First Bumps

Gulp!  Sarah Palin is a flip-flopper!  Why, oh why, didn't Sailor pick Mitt Romney instead?:

While running for governor in 2006 … Palin backed federal funding for the infamous bridge, which McCain helped make it a symbol of pork barrel excess.

And as mayor of the small town of Wasilla from 1996 to 2002, Palin also hired a Washington lobbying firm that helped secure $8 million in congressionally directed spending projects, known as earmarks, according to public spending records compiled by the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste and lobbying documents…

She changed her mind, [her spokesman] said, when “she saw that Alaska was being perceived as taking from the country and not giving, and that impression bothered her and she wants to change it. … I think that Sarah Palin is someone who has the courage to reevaluate situations as they developed.”…

McAlister said he was unaware of the details of Wasilla’s earmarks. But, he added, “As mayor of the city, her charge was very different than it is now. She’s obviously taking a much broader look at things as governor.”

Sounds like a believable explanation to me.  Almost like she was learning, her governing perspective broadening as she gained experience and higher offices.  Kind of like "shrinking in office" instead of the other way around.  Which makes her rarer than hen's lips in today's political landscape.

Put another way, I'd rather have had her be for the bridge to nowhere before she was against it instead of the other way around.  It's the kind of flip-flopping I can live with.

On another hand, it's not a complete flip-flop, as Alaska isn't returning the bridge funding, and a twenty-five million smacker project for a road to nowhere is going forward anyway for pretty much the same reason.  Throw this in the "con" kitty along with her Obamaesque state windfall profits tax - which I have yet to see any lib dredge up as a discrediting criticism, interestingly enough.

Instead, some Donks are accusing her of the anti-pork flip-flop as an act of, er, naked political ambition to butter up McCain and get on the 2008 GOP ticket.  A severely damaging allegation, until one lines up the timeline and discovers, as AP did, that....

(a) McCain was politically dead in the water at the time of that press release and therefore not the Republican candidate one would want to ingratiate oneself with.

Heck, maybe the flip-flopping was meant to get Governor Palin in good with Governor Romney instead, and she just lucked out on picking the right issue to flip on, and in the correct direction, to score the veep slot from Maverick.  Makes about as much sense as any of these crazy anti-Barracuda lunges.

Seems to me the hypocrisy on pork matters more than the flip-flopping.  If I were advising the other side, that's what I'd urge them to focus on if they truly want to undermine her credibility.  But then how seriously could anybody take anti-pork crusading from the Swine Party?  It'd just boomerang on Joe Biden's fiscal hog-harvesting, Obama's newfound love for lobbyists, and bleed down to the congressional level where the Dem majority has taken the "culture of corruption" to unfathomed levels.

Besides all of which, how can you point the corruption finger at a woman, one of whose first acts as governor was, in the spirit of Andy Jackson, to fire the gubernatorial chef?  Oh, and unload the gubernatorial jet - on Ebay?

Also like Old Hickory, Governor Palin's political enemies are neither shy about nor hesitant to plunge into the gutter in the hopes of flushing her reputation, and McCain's candidacy, down the sewer.  In President Jackson's day, men settled disputes of honor via pistol duels.  'Tis fortunate indeed for the Barracuda's enemies that they don't have to face that possibility versus the long-time NRA member and moose-hunter.

Instead, they'll have to settle for metaphorically blowing their own feet off instead:

The seventeen-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.

Bristol Palin, one of Alaska Governor Palin’s five children with her husband, Todd, is about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, the Palins said in a statement released by the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain…

Senior McCain campaign officials said McCain knew of the daughter’s pregnancy when he selected Palin last week as his vice presidential running mate, deciding that it did not disqualify the 44-year-old governor in any way…

McCain officials said the news of the daughter’s pregnancy was being released to rebut what one aide called “mud-slinging and lies” circulating on liberal blog sites.

As disgusting a smear as the "Palin faked her pregnancy to cover up her daughter's" meme was, when you get past the outrage, what's left is more ridiculousness.  How could the most prominent public official in the state of Alaska possibly fake a pregnancy and successfully put it over for a full nine months?  Would the implausibility of such a scheme not simply draw attention to what the Palins purportedly wanted to conceal?  And wouldn't the more or less inevitable whistle-blowing make the Guv look both dishonest and really, really foolish?

I'm puzzled as to why a teen pregnancy in the Palin clan would be some sort of major scandal for Bristol's mom in any case.  Let's try and make our minds work like a left-wingnut's:

1) Bristol's obviously a whore, and "the fruit don't fall far from the tree."

2) Whores are not fit to raise children; the only thing Palin can do to redeem her maternal failure is to step down from the ticket, resign as Alaska Governor, abdicate her entire career, de-feminize herself, and stay home with her pregnant-after-all daughter, as well as keep her other street-walking, trailer trash girls from getting knocked up as well and devote the rest of her time to caring for Bristol's [AHEM] her Down's baby, Trig.  At least until Alaska social services comes and takes her and lush hubby's whole misbegotten brood away from them to be raised properly as wards of the state. 

3) Governor Palin is a hypocrite for being a whore raising multiple whores and yet being for abstinence education and against mandatory condom distribution and "how-to" sex ed in public schools.

4) If Governor Palin were an "authentic" woman, she'd have had Bristol [AHEM] she'd have aborted Trig, and she'd make Bristol abort her baby - both on [feminazi] principle and to protect her own political interests.  Or else she'd be a lesbian and none of this unpleasantness would ever have happened.

Ouch.  Trying to think like a detestable prick is giving me a headache, which will probably turn into brain cancer if I don't stop.  And I don't want to be more like Teddy Kennedy in any imaginable sense.

Now let's get to the rebuttals.

#1 and #2 are of the worst breed of sexism, as I've always understood the term.  That, of course, is in turn a gutteral breed of hypocrisy, but hypocrisy is for libs a forgiveable sin - hell, it's a virtue - when the target is on the Republican side of the aisle, in direct proportion to the degree of political threat the targeted Pachyderm poses to Donk dreams of permanent hegemony.  Obviously, Sarah Barracuda enters the campaign at at least political DefCon 3 as the Left perceives her.

#3 and #4 are supposed to destroy her right-wing support; which is another way of saying that libs are expecting evangelicals to denounce Governor Palin and her daughter as "harlots," not unlike the Scribes and Pharisees bringing the woman caught in adultery to Jesus.  They, too, were trying to trap the Object of their hatred into a hypocritical lapse by making Him choose between His justice (condemning her for her sin) and His mercy (forgiving her sin).  His riposte was (supernaturally) sublimely brilliant: "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

In the same forgiving spirit, evangelicals are not following the Donk script.

CBN's David Brody:

I’m sure lots of people will take their shots at the pro-life Christian woman but hold on a moment. If you think Evangelicals are going to ditch her for this, you’re totally misreading the situation. As a matter of fact, they are ready to fire back at any potential critics…

Look, this development will actually be positive for the most part with Evangelicals. First they hear that Sarah Palin chooses the life option even though she had a Downs Syndrome baby and once again the family (and Bristol) has chosen the life option in this recent case. That’s a double “ca-ching”. Let’s call this the Evangelical daily double. If anything, this whole situation will probably make more people around the country relate to her and her family. It makes them more real. Will there by some turned off by the whole pre-marital sex thing? Of course but this type of story doesn’t sink her at all with Evangelicals.

Or, as the LORD said to the woman:

"Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"

"No one, Sir," she said.       

"Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin."

Bristol is marrying her baby's father and the Palins are lovingly supporting them to the hilt.  What more can anybody ask of them?

Dr. James Dobson:

“In the 32-year history of Focus on the Family, we have offered prayer, counseling and resource assistance to tens of thousands of parents and children in the same situation the Palins are now facing. We have always encouraged the parents to love and support their children and always advised the girls to see their pregnancies through, even though there will of course be challenges along the way. That is what the Palins are doing, and they should be commended once again for not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances.

“Being a Christian does not mean you’re perfect. Nor does it mean your children are perfect. But it does mean there is forgiveness and restoration when we confess our imperfections to the LORD. I’ve been the beneficiary of that forgiveness and restoration in my own life countless times, as I’m sure the Palins have.

“The media are already trying to spin this as evidence Governor Palin is a ‘hypocrite,’ but all it really means is that she and her family are human. They are in my prayers and those of millions of Americans.” [emphases added]

In other words, it is not Governor Palin and her family that are the "hypocrites" - or the ones with the ingrained bigotry that renders them incapable of understanding their enemies, or unwilling to acknowledge that their enemies may be anything better than the insulting stereotypes into which they insist upon trying to bludgeon them.

To see the Left get so viciously personal so quickly tells me all I need to know about Sarah Palin, and about John McCain's judgment in selecting her.  I'm no fan of the Sith master, but over the past several months he has run little short of a brilliant campaign, not so much knocking down The Chosen One as goading and manipulating him into self-destructing again and again and again.  With the choice of Governor Palin as his running mate, he has provoked the Donk base into waving the bloody shirt of their ugliness and hate anew for the entire electorate to see.  A development that cannot help but make her an even more sympathetic and popular figure than she was already.

Why do I draw that conclusion?  Simple - False Messiah's reaction:

Mr. Obama, campaigning here, also noted that his own mother was eighteen when she gave birth to him.

“People’s families are off limits,” he said. “People’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. ”

“I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories,” he added. “That shouldn’t be a topic in our politics.”

He vehemently pushed back against an unnamed McCain aide suggesting his campaign had any ties to the blogs that were spreading rumors before the news broke, saying he was “offended” by that and if any of his staff was involved in spreading the issue, “they’d be fired.”

Here, for once, is a rake on which Barry actually managed not to step.  Perhaps it's a lesson to him to leave the sewage-throwing to surrogates and see if he can revive his "post-partisan unifier" gimmick - his Sister Souljah moment, as it were.  If any of the crap sticks, he can benefit from it, but if it backfires, he's got that six degrees of separation.  Indeed, he may be looking at this slimeicane as a pivot for that meme switch just as Team Sith is playing it as an anti-Obama boomerang.

Quite a crash-course in the underside of national presidential politics the Barracuda is getting, isn't it?  Except I don't think she, or Darth Queeg, are surprised by any of this.  Rather, they're making sure that any "October surprise" like Bush43's DUI story was eight years ago gets out of the way early so that the decks will be cleared for the home stretch.  

You might even say that "all is proceeding as they have foreseen."