Proof #9487 that the humiliation and degradation of Sarah Palin had nothing to do with Sarah Palin: The political opponents of Mitt Romney are now lying about what Ann Romney says, in order to humiliate and destroy a woman who has left the liberal plantation.
http://twitchy.com/2012/07/19/media-fail-so-ann-romney-never-said-you-people-after-all/
And Michele Bachmann:
Filed under Uncategorized
Mitt Romney knows he has one large electoral problem, and it’s his time spent as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s. If there’s one thing the left and Obama know how to demagogue against (disingenuously, perhaps, but that’s for another day), it’s big-business “Wall Street Fat Cats”. But that specific line of attack only really hurts him with the left-wing Democrat base, which he need not worry about. It’s the Republican base he has to fear, even though it has traditionally resisted this attack, as “Wall Street Greed” has traditionally been seen by conservatives as an ugly but necessary part of free-market capitalism.
To that point, this 25-minute short film, “When Mitt Romney Came To Town”, is an intriguing case in what may be one of the most sophisticated Presidential campaign “black-ops” we have ever seen. The film tells the story of a few examples of Romney’s “creative destruction” at Bain Capital, through the eyes of blue-collar workers whose jobs were eliminated due to the “corporate raiding” of Mitt’s firm. Watch for yourself, and you’ll see this takes a decidedly left-wing tone: it says, essentially, “Romney destroyed the lives of thousands of poor helpless blue-collar workers”. It’s a tone that, while dramatic, does not really resonate with the Republican base, which generally accepts the thesis that bankruptcy and “creative destruction” are a legitimate part of the free market. So the question is: why would Newt Gingrich be so foolish as to use this film to try to rally the conservative base against Romney?
While countless conservative commentators have rightly chastised Gingrich and Rick Perry for promoting the left-wing populist angle used in this film to attack Romney (conservatives do not want their candidates to be seen as attacking capitalism), most have gone a step further and given Mitt Romney the ultimate weapon in securing the Republican nomination: they’ve told conservative voters to LAY OFF BAIN! Only Sarah Palin, in her numerous Fox News appearances in recent days, has refused to declare Bain “off-limits”, and has advised voters to take a close look at Mitt’s record – in particular, his claims of job creation, and his possible use of his corporate takeovers to attract government subsidies and bailouts. In fact, last night on Sean Hannity’s program, she used the key word that I think explains what’s going on here: inoculation.
Which gets me to my theory: this film was subversively created by the Romney campaign itself, in order to achieve this desired result of inoculation on Bain. The reason he needs to create the meme out there that “an attack on Bain is an attack on capitalism”, is because of the aforementioned Governor Palin, and her rallying the Republican base around the cause of Crony Capitalism. The Tea Party base of the party is now wise to the concept of statism, cronyism, corporatism, and corruption coming from the big-business side of the economy. The type of capitalism Romney engaged in with Bain is a problem with the Tea Party base not because he put people out of work (many types of capitalism involve the elimination of jobs), but because the businesses and jobs themselves were not a factor at all in the business decisions of Bain, just collateral damage that, on the aggregate, has been extremely harmful to America. Jobs, and the businesses themselves, were irrelevant to the partners at Bain. What Bain and other corporate raiders actually do is not “turn around failing companies. It’s the search for opportunities on balance sheets, stock prices, and regulatory environments, to exploit through political connections and complex financial instruments, to create paper profits, and damn the consequences.
It’s a complex discussion that can take volumes to fully explain. But what Romney’s campaign has discovered it needs to hide is the fact that the profits at Bain usually could not occur without the exploitation of political contacts, regulatory loopholes, and questionable complex financial tactics. So while Newt and Perry were foolish enough to take the bait on this film’s apparent attack on capitalism itself, Palin will continue to try to drag them back from the edge of self-destruction by rescuing the narrative. Romney’s problem is a Crony Capitalism problem, and he knows it. That’s why it’s no coincidence, this film was produced by Jason Killian Meath, a former business associate and 2008 campaign leader for Mitt Romney himself. Romney’s team, consisting undoubtedly of many brilliant and experienced tactical political operators, is loving the effect this film is having. Mission accomplished? We’ll see how successful the savviest political minds, including Governor Palin, are at rescuing the narrative.
The Fundamental Restoration has begun…2012 is going to be fun.
(From the Rolling Thunder photo gallery at SarahPAC.com. )
Filed under American Restoration, Governor Sarah Palin
Few things have bothered me as much in the past couple of years more than the Canadian commentariat’s reaction to former Alaska Governor and Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s emergence as a political force. The left’s vitriol is completely expected, as disgusting as it is (the true face of the left emerges, as the supposed champions of feminism savagely rape the reputation of a successful woman). But nasty attacks from the likes of David Frum, Margaret Wente, Diane Francis, and many in the National Post’s roster of otherwise sensible young libertarian commentators, had been mystifying and depressing.
Well, it took nearly two years, but finally – finally! – an intelligent Canadian pundit has figured out that the Sarah Palin phenomenon is a wonderful thing, and that her detractors’ primary source of animus comes down to the fact that she is an outsider working in an elite insider’s culture. In today’s National Post, Rex Murphy breaks it down in Understanding the Sarah Palin Effect. First, he explains why she is an attractive person and politician:
She is a cheerful human being, with a large family, an apparently easy-going and normal husband. She has a personality that would sell corn flakes — if not grow them. What career she had in Alaska, she earned. She’s at home indoors and out, radiates human warmth, seems to have some balance about herself, and has displayed over the last year or so a considerable fortitude under an avalanche of mockery and hatred. For the final stroke of this cameo I should note she is smart — smarter than 90% of the people who make a point of how rock-stupid they know she is.
She, by rights, should be queen of the feminists. All that self-reliance, her takeover of Alaska politics, the rocket ride to a Vice-Presidential ticket, a public career she blends with her family life– these seem gold-standard credentials for a real feminist. But official feminism derides herewith an unspeakable intensity. Her early critics were not beyond the inane claim that she was somehow not really a woman.
Then, perhaps using insight gleaned throughout his career, as a Newfoundland-born-and-raised outsider with a funny accent who was likely often treated like the “House Newfie” by many elitist colleagues at the CBC and Globe & Mail, he nails what may well be the #1 reason why the political and cultural elite of both left and right hate Sarah Palin so much:
I side with those who venture that the nerves Palin hits have more to do with class — where she’s from, how she speaks, where she was educated, what she likes (the moose-hunting), than her politics or her gender. She’s rural, she came into national politics from (ugh) Alaska. She and her husband have the unerasable stigmata of the modern working class. She would not be embarrassed to be seen walking into Wal-Mart.
Those characteristics and attitudes, in themselves, are not objectionable. In fact, hymns to working class habits and virtues are the very songbook of most elite American politicians and journalists. That crowd sings lustily what it does not feel. Remember the aphorism ascribed to Lincoln: “God must have loved the common man. He made so many of them.”
But America’s professional public class, and the commentariat who still have some (though declining) power to police it, like to view Lincoln’s common man, or woman, as an object in the distance, as an object of their supercilious care and concern, but not as a player in the game. Palin is simply not supposed to be a player. She’s not only from the wrong side of the tracks, she’s so far over on the wrong side she can’t see the railway station.
But there she is, in all her roughness and candour, and her spiky wit and ability to irritate her self-nominated betters. She also happens to be the most naturally charismatic politician at the moment in the United States. She is the one major figure who can claim authenticity without morally choking on the word. That makes her the populist rallying point of a nascent rejection of the fervid partisanship and Washington insiderism that is eroding the consent on which American politics is founded.
No wonder Obama claims he won’t respond when she tweets. The Hope and Change President still owns Hope, but real Change in current American politics is on Palin’s side of the ledger.
By Jove, he’s got it: the elites (moneyed, educated, urban, effete) may claim to be “for the common man” – but their policies, almost universally, effect to keep the common man at arm’s length. Whether it’s “universal health care” (public hospitals for thee, private American clinics for me), public transportation (get these peons and their beat-up Hyundais off my roads!), or the false promise of sustainable public pension plans (we’ll pay you out if we can…we’ve still got our investments), the Marie Antoinettes of both parties wish for the good things in life to be reserved for them, without having to bear the indignity of rubbing shoulders with the great unwashed. For bringing this insight to the minds of Canada’s group-thinkers – thank God for House Newfies! And God Bless Sarah Palin, who understands that the world without a strong America is a very frightening place.
Filed under Against the Grain, Politicians
Despite growing up in a largely hedonistic liberal-Jewish community and family, I never felt comfortable with left-leaning politics or the cultural mores of those around me. Although my conservative awakening started to emerge quite early (I remember feeling great sympathy for Preston Manning and his Reform movement for the snobbish bashing he was taking back in the early 1990s, when I was barely 20), it took until sometime just after 9/11/2001 for me to finally and forever consider myself “of the right”. As liberals – whose propaganda throughout my youth created the myth of “liberal compassion” versus “right-wing hate” (as in “The Holocaust is what happens when the right gains power”) – fell over themselves to make excuses for Islamic hatred, ignore the celebrations in the Arab street, promote the non-existent “anti-Muslim backlash”, and in many cases not-so-subtly imply that “America had it coming” (as if the hundreds of children whose fathers would never come home to tuck them in to bed at night ever again were somehow acceptable collateral damage in some sort of acceptable counter-attack to some sort of unacceptable American sin), I discovered the truth – that “liberal compassion” is indeed a myth, and the reality is that liberalism is cruel, selfish, and harmful. (The next major event to confirm this conclusion came a couple of years later, when liberals from Nantes to Nunavut were adamant to diagnose with certainty that a woman in a home for the disabled in Pinellas Park, Florida was brain dead, and insisted she be starved to death for the convenience and profit of her conniving husband).
For “Robin of Berkeley” (the pseudonym for a Berkeley, California based psychotherapist and former leftist who now writes for The American Thinker), the realization that liberalism really stands for cruelty came only after 30 years of hard-left activism. Probably in her 40s now, Robin abandoned liberalism and swung to the right less than two years ago, and gained affirmation that “everything I believed was wrong” in last year’s US election campaign thanks to the obscene treatment of, first, Hillary Clinton, and then Sarah Palin. I highly recommend going back and reading Robin’s earliest entries in her regular American Spectator career by browsing her columns here, particularly for her views on Clinton’s treatment; however, I insist you read her latest installment, “The Wilding of Sarah Palin”. In the column, she reveals the ugly parallels between the left’s hard-core sexualization, dehumanization, and humiliation of the Vice Presidential candidate, and the use of gang-rape as a tool of intimidation, dehumanization and humiliation in tribal war. By violating Palin and her family in the most personal way, the left seeks to both destroy Sarah Palin as a human being, and emasculate the men of the conservative movement who stand by powerless to stop the abuse.
The paradox here is that the Palin phenomenon is only gaining steam, as the former Alaska governor continues her rise to prominence and power. This is because, unlike the tribal primitivism that still dominates much of the world and still informs the sensibilities of the left, the progressive world of Sarah Palin and the American heartland does not believe that a raped woman has been shamed and must submit to a shunned second-class status or worse. Thank God, most Americans believe that a raped woman is simply a victim with the power to recover and come back stronger; in a civilized society, it is the rapist that must be shunned and must submit to a second-class status or worse.
It doesn’t take much more than a pinch of wisdom to recognize who, in any public persecution, is the rape-victim, and who is the rapist. It does, however, take great moral weakness to allow the rapists of “your team” get away with it. It takes great intellectual weakness to delude yourself into confusing which party is the victim, and which the perpetrator, or to use the “slutty dress” defense to convince yourself that “she had it coming”. And it takes a great spiritual emptiness to sit back and enjoy the wilding of an innocent woman, guffawing at the latest Palin joke as another installment of today’s soul-destroying revel-in-the-brutalizing-of-people-for-televised-amusement culture.
(h/t goes to The Tammy Bruce Show for this one. Listen to the former radical feminist Tammy for a month, and you’ll understand the left for a lifetime.)
(For more on the near-equivalence between the rape of a body and the rape of a name, read Dennis Prager’s seminal column, “The Rape of a Name is Also Rape”.)
In all walks of so-called educated, sophisticated life, people are pigpiling on Sarah Palin as US election day draws near. Everywhere I go, otherwise intelligent people repeat the same droning mantra: she’s stupid, she was a bad choice, she’s out of her depth, she’s a joke.
I’m not going to argue the points. Believe me, I’ve tried, and no amount of logic or facts seems to get through to those who prefer to retreat into intellectual laziness, and accept the bully-boy hate-mongering of the Obama media in order to join the herd to join in on the trite, assinine jokes. But I suggest reading this piece by Greta Van Susteren, the former CNN and current FOX News legal analyst, and a liberal feminist:
Governor Palin is very smart. You may not agree with her on issues — but that does not mean she is not smart. People who don’t agree with YOU are not stupid. Sometime YOU are the stupid one.
She is a lot smarter than many journalists who say/write she is not. I am appalled by the arrogance of some who call themselves journalists. I don’t know why the gross disregard for this woman and her accomplishments — is it because she a woman? or because Hillary isn’t around to take the whacks? or it is the “herd mentality” where they all copy each other and then label it “conventional wisdom?” Some of the so called conventional wisdom turns out to be completely wrong but the journalists never revisit their mistakes and admit how stupid they were earlier. God forbid that a journalist should mumble the words “I got it wrong.” It is absolutely disgraceful the personal insults hurled at the Governor of Alaska.
I can understand not agreeing with her — whether it be on one issue or many and that is our job– but you are so wrong if you think this woman is not smart. Let me repeat: she is a lot smarter than many journalists who I hear yapping about her. (And I am around journalists from all news organizations all the time and I hear some pretty stupid stuff from them…or stupid predictions like “Obama [the day before the New Hampshire primary] is going to beat Hillary in New Hampshire.” NOT!
Plus get this – the journalist below can’t even a get a quote right in interviewing her? Who is the dummy?
Here is a fact: Governor Palin is also more accomplished than many (most?) journalists…make no mistake about it: it takes a lot more to be a mayor or a governor than a jounalist. A mayor or governor must be chosen by the people. To be a journalist, you just announce, “I am a journalist.” There isn’t even a test!
And yes, I am a defense attorney at heart…I will stand up to the crowd – in this instance the journalists who are so arrogant and so wrong. It makes me sick to see people so unfair to anyone. I hated it when I worked 24/7 for about 12 years for poor people as a young lawyer. I hated the unfairness…I hated the discrimination against my poor African American clients (and 99 per cent were African American.) I hate the unfairness and meanesss now, too – the discrimination against this woman. I hate to see anyone whacked unfairly. It is not right and you all know it. Question the Governor (and other politicians) about issues – that is our job and we should do it — but the insults? Give it a rest.
And if you can’t “give it a rest” because you are petty…how about at least getting the quote right instead of exposing yourself a fool?
And watch this 5-minute clip of a Palin rally in California from October 4, in which an uber-liberal-feminist, President of the L.A. chapter of NOW (the pro-choice National Organization for Women), Shelly Mandell, endorses the Alaska governor and her running mate. If you watch any major news source or read any newspaper, you would never know this happened:
Now, if you still feel Sarah Palin is a bimbo to be dismissed, ask yourself the following questions:
1) Do you judge all individuals by their worst moments? Do you dismiss all individuals entirely because they flub an interview question here or there?
2) Do you hear the flubs of other candidates discussed by news readers, pundits, or comedians in the same context, with the same intensity, with the same sense of glee? Do you dismiss another V-P candidate because he thinks “Jobs” is a three-letter word? If you discovered that there was a double standard being unfairly applied to one particular candidate, would you try to find out why?
3) Do you wonder why items like the Mandell endorsement, or the massive Palin rallies around the country where enthusiasm and crowd size dwarf those of Barack Obama, are unreported or dismissed by the media?
4) If you have been convinced that Sarah Palin’s experience makes her unqualified to be Vice-President, how were you convinced that Barack Obama’s experience makes him qualified to be President?
5) When a child was being bullied in the schoolyard, were you the type to a) stand up for the victim, b) avert your eyes and cower away; or c) join in on the torture?
Filed under Politicians
Do Bill and Hillary Clinton want Barack Obama to win the 2008 Presidential election? Some have argued that they would rather see Obama lose, to clear the field for a 2012 Hillary Clinton run at the White House. Here’s an interesting little item that may support that theory: Clinton Cancels Appearance at Pro-Israel, Anti-Ahmadinejad Rally in New York.
The cancellation stems from the rally organizers’ invitation of Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin to address the same rally. Hillary’s camp claims that the invitation of Palin “politicizes” the event, and that she will not attend the rally if Palin is there. So, who does it help and who does it hurt, if Palin speaks and Hillary does not? 1) it doesn’t hurt Hillary, as the majority of the American Jewish community sees her as “one of them”, and will support her until the cows come home; 2) it helps Palin and McCain’s campaign, as this simply clears the stage for the Alaskan Governor to make friends and fans in the heavily Democrat-supporting Jewish community; 3) it hurts Obama, as it clearly allows the Republican campaign alone to make a high-profile defense of Israel – one that more and more Jews, including liberal Democrat Joe Lieberman, believe is stronger than that of Obama’s Democrats.
Shallow-minded folks may find this to be a Hillary signal that Palin is to be shunned. But the Clintons are too smart to think that petty-minded thinking like that is effective with more than just a sliver of the electorate. Thoughtful people – which, on most issues, the Jewish community is full of – will take the opportunity to listen to what Palin and the Republicans have to say on the issue. And their message is a powerful one: Israel is our friend and ally no matter what it decides to do to defend itself, and Iran’s threats will not go unpunished.
Filed under Judaism in Canada, Politicians
The sneering condescension dripping off the lowered reading glasses of ABC’s Charlie Gibson during his series of interviews with John McCain’s VP running mate Sarah Palin this week was obvious, typical, and despicable. ABC should be embarassed – but, of course, they’re not.
What has made Governor Palin such an object of utter revulsion in the eyes of American liberal Democrats? And why has the Canadian reaction to her been even more vicious – not only by the usual suspects like the miserable, angry “feminist” Heather Mallick , but by normally-reasonable Margaret Wente, who trashes her as part of a bizarre column that proudly retreats into shallow anti-Americanism by glorifying the fact that our Canadian elections are vapid and meaningless?
Col. Ralph Peters, the excellent, biting columnist for the New York Post, identifies the source of the hatred: the secular urban elites’ contempt for, and fear of, people who actually, truly, deeply, spiritually, on a day-to-day basis, in theory AND in practice, believe in God. A great column, worth a full read: “Why Our Elites Fear Faith”, Ralph Peters, New York Post, September 12, 2008:
NOTHING in recent memory has driven home the divide between our self-appointed aristocracy and “commoners” as sharply as the intelligentsia’s rush to mock Gov. Sarah Palin’s religious faith.
While the attacks and insults are backfiring on the mortified elites, the double standard applied to “Sarah America” is a disgrace that can’t be excused as “just politics.”
Certainly, much of the left-wing fury over Palin stems from the Democratic Party’s assumption that it “owned” the exclusive right to nominate women to the executive branch (despite the crushing of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy). How dare the Republicans advance a woman? How dare they change this year’s election script?
But the root of the left’s dread of this happily married mother of five seems to be that she actually believes in God: How could anyone be that stupid?
…
Washington fears faith – even nominal believers inside the Beltway have been shaped by secular educations and secular caste values.
Humans fear what they can’t understand, and our comfortable ruling class just can’t comprehend the power and the glory, the beauty and the ecstasy, the awe and commitment experienced by those who believe in a divine power. To paraphrase the late Leona Helmsley, “Faith is for the little people.”
Believers are mocked (if not too publicly at election time). Sen. Barack Obama‘s behind-closed-doors remark in San Francisco to the effect that worried blue-collar chumps cling to God and guns perfectly captured the left’s worldview, equating faith and firearms as equal menaces to an enlightened society.
…
I don’t see extremism in Palin’s faith. I see the love of God that prevails beyond the Beltway. The media’s bigotry toward her tells us far more about the political biases and snobbery of journalists than it does about Sen. John McCain’s running mate.
In recent years, a succession of pundits has compared our country to ancient Rome. Most of the assertions are silly. But our governing elite certainly shares the Roman patricians’ disdain for the faith of the common citizen.
Canada’s best regular columnist may well be David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen. This must-read column captures the utter frustration of those of us who don’t buy into the sustained status-quo of Canada’s governance: “We are all prisoners of the Canadian consensus” . The conclusion is a spot-on revelation – especially to anyone who, like myself, has witnessed the widespread, utterly agonized revulsion against the future VP of the USA, Sarah Palin, that has emerged in Canada this past week:
The reason Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican convention in Minneapolis this last week was so very explosive — not only to Americans with the chance to vote for or against her party, but to Canadians, with no chance at all — had only indirectly to do with the fact that she is a remarkable woman. It was the sudden raw exposure to a well-articulated worldview completely opposed to our “Canadian consensus” that we found so horrifying — or exhilarating.
Millions of Canadians long to hear something like that from a politician up here. But millions more are determined that they must never, ever, be given the chance.
Filed under Canadian Identity, Political Idiocy, Politicians, Soulless Conservatism
Flaggman's Canada 