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WSJ on Palin

The Wall Street Journal editorial about Palin pretty much nails it.

Discussions - 13 Comments

Would have been "fun" if you conservatives had gotten your way back in November, and then imagine if Palin would be required to step up to the plate after McCain's life would come to a natural end.

Only Palin could insist, as she's quitting, that she's no quitter.

"Craig Scanlon"


Dumb as a stump.


You just keep believing that Mrs Palin is a "quitter"

and while you are busy chucking and feeling superior she will blindside you so hard you won't know what happened.


You toads keep forgetting that she is a life long hunter who knows how to stalk and take down her prey.


BTW her prey is you.

Craig, if you expect me to look at Obama and Biden and say, "Oh, thank God we got them instead of McCain/Palin!", think again. You are just talking about a different vile mess than the one we've got.

I did not really want or trust McCain, and I was not alone. (Note the article)However, there is no way I can look at the president we've got and say that I am happy with America's choice. Many of America's conservatives stayed home during the last election and today I simply cannot blame them; we did not have much of a choice.

As to the WSJ editorial, yes, it does nail the matter as it stands right now. I feel like I should adopt some Doris Day persona and sing "Que Sera Sera" for all of the Palin supporters on these back pages. God help us! Yet, if Palin's judgment turns out to have been sound in this, both in that this works out well and that it proves she actually has sound judgment, I will be delighted and consider it a miracle. Or maybe Craig is right and I should consider the election the grace of God.

No.

How about Douthat?

Palin is a lifelong hunter who knows how to stalk and take down her prey, except when her Board of Game authorized shooting wolves and bear from fixed wing aircraft, and gunning them down with automatic rifles from helicopters. Sort of took the 'fair' out of fair chase hunting. That along with her wire snare loops, which traps the game by the leg. Her actions overturned decades of predator science in her state. She also re-installed the 'incentive' which places a bounty on wolves legs, reversing 50 years of wildlife management practices. Biologists and environmentalists know her true score. Nature to her is a biblically-mandated resource shopping center and game preserve, like a Cabela's superstore but with a drive-through gas station next to the stocked pond. She is to the outdoors what Bush was to cowboys, a pretender who knows just enough to be dangerous, and to create a fictitious outdoor persona that has 'thedaddy' citing her for some killer instinct.

Kate, what in the world did I say that even implied that you "should consider the election the grace of God"?

"thedaddy" - fun description of Palin as some sort of Jeremiah Johnson-type assassin. I'm her prey? Scary! Should I fear taking any wilderness ventures (to, say, the Wasilla outlet of Chili's Bar and Grill)??

I was right!


It is ren from 'ren and stupid'

Craig: I love how you utter some general slurs about McCain's age and insinuate conservative naivete in your first post -- which have nothing to do with the linked WSJ article -- only to continue your forum postings by exhorting Kate to comply to some standard of discourse with yourself that you have no apparent need for.

But then, you have so much free time to post around here it seems you would be the perfect Democrat, though you might spend a bit more of that time fine tuning your writing -- or is that me throwing up a couple unfair fallacies at once? Always throwing the first punches, expecting whatin return, exactly?

And as for ren, well, she's just doin' her thang.

ren, the rest of us here are talking about Palin's resignation -- I think what you want is the PETA website. But while we are on the topic, if the environment is to Palin just a "biblically-mandated [sic?!] resource shopping center and game preserve," what then is it to the environmentalists?

Not really getting it, as one who listens to the finger-pointing and moralizing on this rarely does. Until I see you driving around in a Government Motors car (golf-cart?), not really buying into the tired old "save the earth from ourselves" fides, or lack of. It is sort of like the 21st century version of the pontification from the old Catholic clergy...

Craig, what you wrote had that implication to me, although I knew full well that you would never use that phrase. I see T-Hag understood what I meant, which was that if you were right that the election of McCain and Palin would have been a disaster, then we must conclude that we are better off with the election results we got. I don't think so. Do you really think so?

A McCain/Palin ticket surely could have been a huge disaster, particularly if McCain had expired during his term. I said nothing that compared such a possibility to an Obama presidency. Instead of seeing the reality of the Obama administration - that he is tracking a far more centrist (or even center-right) course than nearly anyone predicted - the Right continues raging on in their ODS (Obama Derangement Syndrome), with their pitiful tea/pity parties and such, and insisting that Obama is even worse than the crazy warnings that emanated from the Right (see those vids of the McCain/Palin rallies, you know the ones) during the campaign season, that he is destroying the USA as bad or worse than Al Qaeda would with his Communistic, fascistic, unrepentantly liberal, terror-encouraging, Islamophile ways.

While I am dissatisfied with the Obama administration in many ways (although not necessarily disillusioned or surprised), surely it's for reasons quite different than yours (which I suspect would exist no matter what he would do, short of putting Rove and Glenn Beck in charge of policy matters).

But again, my first comment here had no comparative aspect to it, I was just noting what a wild trip we could have had, if we had elected McCain and he would have died in office. Would Palin put her country first in a time of crisis (as she is with Alaska now; and it's hardly plausible to say that Alaska isn't in crisis if the whole country is by virtue of the horrors that all began with Obama taking the oath (or....DID he?? haha) on Jan. 20th) by stepping down then, too? Would she show us how she's not a quitter by stepping down in that situation, too?

@ Craig: Your nuanced thinking of the conservative position would be similar to me picking up something wacky from over at Daily Kos and claiming it to be sacred text for all liberals. I might as well just read off the mission statement from MoveOn's website and call that doctrine. Not fair, dude. But to get to your post: the turnabouts of campaign mode Obama and president Obama weren't surprising (if not predictable), insofar as the tasks before foreign policy officials often only present themselves in terms of 'bad' and 'worse.' Easy to speak out from a Senate seat about the situation, harder to call the shots in the hotseat.

I for one do not buy into the split personalities most conservatives create of president Obama. On the one hand, there is the sinister Machiavelli from Chicago who relentlessly cut his opponents' throats; on the other hand, a naive deer-in-headlights POTUS who has not the guts or will to take down the enemy. Sorry...we conservatives can't have it both ways. I have a tendency to believe he might be the former through and through. This cool underhandedness may work domestically with his cushy congressional majority; it could prove tougher with tyrants who won't be lured in by or interested in a new America abroad

I take issue with this weird revisionism that you present, Craig, as if Sarah Palin's resignation from an obscure governorship in Alaska would be anything like a resignation from the Oval Office. There is more than one way to 'put the country first,' and stepping down from a position might only be the best way in a particular time and space. Before these conceited 'what-ifs' are thrown around, I believe it would be more prudent to gather some sort of context and perspective and judge from clearer ground. As important as what she said might just be what has been left out, after all.

I just wonder why all the derision from the likes of the left over this issue. If this is believed to be the career killer for her, why all the obsessive speculation and fuss? If what you're saying you believe to be true, isn't going on about Palin a bit gratuitous at this point?

Unless of course not everybody subscribes to enlightened liberalism and will still take a 'Jackonian populist' that 'clings to guns and religion' -- already enough threads on this blog about that issue.

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