Mike Gravel on Palin

Here is a rare moment for me, a politician with whom I can't disagree. Mike Gravel, the former Senator from Alaska was invited onto a Left-wing radio show. It seems clear that the hosts were hoping to use him to rip into Sarah Palin and they brought up numerous lies and distortions about Palin that the Left have been insidiously spreading around. Senator Gravel, of course, is intimately aware of Alaskan politics and he doesn't let them get away with it. While he makes it clear he would never endorse McCain/Palin he also makes it clear that lying about her just isn't right.

I've read so many distortions about Palin in the last few days I've lost track of them all. Sadly I've even seen friends who were taken in by some -- such as the list of books that Palin supposedly tried to have banned.

Where Gravel was excellent was the so-called Troopergate incident. A state trooper, who had been married to Palin's sister was fired and Palin was "blamed" for that. The way the Left portrays this she had him fired because he and her sister were divorcing. The fact is that the trooper was fired after a series of violent incidents by himself. He tasered his young stepson, he threatened various people with harm and/or death. He was a thug who deserved to be fired. And Gravel is shocked that these Lefties seem to be siding with the cop in question in spite of his violent record -- just so they can attack Palin.

There are two major issues I have with Mike Gravel but the more I hear of him the more I like him. I was very impressed with the way he handled himself when he was seeking the Libertarian Party nomination in Denver. His wayward views on a couple of big issues were enough to keep me from supporting him. But in Denver the LP obviously decided that being a libertarian was NO longer a criteria for representing the party since they gave the two top slots to conservatives. Certainly among the not-quite libertarians running for the LP nomination I think Gravel is heads above the others. I'm glad he's around and he's doing a lot of good things. I especially love his attack on the Democrats at the end of the interview. The whole interview is about 9 minutes and well worth listening to.

Media frenzy about Palin gave McCain his boost.

It is normal for a candidate to get a bit of a bump in the polls after their official nomination. If the most recent polls are accurate McCain got far more than a bump -- he took the lead.

Last week Gallup showed Obama in the lead by 7 points. Now they say McCain is leading by 10 points.

A few percentage points were expected but a shift of 17 points in total is rather surprising.

Neither McCain nor Palin offered any concrete proposals that would stimulate this much interest. Nor did Obama do something incredibly stupid. So why the jump?

I think at lot of it has to do with the Sarah Palin controversy. I think that many people responded to the media feeding frenzy the way I did -- they were disgusted about the dirty way the media had ganged up on her and tried out every unsubstantiated rumor they could find, in order to sink her.

A lot of Americans don’t like to see someone getting picked on unfairly -- we tend to champion underdogs. And in that battle Palin was the underdog. After the media had basically fawned over Obama the beat-up they did on Palin appeared even more vicious in contrast.

Certainly various Left blogs and web sites went into overdrive pushing claims about Palin that are either clearly false, or are vastly exaggerated. And please, I’m not recommending her. I have no desire to vote for her. But she is being down dirty by the media and the Left -- who often team up to beat up anyone questioning their perspectives.

Palin got more support merely because the media was so openly and obviously biased. A lot of voters, I suggest, thought this sort of underhanded attack was unfair and they felt sympathy for Palin. It is my belief that the media, quite unintentionally, pushed a lot of voters into Palin’s corner. They looked a bit like people who like to torment kittens -- even cat-haters can get angry when they see that happening and will step in to protect the cat.

There is one other way in which the media helped push voters into Palin’s, and thus McCain’s, corner. And in this area they had a lot of help from the blogosphere, political pundits, and Democrats. What we had was a concerted effort to attack Palin for who she was.

Now, I’m a bit of an elitist myself. I happen to think there are (classical) liberal values which are superior to others. I think reason is superior to faith. I think education is important, that culture is valuable, the intellect counts for something, etc. I’m no fan of vast areas of American culture. Call me a cultural elitist if you want and I’ll admit that I am -- I do believe some values are superior to others.

But I also know that the typical voter, that species Boobus Americanus, doesn’t see things that way. And when it comes to voting it is the will of the majority that prevails even when that will is wrong, uncouth, uneducated or just plain stupid.

The Iron Triangle of the media, the Left and the political elite went into overdrive emphasizing how Palin wasn’t one of them. She didn’t have the “qualifications” that they think are important. In fact, they went much further. They also made it clear that Palin was like -- well, just like the typical voter.

Remember the voters are watching this. Palin gets beat up unfairly and then insulted for being like a typical voter. As the voters see it, that means she’s a good old gal and perhaps worthy of support. The Founding Fathers never intended for a political elite to run the country -- though neither did they believe in democratic rule in every way, I should note. They did believe that citizen politicians were better than a ruling class.

Since then we have developed a ruling class and they don’t see eye to eye with the Founders -- as might be expected. Part of the assumptions of that ruling class is that you have pay your dues to them through a specific process where you eventually get admitted to their little club. And they are adamant that you have to be one of them to obtain the highest office in the land. What you can’t be is like one of the public.

This sort of sneering view of the typical voter is usually better hidden. But the Palin nomination caught them so by surprise that they had a knee-jerk reaction to her and started fuming. They also started saying precisely what they think -- a very dangerous thing in politics. The net result was that they appeared to be elitist snobs picking on a woman because she was a “soccer mom” and not the wife of a former president. Their contempt for Palin’s status as an “average” American was obvious.

But since “average Americans” will be the people who vote this November that sort of attack only endeared Palin with the public.

Obama, was somewhat similar to Palin, in that he came in as a political outsider. This is one reason that the political elite in the Democratic Party was so heavily behind Hillary. But Obama, as the outsider, appealed to the voters. Obama, however, has one advantage with the media that Palin doesn’t have -- he’s a Leftist. Obama is pretty open that he believes in the political control of the economy, which means he believes in having the political elite run things. So while his outsider status attracted him some support at the polls from the voters, his support for political elitism garners him the support of the media.

But still Obama road his outsider status to the nomination because the voters were the ones who decided who would get the nomination. While many in the media were furious that McCain nominated a woman, saying it was a flagrant attempt to win the Hillary vote, I suggest they may have it wrong. Palin’s appeal to voters will not be because of her gender. It won’t be the Hillary voters she attracts.

But she may have appeal with some Obama voters. She and Obama are both seen as outside the political elite. But with the media so cozy with Obama he will find it harder and harder to portray himself as the champion of the little guy. He needs to portray himself as one of the common people. He wants to appeal to the worker, the stay-at-home mom, the parents struggling with raising a family. Obama wants that image very badly.

Then his friends in the media, in their reactionary fury over Palin go and paint her with precisely the image that Obama wants. They didn’t do it to help her but to insult her. It was a big mistake on their part. By doing this they catapulted Sarah Palin into being the representative of the average American. And like, or not, it is those average Americans who will decide the election in November. All across the country the local equivalent of a "hockey mom" will be voting. Who do you think they'll identify with -- a mother who worked her way up and raised a family or a Harvard law school graduate? That is the comparison that Obama didn't want them making and that is now the contrast that the media has burned into the public's mind. Ooops.

Andrew Sullivan has gone too far.

Is there a club for people utterly disgusted with Andrew Sullivan? If so, please count me in.

Now, I know many conservatives dislike him because of his wacko campaign on behalf of Obama. I’m no conservative. And I know Sullivan claims to be a libertarian, as do I, but I also know that Sullivan claims lots of things that just aren’t so. But his hatred for Sarah Palin is so rabid and irrational that I have to wonder the cause -- a stroke perhaps?

Sullivan was a major source spreading the demonstrably false claim that Palin had faked her recent pregnancy in order to deceive the public. This wacko theory argued that the baby actually belonged to her daughter. That is physically impossible as the daughter is pregnant now and sufficiently pregnant to have been in that condition when the baby was born in April. In other words, for Sullivan’s bullshit theory to have been accurate the girl would have to be pregnant with two infants simultaneously, conceived months apart. But Sullivan is into virgin births so maybe this sort of “miracle” makes sense to him.

The people at Reason magazine had been friendly with Sullivan in the past. They had him speak at a conference they put on in Amsterdam which I attended. But Reason rips into Sullivan for his irrational bout with fringe theories and his snipping manner. The Reason article notes that Sullivan pushed his theory without a shred of “compelling evidence.”

Narcissistic Andrew went so far as demanding that Palin release her medical records to prove she had actually given birth to her son. In another post he demanded that the McCain campaign put an end to the rumors, which he was helping spread, by releasing the medical records. He bitched: “So let’s have them. And then we can move on.”

This is typical Sullivan who is convinced that the sun shines out of his ass. Sullivan spreads a false rumor with no hard evidence to back up his wacko theory. He then demands that others cater to his demands to prove him wrong. And he whines that their refusal to obey him is preventing us from moving on.

Reason was amazed that Sullivan couldn’t “move on” from his petty gossiping even after it was shown to have been impossible for the infant to belong to Palin’s daughter. “Even after Palin announced that her daughter was pregnant, Sullivan couldn't exactly move on, and despite the chronological impossibility—to which he was previously so attentive—of the child actually belonging to the governor's daughter, Sullivan proclaimed: ‘Now all we need is confirmation from the obstetrician who delivered Sarah's baby, Trig.’”

I started out liking some of what Sullivan was saying. I got his book on conservatism and found some of it correct but much of it just nonsense. And I listened to his speech in Amsterdam, which I thought was badly organized, disjointed and poorly delivered. His arguments were weak there as well. I personally think he ripped off the Reason people and took a free trip to Amsterdam on them without delivering the goods. The high point of the evening when Sullivan spoke was when Tom Palmer, from Cato, very aptly and accurately pointed out the errors and mistakes Sullivan had made in his speech. Sullivan basically stuttered a bit, tried to respond without responding, and then ignored the response.

And in recent months it has become clear to me that Sullivan is actually a sad little man. He isn’t stupid but I suspect he may be lazy. He is not doing the research to back us his positions. He basically makes decisions and then twists evidence to fit them. He is absolutely convinced that he is correct and therefore the evidence must fit his theory. To make it more boring he is entirely self-absorbed constantly informing us about his personal life, as if we care, or trying to promote his own importance in the grand scheme of things.

I have to wonder if Mr. Sullivan, having been afflicted with decades of self-loathing inflicted on him by his Catholicism and the closet, has never actually made peace with himself. He appears to literally think that he is the center of the universe. And I find myself reading less and less of his tiresome blog at The Atlantic. In fact I only checked it today after reading the Reason article to see if he responded. After all it is a chance to make himself a topic of conversation again.

What I found on today’s blog was mind-boggling. It was a full page of attacks on Palin. I counted 31 different posts, most consecutively, attacking Palin. Really, if Andrew has such a hard-on for Obama he really shouldn’t be so obvious.

Now Sullivan is stooping to a new low and trying to paint Palin as an anti-Semite. We saw how Obama’s people were trying to claim that she was friends with a “Nazi-sympathizer” because she attended a local campaign meeting where Pat Buchanan spoke. Sullivan pushed that as well even though Palin was on record as supporting Steve Forbes not Buchanan!

The proof that Sullivan offers is as pathetic as normal for him. Palin attends an evangelical church. At that church a representative from Jews for Jesus spoke. Jews for Jesus are converts to Christianity who attempt to convert other Jews. There you have it! Anti-semite. This is pathetic.

Evangelicals try to convert everyone! That means Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Hindus, Anglicans, etc. While I have no sympathy for evangelicalism in particular, or religion in general, it is the height of absurdity to try to paint this sort of evangelism as anti-Semitism. That is the nature of the evangelical. If anything, the evangelical tends to be overly pro-Israel taking the view that Israel can do no wrong. And Sullivan’s own much loved Catholic Church, has a long history of real anti-Semitism that makes the Evangelicals look like amateurs. As far as I know Evangelicals have never burned a Jew at the stake the way Sullivan’s own Church has.

What is even more astounding is Sullivan’s open double-standard on such things. When Obama was crtiticized for attending a church where his pastor said things considered anti-American he was defended by Sullivan. After all you can’t really hold him responsible for a sermon he heard. But Palin, well, she’s a different matter. His constant looking for dirt with which to smear Palin is even more bizarre when we consider his own sleazy record.

In this blogger’s view Andrew Sullivan has just become more than I can stand. His moralistic, hypocrisy, while being firmly rooted in his rampant Catholicism, is too much to endure. Add in his exaggerated sense of his own importance and the mixture is entirely stomach-turning. This blog has often given out a “moron of the week” award. But we have been reticent to award an “asshole of the week” award because I find the term rather offensive in general. But as I try to grapple with an apt description of Andrew Sullivan it is the only term that I find that really fits him perfect -- so we award Andrew Sullivan our first Asshole of the Week award -- no, at the very least it ought to be Asshole of the Month. It’s only September but so far he is our lead candidate for the annual award as well.

One wag has suggested that Mr. Sullivan suffers from AIDS dementia. However, he notes that this rumor could be cleared up immediately if Mr. Sullivan will just release his medical records to the public. Quoting Mr. Sullivan himself, I say: "So let's have them. And then we can move on." What about it Andrew? Will you prove with your medical records you are not suffering dementia?

Media circles for kill.

It is my guess that the media sharks are circling and hoping to rip Sarah Palin to shreds. Their darling is Obama and they are his foot soldiers.

The Left has been in a frenzy concocting rumors, lies and exaggerations to try and sink Palin. For a couple of days the Left was pushing the claim that Palin didn’t actually give birth in April. They claimed she invented the pregnancy and that the real mother was her teenage daughter.

But when Palin announced that the daughter is actually five months pregnant now that ruined that lie and it deflated very quickly. Even the increasingly odious Andrew Sullivan took to promoting it on his blog but then Andrew has the hots for Obama and when Andrew gets something into his thick skull it has to be true no matter what the evidence shows. Andrew works on faith and faith alone.

Of course since the daughter is now five months pregnant she couldn’t have been the “real” mother just four months ago.

Of course the media has also invented theories for everything. If something happens they will not only tell you what happened but they will invent the reasons that it happened. Palin is a presumed vice presidential candidate. Her daughter is five months pregnant. That will become a bit difficult to hide I would think. But the LA Times, and other unscrupulous publications, claim the real reason the announcement was made was “an effort to stop... ‘out of control’ Internet rumours that Plain’s youngest child actually was conceived by her daughter....”

Is that the reason they announced it? How about the fact that the way the media has been sniffing for blood? It seems to me that the pregnancy wasn’t exactly something that was going to stay a secret for very long and that announcing it was the most logical thing.

Exactly why is this girl’s pregnancy worth of media feeding frenzy? She did what evolution compels the young to do -- procreate. Admitted they aren’t wanting to procreate when they do it and probably wished to avoid it. But nature evolved us in such a way that sex is fun and the fun compels us forcing pregnancy in order to propagate the species. That’s evolution -- it sure ain’t intelligent design. No intelligent designer would riddle teens with gallons of hormones to make them incredibly randy and then shake his finger at them. Any creator that would do that is just mean and nasty. It’s evolution. It’s nature’s way of making sure babies are born. And Mother Nature isn’t that nice either, contrary to Green logic.

What disgusts me is that there are now tens of thousands of reports on this girl’s pregnancy. She is not the candidate and when the media, and the Left, starting going after the kids of candidates then they have gone too far. It’s just none of their damn business.

Certainly if a Democrat’s child were in a similar situation, and the Republicans were making political attacks out of it, the media would be condemning them most loudly. The media has one standard for candidates they like and a very different standard for candidates they don’t like. Since there are no candidates I like, I can hold them all to the same standard and their kids are off the table. How a candidate treats his or her children is an issue but the children themselves are not public property and the media should bud out.

That they are making such a big deal out of this indicates to me that many of them are gunning for Palin in a major way. Their intention, I suspect, is to try to force McCain into dumping Palin. The media was just thrilled to have a female sitting in the White House, provided it was Hillary. But Palin is the wrong female and they will try to crucify her. The reality is that the press has written their story for November -- they want to cover the “historic moment” when Obama is elected president. And they don’t want Palin interfering.

That they could hurt her daughter in the process is just collateral damage to the press.

Photo: the press gallery.

McCain's age is a point in favor of Palin.

Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, John McCain certainly took a lot of attention away from Obama. If Obama was thinking he’d bask in the “glory” of his nomination, with a media already prone to proclaim him the new messiah, he is surely fuming with disappointment.

And some of the really slimy Democrats are slithering out from under their rocks to hiss and strike. One of the most disgusting of the Congressvermin is Robert Wexler of Florida and he is trying to raise the cry that Palin hates Jews. He is claiming that Palin was a supporter of paleoconservative Pat Buchanan. And Wexler claims that Buchanan is a sympathizer with the Nazis. Wexler does get rather rabid when he’s off his medication. Unfortunately he never takes his meds.

While I happen to think Buchanan is a very odious fellow, and probably a closet anti-Semite, I think calling him a sympathizer for the Nazis indicates that Wexler is just as venial as Buchanan, just in different ways. Apparently when Palin was a mayor of a small town in Alaska, Buchanan came through on a campaign visit. She attended a fundraiser for another local Republican where Buchanan spoke and was seen wearing a Buchanan button.

Is that proof? Well, unfortunately for the smearbund, Palin was actually on record as endorsing Steve Forbes in that election. Apparently she attended the local rally in her official capacity and wore the button as a courtesy. I also understand that when a local newspaper wrote that button incident might mean she was endorsing Buchanan she actually wrote a letter to the paper making it clear that she was NOT a Buchanan supporter.

However, don’t expect that smear to disappear. The more radical elements in the Democratic Party will go full hog to try to paint Palin with the worst sort of viewpoints. No surprises there, they have all the honesty and fanaticism of the Religious Right. Personally, when I see creeps of the Wexler variety going after real creeps in the Religious Right, I enjoy the fight no matter who wins. It’s like watching Stalin and Hitler going to war -- you hope they destroy each other.

As I see it, the Far Left and the Religious Right are both immoral, vile, hypocrites and a danger to the country. But the hypocrisy of the Left in regards to Palin is staggering. She sat in on one local fundraiser where Buchanan spoke while the Mayor of her town. Suddenly Wexler is invoking the Holocaust and trying to paint images of Palin pushing Jews into gas chambers.

Meanwhile, when Obama’s long time association with the radical Rev. Jeremiah Wright was revealed we were told it meant nothing. Attending what amounted to be a big political event as Mayor is endowed with great meaning while a long term personal relationship is supposed to mean nothing.

We are also hearing that Palin has no experience. Up until last week, that was one of Obama’s selling points. He was the “outsider” who wasn’t part of the Beltway crowd. So he was going to be a fresh breeze in politics. Damn, trumped again, since Alaska is even more outside the Beltway. And you can’t exactly say that a couple of years in the Senate gives one executive abilities. If anything, a governor is more used to the executive office than a legislator. If anything former Senators have a tendency to think it is the president’s job to pass legislation instead of veto it.

What about foreign policy? Obama’s entire experience on foreign policy is running off to Berlin to give a speech to local adoring socialists. Giving a speech to Berliners is not exactly foreign policy experience. It’s barely more than a tourist trip.

I happen to think that the Republican Party is pretty much a cesspool. So what does concern me about Palin is that McCain found one of the least noxious politicians in his party. That bothers me because she will only make him look better by her presence.

I’m not anxious to put Palin in the White House, with or without McCain. But I know I don’t want Obama there either -- especially with Joe Biden.

But there might be a reason to wish that a McCain/Palin ticket wins. One reason, of course, is that a Democratic legislature will be a war with the president and that means gridlock. The country is safer with gridlock. The less they do, the less they damage. But that isn’t the most appealing feature of having Palin on the ticket. It’s McCain’s age that is most appealing.

Let’s face it: the dude is old. And he could keel over any day. Out of the power-hungry jackals that infest politics, from what I can see, Palin is one of the least offensive. She has stood up to corruption local pork-barrel politics in Alaska and might be willing to resist it in Washington. She is not nearly as extreme in her social conservative views as most Republicans. She is not our savior by any means, probably barely tolerable. But in the political swamp, barely tolerable is often a big improvement.

She is tolerable enough that she could never actually win the presidency on her own. And about the only way to get someone, who isn’t entirely noxious, into the presidency these days is get them in as vice president and then have the president die. Certainly Bush knew that and hence one reason he had Cheney as vice president -- assassination insurance.

If a McCain/Palin ticket carries the day in November, and I suspect it will, then I would encourage decent Americans to shower McCain with gifts -- rich foods, with lots of salt, grease and fat. Every campaign stop ought to have an obligatory photo op of him chowing down on some artery clogging morsel.

I know that scoundrels, creeps and closet authoritarians tend to win the White House these days. And whoever wins the White House in November will be no cause to celebrate. But McCain’s age is certainly one reason to hope he wins. At worst he’d be a typical politician and at best he might not make it through the first term. Obama will be a disaster no matter how long he stays and, if he goes home to Jesus a tad bit early, he’ll leave us with Biden.

If the vice president is basically someone who waits around to take over when the president dies, then I think I’d rather have Palin than Biden. On the other hand, I don’t find her so appealing as to actually bother voting.