If Doug Hoffman does defeat the GOP’s appalling nominee in the NY23 race, it just may be the wake-up call the party needs.  Or maybe I’m being unduly optimistic.  Maybe guys like Gingrich who just don’t get it are too deeply entrenched and the party will go on making gargantuan blunders and supporting candidates like Scozzafava.

We shall see.

More on NY23 from Malkin, McCain, Hot Air, Caffeinated Thoughts, Manly’s Republic, Jawa Report and Joshua Pundit.

President Obama shot his mouth off about a white policeman arresting a black professor, sparking an endless debate among bloggers and pundits, but instead of entering the fray, I took the kids to the Plaza for lunch and ice cream.

The internet exploded with a rumor that Sarah and Todd Palin were divorcing, and instead of writing about that, I read to the girls.

The health care and cap and trade bills loom like vultures over our battered and bleeding economy, and instead of posting, I played Risk with my two eldest daughters, whose nonagression pact held long enough for them to crush their father and me like bugs and rule the world between them.

I wonder what stories I’ll get to ignore next week?

I wanted to, I really did, but family pressures intervened. How Governor — soon to be ex-Governor — Palin has managed to do all she has with her large family is beyond me, but I suppose when you have five children over an 18 year period it’s not quite the same as having four over a 7 year stretch, so maybe I have an excuse.

Anyway, when I heard the news on Friday that Palin was resigning, my first thought was, small wonder. There she was up in Alaska trying to do her job and not only was she being hounded by frivolous ethics complaints, but she was the subject of a brand new hit piece in Vanity Fair — long after the last campaign and long before the next, a harbinger of the vitriol that will spew if and when she launches a bid for the nomination in 2012.

I read some of the online commentary before I saw the video of Palin’s speech, and much of that commentary confirmed what had been my initial guess: she was sick of it, fed up, getting out of the dirty business of politics, good-bye and good riddance. Those on the right were saying no wonder, as I did, while those on the left were sneering words to the effect of don’t let the door hit you on the way out, you crybaby prima donna bitch.

Then I watched the video, and realized she had no intention of getting out. My first thought was, she’s got to be kidding. You don’t quit your first term as governor and then expect people to elect you president. And then I listened to her again, and realized that she knows that. She knows that this simply isn’t done — not in the game of politics as it’s usually played, anyway. She said several times that this wasn’t “politics as usual” and she wasn’t kidding.

She said that the taxpayers of Alaska had been hit with a $2 million bill for those frivolous ethics complaints — all of which Palin has successfully defended — and that as long as she remains in office, they are certain to continue coming fast and furious. This, she said, is not fair to the taxpayers of Alaska. She herself has run up legal bills of half a million dollars, and that bill would certainly go up as well. Because she has become an incredibly polarizing national figure, she can no longer govern Alaska the way she did before John McCain chose her as his running mate.

If she has accomplished what she set out to as governor, is handing over her office to a lieutenant governor she trusts and who will not be handicapped by national notoriety, and will save Alaskans a lot of money by stepping down, then a case can be made that she’s not being a thin-skinned quitter who doesn’t finish what she starts, but truly is thinking outside the political box and doing what she believes is right despite the risks to her own political future.

This is not to say, of course, that there aren’t political benefits to her choice. It frees her up to travel the lower 48 making contacts, building grassroots campaign infrastructure, raising money, and campaigning for other Republicans who can return the favor in 2012. Those who hate Palin will say that’s all there is to it.

For those who think Palin shot herself in the political foot on Friday, it’s a glorious time to be a liberal. First GOP golden boy Mark Sanford self-destructed in a sex scandal that not only wrecked his career, but gave leftists the added pleasure of being able to have a laugh at Sanford’s private e-mails to his mistress. And then Sarah up and quit. “And another one gone, another one gone, another one bites the dust!” the Obamanistas exulted.

Maybe. The funny thing about politics these days is, as Yogi Berra used to say, it ain’t over till it’s over. A couple of short years ago everyone who knew anything was saying a young, black first-term senator could never wrest the nomination from the well-connected wife of a popular former president. I have no idea what’s going to happen in 2012. And nobody else does either.

What the rest of the crowd is saying:

Anchoress on the initial announcement, thinking there must be an illness or marital trouble brewing and Sarah just didn’t want to talk about it, and then upon later reflection, thinking maybe she’s crazy like a fox after all. Bill Kristol, saying she was crazy like a fox from the get-go.  Melissa Clouthier agrees.  Fausta says she’s done for.  John Hawkins is hedging his bets.   Michelle Malkin not saying much but has a lot of links.

Ace had an outstanding post on Sarah just before her resignation, then said after the resignation that the fat lady had sung, she’s toast. Russ posting at Ace’s site couldn’t disagree more, however, and he and Ace are agreeing to disagree.

Stacy McCain thinks Sarah knows just what she’s doing, and then follows his own Rule 5 with a picture Sarah would probably not appreciate. One of McCain’s bloggers, Smitty, seems markedly less smitten, observing:

if it’s merely trading one megalomaniac for one with longer hair, then it’s a difference making little difference.

They’re having a field day over at the Grey Lady. Gail Collins wrote one of the most pedestrian, ham-handed hit pieces I’ve yet to see. If you’re going to be a bitch, at least do it with a modicum of cleverness, the way Maureen Dowd usually does. Not this week, however, when Dowd’s column is almost — but not quite — as close to cringe-worthy high school journalism as Collins’s.

Speaking of high school, Erik Sean Nelson at Huffington Post used the announcement as an excuse to make retard jokes. Wonkette and KOS are having a similar sort of fun. If these folks get a little more mature they might give Gail Collins a run for her money.

I’m a little puzzled as to why people are demanding David Letterman apologize for making a joke about Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter getting knocked up by Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez.

Are there really people who still don’t understand that making lewd jokes about the young daughters of politicians is only inappropriate when the politicians are Democrats? Don’t they know that Republicans are so foul, so depraved, so dedicated to keeping down the downtrodden that all’s fair in the campaign to make them look ridiculous? And don’t they realize that, as horrible as Republicans are in general, Sarah “Slutty Flight Attendant” Palin is so evil, so vicious, so ignorant, so bigoted, so racist, so utterly subhuman that it’s positively patriotic to mock her, and given her extraordinary loathsomeness, that her minor children are fair game, too?

Update: Apparently, my sarcasm was lost on some readers, who actually thought I was insulting Palin in this post rather than defending her. Good grief. Click on her name in the tag cloud at right at catch a clue, folks.

Other blog reactions:

John Nolte offers his own Top Ten List, which is pretty clever.

Ace notes that Letterman:

“knocked up” his long-term live-in girlfriend accidentally. And that he did not marry his babymama for six years or so…I don’t really get it. Why is a 17 year old girl to be ridiculed for the same carelessness the 122 year old decrepit fossil David Letterman exhibited?

More from Lileks, Anchoress, Little Miss Attila, Malkin. Nothing yet from McCain (not the senator with the daughter it became very cool to make fun of for being, among other things, fat the minute her dad stopped being a bipartisan maverick and became the GOP presidential candidate) because he’s too busy thinking about who The 15 Hottest Conservative Women in the New Media are.

Ahem. I think someone is missing, don’t you?

John McCain has endorsed Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio in the Florida senate race. This comes as no surprise. McCain is a moderate and Crist is a moderate. McCain is part of the old-guard party elite and Crist is a sitting governor. You don’t endorse some kid from nowhere over a guy who’s paid his dues, don’t you know. It’s just not sportsmanlike. And we see where being sportsmanlike got McCain. Got him right back in the minority seats of the Senate house, that’s where.

More troubling, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) has also endorsed Crist (HT: The Other McCain) on Hot Air. These guys just do not get it.

My guarded optimism remains guarded for two reasons. First, the fact that guys like Crist and McCain who do not get it are in charge of the party. Second, if Marco Rubio or another young, attractive, charismatic conservative bursts onto the scene, the left will do all they can to destroy him the way they tried to destroy Sarah Palin. The intellectuals, the media, Hollywood, everyone will jump on the bandwagon and mount a campaign of vicious mockery and vilification against any Republican who seems poised to revitalize the party.

Then again, they mocked Ronald Reagan. I was in my late teens and early twenties, and recall it all vividly — He’s old. He’s a warmonger. He’s dumb. He takes too many naps. His wife is an astrology nut. He’s senile. He thinks ketchup is a vegetable. He bullies other countries. He’s a jingoistic uberpatriot. He’s Ronny Ray-gun, going to start a nuclear holocaust and kill us all.

And you know what? Not only did their mockery not bring Reagan down, but somehow he didn’t manage to destroy all life on the planet. All he destroyed was the Soviet Communism that kept millions in bondage, and did it without dropping a single nuclear bomb.

And so I take heart. Marco Rubio may not be the next Ronald Reagan. He may not be the new American Cicero of the Right. He may not, but someone will. Someone will.

It’s supposed to symbolize an African proverb that says power is like an egg: if it’s held too tightly, it breaks, and if it’s held too loosely, it will slip from your grasp. I have no idea why my fellow right-wing bloggers have latched onto this and made fun of it. Whether the proverb is ancient or not, African or not, it’s 100% true, and a neat looking doodad that sits on the President’s desk and reminds him of this eternal truth is all for the good, as far as I’m concerned.

And don’t go e-mailing me telling me I’m a closet Obama Mama, defending him again just because he’s so gosh darn cute.

But back to Iowahawk, who doesn’t try to make the absurd point that the Egg of Power statue says anything negative about the President. No, he just uses the “African proverb” angle as an excuse to write his own hilarious a list of multicultural proverbs. Some are funny and political:

“A wise man offers his millet to be shared among the village, for his gift will be repaid a thousand times in gratitude. A wiser man takes somebody else’s millet and offers it to the village. Guess what? Same gratitude, and extra millet for good ol’ numero uno.”
Ethiopian

Others are just plain funny:

“Remember that the egg of power will drop if held too loosely; and an egg cannot break a rock. Okay, maybe if it’s some sort of crazy unbreakable super-duper-power egg. But then you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and neither can you make an omelet with broken rocks. It would taste like crap, and be hella hard on your teeth enamel. That is why you should probably just order the waffles.”
Luo

I got quite a few laughs out of this. Hope you will, too.

Oh, and if you like these, check out his “transcript” of the incredibly asinine video Demi Moore and her boy toy husband and their Hollywood friends put together.  The only problem with the parody is that the video itself is actually funnier than Iowahawk’s parody. It’s hard to parody something that’s already something of a parody in its original form — exactly what the left used to say about Sarah Palin – but Iowahawk is right up there with Tina Fey.

As passionately as I wanted John McCain to win the presidency, I’m feeling remarkably tranquil in the wake of an Obama victory. Maybe it’s just the calm before the storm. Maybe it’s the booze. Maybe it’s a combination of the following:

1) I won’t have to listen to Democrats caterwauling about how the racist Republicans stole the election. Republicans accept defeat gracefully.

2) Maybe leftists will finally stop bemoaning what a racist country the U.S. is. After all, won’t electing Barack Obama pretty much bury that argument? I fear not, alas. Maybe they’ll accept that white Democrats aren’t all bigots, but they can continue to reassure themselves about how racist all of us who didn’t vote for Obama are.

3) It will be nice to have Leno and Letterman and all the rest pick on a Democrat again. Ah, how I’ve missed Bill Clinton! Though something tells me they won’t be half so hard on Obama as they’ve been on Bush, and Obama seems far too circumspect to give them anything like the sort of comic fodder Clinton did.

4) Maybe people will leave Sarah Palin in peace. It’s become truly painful watching the feeding frenzy.

5) The economy is going to blow up in the next president’s face, and it won’t be a Republican face.

6) At least it was Obama-Biden, not Biden-Obama. Let’s be thankful for what we can — and let’s all say a Hail Mary or two (or two thousand) for Mr. Obama’s continued excellent health.

I really am trying to be a good sport about this. But the fact remains, President Obama and his Democratic super-majority in Congress are going to tax the living daylights out of their fellow Americans. You happy Democrats out there are saying, “You bet your assets he is — time for those fat cat capitalists to pay their fair share!” But it just isn’t that simple.

More frighteningly, Vice President-elect Biden was right (for once) when he said that those who hate America would be sure to test President Obama. Test him they will, and we can only pray that responding to the challenge and protecting those of us who elected him, along with those of us who didn’t, will not prove to be above his pay grade.

But one day while Goldilocks was on Facebook, she stumbled onto a conversation about politics. Because one of the participants was this really hot guy in her sociology class, she decided to do a little web surfing outside her usual circuit of celebrity gossip and fashion sites so she could impress him. Here is what she learned:

There was one candidate who was way too rich. She found this quote from the candidate’s opponent on Politico:

Somebody asked John McCain, ‘How many houses do you have?’ And he said, I’m not sure. I’ll have to check with my staff. True quote: I’m not sure, I’ll have to check with my staff …the answer is: John McCain has seven homes.

Nobody should be allowed to own seven houses when other people are homeless, Goldilocks decided. She would definitely not vote for Papa Bear.

There was another candidate who was just too low-class. She said things like “You betcha” and talked like those hicks in Fargo. Goldilocks found this post by Bob Cesca at the Huffington Post:

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is, by all indications, a bonafide hooplehead . . . she’s excusing her embarrassing television interviews and farcical candidacy as an historical breakthrough for “normal Joe Six-pack Americans.” . . . Do we really want a “normal Joe Six-pack American” sitting in the Oval Office?

Joe Sixpack indeed, said Goldilocks to herself. I don’t think so! She would not vote for Mama Bear either.

Then she found a candidate who liked arugula instead of beer, who shopped at Whole Foods instead of Wal-Mart but only owned one house. Sure, the house might have six bathrooms, but, well, at least it was only one house, right? Most of her girlfriends were going to vote for him, and more importantly, so was that hot guy in sociology. And speaking of hot, well, he was, sort of, if a guy in his forties can be hot. Anyway, hot or not, she had made up her mind: she would vote for Baby Bear.

When Goldilocks went home from college for a long weekend, she was excited about impressing her dad with how much she knew about politics. He ate, drank and breathed politics, and was always trying to get Goldilocks interested, but without success. Would he ever be surprised!

“So let’s get this straight,” her dad said. “John McCain with his seven houses is too rich to be president, but Sarah Palin with her white-trash, Joe-Sixpack family is too low class? We don’t want someone just like us but we don’t want someone who isn’t like us either, because he doesn’t understand where we’re coming from. Like George H. W. “Silver Foot in His Mouth” Bush, he doesn’t know the price of arugula at Whole Foods. Like John Kerry, he had the bad taste to choose an heiress for his second wife. Maybe a ketchup heiress is okay but a beer heiress isn’t. Or maybe it’s an older, plainer heiress that’s okay and a younger, sexier heiress that isn’t.”

Who is Joe Kerry, wondered Goldilocks, and what does ketchup have to do with any of this?

“There’s this very narrow band of ‘juuuuuust right’ between Six-Pack Sarah and Diamond John McCain,” her dad went on. “And thank God we can turn to Barack Obama, who is just right, with his big house – but only one house – and his wife’s big salary – but not big enough that the cost of those cute kids’ piano lessons don’t pinch their pocketbook..” He picked up his coffee cup and took a drink, and for a minute Goldilocks thought he was finished, but no such luck. “You know who else was ‘just right’ in terms of money and class, according to the new rules?” he asked.

Of course she didn’t, and what kind of crack had he been smoking to think she cared?

“Richard M. Nixon, that’s who,” he continued. “ And you know who was just too damned rich and out of touch to be able ever to understand the American people? John F. Kennedy, that’s who. And we all know that Tricky Dick was an infinitely better president than the Prince of Camelot, right? We all know that the well-bred and wealthy Franklin D. Roosevelt was a disaster for the country, as that out-of-touch multi-millionaire from Arizona would no doubt be. We know too what a terrible president was Harry S Truman, who didn’t have a college degree, even from a jerkwater school like Sarah Palin’s alma mater.”

Hairy-ass who? Never mind, she thought, I won’t ask, or he’ll never shut up.

“People made fun of the Trumans for their lowbrow tastes just they way they do the Bushes,” he went on.

Goldilocks could see he was just getting warmed up, and sorry, but she just couldn’t take it anymore. “Whatever,” she said, tossing her golden locks and flipping open her cell phone to see if the guy from sociology – whose name turned out to be Hunter – had texted her.

Election day came, and Goldilocks voted a straight Democratic ticket, then texted Hunter proudly to tell him. Election night came, and Keith Olbermann couldn’t have been more excited reporting the news if he’d had an MSNBC intern playing “Monica and Bill” under the desk. Goldilocks and Hunter did play “Monica and Bill” in a bathroom during an election night party.

Papa Bear flew to the nicest of his vacation homes, poured himself a very dry martini and tried not to think about what might have been.

Mama Bear took off her Valentino jacket, put on her L. L. Bean parka and went back to Alaska, flying commercial again and thinking maybe she shouldn’t have listed that state jet on e-Bay after all.

Baby Bear sat down with Harry Bear and Nancy Bear and got to work on a tax package that would spread so much wealth around it would make old Diamond John’s and Six-Pack Sarah’s heads spin.

Uncle Joe Bear said, “What’s the matter with you people? Can’t you count? There are four bears, not three. Four, four, FOUR! There’s a four-letter word for you people: s-t-u-p-i-d.”

Baby Bear told him there was an important funeral in Uzbekistan he’d better get ready for.

April 15 came, and Harry Bear and Nancy Bear and Baby Bear spread a lot of Goldilocks’s dad’s wealth around. When the lease on the BMW convertible Goldilocks drove was up, her dad said he couldn’t afford to lease another one, and she’d have to drive the old Corolla the housekeeper used to drive. They’d had to let the housekeeper go, and from now on Goldilocks would have to do her own laundry, clean her own room, and help her mom with the rest of the housework.

“Oh well,” she shrugged, “I’m not home that much anyway.” But that was going to change too, since some of dad’s wealth that had been spread around included the tuition money for Goldilocks, and they were “too rich” to qualify for financial aid. She would just have to transfer to the state college nearby and move back home.

As Goldilocks was packing up her dorm room, she saw Hunter walk past the open door with a gorgeous brunette. No, Goldilocks thought, not her! It couldn’t be! She raced to the door and looked out. The brunette smiled at her. It was her – the president of the College Republicans. What on earth was Hunter doing with that right-wing harpy? Hunter grinned a little sheepishly, shrugged, and walked off with his arm around his politically incorrect but anatomically impressive new friend.

Goldilocks was putting the last of her boxes into the Corolla’s trunk when a poster on a bulletin board nearby caught her eye. It featured a smiling picture of President Obama. Goldilocks walked over, pulling a sharpie marker out of her purse. She glanced around to see if anyone was watching, and quickly crossed his eyes and blacked out two of his teeth. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “You cost me a Beemer.”

And she lived resentfully ever after.

Dave Maass over at Swing State probably thinks I’m just hiding because Sarah has embarrassed my side so badly.  He sent me a link last week to his post about what a dummy she was for not knowing the names of any newspapers. I freely admit the Couric interview was an absolute train wreck, but I really don’t think Palin is so staggeringly uninformed that she could not come up with the name of even one newspaper she’s ever read. It seemed to me more like she thought Couric was being patronizing by pressing her for names of papers, and she wasn’t going to play along. She seemed to have recovered some of her composure by the VP debate, thankfully.

Speaking of debates, as much as I hate to say it, I think the smooth and suave Mr. Obama came, saw, and conquered at tonight’s. I suppose my husband will make some snide comment about how I’m wrong about this, but that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it. I still think McCain is the better candidate on substance, but on style — which is how so much of our shallow electorate judges its candidates — Obama came out on top.

The only substantive position on which I disagreed with McCain was his call for the government to buy up all the mortgages in foreclosure and renegotiate them at their “true value” today. All I can say is, boy oh, boy, did we miss a great opportunity when we bought our house. We should have scraped together some creative financing to buy this amazing house I looked at in Las Campanas and then defaulted on the mortgage so that the government could have given us a “do-over” and let us retroactively buy it at the current deflated price. But alas, we’re stuck instead with the house we could afford, and nobody’s going to give us a “do-over” and give us back the equity we’ve lost.

This mortgage crisis business is like some sick comedy of errors. The bail-out that started out as 4 pages and $700 billion ended up 400-plus pages and $800-plus billion — and the Dow took a nosedive anyway! And nobody’s supposed to talk about what Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Franklin Raines or the Community Reinvestment Act had to do with bringing it all about.

But looking on the bright side, the week hasn’t been a total disaster. I finally perfected my cilantro vinaigrette, which makes the one at Blue Corn Cafe taste like Wish Bone.

A reader who commented on my blog wrote to tell me about her own blog, which is a spoof of the “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” called “Tom and Trix Plus Six.” I checked it out and found it quite clever, especially the three-part Trading Spouses spoof where Trix Googler (Kate Gosselin) trades places with Esther Goddard (Michelle Duggar). The spoof is satire, and not particularly mean-spirited, though the author said she’s received hate mail. This hardly surprises me, given my own experience.

Apologies to my husband, who likes long, meaty posts here at Moralia, but I have to get back to work now. I have a second grader to teach, a pot roast to make, and the incredibly depressing economic crisis news to watch during baby-feeding breaks. I still haven’t completely sorted out my own thoughts on the bail-out, but watching Harry Reid talk about it on CNN this morning, I do know that I don’t trust that guy as far as I could throw him.

Wilson opens her diatribe “Pissed about Palin” with the assertion, “Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain’t no woman.” Peppering her remarks profusely with profanity and vulgarity, Wilson proves that she herself may be a woman, but she ain’t no lady.

Warning: unladylike language and tackiness in general follow. Read on at your own risk, ladies.

Wilson calls Palin “a hyperconservative, fuckable, Type A, antiabortion, Christian Stepford wife in a ’sexy librarian’ costume,” “a boost of political Viagra for the limp, bloodless GOP,” the GOP’s “hardcore pornographic centerfold spread,” “an opportunistic anti-female,” a “Republican blowup doll,” “the Carmella Soprano of the GOP — an enabling wife of organized crime, who sees, hears and speaks no evil of the boys in her old-boy network for whom she does this ideological lap dance.” The thought of this “power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty” being elevated to the vice presidency “is akin to ideological brain rape.”

Is that enough sexual imagery for you?

I’ve written before about the sexualization of Palin, but not about the sexualization of the McCain-Palin ticket itself, the staggeringly reactionary notion that a man and a woman running together on a national ticket are not just partners in politics, but a “couple.” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times, for example,

Am I the only one who finds the whole thing creepy? John McCain still views himself as the handsome flyboy (remember the guy who played around on his faithful first wife with his hotter, richer current one). Now the old geezer is hugging his hot “soulmate” with a little too much enthusiasm in my opinion. It’s an image I find disgusting.

Creepy and disgusting in the way a lot of people found Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones being romantically involved creepy and disgusting in that movie whose name escapes me, I presume? Why should the visual image of McCain and Palin be creepy and disgusting? They’re political running mates, not lovers. Standing not far off on that stage were McCain’s wife and Palin’s (very attractive) husband.

I fully expected Maureen Dowd to sexualize Palin, since Maureen Dowd sexualizes everything. It’s part of her schtick, sort of the way insulting liberals is part of Ann Coulter’s. The two Queens of Mean from opposite sides of the political spectrum have in common a breezy, witty style that comes from the fact that they’re both obviously having so darn much fun picking on Caribou Barbie and B. Hussein Obama (Coulter’s name for him, not mine, so no hate mail, please). Every single one of Dowd’s columns since the Palin pick has been about Palin, and every one of them contains sexual and/or sexist language:

‘Barbies for War!’ (9/17), Bering Straight Talk (9/14), My Fair Veep (9/10), Clash of the Titans (9/7, in which she refers to Palin as “Hottie Granny”), Life of Her Party (9/3, includiing the “wild soap opera story lines erupting from the Palin family”), and Vice in Go-Go Boots? (8/31, which describes the Palin rise to prominence as a “hokey chick flick….a Cinderella story so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not premiering on Lifetime” and includes a scene where Palin takes off her glasses and down her hair to appear at her sexiest for a showdown with Vladimir Putin).

There is a playful humor in both Dowd’s and Coulter’s columns that is missing in Cintra Wilson’s attempts at humor, which have a dark, desperate edge that cuts far closer to the bone. Dowd and Coulter seem to see Palin and Obama respectively as candidates who would be bad for the United States, but looking on the bright side, very good for their own writing careers. Wilson, on the other hand, when she sees Palin on the Republican ticket claims to feel “as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.” Way to trivialize the murder of six million, girlfriend.

Wilson writes in a blog post titled “Sarah Palin: White House Bunny” that her Salon article “seems to be arousing the ire of backwater, atavistic, evangelical Christian Taliban zealots everywhere,” and signs off with “Pro-Lifers, if I’ve made any of you finally see the light, your next abortion is on me.”

Okay, abortion is funny? Obama and Clinton and every other serious pro-choice politician is careful to say that they are in favor of the right to choose abortion, but that it would be far better if fewer abortions were performed, implying that there is something at least morally problematic about terminating a pregnancy. Not Cintra Wilson. She thinks it’s just a big joke, telling readers of her blog, “Instead of sending hate mail, please go abort yourself.” And it’s Republicans who are mean-spirited.

Nothing mean-spirited, of course, about dragging Palin’s children into the fray:

Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right. The throat she’s so hot to cut is that of all American women.

Because, as we all know, nothing else — national security, the war, the mortgage crisis, federal bail-outs, taxes, energy policy, immigration, foreign relations — matters at all to any woman besides the right to terminate a pregnancy right up to her due date.

What makes the feminist hysteria over abortion truly absurd, however, is the simple fact that electing John McCain and Sarah Palin is not going to make it impossible to get an abortion. Even if a liberal Supreme Court justice dies or retires during McCain’s term, and if he chooses a strict constructionist judge as a replacement, and if the Senate doesn’t Bork the nominee and force McCain to choose someone more to Senate Democrats’ liking, and if the Court does end up overturning Roe v. Wade, all that will do is remove the Federal protection for abortion, and leave the issue up to the states. Utah and a few other states may pass laws limiting or even outlawing abortion in that state, but California and New York and most other states wouldn’t. Utah’s laws wouldn’t affect any other states, and women in Utah would still have “the right to choose,” since they could choose to drive across the border into Nevada to abort their babies.

When Wilson and other feminists like her make politics all about abortion, they are engaging in the worst sort of reductionism, in effect equating women with their reproductive organs. Ms. Wilson can fixate on body parts if she wants, but I refuse to be defined by my physiology. I am a citizen, not a walking, talking uterus.

Wilson tells pro-lifers, “Squeal all you like, just stay out my underpants. You’re not my type.”

I was tempted to make the retort that Wilson is asking for with this line, but since I prefer to be a real lady rather than a real woman, I will refrain, and say only that her underpants are in no imminent danger, since even if Roe is overturned someday, she will still be free to have all the abortions her heart desires as long as she keeps her black lace in a blue state.

His editorial begins by noting that the station has to run political ads regardless of their truthfulness (under federal law). Gordon then goes on to say:

“This election is not about race, gender, age, terrorist fist bumps, cookie recipes, Muslin attire, church pastors, flip flops, lipstick or pigs.” Rather, he notes, the election is about “high gasoline prices, a sinking economy, the war in Iraq, the lack of support for our military vets, global climate change and pollution, corporate greed, the 1 percent getting richer and the poor being ignored.”

Better off than you were eight years ago, Gordon says, then you can only be one person: the CEO of Halliburton.

So McCain pays for ads on KABC, and the radio station follows the ads immediately with a rebuttal essentially calling McCain a liar and all but endorsing Obama — except that Obama isn’t paying for the ads (I mean editorials). Gordon told Goldberg that he ran an editorial after Bush’s ads on the station in 2004 as well. I guess that’s what the “free” in Radio Free Santa Fe means: free ads for Democrats. Now, that’s what I call fair and balanced.

I was trying to figure out whether Ms. Goldberg was being sarcastic when she wrote, “I’m kind of loving Ira Gordon right now,” since I know Dave Maass over at Swing State is a fair-minded guy, and expected fair mindedness from other writers on the site as well. Goldberg titled her post “Radio Free Indeed,” which suggests she was, but the collection of articles she recommended as “worth reading” the other day suggests that perhaps she was not. All five were from at least a vaguely left of center perspective, and one was Maureen Dowd’s latest Sarah Palin hit piece, “Barbies for War!” which is one part people-in-Alaska-hate-Palin to two parts people-in-Wasilla-are-fundamentalist-white-trash-rednecks.

By the way, I’m better off than I was 8 years ago, and I’m not the CEO of Halliburton. There may even be a redneck or two up in Wasilla who may have managed to stay out of the poor house without running Halliburton. If Mr. Gordon over at Radio Free Santa Fe isn’t doing so well, maybe it’s because he’s giving away too much free advertising to the Democrats, and ought to start charging them for it.

Barbie isn’t the only B-word Palin is being called, of course. In many ways we are living in a feminist world, but it seems no woman of either political persuasion can have any sort of success without being called a bitch — in Palin’s case, a crazy, dangerous bitch.

Bluegrassroots.org kills two political birds (no pun intended) with one stone, by observing that since the GOP

couldn’t have a “castrating bitch” to run against, they chose a “castrating bitch” to run with.

Wondering how many other people were calling Palin a bitch (calling Hillary a bitch is already a tired cliche), I did a quick search for “Sarah Palin bitch” and found the following sourceless slur on Democratic Underground:

“So Sambo beat the bitch!”

This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.

Let’s unpack this a little. A waitress who wants to remain anonymous said that Palin said this to five or six anonymous people in an unnamed restaurant. No names, no dates, no sources. The post links to an article by Charley James in Dick and Sharon’s LA Progressive called “Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper): Palin Is “Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean””

The article cites only one source by name, Anne Kilkenny, but Kilkenny speaks only about Palin’s public policy record, and says nothing about racial slurs. It’s only nameless “Alaskans interviewed for this article” who can testify to Palin’s racism and cruelty:

According to Alaskans interviewed for this article, she is also vindictive and mean. We’re talking Rove mean and Nixon vindictive.

As opposed to “LA Progressive mean” and “Democratic Underground vindictive,” I guess.

I had never heard of Charley James or Dick and Sharon’s LA Progressive before. The “About Us” page on the site says that

Dick and Sharon are a married couple that got fed up with the status quo. Fed up with the do nothing politicians, the say nothing media, and the unengaged populace. Together they edit and publish the LA Progressive Ezine (electronic magazine) and distribute its weekly e-news.

I have no idea what the circulation of their e-zine is, or what journalistic credentials Charley James may (or, more likely, may not) have. I only know that when Mr. James posted an exerpt and link to his scurrilous and unsubstantiated story on Democratic Underground, the post got hundreds of recommendations and hundreds of replies, all, from what I could see, accepting it unreservedly as true. One outraged Undergrounder opined,

she’s perfect for the republican party. My personal thoughts are that the republicans should be removed form our society and given their own ocuntry [sic]……..maybe Florida across to AZ, call it their reservation, or jesus land.

To which another person (who unlike Nixon, Rove and Palin isn’t at all mean or vindictive) replied:

I’ve often had that same thought. give ‘em their own country. Fence off the borders so they can’t get out. Then let them go to it. And I’ve often wondered what that country would turn into after five or ten years. Afghanistan under the Taliban? Germany under Hitler? A huge Jim Jones cult?

Whatever it was, it probably wouldn’t be pretty.

I’ll bet one of the first things they’d have to deal with would be what to do with unwanted infants. No birth control allowed. No abortion. They’d be overrun with babies, and I can bet that out and out infanticide would be the first order of business.

After that, things would really get nasty. Maybe they would end up destroying themselves totally…

one can only dream…sigh….

And Sarah Palin is the one who is vindictive and mean.

Rosa Brooks, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, writes in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times,

a week ago Palin — ex-mayor of Wasilla and a runner-up for Miss Alaska — probably couldn’t have explained the difference between a G-string and the G-8

Sarah Palin and I were born in 1964, the year after Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique was published. We and our contemporaries were raised in a feminist world, told all our lives that we could do anything, be anything that men could.

Well, not anymore, sister. Not if you’re good-looking, anyway.

For decades, feminists insisted that women shouldn’t squander their talents at home, should put the kids in day care and do something that matters. Then, suddenly, once John McCain had the bad taste to choose a conservative female running mate, it became socially acceptable for good progressive feminists to say that mothers ought to be home with their children instead of running for national office.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, now it seems that it’s also permissible to sexualize ambitious female politicians, and to suggest that if they happen to be both beautiful and Republican, then they must also of necessity be stupid.

We’ve come a long way, baby.

Unfortunately, we’ve now gone all the way back.

I don’t want to post a comment because I don’t want to appear that I’m against the McCain/Palin ticket, which I’m not. I think Sarah Palin is great, and I don’t think she’s a bad mother because her daughter got pregnant as a teenager.

However, I do think that you make a rather strange point when you say that if Bristol were to go to college “everyone would be getting drunk and high and hooking up, and she’d either be a social outcast by rejecting the sex-drugs-booze college culture or she’d become a part of it, likely ending up depressed and degraded by all the sordid experiences with guys who used her for sex without caring a bit about her.” Really? Do you actually believe that EVERY college student gets drunk, high, and has random sex or is a social outcast? Gee, I don’t remember that from my college days. Many of the people I knew in college actually met their future husband or wife there. It seems that you’re saying that marriage is a better alternative to getting an education because colleges are a regular Sodom and Gomorrah. I don’t get it — you have a Ph.D., for Pete’s sake, you obviously value education!

The problem isn’t that marriage is a death sentence, the problem is that a person should be able to support himself or herself before having children. That means either learning a trade or going to college to get a degree that will ensure some kind of livelihood before getting pregnant. I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine that either Bristol or her hockey-playing boyfriend are capable of supporting themselves or their child. And, fair enough, I know they’re not going to be collecting welfare or any other public assistance, but the fact is that their parents will have to support them, at least for a little while. I do believe that Bristol made a brave and wise choice in keeping the baby, but to say that she hasn’t ruined her life, at least for the next few years, is silly and a bit naive.

Because the person who wrote this is someone whose opinion I respect, I think it deserves an answer, and I’ll make it publicly rather than in private e-mail since if she had this objection to what I wrote, others probably do, too.

When I first read my friend’s e-mail, I stopped and thought, yes, I probably was too flippant, and that her objection had some merit. Upon further reflection, I do think that I ought to have been more nuanced in the point I was trying to make, and that for the sake of flashy rhetoric I made my case in bold strokes of black and white, too bold perhaps. Still, I stand by the substance of what I wrote, and perhaps the following explanation will make it clear how I can do so while not disparaging education.

I obviously value education. Of course I do. And no, I don’t believe that every single college student either goes into full-blown self-destructive hedonist mode or is a social outcast. There are some who manage their vices in moderation, and others who work and study hard and avoid the sordid sex and substance abuse while still enjoying a social life. I was painting with a broad rhetorical brush, and I readily acknowledge this. Nevertheless, the friend who wrote this has been out of college for quite a few years. True, she has taught at colleges, but teaching isn’t the same as living an undergraduate life, and most 30-something and 40-something adults today don’t fully appreciate just how different the college culture is today than it was when we were in college.

When I taught college myself, I had a lot of students in my classes who in my opinion had no business being in college at all. They had neither the skills nor the self-discipline to do basic college-level work. A great many of them, I suspect, were only attending university because that’s what’s expected of a middle-class high school graduate, and they didn’t seem to value learning for its own sake at all. Some of them did, of course, but not the majority. College has become for all too many young people simply a way of deferring the responsibilities of adulthood, of getting mom and dad to continue footing the bill for four (or five or seven or however many years it takes some of them to finish) more years.

If Bristol Palin was planning on going to college for that reason, then there’s no great loss in her not going. But if she is one of those young people who sincerely does want an education for the right reasons, then she will probably manage to obtain one even as a mother. But being married doesn’t mean you can’t still go to college. And having a child doesn’t mean you can’t go either. If Sarah Palin can govern Alaska with five children, why can’t Brisol Palin get a bachelor’s degree with one child? Would it take a lot of hard work and juggling of responsibilities? Indeed it would. But hard work and responsibilities build character and maturity. It’s probably even harder to earn a B.A. with a perpetual hangover than it is to earn one with a baby at home — and I say this as someone who has a baby at home.

While watching the RNC coverage, I saw an interview with Michele Bachman, a Congresswoman from Minnesota, in which Bachman said that she and her husband were both in graduate school while they had two children at home, and that while their situation was difficult, it forced both of them to become very focused and self-disciplined. She recounted this experience not in regards to Brisol Palin, but in response to a question about Sarah Palin’s ability to balance motherhood and the vice presidency.

As to Bristol Palin’s parents having to support her during the next few years, well, wouldn’t they be supporting her anyway while she attended college? What’s the difference whether they pay her tuition and rent while she’s single or while she’s married? I realize that there are some parents who would not finance a son or daughter’s education in those circumstances, because they disapprove of early marriage and would rather the couple choose to abort the child and stay unmarried and in college. I hope those parents are in the minority. I really don’t see why people think nothing of financing their unmarried children’s education when those children are frittering away a lot of their time and money on pleasure-seeking rather than studying, but think it’s somehow inappropriate to help a young married couple earn an education that will help them and their children have a better life.

I don’t think a young woman who chooses early marriage and motherhood has ruined her life. Many young women who get pregnant and keep their babies, whether they marry the father or not, probably do end up with regrets. But have they ruined their lives? Is it really impossible to earn a college degree after becoming a parent? For that matter, is it really impossible to have a decent life without a degree? Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not disparaging education. I value my own education, and want to give my daughters the best education I can possibly provide.

That said, I have seen people with college degrees living empty and meaningless lives, and people without them living rich and fulfilling lives. I would wager that a good many women who put off marriage and family for so many years that when they finally tried to have a baby, found that it was too late, felt that they had ruined their lives.

Is my own life richer because of my education? Undoubtedly it is. But if I had to choose between having my four daughters and having those three letters after my name, well, there’s just no choice at all.

When I advocated a McCain-Palin ticket back when people thought I was crazy for hoping for it, I had no idea that Sarah Palin would be our next Great Communicator. The other day when McCain announced her nomination and she gave her first national political speech, I thought she did a good job, but tonight, seeing her work the old Reagan magic on the crowd at the Republican National Convention, I was absolutely blown away. This woman, whom the Beltway pundits have been dismissing as some small town yokel, has just thrown a huge can of gasoline onto an already volatile campaign.

God, I love politics.

Reading the exchange you and Slackonomics author Lisa Chamberlain had about the challenges of parenting (and noting that you haven’t had much time to blog because of the needs of your own children), I’m curious what you think about Gov. Palin campaigning for – and possibly becoming – Vice President having a four month old special needs child.

And this comment was sent to me in e-mail by someone I know personally:

Maybe if she stayed at home and watched out for her kids her 17 year old daughter wouldn’t be preggers. Now this stupid 17 year old has to get married b/c her mom would get slammed in the press if her kid got an abortion or gave up the baby for adoption. “Bristol, take one for the team.”

Where do I begin? I feel like I’m in some kind of Orwellian dream world, where 2 + 2 = 5 and we’ve never been at war with Eurasia, but always with Eastasia.

For years I’ve been hearing things like, “Why are you wasting your talents staying home with your kids?” and reading books and articles by feminists lamenting the fact that so many other educated women are doing the same thing, setting aside their careers, squandering their talents, wasting their time taking care of children when they could be doing something meaningful and hiring a housekeeper, nanny and cook to do the grunt work at home. Women are just like men, only with ovaries instead of testicles. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. If men can have children and careers, by God, so can women. Anybody ask John F. Kennedy how he managed to “have it all” with a baby and a toddler in the White House? And yet here we are, more than 40 years later, demanding to know what business Sarah Palin has being Governor of Alaska — let alone Vice President, God forbid — with three kids and a baby at home. And, irony of ironies, since she’s a Republican, the very feminists who have demanded full equality for women all these years are in the position of having to oppose Palin’s candidacy, and are faced with the temptation to jump on the “How can she possibly do it all?” bandwagon when their own principles insist that of course she can.

First, the question of what I, often too busy with my children to blog, think of Palin’s ability to balance family and high political office. To that I reply:

1) My children are 7, 5, 3 and less than two months old. They are all very young, too little to be left alone at all, too little to be of any substantive help to me. Even though she’s my age, Sarah Palin was smart enough to get an early start having children, so hers are now 19, 17, 14, 7 and four months. Big difference. The 19-year-old is grown up and in the Army. The two teenage girls do not need 24-7 supervision, and are old enough to be of real help to their mother in caring for the youngest children. 17-year-old Bristol Palin, who is expecting a baby herself, was holding her baby brother all during their mother’s maiden campaign speech on Monday, and I have little doubt she’s a tremendous help to her mother. I have a 17-year-old niece, and when she visits it’s a dream having an extra pair of grown-up hands around the house. Even the 7-year-old is old enough not to be quite the physical drain that younger children are. My own 7-year-old is far less difficult than she was just a year or two ago.

2) I homeschool my children, while I’m assuming Governor Palin’s children are in school.

3) Mrs. Palin must have domestic help. Until I hired some part-time help last week, I didn’t, and was being run ragged by doing everything around the house myself. Part of what makes housekeeping so time-consuming for me is that I love to cook, and cook just about everything from scratch. I don’t know if Gov. Palin makes her own moose stew from scratch, but I can’t imagine that governing Alaska allows her to spend as many hours a week cooking as I do. Sometimes I really wish I could just pop open a can of chili instead of making the real deal, but alas, I can’t. I’ve spoiled my family, and now they wrinkle their noses at pre-packaged food. When I was sick and pregnant, I tried to foist frozen lasagna on them, but no dice. After all, would you eat Stouffer’s when the only lasagna you’d ever known was made with creamy whole milk mozzarella, fresh basil, and onion-and-nutmeg-infused bechamel?

4) A Down Syndrome baby isn’t any more work than any other infant. The difficulties begin when the child is a toddler, and by that time Palin’s daughter Bristol will be married and on her own, and the other two girls will 16 and 9, not exactly toddlers demanding their mother’s attention every moment.

5) Given her 80%-plus approval rating in Alaska, Palin has been doing an outstanding job as governor. She doesn’t seem to be bleary-eyed and frazzled now, and while it isn’t the presidency, the governorship of the largest (in terms of territory) state in the Union, a state which borders not only Canada but Russia, a state in which the governor must be an expert in the field of energy policy, isn’t exactly an undemanding job. As McCain’s vetting team found, she’s been performing it competently.

Now, on to the question of Bristol Palin having to “take one for the team” so her mom can get elected, and of her mother’s culpability for the pregnancy in the first place.

1) If Sarah Palin had been a stay-at-home mother, her daughter might still have gotten pregnant. No mother, be she a SAHM or working mom, spends every moment of every day with her teenage child. If she did, people would call her overprotective and smothering — if not downright psychotic. The youthful sex drive is a powerful force, and one that’s been triumphing over parental proscriptions for millenia.

2) A related criticism that my e-mail friend did not raise is Palin’s culpability because as governor she backed abstinence-only education rather than sex ed that taught students about contraception. This is a non-issue. Show me the teenager that actually learns something in sex ed. Kids learn about sex and birth control from their more precocious classmates long before they hear about it in the classroom. That was true when Sarah Palin and I were teenagers, and it’s still true today. In addition, today’s teenagers have access to all the information on the Internet, which kids in my day didn’t have. Believe me, any girl who knows about sex also knows about the existence of birth control.

3) Poor Miss Palin has to get married because her mom would get slammed in the press if she had an abortion or gave up the baby for adoption? In the first place, I think many people would find it admirable if she allowed a childless couple to adopt her baby. In the second place, given her own willingness to carry to term a Down Syndrome child, Mrs. Palin would no doubt oppose her daughter’s getting an abortion even if she wasn’t in politics. Finally, this analysis makes marriage sound rather like a death sentence. If she didn’t get married, Bristol Palin would likely go off to college where everyone would be getting drunk and high and hooking up, and she’d either be a social outcast by rejecting the sex-drugs-booze college culture or she’d become a part of it, likely ending up depressed and degraded by all the sordid experiences with guys who used her for sex without caring a bit about her. So many people today assume that marrying young is a mistake — even a tragedy. But I know couples who married and had children young, and they are doing just fine. I have a friend here in Santa Fe who got married at 18 or so and had her first child at 20, now has two and is planning a third. She and her husband (who is her age) are so mature that I often forget I’m nearly old enough to be their mother. Both of them say that marrying and having a child really made them grow up, and that they’re glad they did things the way they did. I realize that this isn’t the way a lot of young people’s marriages turn out, but that’s an argument for people working harder at their marriages, not for eschewing marriage in the first place. I really don’t think it’s a terrible thing for a young woman to be married and a mother instead of being cannon fodder for horny frat boys.

McCain’s choice of Palin as his running mate has created some strange political bedfellows, putting traditional, conservative Republican women in the position of defending a working mother’s ability to have it all and do it all, while forcing feminists to sit tight-lipped and silent while Palin’s opponents question her ability to balance political power and family responsibilities. As feminists, they want to say, “Yes, she can!” but as liberals they want her and McCain to lose the election, so they need to make difficult choices.

Truly, this has been one of the most interesting elections in decades. During the primary season, when it looked like Mitt or Rudy or some other candidate who didn’t inspire me, I thought, here we go again, Bob Dole all over again. Then McCain came out of nowhere to snag the nomination, and I thought, great, Mr. Bipartisan, just what we need. But Mr. Bipartisan surprised me, and gradually won me over. Then, with his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, he proved that he really deserved the “Maverick” reputation I used to scoff at. My husband and I have opened our hearts — and our checkbook — to McCain and Palin.

I hope many of you do the same. I hope some of Hillary’s PUMAs realize that there’s more to being a feminist than the right to get rid of a baby you don’t want, and that being a Republican doesn’t make Sarah Palin any less of a role model for their daughters.

I try to keep a balance on this blog between political and non-political posts, but I hope my readers will forgive me if during these final days of the presidential campaign politics dominates my blog, as it dominates my thoughts.

First, McCain’s imminent VP announcement. Imagine my elation when I sat down to feed the baby at 5:00 a.m., turned on the news, and learned that a plane from Anchorage, Alaska, had recently arrived in Dayton, Ohio, all very hush-hush. When I wrote my Sarah Palin for VP post, I really thought I was setting myself up for disappointment, that McCain would pick Romney or Ridge or some other uninspiring, middle-aged white guy who’d look washed out beside the glare of Obama’s star power. With his inspired choice of the Alaska governor, however, things are looking very bright indeed for the McCain campaign.

Second, all the Democrats’ speeches that I meant to comment on but didn’t because one or more of my four children needed something or wanted something just when I was sitting down to write.

Hillary — yes, I know I commented the other day, but another thought occurred to me after I did so. When I was watching Hillary Clinton’s speech the other night, it struck me that her endless repetition of how proud she was – a proud mother, a proud Senator from New York, a proud Democrat, a proud American – seemed unnecessary and even a little self-destructive. After all, who doubts for a moment that either Bill or Hillary Clinton possesses a sufficient – one might even say excessive – amount of pride? Then the next day I realized why she said it, and said it again and again and again. I don’t know why I didn’t realize it at the time, especially since Michelle Obama looked so angry listening to the speech. The endless litany of pride was Hillary’s way of subtly (and it was subtle, since I didn’t even think of it until long after the speech was over) reminding people of Michelle’s comment that the first time she was ever really proud of her country was when Barack started doing so well in the presidential primary. Am I reading too much into the speech? Maybe. I’m suspicious by nature. Being the mother of sneaky little girls does that to one. But I don’t think so. You know the Clintons and all their top gun advisers went over and over and over every detail of that speech for weeks, parsing every word for the effect it might produce. A proud American is Hillary…unlike somebody else, who shall remain nameless. She’s a cool customer, that one. I wouldn’t have voted for her because I disagree with her policy positions, but I have to say, she’s more than a match in diabolical cleverness for any dastardly dictator who might give the U.S. trouble on the international scene.

Bill Clinton — I have to admit, I thought he was all washed up, yesterday’s news, superceded in his star power by the smooth, suave and much younger Barack Obama. I was wrong. Bill may be on the scary side of 60, but damn, he’s still got it. The day after his wife’s wooden and ineffective speech, old Bill hit one out of the park. As usual, my husband couldn’t see it, says I’m a typical woman, taken in by the Clinton charm, and that his delivery was grating as always. If that’s the case, why does every male pundit on TV, including the conservative ones, concede the former president gave a good speech? The fact is, the man can work a crowd like nobody’s business. He always could. How I wish we had somebody on our side who had that magic rhetorical touch. We had it in Reagan (who was even better than Clinton) but haven’t had it since. But that’s style. In terms of substance, Clinton’s speech could have been titled, “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics,” in Mark Twain’s immortal words. The man always could twist facts and figures into flights of rhetorical fancy that leave the ignorant totally bamboozled, and the knowledgeable shaking their heads at the stunning audacity of his misrepresentations.

Biden — rhetorically, a very impressive performance. Substantively, same old same old. Substitute Ted Kennedy or any other old-line party hack, and the message would have been the same. Personally, however, Biden is a sympathetic character. His first wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident in the 1970s, leaving Biden a single father of two little boys, a vocation he fulfilled admirably, by all accounts. His son in the National Guard is due to deploy in Iraq next month, adding to the patriotism quotient of the ticket. His attractive wife could have come straight out of central casting, looking every inch the part of a senator’s wife.

Obama’s very long acceptance speech last night — hmm. The crowd seemed to like it, but all I kept thinking was, Sweetie (as Barack liked to call us gals before the feminists slapped his wrist and made him stop), you’re no Bill Clinton.

Born in 1964, the same year I was, Sarah Palin is the Republican governor of Alaska, the youngest governor ever elected in that state. (She was 42 at the time.) She and her husband Todd Palin, a commercial fisherman, have five children, the eldest a son who enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 18 last year, the youngest a son born with Down Syndrome earlier this year, and three daughters in between. McCain also has a son serving in the military, and if he does choose Palin, the ticket will be the first in a very long time in which both candidates have sons who would be put in harm’s way as a result of U.S. military policies. Certainly a McCain-Palin administration could not be accused of unfeelingly sending other people’s sons off to fight their wars.

Pesonally, I would love to see McCain choose Palin, and not just because I’m a woman and want to see a woman as president or vice president. I wouldn’t have voted for Hillary if she’d won her party’s nomination, and I’d be disappointed if McCain chose Condoleeza Rice as his running mate, as some pundits have suggested. It’s because I think a McCain-Palin ticket would both energize the Republican base, and attract a lot of moderate and independent voters, particularly younger people and younger women especially.

To find out more about Sarah Palin, check out Adam Brickely’s blog Palin for VP, which has links to dozens of news stories and websites about the Alaska governor and her qualifications for national office.