How LOW Can They Go?

Unbelievable! The smearing and slamming of Sarah Palin is already boggling my mind.

I remember a professor of mine in college talking about the inner process of acting with me. We were sitting in his office and the conversation was getting very esoteric and interesting to me. At one point in our chat he leaned forward and said, "be careful what you hate and fear; because there's an inherent danger in BECOMING that thing as you try to fight it." I didn't understand what he meant at the time but I remembered and as the years wore on he's been proved right over & over again.

The Dems and Far Left as now JUST AS BAD AS THE ACCUSED THE FAR RIGHT OF BEING IN 2000 AND 2004!!

Today alone I heard that:

• Sarah Palin isn't a good mother to her infant, special needs child - because she's running for Vice President! (Would they say that to a man?)
• Sarah Palin was a knee-jerk choice on McCain's part because the RNC vetoed Joe Lieberman. (say what??)
• Sarah Palin was chosen because of big oil. (Alaska... ok, I "get it"... LOL)
• Sarah Palin had no right to thank Hillary Clinton for the "cracks in the highest glass ceiling in the country." (Hand - Forehead - Staple!)

And the one worthy of Star Magazine or The National Enquirer:

• Sarah Palin's special needs child isn't really hers -- it her daughter's child! (Sounds a lot like the robo-calls from the Bush Campaign in 2004 saying McCain had an illegitimate black baby!)

• Those whiny, menopausal Hillary supporters are just backing her out of spite. (If you think we don't have the brains to know the genuine article when we see it -- then you're dumber than you look!)

And these were just the salvos I personally find printable and repeatable. Obama and his thugs obviously will stoop to new lows. Considering the reprehensible and disgusting way Barky and his thugs treated Hillary during the primaries, why should I be surprised? Guess he's peeved that his Barackopolis bubble got burst by McCain's announcement. So who is knee-jerk reacting now?

Time for me to sit back again and watch the circus... but who's going to sweep up after the donkeys?

(I added a few embedded links from my abuse site's links to make some of Barky's actions crystal clear for everyone:)
From NoQuarter:

How Does Obama Attack a White Woman in the Post-OJ Era - part deux
By LisaB

1) Politico has a piece today about how Obama manages some of his attack messages. His staffers deliver the message and Obama then disavows by saying his staff was “overzealous.” It’s the rhetorical equivalent of WORM (What Obama REALLY Meant) when delivered by his staff. Now Obama says “what my staff SHOULD have done/said.”

The latest disavowal of his staff’s comments on his behalf or in his name [the initial slam against Palin] continues a tactic Obama employed repeatedly during his contentious battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

When confronted about a campaign memo during the primary that criticized Clinton’s ties to India, referring to her as “D-Punjab,” Obama called it “a screw-up on the part of our research team” and said “it was stupid and caustic.”

And when the late Tim Russert asked Obama at a Las Vegas debate about his campaign’s efforts to push the storyline that Team Clinton was stoking racial tensions, Obama said “our supporters, our staff, get overzealous. They start saying things that I would not say.”

But, he added, “it is my responsibility to make sure that we’re setting a clear tone in our campaign.”

The writer goes on to say that Obama says his staff are terribly important to him but he rebukes them in public. True. But I think it’s more of a tactic in getting out a message.

But Obama also has delegated blame on important policy questions.

The author mentions how Obama blamed his staff for not getting him to a firefighters group in person, filling out a questionnaire incorrectly, phrasing his position on abortion rights incorrectly on his website, and his phrasing in a speech where he said Jerusalem would remain “undivided.”

Oh, and this one:

Obama also blamed his staff for underestimating how much money since-convicted businessman Tony Rezko had raised for his earlier campaigns and for a letter from his office urging city and state officials to fund a Rezko project.

If Obama wins the presidency, we all better hope he hires more competent people or, at least, mind readers.

2) The Weekly Standard runs through recent Republican and Democratic candidates on the campaign trail and says the pattern is for Democrats to seem smarter than they are and for the Republicans to get the “dumb” label. An arguable point, I’m sure. But it includes a bit about how Sarah Palin is likely to be attacked by the left wing.

So in order to bring down Palin, her malefactors on the left will have to argue a lack of “readiness,” which with the thinly credentialed Obama on the other ticket can only serve as a shorthand for lack of intelligence. . . Of course, any misstatement on the campaign trail will serve as prima facie proof of her dim intellect. True, political observers have formed gambling pools wagering on when Joe Biden will make his first hilarious gaffe as Barack Obama’s running mate. While that gaffe, inevitable as it is, may do damage to the ticket, no one on the New York Times editorial board will conclude from it that Joe Biden isn’t that bright. Sarah Palin will not receive the same benefit of the doubt.

In some ways, being Sarah Palin for the next two months and change doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. In spite of her many and notable self-made successes, an entire intellectual industry has already sprouted up with the sole intention of proving that she’s a moron. The left wants to Quayle-ize her, and their efforts to do so won’t be half-hearted.

Well, we’ve already seen the “Quayle” reference.

3) Now HERE’s something interesting. The NYT has an article today about some young Obama supporters felt alienated at the convention.

Members under 35 made up 16 percent of the delegates — a record for the party’s national convention, according to the Youth Council of the Democratic National Committee. . .

Mr. Meek, a co-chairman of a Democratic group working with young voters, said this subset of the electorate would be especially attuned to shifts in policy, even subtle ones, made by Mr. Obama.

“He’s going to have to master the art of being able to keep individuals motivated,” Mr. Meek said, “so that they don’t feel heartbroken because something they were told during the primary phase is something that he’s going to have to take a different position on in the general election.”

Edward Espinoza, 35, a delegate from California who has been involved in the Democratic Youth Council, said he was disappointed by Mr. Obama’s recent indications that he might support a limited expansion of offshore oil drilling.

“I understand why he needs to do it. I don’t agree with it, but I’m still with him 100 percent,” Mr. Espinoza said. “You can’t govern if you can’t win.”

Is this a potentially large break? I don’t think so. Of all the constituencies out there, I think Obama’s “youth vote” will be terrifically reliable - if they get to the polls. They may find that politicians don’t always deliver on their promises and get disappointed, but we’ve all been there. They’ll still vote BO.

4) The New Yorker has a piece on the Democratic convention and how it played out. I don’t know why it starts with Norman Mailer, but it does. At any rate, if you followed the convention at all, you don’t need to read this. No new information and little analysis. It’s simply a kind of travelogue for the convention, without any entertaining bits or critique.

5) Far more interesting is a NYT piece on how the GE will shape up now that both tickets are full. Among several points, the author notes that Democrats did not do much research on Palin and have yet to decide how to attack her. To me that means the attacks will be rather general at first and yet more wild. As we know, DK (I won’t link to it) has already been spreading the rumor that Palin’s baby is not really hers but her daughter’s. Blech.

Mr. Obama’s advisers said that compared with the mountains of data they had gathered on Mr. Pawlenty and Mr. Romney, they had far less information on Ms. Palin. Their dossier consisted of a thin document based mainly on her run for governor and newspaper clips.
———————-

“I can’t imagine the Obama team will spend their time on Palin; they’ll spend their time with their negative ads attacking McCain and Bush,” said Mandy Grunwald, Mrs. Clinton’s chief advertising strategist. “You always have to be careful not to rally people to her side by attacking too much.”

Republicans said Ms. Palin would provide an outlet for women angered at what they said was the poor treatment of Mrs. Clinton by the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party leadership and the news media. Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain, said: “I think the public pretty much accepts the fact that they played pretty dirty and that sexism played a role in the primary.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign has moved on a variety of fronts to increase his appeal to women. Leading women in battleground states are being mobilized, and a disproportionate number of female surrogates are being sent to argue for him on television. They are being asked to focus on abortion rights and pay equity, aides said, and to steer clear of criticizing Ms. Palin as having limited experience in elected politics and government.

Pay equity? Obama’s going to emphasize pay equity? Huh. Didn’t see THAT coming. He might just want to equalize the pay in his own campaign then - something McCain did from the jump.

As an aside, it looks like the Obama campaign will still pursue the idea that McCain wouldn’t capture Osama Bin Laden. Kind of looks like the Rovian “attack a strength” strategy. But seriously, it makes no sense.

At a stop on Friday in western Pennsylvania, one of Mr. Obama’s biggest applause lines was reprised from his Denver speech, mocking Mr. McCain for pledging to follow Osama bin Laden to the “gates of hell” but not, in the view of Democrats, supporting sufficient military force in Afghanistan to capture him.

Oh, I get it. It’s payback for all the snark about Obama not going to Iraq. OK, yawn. Did Obama do some spelunking during his visit in Afghanistan we didn’t hear about?

6) At The Hill, someone obtained an internal Obama campaign memo about how to frame Palin as the VP pick.

While the Obama campaign released a statement Friday saying that Obama and running mate Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) hailed the pick, the internal talking points memo distributed to surrogates made it clear that Democrats plan to portray Palin as inexperienced and a politically expedient pick for McCain to mollify hardcore conservatives in his party.

“What does it say that he knuckled under to the right-wing of his party, who angrily threatened to veto McCain’s preferred candidates, Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, for their pro-choice views?,” the memo reads. “What does it say that, in order to satisfy the right, he hastily selected someone he barely knew-and had only met once – to serve a heartbeat away from the presidency?”

Inexperienced? Given that her resume is no less solid than Obama’s own, I suspect the “inexperienced” label will come laden with sub-text relating to her appearance, her being a her, her family and her being part of a wilderness state - so rural “they don’t know how big boys play hard in the big city” kind of thing.

As for the expedient part, it’s good to know that Biden wasn’t at all expedient. He is a change-agent who can rock the youth vote and bring hope to all those he hasn’t managed to touch in 30+ years as a legislator.

Actually, I don’t think the expedient idea will sell either. It’s too easy to counter that Obama, running on change and anti-Washington themes has pivoted from his initial and core theme - change.

What could be more expedient than that?

7) Newsday has a good piece about the position the Obama campaign finds itself in with respect to gender.

After treading lightly for months to avoid a slip or slight that could be seen as a racial attack, McCain’s camp converted the glass ceiling into thin ice for the Obama campaign. They did it with a pick that almost dares Democrats to criticize Sarah Palin and risk charges of insensitivity or sexism.

“I think the Clinton campaign has heightened the sensitivity of women about any kind of implied or inferred slight,” said Ruth Mandel, director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

“The Palin nomination,” she said, “has kind of reopened those sensitive feelings.”

The trap was set when McCain aired an ad congratulating Obama on his historic nomination as the Democratic candidate on Thursday. The next day, McCain made history by tapping Palin, the Alaska governor, as the first woman running mate on a GOP ticket.

Obama’s campaign quickly fell into the net, firing out a statement hitting Palin as inexperienced - before Obama had second thoughts and issued a statement praising Palin for her own historic moment.

Yesterday the McCain campaign signaled it’s ready to debate whether Palin actually has more experience than Obama, a first-term U.S. senator and former state legislator.

That move carries the implied threat that if Obama’s camp dismisses Palin’s accomplishments as a businesswoman, small town mayor and Alaska governor of 19 months as inadequate, McCain’s backers will charge it’s because she’s a woman.

I mentioned in an earlier post that McCain’s ad congratulating Obama was classy, but that any ad would also serve some other purpose. So, while the Democrats were breaking their collective wrists patting themselves on the back for nominating the first AA, the McCain campaign prepared for its own historic run.

However, I would caution the McCain camp on one thing. Despite the anger of many women this election cycle over how HRC’s campaign was handled by “her” party, the charges of sexism and racism do not automatically cancel each other out. If that had been the case, then all the charges of racism would not have been so useful against Bill Clinton and others who would not vote for Obama.

And the media would NEVER have gotten away with what it did. Sexism is still tolerated to a degree that racism is not.

8 ) But, hands down, the best discussion of the Palin pick I’ve seen is the transcript from PBS NewsHour.

DAVID BROOKS: Yesterday. And it did not follow a lot of intimate contact between John McCain and the governor. He’s obviously met her, had some phone calls, but they do not know each other as well as McCain knows all the other short-listers.

So he was taking a risk. But what he saw was someone like himself. Everybody is emphasizing the differences between them.

JIM LEHRER: Sure.

DAVID BROOKS: But what he saw when he looked at her, according to the people I spoke to, is someone who fights the same fights I fight. The first gateway sort of fight that he thought they have in common was the bridge to nowhere. He’s been talking about that for years. She’s the one who killed it.

————–

DAVID BROOKS: She said, “Forget it.” She said, “Forget it.”

The second thing he liked was she took on the Republican Party. She had a corrupt Republican Party. It was her own party. She took it on in a very risky way. McCain sort of sometimes sees himself in that role, Jack Abramoff.

And the third thing was the fight she had with the oil companies over the pipeline, which was a big fight. And he saw her — he goes after Boeing, she goes after the oil companies.

So he said, “This is someone who’s like me.” I mean, I’m sure he appreciated that she’s a woman and all the differences. But the essential thing was a reformer like me, even though he doesn’t know her that well.

———————-

DAVID BROOKS: But I thought she did well today.

But the second thing to be said is she is an under-45 Republican. That means she’s unwedded to Reaganism. She’s Evangelical, but she’s pretty progressive on gay and lesbian issues. She’s for drilling in ANWR, but she talks about global warming quite a lot.

She’s got different categories in her head than, I think, the older conservatives who are pretty much down the line ideologically.

——————-

KAYLENE JOHNSON: Well, she basically took on the good-old-boy network right at the beginning with city council starting in the Wasilla city council. And when she did that, she made enemies right away, but she also made some good friends.

And I think that that has served her well, that she has basically stood up for what she believed in and moved forward. And she hasn’t really taken the notion that inexperience is a reason not to move forward and not to move on the things that you believe in.

JUDY WOODRUFF: She then ran for the Alaska — or was asked to serve, I should say, on the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission. What about her record there?

KAYLENE JOHNSON: Well, she was — she was appointed to be the ethics officer for that position or for that commission. And she saw some violations in ethics that were coming directly from the leader and the head of the Republican Party here in Alaska.

Well, she called him on that. And you would have thought that that might have been the end of her career, because she was calling on the carpet the person in charge of the Republican Party in Alaska.

So she really — she did that, and she basically came out swinging. And that really showed her as a reformer, and it also showed that principle was above party politics, as far as she was concerned.
————-

MICHAEL CAREY: I would — so far, she’s been a fairly practical conservative. It is true that she’s an abortion opponent and holds some very conservative views, but she really hasn’t pushed it, and she’s made some super-conservatives very angry for that purpose.

This is good stuff. The transcript is 2 pages long, but very interesting and worth your time. You will learn something new here.