This is really rich!
From: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=15591&R=13C18230F1
The Palin Effect
Her enemies are bellowing like a wounded moose.
by Noemie Emery
09/29/2008, Volume 014, Issue 03
Excerpt below:
“McCain picked Palin for a number of reasons–youth, pizzazz, energy, appeal to the base and to middle-class women, to the West and to blue-collar voters–but it may turn out that the main contribution she makes to his effort is in goading the Democrats into spasms of self-defeating and entirely lunatic rage. Somehow, every element of her life–the dual offense of being a beauty-queen and hunter; the Down syndrome baby who wasn’t aborted; the teenage daughter about to get married, whose baby also wasn’t aborted; the non-metrosexual husband working the nightshift; the very fact of five children–touched a nerve on the liberal template, and sent the whole beast into convulsions, opening an intriguing and somewhat frightening window onto the turbulent id of the left.
On September 2, the New York Times ran six stories that touched on the teenage daughter’s pregnancy, three of them above the fold on page one, each of them making Palin’s family life look like Tobacco Road meets Jerry Springer. Carol Fowler, chairman of the Democratic party in South Carolina, said that Palin’s main qualification “seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion,” which, in some circles is nothing to brag about. (Fowler’s husband Don, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, had just faded from the headlines after suggesting that the disruption of the Republican convention by Hurricane Gustav reflected the judgment of God.)
The editor in chief of the New Republic said Palin was “pretty like a cosmetics saleswoman at Macy’s,” and called her and her ilk “swilly people.” Leftist “comediennes” made up rape scenarios. A hacker broke into Palin’s private email account, spreading family photos and emails far and wide. Gawker, a website beloved of the New York-based media, gleefully dialed up one daughter’s voice mail, published the photos, and a long list of email addresses of Palin’s friends and family. Rumors surfaced that four-month old Trig was really the son of her now-pregnant daughter. Vanity Fair and New York magazine offered “The Authentic Trig Palin Conspiracy Time Line,” with alternative theories of the infant’s conception and parentage. Talk of bodily fluids sloshed through the blogosphere, as “Who had her baby, and when did she have it?” became the rallying cry of the left. A blogger for the Atlantic demanded medical records: “The circumstantial evidence for weirdness around this pregnancy is so great that legitimate questions arise.”
But the main questions that arose concerned these over-the-top accusations, and the mental state of those making them. At the end of it all, Palin’s backers had become a large guard of impassioned defenders; McCain got a boost among independents and in state-by-state polling; and a Ramussen poll showed that 68 percent of the people considered the press biased and partisan, and 51 percent thought it was out to skewer Republicans. Democrats, who have fretted for years about winning more votes in Middle America, are seeing their plans for “expanding the map” being flushed down the toilet. Wooing the red states will have to wait for the next cycle.
There were signs too that Palin was confounding Obama almost as much as she was enraging the left and the press, assuming there still is a difference between them. Planning to run as the agent of change against boring old white guys, he was knocked off his balance by the sudden emergence of a rival barrier-breaker, and someone as young and as jazzy as he. As Michael Barone wrote, the fighter pilot played an old pilot’s trick on the rookie, getting “above and behind the adversary so you can shoot him out of the sky.” In political terms, McCain set it up so “that the opponent’s responses again and again reinforce the points you are trying to make, and undermine his own.” Just so. Obama can’t knock her as a flash in the pan, because that’s what he is; he can’t say she just gives good speeches, because that’s what he does; he can’t say she doesn’t have enough deep experience, as his is scarcely deeper. In August, he didn’t seem to know that Russia has a seat on the Security Council, and has the power to veto its measures. If Palin becomes president before 2012, it would be after a period of intense preparation. If Obama does, he would be unprepared on Day One.”
