusion about her that is negative. Therefore, in all the ways that matter, she’s as experienced as any balanced aribiter would wish for her to be.

It would appear that this “The People” of whom the pollsters and power-brokers are constantly speaking, has figured this out. And I don’t think they did it by listening to rhetoric from one side or the other. They done it all by themselves. But there is something far more significant happening here. This time, the message came through starkly, clearly, and within a relatively short period of time; just a little over a week. The dialog was something like this.

The Left: We hate her! She’s inexperienced and incapable!
The People: Huh. She seems to be pretty capable. And besides, those guys hate her. Cool.

In these post-Carter years, The People have repudiated The Left fairly often in our national elections. Seven out of the last ten presidential elections have gone that way; so have five of the last seven. A couple of years ago The Left managed to take Congress. From listening to them crow about it, it would seem they’d have no qualms at all with the election of 2006 being held aloft as the template for the narrative in which The People grow weary of Republican leadership, and decide to entrust the workings of government to those better, nobler guys. The problem that comes up, though, is that this is the “Mark Foley” Congress; it wasn’t elected on the issues, or on the superior innate goodness of the democrat slate of humans. What happened was, the elections were right around the corner, and in late September the Los Angeles Times dropped a Babe Ruth bar in the punch bowl. That’s it. Hello democrat Congress — manifestation of The People’s modern and passionate desire for progressive government.

So The People have had their shot at showing their support for progressive ideology. Here and there they nibble at it. But overall, they don’t want it. Now we just have more proof to this; The Left says you can’t be a good leftist in good standing if you show any support for Gov. Palin, and The People say: Okeedokee!

But the real reason why Sarah Palin is so popular? Her supporters. People like me.

You see, for the last forty years The People have been buried in all these images of supposed sexism and non-sexism…in our politicians…in legislation…in our teevee sitcoms…at the water cooler. They’ve been lied-to the entire time, and they know it. Sexists claim to be non-sexists perpetually, 24 hours a day, seven days a week — half the time, when they do that, they point to some other guy as a sexist, who really isn’t one. And it’s widely understood that that’s a lie, too. It’s been flying around thick and fast.

That’s what is so refreshing about the Palin movement. Here, you see gender-blindness for real, and probably for the very first time. We are for McCain/Palin…emphasis on the last two of those syllables. We’re for them, because we’re for her. It’s the “Sarah Palin and that old guy she’s running with” movement. And the fact that she’s a woman, counts neither as a plus or a minus, in our eyes. We really don’t give a good goddamn. In modern times, nobody has ever seen a woman in politics draw this kind of support, from supporters who manage to arouse from themselves such a stunning, blinding apathy toward the fact that she is one. And that is what is so inspirational to everyone else.

The leftist attack soldiers say the pick is a cynical, pandering move, made for the express purpose of attracting women. The truth is, the pandering of which they speak, is the status quo. We’ve been neck-deep in it for generations now; culturally bludgeoned into saying out loud this-woman or that-woman was picked for her abilities and not because she was a woman…in fantastic, surreal situations in which no thinking person believes that to be true. The Left just doesn’t get it — people are rallying around Gov. Palin because her selection is the end of this kind of nonsense, not the beginning of it.

This point is nailed — as in, bulls-eye — by Jeffrey Bell, writing in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard. He buttons this one down in just two sentences:

But it was precisely the venom of the left’s assault that heightened the drama and made it a riveting television event. Palin benefited from her ability to project full awareness of the volume and relentlessness of the attacks without showing a scintilla of resentment or self-pity.

We like her politics. We like her dedication to the principles behind them. And we love how she doesn’t apologize for this. We admire her for her drive, and for her scruples. After those, the experience she does have, is just frosting on the cake; it is more than sufficient for the task at hand. Keep arguing with us on that point, leftist ankle-biters, and you’ll just drive up her approval ratings even higher.

I can’t wait to watch it happen.

Dirty Harry’s Place, which reviews films from a right-wing perspective, has an interesting entry to make on that flick from eight years ago about the uppity female Vice-President. Remember that one?

It was the brainchild of that guy…who has something to say about what’s going on now. It might not be quite what you expect.

This quote will take your breath away, and not in a good way. Remember The Contender (2000), the Joan Allen film about a female vice presidential pick? When faced with the reality of his own idea, here’s what writer/director Rod Lurie had to say about Sarah Palin:

People who understand politics know anything is possible,” he said. “Picking a woman is an absolute strategic idea from McCain’s point of view. He’s not talking about governing right now. The idea of this woman actually facing down [Vladimir] Putin and negotiating with [Dmitry] Medvedev is idiotic.”

This is the same guy who cynically produced that short-lived love letter to Hillary Clinton.

Nope. No Palin Derangement Syndrome going on there. Just another case of not being careful about what you wish for.

The narrative never does change very much, does it? The first female Vice-President might very well be a conservative Republican — and they just can’t handle it. They say it’s about experience, and they fully expect people to take ’em seriously — what the hell? How stupid do they think people are?

They just want liberal politics. Period. Getting a woman in there, that’s just a way to make it happen. It was never anything more than that, to these people.

They wanted women to be put in office…but not to do whatever made sense to those women. They didn’t want the women to use their judgment. They just wanted them as figureheads. To…well, to do what they were told. That was the real vision all along.

Now the Republicans are running with a strong, smart, capable woman in the Veep slot. And she’s no moderate. Nor should she be. Like I keep telling people…you got one guy who says humans breathe air, another guy says humans breathe water, you don’t go sticking your face in the toilet half the time to achieve compromise. But there’s a real possibility here that the first woman in the White House in that capacity, will be a stalwart Republican. And the hysteria it’s creating is like one of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. It is palpable.

These people never had any respect for women from the get-go or for whatever authority those women could justify for themselves. It’s like this: The Hollywood crowd wants powerful women to decide things in whatever way seems fitting to those powerful women…the same way Henry Ford allowed his customers to pick out whatever color of car they wanted. Exactly like that.

Just figureheads. Figureheads for hardcore left-wing politics. With pretty china-doll faces.

But unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last eight days, you already knew that.

This post is pure rehash. Deal with it.

Liberal gadfly Zossima, commenting at Rick’s place…oh, by the way the subject under discussion is Obama might pursue criminal charges against Bush. That’ll become relevant.

I believe conservatism is common sense. Tell me what is “conservative” about running up trillions of dollars in debt? What is being conserved when we outsource jobs and depend on foreign oil that depletes natural resources? What is being conserved when the president issues signing statements and executive orders that are unconstitutional? What is being conserved when we have our military in the wrong war?

I could go on and on.

Whereupon, I wisely pointed out…

“Popcorn”; that’s my new name for you.

Because when the heat gets too much, you explode into this puff-ball of talking points about unconstitutional blah blah blah trillions dollars debt blah blah blah.

You’re cornered, and you cannot stick to the subject. All that butter makes you slippery, I guess.

To which Zossima Popcorn retorted…

Huh, lesseee. Morgan stated conservatism is common sense. I used facts to say that it is not. That means I can’t stick to the subject. Morgan quoted Obama to say that Obama is unqualified. I pointed out that his “logic” would mean that Palin is more unqualified. Again, apparently, that direct response is not sticking to the subject.

And here we have it, the GOP brain at work. Can’t address the real issues? Call names. Someone actually arguing with indisputable facts? They must be changing the subject. It’s just a bizarro world of propagandist relativism over here.

Call me whatever you want. You still haven’t made one single positive statement about why Palin is qualified to be Vice President of the USA. Pathetic.

And at that point, I had to set Zossima Popcorn straight.

Can’t address the real issues? Call names.

As worthy as the public debt may be for further discussion, along with outsourced jobs, foreign oil, signing statements, et al, may be — they are off topic, Popcorn.

Someone actually arguing with indisputable facts? They must be changing the subject.

Signing statements being unconstitutional, is certainly a disputable “fact.” I believe if we were going to pursue it, it would be up to you to cite what controverts the Constitution. And what part of the Constitution that would be. Which you can’t do. Popcorn. But that presumes it’s got something to do with the subject under discussion. Which it doesn’t, Popcorn.

Call me whatever you want. You still haven’t made one single positive statement about why Palin is qualified to be Vice President of the USA. Pathetic.

There’s nothing to address. She’s the governor of the LARGEST state in the entire nation — she is a highly successful one, too — and some of our very best Presidents have been Governors. Republican or democrat, they make the best Presidents. That’s because being a Governor has to do with executive decision making, whereas being a Senator has to do with legislating, which is ultimately pandering. It’s John McCain’s hidden weakness. He mitigated it appropriately by bringing someone to his ticket who actually has experience running things.

Barack Obama augmented his ticket by bringing someone into it who’s just another Senator. More legislative experience. More pandering. Thirty-five years worth. A lifetime spent in the good ol’-boy club. And that, there, is an indisputable fact, Popcorn.

I have no intention of demeaning Palin. (Nor can you point to a single demeaning thing I’ve said.) It is not demeaning to say she isn’t as qualified as other women. It’s just fact. This is no matter of opinion.

So you can’t tell the difference betwen the two. No news there, Popcorn.

I think my wife is the best mother in the world, but she is not qualified to be vice president. And if anyone picked her to be veep over those more qualified women, I’d be saying the same things. Please, develop some common sense and a spine to deal with this thing the rest of us call FACT. McCain and the GOP and YOU! are exploiting Sarah Palin. Own up to your exploitation of women and we can talk.

There’s nothing to talk about, Popcorn, because the FACT of it is Sarah Palin has shown herself to be a strong, dynamic, experienced and principled leader. She has shown, word for word, and articulately, how her ideological preference soundly addresses the problems our country has to face. Liberals cannot do this, because liberalism has to do with solutions to things that do not work. Even worse — it has to do with solutions to things that have been tried, and proven not to work. Palin lives what she believes.

And if you’d bothered to go reading my link and inspecting what you found there, from top to bottom — it’s not one of my more abbreviated pieces, so I knew you wouldn’t do this, Popcorn — what you’d find is that I agree with you that Palin is inexperienced at some things, and this inexperience is an asset. She does not piddle on peoples’ shoes and tell ’em it’s raining, like you do, Popcorn. She doesn’t do that because she has no experience doing it. And the truth of the matter is, if she was nine hundred years old and the option had been available to gain “experience” doing this, she’d pass it up. She does not care to learn how to sell ice to the proverbial Eskimo. She does not want to learn how to say it’s a sunny day outside when it’s stormy, or vice-versa. This simply isn’t her schtick. It isn’t what she does, it isn’t what she’s all about. She’s keepin’ it real.

Go on, Mister Reality Guy. Try to tell me the same thing about Joe Biden with a straight face.

Here’s the truth: The United States of America is a glorious, wonderful country. If we had to pick and choose which countries on the globe are worthy of an impassioned, deadly defense — and we do not — the US of A would be at the top of the heap. It is worth a lethal defense, a terrible defense, a patriotic defense. McCain/Palin agrees with that. Obama/Biden does not. And so, they will lose.

Popcorn.

Now, coincidentally — or not, depending on your point of view — Jim Ryan delivers an amateur psychological diagnosis that is most apropos to the situation at hand…which I thought was interesting…

Hating Sarah Palin

If you are animated, excited and indignant at the presence of Sarah Palin, if you wish for her candidacy to crash and burn in a shameful spectacle, then you resent and hate Sarah Palin.

This is a problem for you. It’s a problem within you. You are hypnotized by an impulse to rage against people who stand up to you politically and morally and who are calm, confident, unafraid of you, unashamed of themselves, and aware of your own craven state. She shames you. This feeds your rage. It’s a vicious circle.

The reptile brain within you, the part of the brain responsible for stupidly driving you forth in rage an resentment, is running the show within you. The higher-order intellectual faculties, those responsible for formulating political and moral stances, are beholden to your reptile brain’s bidding because you have relinquished control of the ensemble. You have relinquished control because you are stricken by your anger and resentment and have allowed those impulses to control you. You are mesmerized by them. You don’t realize this, on one level. On a deeper level, of course, you do. You mourn the loss of your composure and decency. The pain of this mourning feeds the resentment, unfortunately. You are left angry, unhappy, and dimly aware that things are not right for you.

I think it fits pretty well. Over the last week, I have yet to see anyone, anywhere, cheerfully attack Sarah Palin’s experience. It seems to be a thoroughly miserable enterprise, embarked upon by thoroughly miserable reptile-like people.

Via Ms. Zanotti, we learn Oprah has a problem.

A problem she would not have, if the left wing placed one-fifth as much value on the free expression of ideas, as they have always claimed to.

Last time Oprah decided to choose ideology over her audience, her viewership went into the toilet and her magazine lost 12% of its circulation. After this, she’ll be lucky to be a guest on Rachel Ray.

“Half of her staff really wants Sarah Palin on,” an insider explains. “Oprah’s website is getting tons of requests to put her on, but Oprah and a couple of her top people are adamantly against it because of Obama.”

One executive close to Winfrey is warning any Palin ban could ignite a dramatic backlash!

I’m not sure I’d want poor Sarah exposed to that, anyway. All that crying and fake religion; all those weird women with exactly the same haircut and polyester stretchpants looking serious for the camera. It doesn’t seem like Sarah’s scene. She’s more of an Ellen girl, if you ask me.

Ah, well. If Sarah can handle herself around thousands of pounds of elk, I’m sure she can handle herself around Oprah & crew. The real question is what kind of wreckage she’d leave behind.

Probably like Dorothy after that scene with the bucket of water, only without the mournful apologies.

But whatever. It won’t happen. E.M. goes on to provide a link to TMZ, in which Oprah insists it isn’t true, and she’s got a great excuse anyway.

The item in today’s Drudge Report is categorically untrue. There has been absolutely no discussion about having Sarah Palin on my show. At the beginning of this Presidential campaign when I decided that I was going to take my first public stance in support of a candidate, I made the decision not to use my show as a platform for any of the candidates. I agree that Sarah Palin would be a fantastic interview, and I would love to have her on after the campaign is over.

Kind of reminds me of the Clinton defense(s). There isn’t a shred of truth to it, he never did it; and everybody does it all the time.

People are starting to find out about the Sexism Offset Voucher, and in our post introducing it there is way too much reading to be done. And so we’ve come up with this handy FAQ.

1. How does this work?

The sexism voucher regulates your Female Flattery Footprint (FFF). What we are asking people to do is to anticipate the pollution (saying positive things about females, particularly regarding their ability to lead), and purchase an equivalent number of sexism offsets…thus bringing their net FFF to zero. In order to be a responsible steward of the environment, of course.

2. And that helps how?

When you purchase a sexism voucher, what you are buying is the knowledge that someone else will be committing one or several offsetting acts of sexism. Using demeaning words like “chick”; patting a nice-looking girl on the rear end; yelling for the lady of the house to get you a cold beer without saying “please.”

3. Why is this important?

It’s important to our environment for many reasons. First of all, our feminists — as they have made it abundantly clear since August 29th — have riveted their mental and emotional well-being to the far-fetched notion that we have some epidemic of pig-minded males running around, unready, unwilling and unable to notice competence in females. Sarah Palin obviously places that notion in extreme danger, and with that, the sanity (what there is) of our radical post-modern feminists. Our movement, by preserving chauvinism and placing a limit on how much positive and sincere rhetoric can be used with regard to women, helps to keep this situation in check. We’re doing it for our feminists. Because we’re compassionate that way.

Also, it’s important to keep Morgan Rule #1 enforced: If I’m gonna be accused, I wanna be guilty. In this case, we’re being accused of sexism, so we have to find a way to keep ourselves guilty of it. Even though we’re noticing Gov. Palin is an awesome candidate for all kinds of high offices, and a natural born leader. Which she is. But the Morgan Rule #1 must be upheld, so we have to coordinate our theatrical infractions of egalitarian dogma.

4. Aren’t you afraid you’ll get in trouble?

The central premise to Morgan Rule #1 is that if people accuse you of something, they’ve got their minds made up already anyway. So you might as well go ahead and do it. Because being falsely accused of things really sucks.

5. Do I need to buy a sexism offset voucher if I say something positive about Sarah Palin?

You have to buy a sexism offset voucher if you say something positive about any female. Don’t forget — feminism was able to become popular based on the notion that there are those of us who lack the capacity to do this. It is an accusation; therefore, it has to be proven right. No matter what challenge is involved in that.

6. What if I just think something to myself about how awesome Sarah Palin is?

You do not need to buy a sexism offset voucher unless you say it out loud. If you keep it to yourself, then it’s still possible for feminists to walk around believing in this boogeyman of an epidemic of chauvinist males, who are incapable of acknowledging positive attributes in women. That keeps them from freaking out. There’s only a potential crisis involved if you say what you’ve been thinking; then you have to buy an offset voucher.

7. How can I buy these sexism offset vouchers?

The price is negotiated between the buyer and seller, and it need not involve any actual money.

8. What do you do after you sell me a sexism offset voucher?

Something sexist.

9. Like what?

Are you female?

10. Maybe.

Then get yer goddamn fat ass in the kitchen and make me a samrich.

11. Okay, I think I get it. But what would happen if we didn’t have this kind of system?

Well, we already know the answer to that. We tried saying nice things about females with wild abandon since the 1960’s, and since we had no mechanism for keeping these “emissions” in check (the FFF Female Flattery Footprint) everything got out of hand. We got a whole bunch of man-bashing hippie music like “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar”; we got a whole fistful of empty-headed made-for-TV movies on Lifetime and other cable channels ruminating on what towering assholes men are; we got lots of “family friendly” movies about fathers who just run around telling lies and making problems, that the smartass kids have to solve. During this time, real-life children learned to disrespect and talk back to their fathers — and, somehow, incidents of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and related disorders went through the roof. And we had global warming. Coincidence? I think not!

Now, we’re doing the responsible thing. We’re keeping our FFF’s under control, and this cap-and-trade scheme is an instrumental way of doing that.

12. Are sexism offset vouchers paper?

No, they have never existed that way. Although you could always print one up and cut it out.

13. How do I keep track of how many sexism offset vouchers I have?

That’s your problem. Just like a carbon offset voucher. You buy them, then it’s up to you to keep track.

14. Is the sexism offset voucher voluntary?

Just like carbon offset vouchers, it is completely voluntary…for…now…

15. Won’t this make it more expensive to say nice things about Sarah Palin?

PASS on that question.

16. Do left-wingers have to buy sexism offset vouchers?

You know, in order for that question to come into play, they have to say nice things about what individual women are capable of doing, MORE OFTEN than they say something sexist…like that Sarah Palin should be home taking care of her family instead of running for office…or that women need special programs in order to compete with men. So we don’t know. The situation has never come up.

17. What if a feminist criticizes Sarah Palin, and then I criticize the feminist? Do I need to buy a sexism offset voucher to do that?

We’re trying to find that out.

18. Could it be that by beating up on the feminist who criticizes Sarah Palin, I have a sexism offset voucher I can sell to the market?

We’re trying to figure that one out too. We just don’t know yet.

19. Can I buy sexism offset vouchers from myself?

Of course you can! Al Gore buys carbon offsets from himself all the time.

20. How many sexism offset vouchers do I have to buy to call Sarah Palin a VPILF?

None. You’re being a proper sexist pig at the same time that you are polluting the environment by correctly noticing her inherent awesomeness, and in so doing you are unleashing two equal and opposite forces that cancel each other out.

This sexist voucher thing is giving me a little bit of a headache.

Blogger friend Phil, through a chat session, asks me if I saw a Gloria Steinem article which he refuses to link. Now that he’s picked on Ms. Steinem, he thinks he has some sexist vouchers to sell into the system, to make available for purchase by someone else. If that is the case, then of course under my rules, someone could purchase the “right” to say nice things about Sarah Palin, or some other woman, without polluting the landscape by eroding the institution of chauvinism.

It’s a pretty important question. For decades, now, feminists have been running around treating sexism like it’s some kind of ooze that’s “everywhere” and behaving as if anyone who doesn’t agree with them about something, is just evidence of more-of-the-same. If the last week has taught us anything, it’s that the mental stability of our modern feminists is placed in danger when they see hard evidence that this just might not be so. They have to believe in it. Men like me, who think males & females are actually different (and do all that other yucky stuff…go to Hooters, drink cold bear, eat hot spicy meat, go to archery & gun ranges to hit things with projectiles, etc.) are the boogeymen in which they have to believe. Therefore, we are determined to do our part. Hence, the voucher system.

You can read the Steinem piece here, although Phil’s right — you already know what it says. Sarah Palin is the wrong woman!

Which, of course, is precisely why feminism is dead. It isn’t about looking out for women at all; it is about promoting a specific political agenda. Palin is not friendly to that agenda. Wrong woman, indeed.

Here’s the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing — the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party — are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women — and to many men too — who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the “white-male-only” sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes

Heh. Try again, Gloria. I’ve got my reasons for supporting Sarah Palin, and they really don’t have a great deal to do with Shirley Chisholm. But anyway.

But here is even better news: It won’t work. This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

Well, you don’t really mean “women everywhere,” do you. You clearly are not referring to Gov. Palin; she’s part of “women everywhere,” isn’t she? One would presume so, but it seems you don’t agree, Ms. Steinem. And since blogger friend Cassy Fiano is Sarah Palin, you don’t think Cassy is part of “women everywhere” either. So I’m going to go waaaay out on a limb, and guess you don’t think that other Michelle is part of women everywhere, or Rachel, or Dr. Melissa Clouthier, or Dr. Helen, or American Princess, or Karol, or Phil’s wife, or my girlfriend, or Laura Bush or Cindy McCain or Lynne Cheney or…or…or…

This is the bogus thing about “everyone,” and it isn’t just liberals who abuse it. Everyone, as I have noticed more than a few times, is a concept that hardly ever is intended to mean what the culturally unacquainted might expect it to mean.

Most of the time, what it means is “the person speaking, and those who agree with him/her.”

This is one of those times.

Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton’s candidacy stood for — and that Barack Obama’s still does.

Okay so it does nothing to address your complaint when the Republicans pick a woman for the Vice-President job. And yet, the substance of your complaint is manifested through the fact that there are still twice as many men as women.

You know what? I think I’ll check back with Ms. Steinem in a another decade or two, to see if she’s made up her mind whether she wants to be a bean-counting quota queen or not. In the meantime, I’m done. She can’t stick to one side of that question, or the other, consistently throughout a couple of paragraphs. Why in the world do I want to waste some of my precious hours reading the words of some flibbertigibbet like that?

I’m much more interested in Phil’s chat-session question: Does he have a sexist-voucher or two he can sell to the marketplace, now that he’s picked on Ms. Steinem?

Oof. Um…I dunno. Gloria Steinem is a chick. But Gloria Steinem is kicking around Sarah Palin, who is also a chick. To attack Steinem for attacking Palin, you’d have to defend Palin, and in so doing you’d be creating a need to purchase sexist offset vouchers. The object of the exercise is to preserve our national heritage of chauvinism, sexism and general male piggery. Perhaps engaging in such an exercise unleashes two equal and opposite forces upon each other, producing a zero net result.

I’m stumped on this one. Anybody got any ideas?

Our sexist voucher program, by which established pinhead misogynists like myself can retain our sexist identities while saying good things about Sarah Palin, is off to a great start. I was worried people would be confused by the concept, but it seems this is an idea whose time has come: Delegating someone else to help preserve our fine institutions of discrimination and ugly slang that degrades women, thus purchasing the “right” to further pollute the environment through ancillary inflation of the female ego. Sort of a “cap and trade” system of letting those uppity women think they might be capable of running things.

Much more civilized than those dark times of thirty years ago, when we ran around with wild abandon, singing along to “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar,” with no thought whatsoever as to the long term consequences. **shudder** Nowadays, thanks to my voucher program, we keep it all under control. And maybe this way, through our marketplace-driven scheme to contain our emissions of female fluffery and flattery, the planet won’t burn out.

This blogger has noticed our little scheme — hey, look, someone actually reading The Blog That Nobody Reads — and commented…

…obviously some liberal bloggers with an agenda have propagated some false rumors. But at the same time, are any of her noted positive qualities valid? That question, along with the obvious “in case the old man were to die, is she ready to be president” question seems not to matter at all; these smitten flag-wavers seem ready to knock over the old man right now and put her in the top spot (for example here’s a great logo sitting right next to thoughtfully giddy praise for her).

End judgement: the “base” gets electrified any time someone with some sort of (manufactured or genuine) down-home public persona gets on the ticket. What would this look like if the Dems started playing this ballgame? Here’s to four more years of personality politics, kids…

Hmmm. I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, I would not hold that particular post aloft as a statement of my reasons for supporting Sarah Palin. To me (and really, this seemed pretty obvious) the purpose of it was: How can I retain my identity as a sexist pig after all those pro-Palin arguments had been proffered elsewhere, with my name virtually etched underneath such flattery? How to resolve that vexing conundrum. Hence the title.

On the other hand, I do think I’m guilty of lavishing what might be called “giddy praise,” albeit “thoughtfully giddy praise.” Thoughtful is always good; the same cannot be said of giddy. In other words, perhaps the exuberance has outpaced the substance. I think this is the spirit of the blogger’s complaint, and I find it to be legitimate.

I don’t know what the blogger’s been watching if he thinks the Obama campaign has been anything but personality politics from the very beginning. But that’s a whole different discussion. To me, Sarah Palin is an electrifying candidate because she makes conservatism look like the essence of moderation; and she makes it look like the essence of moderation, because that is precisely what it is. She makes it look like life itself, and liberalism look like death itself, because that is precisely what they are. She does this because she can’t help it. She is virginal to the beltway art of making extreme ideas look moderate & vice-versa, and simple things look complicated & vice-versa. Let’s look back over the best and beefiest parts of her speech one more time.

America needs more energy; our opponent is against producing it. Victory in Iraq is finally in sight; he wants to forfeit. Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay; he wants to meet them without preconditions. Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America; he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights? Government is too big; he wants to grow it. Congress spends too much; he promises more. Taxes are too high; he wants to raise them.

What is powerful about this style of speech is that it is unanswerable. Oh sure, that isn’t entirely true, you could answer it. You have two options. You can change the subject subtly through the use of emotionally charged rhetoric, and engaging in what’s called “spin”; or you can appeal to the ignorance of someone completely unacquainted with these situations.

And our liberals, or anyone who wants to disagree with Gov. Palin about the right thing to do here, would have to spin. They’d have no choice. Think about it — how far would you get by saying “No! America does NOT need more energy! Victory in Iraq is NOT in sight! Terrorist states are NOT seeking nuclear weapons and Al Qaeda does NOT seek to harm America! Taxes are NOT TOO HIGH!”

Those would all be very silly things to say.

Palin’s argument is unanswerable. It is unanswerable because it is life itself. Life, from time to time, requires defense; defense requires that danger be named. It requires — read that as, “is synonymous with” — motion; motion requires fuel.

If you’re reading this as yet another anti-beltway argument, well, you’re reading pretty accurately. As to why our beltway crowd doesn’t talk like this — I really don’t know. President Bush used to speak this way all the time…specifically, with regard to this bit about Al Qaeda seeking to harm America. He still does. But only rarely now. The beltway just doesn’t talk like this. The beltway functions, not by sustaining life, but by building larger coalitions out of mini-coalitions, each of which seek to conquer each other as rival factions. It does not seek to sustain life — it is up to We, The People to do that, by means of wise selection of those tasked with steering this apparatus.

Now, I’m told John McCain is the very picture of the kind of man who can do this. I dunno ’bout that; explain the Gang-of-14 to me, if that’s the case.

So that’s why I’m “giddy” about Sarah Palin. And I think that’s a good reason all by itself, but of course in my case there’s more. I’m one of those hold-outs who was snubbing McCain all summer long, while the old man tossed and turned over whether he needed people like me to win. Palin, therefore, is vindication for the folks like me. If McCain could get away with choosing someone else, Mister Gang-of-Fourteen would’ve chosen someone else. We gave you Sarah Palin. Those other guys, who declared allegiance to the McCain ticket from the very first day, unquestionable and unshakable, don’t like talking about this. But it’s true. And Gov. Palin, in turn, gave McCain tens of millions of dollars in campaign donations he otherwise would never have seen.

But why am I giddy about Sarah Palin?

Because when she talks about why her party should run things — she doesn’t go running headlong into the weed patch that is “marriage is between a man and a woman.” She makes it look like the other folks are the control freaks; and she makes it look that way because that is exactly what’s going on. We aren’t debating what marriage is or what it isn’t. We are debating whether food should be grown and used to feed people, and fuel should be pulled out of the ground and burned; or whether food should be burned up to make our cars go, and fuel left in the ground. We are debating whether evil is to be confronted, or invited over to Camp David for “talks” over some mint julip. And in this country, most people think people should eat food, fuel should be burned to make our cars go, and evil should be confronted.

I’ve been saying over and over again how worried I am about this problem, but of course that does nothing to actually solve the problem. The problem is this…waitaminnit…before I get into that, all the women and girls leave the room. Just get out. For a little bit. Okay? Okay. I’ll wait.

Dum de dum de dum…

Okay, are they gone? Alright, gentlemen, here’s the situation. It’s not good for us at all. There’s this uppity woman Sarah Palin, you know…and the problem that arises is that, Sarah Palin is awesome in so many ways. And that wouldn’t be a problem at all — except, and I think I speak for many, I’ve been actually noticing it.

And that wouldn’t be a problem either. Except I’ve been saying so out loud. Many times. I’m not the only one. In fact, since she was named as McCain’s running mate last week, I haven’t seen any conservatives anywhere express a wish to support her ideas, coupled with grudging recalcitrance about doing so, on account of the fact that she’s a woman. I haven’t seen anyone on the right wing actually discriminate against her.

In short, we’ve been given this gift of a smart, competent, effective politician who isn’t even a politician…someone who believes in our values and demonstrates an effective ability to promote them…who happens to be a chick. And we’re actually being open-minded about it.

The problem this creates is that it violates Morgan Rule #1. And this is a hard-and-fast rule. I do not violate this rule, ever — it is a primary directive — until the few days since this last Friday morning, at which time, I have busted it repeatedly. That rule is:

If I’m going to be accused, I want to be guilty.

Got it? It means do not pander. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, at all, at any time, try to disprove things about you someone just got done announcing they believe about you. There is a good reason for this. First of all, when people accuse you of being something you aren’t, and doing something you didn’t do, usually they had their puny little minds made up since long before they said anything about it and nothing — NOTHING — will ever motivate them to question it. That’s the way people are. Secondly: Since Roman times, and centuries before that, accusing people of being things and doing things has been a political tool. You ask someone to do something, he says no; you accuse him of something he hasn’t done, and suddenly he’ll do it. It works even better than what the Corleone family did to Sen. Pat Geary. Oldest story in politics. On whether he really is what you say he is, you don’t give a rat’s ass. (We covered this when we invented the word bullcuse last year.)

So the Morgan Rule #1 says, you do not play to this by trying to earn an exoneration that will not be forthcoming. If your energy goes into anything, it goes into doing the opposite of exonerating yourself. In fact, the Morgan Rule #1 says you go right ahead. Your accuser already has his or her mind made up. So you prove ’em right. Because, to be realistic about it, you might as well.

You accuse me of breaking something I didn’t break, I’ll make sure it’s broke.

You marry me and accuse me of forgetting our anniversary, I’ll make sure I never remember it again.

You’re missing something, you accuse me of hiding it, I find out where you put it before you forgot you put it there, I throw it out the window.

Because I hate being falsely accused of things. We-ell…we’re conservative Republicans. Regularly accused of being sexist pigs because we happen to be straight men. And we have this awesomeness that is in Sarah Palin…some of us have been pointing it out, making nary a hint about her gender, save to occasionally observe this is the kind of woman all women should be. We have been seeing positive things about her. We have been saying them out loud. We have been envisioning her, seriously, as a candidate for our future leader, with the potential to make that happen, and the personal attributes that would contribute toward being a good one. Some of us have even been using our own words, excluding it as a possibility that we might have been reciting the words of others just to masquerade in phony notions of equal opportunity. Simply put, by recognizing Palin’s decency and her leadership qualities, we’ve proven that we have the capacity to do this. THAT is what creates the problem. That is what violates Morgan Rule #1.

So the time has come to restore our sexist credentials. If you’re like me, and you’ve been noticing the things that I’ve been noticing, pointing out the things that I’ve been pointing out — you need to worry about this. You’ve managed to build up an identity attached to being a sexist pig, and for the last six days you haven’t been pulling your load.

So I was racking my brains trying to figure out how to solve this, and I came up with an idea. Actually, I stole the idea. Stole it from Al Gore, I did.

Here it is. Print and cut.

It works like this: You pay me some money. Or not…maybe you do me a nice favor, link to The Blog That Nobody Reads with some glittery prose. What really works for me is something like this: I was sure Freeberg was wrong and I was right, then I realized he’s right and I’m wrong. That works best of all — but there are other things that work just as well.

And then — on your behalf — I’ll do some sexist pig stuff. It’ll probably involve yammering at my sweetheart of a girlfriend to get me some beer without saying “please.” Or, I’ll just generally act like a creep. Maybe do some discriminatin’. Peel off a slur here and there. I’ll find a way to do these things, as your proxy.

And by my doing this, I’ll earn for you a license to genuflect before this long drink of cold water after weeks of wandering in the desert, that is Gov. Sarah Palin, to your hearts’ content. Or, at least, to the limits granted by your “purchase” of these vouchers. If you buy a big enough stack of these sexist offsets, maybe you can even use that horrid and threadbare catchphrase (makes me cringe just scribbling this down) “YOU GO, GIRLFRIEND!” Our identities will remain intact, we’ll keep this apocryphal epidemic of societal misogyny alive and well. And we can still support this female-type-person who champions our passions better than any male politician in recent memory.

It’s a completely capitalist exchange of sexist offsets. Solves all the problems. Everybody’s happy.

Like Han Solo, sometimes I amaze even myself.

Update: I’m going to buy the very first one — er, from myself…wait…does that work? It’s supposed to be a proxy thing, isn’t it? Oh well, Al Gore buys his carbon vouchers from himself, so I figure I can buy sexist vouchers from myself. Okay then. I buy the first one from myself, so I can point out what an awesome bundle of awesomeness is blogger friend Cassy Fiano — who, in fact, is Sarah Palin.

And see? Here I am putting a dollar in the cookie jar…here I am taking the sexist offset voucher from one tray, moving it to another tray, then moving it back again. Sexist heritage preserved. Now those uppity women won’t get all full of themselves as we notice out loud that some of them are…how do those young squirts say it…Da Bomb.

Now, leftists don’t have to buy any of these. There aren’t that many people accusing them of sexism, and so they don’t have to follow Morgan Rule #1; and besides they’ve demonstrated over the last few days that they’re plenty sexist enough.

When I want to be reminded what mean-spirted, small-minded, nasty, toxic, insulting sexism really looks like, I’m making a bee-line straight toward them. I think, over the last week, anybody who hadn’t already figured that out has learned it pretty well.

It can be a little tough to tease a Coulter column properly. She usually winds up and then delivers a smashing uppercut at the end. Which is good, strong writing. Trouble is, that has to go into the teasing, and it’s so central to her overall thesis that once it’s teased, it removes much of the necessity of anyone reading the rest of it. Which breaks the cardinal rule of teasing.

Well — you’ll just have to take my word for it, the rest of it is worth your time.

But here’s the uppercut. Says all that needs to be said.

Attacks on McCain’s “vetting” process require the media to keep claiming that Palin has a lot of problems. But she doesn’t have any problems. Remember? Those were all blind alleys.

Unfortunately, for the ordinary TV viewer hearing nonstop hysteria about nonspecific “problems,” it takes a lot of effort to figure out that every attack liberals have launched against Palin turned out to be a lie.

It’s as if a basketball player made the winning shot in the last three seconds of the game and liberals demand that we have a week-long discussion about whether the player should have taken that shot. WHAT IF HE MISSED?

With Palin, McCain didn’t miss.

Another woman gets it right, and here I am noticing it and pointing it out. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: This week is shaping up to do terrible, damaging things to my credentials as a loathsome misogynist sexist male chauvinist pig. Someday, I shall have to find a way to recover those again.