Never in my lifetime have I seen such a shameful display of piling on as that demonstrated by the mainstream media this week as they picked up and amplified the most disgraceful and lurid rumors about Sarah Palin and her family without any fact-checking or proof. When contrasted with their non-existent reporting on John Edwards affair, a partisan bias was clear.
What was most shocking to me was the outright sexism on display by other women who call themselves feminists. They greeted the surprising but historic selection of Palin, a self made and accomplished woman by any standard, with disparagement and scorn and charges of tokenism, a cynical ploy even that Palin was 'not a real woman' because she is pro-life.
Victor Hanson captures it best. Target Palin
A beautiful, confident, articulate, independent, accomplished—and conservative—woman apparently has enraged Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia, as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America
It was a relief to read the British press.
Sarah Palin: it's go west, towards the future of conservatism
The best line I heard about Sarah Palin during the frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion that greeted her nomination for vice-president a week ago came from a correspondent who knows a thing or two about Alaska.
“What's the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”
“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let's be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.
“The other kills her own food.”
Now we know, thanks to her triumphant debut at the Republican convention on Wednesday, that Mrs Palin not only slaughters her prey. She impales its head on a stick and parades it around for her followers to jeer at. For half an hour she eviscerated Mr Obama in that hall and did it all without dropping her sweet schoolmarm smile, as if she were handing out chocolates at the end of a history lesson.
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It never ceases to amaze me how the Left falls again and again into the old trap of underestimating politicians whom they don't understand. From Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to George Bush and Mrs Palin, they do it every time. Because these characters talk a bit funny and have ridiculously antiquated views about faith, family and nation, because they haven't spent time bending the knee to the intellectual metropolitan elites, they can't be taken seriously.
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No one paid much attention to the fact that she had been elected governor of a state. Or that she got to that office not because, unlike some politicians I could mention, her husband had been there before her, or because she bleated continuously about glass ceilings, but by challenging the entrenched interests in her own party and beating them. In almost two years as Governor she has cleaned out the Augean stables of Alaskan Government. You don't win a statewide election and enjoy approval ratings of more than 80 per cent without real political talent.
One British reporter flies to Alaska and drives to Wasilla .
Sarah Palin: she came from nowhere
At the age of 10, Sarah Palin got her very own bunny rabbit. Which means to say that she crouched down in the grass outside her family home, aimed her shotgun and blew its furry little head off. That's how things work in Alaska. You kill stuff. You freeze it. You turn it into stew.
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Could all the astonishing details I had read about this 44-year-old woman's life possibly be true? Basketball prodigy. Wife of a half-Inuit named Todd who races snowmobiles and calls himself the First Dude. Part-time commercial fisherwoman. Talented moose-killer. Beautiful - former runner-up Miss Alaska. Mother of five (one of whom is named Piper Indy, after the Polaris Indy snowmobile). And, of course, governor - with an Eliot Ness agenda that has seen her take on the members of her own Republican Party, calling out corruption and wasteful government spending, going as far as to auction her predecessor's private jet on eBay.
Alaska's Margaret Thatcher
Oh boy. I don't know what is going to happen next in the Sarah Palin story, but one thing is now for sure: John McCain has picked an Alaskan Margaret Thatcher to be his running mate.
She spoke for 36 pugnacious, stilleto-heeled, in your face, Barack Obama is a limp-wristed cover boy minutes. She blew the roof off. Sarah Palin has now shaken up a presidential race like no other nominee in modern times.
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Having put to rest any doubts that she is a very tough lady not afraid of a fight, many males in the audience - when not giving her a standing ovation - were instinctively crossing their legs--
o an almost primal roar from the Republican delegates, who had just been treated to a barnstorming attack on the Washington media, Barack Obama, and eloquent defence of what it takes to be a mayor and governor, Mrs Palin greeted on stage her 17-year-old pregnant daughter, the father of their baby, Levi Johnston the high school ice hockey hunk who arrived in Minnesota yesterday, her snow-mobiling champion husband Todd, their son Trig born with Down's Syndrome in April, their two other daughters, and eldest son Track, who is to be deployed to Iraq in a week's time.
We are in interesting times.
"She's like a moose going after a cabbage
How perfect is Sarah Palin's First Dude?
It would, after all, take an icy heart not to warm to an oil rig worker and commercial fisherman from the far reaches of Alaska’s North Slope: a man’s man; a beer drinker; a salt-of-the-earth type. ... Adding to the charm were the stories about the 44-year-old sourdough (slang for an Alaskan native) being a stay-at-home dad who cooked for their five children and put them to bed every night.
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When asked what he saw in his future wife, he said: “She was the best-looking girl on the basketball team.”
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The couple were inseparable. They lived five miles apart but talked every night on two-way radios. They fished together in Bristol Bay. When Mrs Palin broke her hand during one particularly brutal trawl, she went straight back out to sea for the next catch. “I couldn’t disappoint [Todd],” she said. “No matter how cold or nauseous, you just didn’t complain.”
WHY, why, why can't WE have a Sarah Palin
The moose-huntin' mom is the most talked-about woman in the world.
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She was an electrifying mix of passion, energy, optimism and plain speaking. The exact opposite of the slippery, two-faced, depressing bunch of third-raters who parade on our Westminster stage.