SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Sully- who wrote (31039)7/6/2009 6:30:35 AM
From: Sully-  Respond to of 35834
 
Sarah Palin Explains Her Decision to Resign

The Campaign Spot
Jim Geraghty Reporting

"I know when it's time to pass the ball for victory," soon-to-be-former Governor Sarah Palin says at a press conference with her family, standing before a picturesque river and seaplane.

She says she's looking forward to the swearing in of Lt. Governor Sean Parnell. "All I can ask is that you trust me with this decision," she says. "I cannot [let] millions of dollars and time go to waste just so I can remain as governor of Alaska.

"This decision has been in the works for a while. It comes after a great deal of prayer and deliberation."

She said when she put the decision to her family, the vote was four "yes"es and one 'Hell yeah.' She mentions the family's reaction to the mockery of Trig.

She said her decision was "fortified during her visit to the troops in Kosovo."

"It hurts to make this choice, but I've given my reasons. I'm reminded of a sign on my parents' refrigerator, 'Don't explain; your friends don't need it, and your enemies won't believe you anyway.'"


UPDATE: The official statement from her office:


Governor Sarah Palin announced today that she will not seek a second term as Governor of the State of Alaska and will relegate the power of governor to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell in order to serve Alaska’s best interests. Lieutenant General Craig Campbell will move into Parnell’s current role.

“People who know me know that besides faith and family, nothing's more important to me than our beloved Alaska,” said Governor Palin. “Serving her people is the greatest honor I could imagine.”

Standing outside her home in Wasilla, Alaska, Governor Palin reflected upon some of the administration’s accomplishments for Alaska as she approaches her final year in office.

“I am determined to take the right path for Alaska even though it is not the easiest path,” said Governor Palin after the announcement. “Once I decided not to run for re-election, I also felt that to embrace the conventional ‘Lame Duck’ status in this particular climate would just be another dose of ‘politics as usual,’ something I campaigned against and will always oppose. It is my duty to always protect our great state. With that in mind, my family and I determined that it is best to make a difference this summer, and I am willing to change things, so that this administration, with its positive agenda, its accomplishments, and its successful road to an incredible future, can continue without interruption and with great administrative and legislative success. I look forward to helping others – to fight for our state and our country, and campaign for those who believe in smaller government, free enterprise, strong national security, support for our troops, and energy independence.”

The transfer of power will occur following the Governor’s picnic in Fairbanks on July 26. At that point in time, Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell will be sworn in and Lieutenant General Craig Campbell will assume his role as Lieutenant Governor.

Governor Palin will spend July 4th in Juneau.Governor Sarah Palin announced today that she will not seek a second term as Governor of the State of Alaska and will relegate the power of governor to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell in order to serve Alaska’s best interests. Lieutenant General Craig Campbell will move into Parnell’s current role.

“People who know me know that besides faith and family, nothing's more important to me than our beloved Alaska,” said Governor Palin. “Serving her people is the greatest honor I could imagine.”

Standing outside her home in Wasilla, Alaska, Governor Palin reflected upon some of the administration’s accomplishments for Alaska as she approaches her final year in office.

“I am determined to take the right path for Alaska even though it is not the easiest path,” said Governor Palin after the announcement. “Once I decided not to run for re-election, I also felt that to embrace the conventional ‘Lame Duck’ status in this particular climate would just be another dose of ‘politics as usual,’ something I campaigned against and will always oppose. It is my duty to always protect our great state. With that in mind, my family and I determined that it is best to make a difference this summer, and I am willing to change things, so that this administration, with its positive agenda, its accomplishments, and its successful road to an incredible future, can continue without interruption and with great administrative and legislative success. I look forward to helping others – to fight for our state and our country, and campaign for those who believe in smaller government, free enterprise, strong national security, support for our troops, and energy independence.”

The transfer of power will occur following the Governor’s picnic in Fairbanks on July 26. At that point in time, Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell will be sworn in and Lieutenant General Craig Campbell will assume his role as Lieutenant Governor.

Governor Palin will spend July 4th in Juneau. >>>

campaignspot.nationalreview.com



To: Sully- who wrote (31039)7/6/2009 6:33:17 AM
From: Sully-  Respond to of 35834
 
The Weak Spot In Every Political Figure

The Campaign Spot
Jim Geraghty Reporting

There was a lot in Palin's meandering speech announcing her resignation that didn't quite make sense, but one brief part that did was her mentioning of the ridicule of her infant son, Trig. Also note that in the past month or so, we've seen David Letterman joke about Alex Rodriguez knocking up one of her daughters. (The fact that Letterman kept insisting that he meant the elder daughter didn't really make it much more excusable; for some reason, getting an apology out of the acerbic late night host was like pulling teeth.)

It's one thing to step into the public spotlight and know that people are going to ridicule your intelligence, your appearance, your judgment, your voice and accent, etc. But it's another to know that your loved ones will get that scrutiny, too, and in particular your children. Kids don't pick their parents. I wrote about this here.

That spurred this terrifying thought: The lesson that the ruthless corners of the political world will take from the rise, fall, and departure of Sarah Palin that if you attack a politician's children nastily enough and relentlessly enough, you can get anybody to quit.

campaignspot.nationalreview.com



To: Sully- who wrote (31039)7/6/2009 7:13:42 AM
From: Sully-1 Recommendation  Respond to of 35834
 
A Letter to Sarah

Stay home and do your job and your homework.

By Jonah Goldberg
National Review Online

Dear Governor Palin,

You’re blowing it.

We haven’t met, but you might remember I was one of the first columnists to tout you for John McCain’s running mate. I cheered you mightily when Senator McCain selected you, and I still believe that you were the smartest choice he could have made given the obstacles before him. I’m also assuming you want to run for president some day.

There’s a reason why the Left and much of the media establishment hated you from day one. Some hated you out of the fear that you might stop Barack Obama’s unfolding coronation. Others because you seemed to expose the snobbery, arrogance, and ideological pieties of elite feminism. Your beauty, your status as a working mom, your blue-collar husband, your bravery in taking on the political establishment in Alaska, your proud status as a pro-lifer and mother of a special-needs child: All of these things were — and are — deeply threatening to a secular left-wing cultural elite.

All of this was an incredible compliment. Powerful people don’t fear the powerless. Remember how Mike Huckabee borrowed that Air Force maxim when he got grief during the primaries? “If you’re not taking flak, you’re not over the target.” Well, you were over the target.

But not anymore. Oh, you’re still taking flak, but not because you strike fear in the hearts of Democrats. You’re taking flak because you’re striking fear in the hearts of Republicans. For Democrats, fairly or not, you’ve become a laughingstock. And for some of McCain’s campaign managers, you’ve become a convenient excuse for their failures.

But while McCain’s strategists do not cover themselves in glory for scapegoating you, you are not without blame either. You do seem to think the best advice is for you to stay just the way you are. Leaders listen to the advice they don’t necessarily want to hear.

For starters, every time I see you on TV, you’re whining about unfair press coverage. Don’t get me wrong: Much of it is unfair, and some of it deserves a response. But it’s not presidential. It’s not even gubernatorial. You are constantly taking the bait, taking up the fights your biggest fans want you to take up.

But here’s the thing: Don’t listen to your biggest fans. Don’t alienate them either, but don’t think that because the Palin4Pres crowd cheers, you’re making progress. Politics is ultimately about persuasion, and you seem entirely uninterested in that, preferring instead to play the victim. Well, victims don’t get elected president. Ronald Reagan was a laughingstock for liberals and despised by the press. But he didn’t whine or take the bait.

Second, peddling a few platitudes and truisms about free markets and limited government is no substitute for really knowing what you’re talking about. Yes, you can talk well about the stuff you know — oil drilling, energy, etc. — but beyond your comfort zone, you fall back on bumper-sticker language that sounds fine to the people who already agree with you but is useless in winning over skeptics.

President Bush had the same problem you do, which is why there’s a hunger for Republicans who can effectively articulate and sell our policies and philosophy. That’s why the wonks have the upper hand. Mitt Romney, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, and other hands-on types are what the party wants and, frankly, needs.

Here’s the good news: You have time. Here’s the better news: You have something no one else in the party has — charisma. And I don’t mean you have the most charisma like it’s a consolation prize for not being elected prom queen. If money could buy what you have, Romney would have bought it all by now. Good politicians can learn how to win over audiences, but the great ones are born with the ability. Reagan had it. Clinton had it. Obama has it. You have it. You are the “It Girl” of the GOP.

What you lack, you can learn. If knowing how to describe the situation in Pakistan or explain the “doughnut hole” in health-care coverage was all you needed to get elected, an intern with a subscription to The Economist could be president.

So here’s my advice. Stay home and do your job and your homework. You’ll still be a national figure come the primaries. But if you can’t surprise your detractors with your grasp of policy when you re-emerge on the national stage, you won’t win the nomination. More important, you won’t deserve to.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

article.nationalreview.com



To: Sully- who wrote (31039)7/6/2009 7:37:08 AM
From: Sully-  Respond to of 35834
 
Cutting Bait

Mark Steyn
The Corner

With respect to many of the Palinologists below, I think they're getting way too hepatomantic over the entrails.

As a political move for anything other than the 2010 Senate race, today's announcement is a disaster. And I'm not sure it's a plus for the Senate - and, even if it were, the manner and timing suggest it was not a professionally planned event and therefore is unlikely to have any grand strategy behind it.

So Occam's Razor leaves us with: Who needs this?

In states far from the national spotlight, politics still attracts normal people. You're a mayor or a state senator or even the governor, but you lead a normal life. The local media are tough on you, but they know you, they live where you live, they're tough on the real you, not on some caricature cooked up by a malign alliance of late-night comics who'd never heard of you a week earlier and media grandees supposedly on your own side who pronounce you a "cancer."

Then suddenly you get the call from Washington. You know it'll mean Secret Service, and speechwriters, and minders vetting your wardrobe. But nobody said it would mean a mainstream network comedy host doing statutory rape gags about your 14-year old daughter. You've got a special-needs kid and a son in Iraq and a daughter who's given you your first grandchild in less than ideal circumstances. That would be enough for most of us. But the special-needs kid and the daughter and most everyone else you love are a national joke, and the PC enforcers are entirely cool with it.

Most of those who sneer at Sarah Palin have no desire to live her life. But why not try to — what's the word? — "empathize"? If you like Wasilla and hunting and snowmachining and moose stew and politics, is the last worth giving up everything else in the hopes that one day David Letterman and Maureen Dowd might decide Trig and Bristol and the rest are sufficiently non-risible to enable you to prosper in their world? And, putting aside the odds, would you really like to be the person you'd have to turn into under that scenario?

National office will dwindle down to the unhealthily singleminded (Clinton, Obama), the timeserving emirs of Incumbistan (Biden, McCain), and dynastic heirs (Bush). Our loss.

corner.nationalreview.com



To: Sully- who wrote (31039)7/6/2009 7:41:51 AM
From: Sully-1 Recommendation  Respond to of 35834
 
Writing Sarah Off

Victor Davis Hanson
The Corner

Conventional wisdom suggests that short-term the Palin decision was unwise — e.g., "quitter," unpredictable, sulking, etc. But what else are her critics really going to say? It's not like a Letterman can trump laughing at her on late-night television as he puns that a Yankees star had sex in a dugout with her 14-year old daughter. Can Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic's website go beyond his slurs that she did not deliver her own child? How much more cleverly can N.Y. feminist pundits tsk-tsk her that she's a Wasilla trailer-park retread?

In other words, it doesn't matter that much what critics say, but — should she pursue politics — only what she does with her newfound time, especially if she travels widely, studies foreign policy, and helps galvanize the party base.

In the long run, she can lecture, earn a good income through speaking, develop a coterie of advisers and supporters, take care of her family, not have the constant political warring on all flanks, and invest time in reflecting and studying issues, visit the country, meet leaders, etc. She's not looking at 2012; but in eight years by 2016 she will be far more savvy, still young, and far more experienced. It matters not all that the Left writes her off as daffy, since they were going to do that whatever she did; the key is whether she convinces conservatives in eight years of travel and reflection that she's a charismatic Margaret Thatcher-type heavyweight.

corner.nationalreview.com



To: Sully- who wrote (31039)7/6/2009 7:44:27 AM
From: Sully-1 Recommendation  Respond to of 35834
 
I'm with VDH

Jonah Goldberg
The Corner

On everything except the idea that we can know she's not looking at 2012. In fact, as I said yesterday, her resignation doesn't make much sense to me if she's not looking at 2012.

Update: From a reader:

<<< Unless her reason for stepping down really does have to do mainly with removing her children from the exposure of the continued vicious attacks of the left. In this case, she has decided family first.... and is willing to take the short-term hits for "abandoning" her post. In the long run, I think this is a plus with the conservative base. >>>

Fair enough. It certainly is true that nobody in public life in recent memory has been as shabbily treated as she has.

corner.nationalreview.com



To: Sully- who wrote (31039)7/6/2009 7:50:44 AM
From: Sully-2 Recommendations  Respond to of 35834
 
Palin's Shabby Treatment

Jonah Goldberg
The Corner

I'm getting a lot of indignant left-wing e-mail for my statement yesterday re Palin: "It certainly is true that nobody in public life in recent memory has been as shabbily treated as she has."

The gist of the complaints is that some right-wingers said mean things about Hillary Clinton or Janet Reno or some such. And it's true, some mean and unfair things were said about those folks. But I think a lot of these lefties seem oblivious to the fact that the New York Times, the news networks (minus Fox), David Letterman, et al aren't supposed to be scored as partisan outlets, but they are. And they've gone after Palin and her family in ways that I think are particularly egregious. Complaining about Richard Mellon Scaife's treatment of the Clintons is perfectly fair. But comparing it to the mainstream and "respectable" assaults on Palin is not persuasive.

corner.nationalreview.com



To: Sully- who wrote (31039)7/7/2009 11:20:56 AM
From: Sully-  Respond to of 35834
 
Palin Blasts Critics, Remains Mum on 2012 Bid

In her first interview since announcing she was stepping down as governor of Alaska, Palin remains coy about her presidential aspirations but criticized both Obama and the Republican Party.

By Robert Shaffer and Dan Springer
FOXNews.com
Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Gov. Sarah Palin was coy about her presidential aspirations but criticized both President Obama and the Republican Party in her first interview since announcing she was stepping down as governor of Alaska.

Standing astride a fishing boat she would later climb aboard to haul in fishing nets and salmon, Palin expressed bitterness at bloggers who peppered her with ethics accusations, whom she said brought government in Alaska to a grinding halt.

"The critics want to put you on a course of personal bankruptcy, so you can't afford to serve," she said, calling the attacks "bull crap."

The governor made the remarks in an interview with FOX News in Dillingham, where she was fishing with her husband, Todd, and daughter Piper. Reporters from three other networks were also in attendance.

Palin said she has started a legal defense fund to raise money for legal fees.

She said Obama is taking the country in the wrong direction, and while she wouldn't reveal her future plans, indicated she has fight left in her.

"Average, hard-working Americans need to be able to get out there, unrestrained, and fight for what is right," she said. "Fight for energy independence and national security, fight for a smaller government instead of this big government overgrowth that Obama is ushering in."

Palin also offered criticism of the Washington, D.C., political establishment, and even the Republican Party, which nominated her to be vice president last year.

"Obsessive partisanship" has hurt the party, she said, striking a more independent beat than the partisan tune she sang on the campaign trail.

"We have so many people who offer advice, but I'm going to continue to be, whether some of them like it or not, pretty darn independent, and not get wrapped up into a strong political machine that hasn't been extremely successful in some ways."

Palin also decried the state of the American media and said news coverage of her children was unfair.

"Most candidates, most public officials get to look into a camera and say, 'you better leave your hands off my kids,'" she said. "Well I haven't been able to say that. And that double standard that's been applied, that's been a little bit frustrating."

Asked if she wanted to be president, she repeated she did not know what her future holds.

"I want to work, right now, for people who are going to work either in office or out of office for the right things. Those principles that build up America, those who are inspired by the values of America, and will not deride or apologize for the values we hold as Americans."

Palin had cited attacks on her family and multiple ethics complaints that had forced her family to rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills. As a result, it's unlikely she'd run for president in 2012, suggested Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.

"Not having talked to the governor, I take 2012 off the table right now simply because given everything she's going through personally, dealing with the financial mess that all these ludicrous investigations have put her and Todd in, at the moment, I think she's trying to focus on getting her house in order, her personal house in order," Steele told FOX News.

"I look forward to welcoming her out and helping us in our campaigns this fall if and when shes ready to do that. Sarah Palin will be the ultimate arbiter of when she will engage and how she will engage," he said.

As Palin spoke, she and her husband Todd Palin loaded four news crews into two small fishing boats and headed into Bristol Bay from Dillingham.

The Palin family -- Todd's sister, mother and father, as well as nieces and at least two children, had picked the journalists up at the airport in Dillingham and shuttled them to Bristol Bay in old pickup trucks and SUVs.

On the bay, Sarah Palin showed how they spent time each summer hauling up pre-placed nets, emptying them of captured salmon, and tossing them back into the water.

Todd Palin was all smiles as he captained the fishing boat in Bristol Bay out to nets filled with Sockeye.

He grew up commercial fishing these waters and Sarah Palin has been making the summer trip to Dillingham for many years. She joked that even though she's been helping her husband haul in fish for decades he still yells at her for doing it wrong. The governor and another hauler lifted the nets out of the water and pried the salmon out.

It was tough work. She wore rubber gloves, knee-high boots and waders.

This was a portrait of the moose hunter and folksy hockey mom that emerged soon after she was picked by Sen. John McCain to be his running mate.

foxnews.com



To: Sully- who wrote (31039)7/7/2009 11:54:26 AM
From: Sully-  Respond to of 35834
 
     If we could, we’d cut off her head and mount it on a wall 
at Tammany Hall, except there is no more Tammany Hall
unless you count Obama’s Tony Rezko–financed home in
Chicago.

I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin

The Republicans bring a knife to a gunfight, and lose again.

By David Kahane
National Review Online

One of the most terrifying moments of my political life came last summer at the Republican convention in St. Paul. No, I don’t mean seeing John McCain careering around the Xcel Energy Center like Eyegore in Young Frankenstein, his face frozen in a Lon Chaney Sr. rictus grin as he reached across the aisle to his erstwhile friends in the media and got his hand bitten off. Rather, I’m referring to the aftermath of Sarah Palin’s outrageous acceptance speech, which whipped up the Rotary Club delegates into a frenzy of white-boy fury that not even heckling by a brave Code Pink embed could deter. Truly a fascist classic and one that sent shivers down our collectivist spines.

Even worse was the glaze of horror on the phizzes of the assembled heroes of the Mainstream Media. Andrea Mitchell — yes, the very same Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, whose employer saw no conflict of interest at all when she married then Fed pooh-bah Alan Greenspan — stood there gaping like a frog while the rest of the assembled Finemans and Matthewses and Olbermanns scurried around like roaches when the light gets turned on: What the hell just hit us? For one horrible moment, it looked as if the carefully crafted plans of David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, George Soros, and the Second Chief Directorate, first department, of the old KGB were about to gang agley.

Not only were we offended at the sheer effrontery of McCain’s pick: How dare the Republicans proffer this déclassée piece of Wasilla trailer trash whose only claim to fame was that she didn’t exercise her right to choose? Where were her degrees from Smith or Barnard, her internships at PETA, the Brookings Institution, or the Young Pioneers? We were also outraged that the Stupid Party had just nominated a completely unqualified candidate nobody had ever heard of, a first-term governor of Alaska whose previous experience consisted of a small-town mayoralty. As opposed to our guy, Barry Soetoro of Mombasa, Djakarta, and Honolulu, a first-term senator nobody had ever heard of, whose previous experience had been as a state senator (D., Daley Machine) in Illinois. After eight long, illegitimate, lawless years of &*^%BUSH$#@! tyranny, how dare you contest this election?

And so the word went out, from that time and place: Eviscerate Sarah Palin like one of her field-dressed moose. Turn her life upside down. Attack her politics, her background, her educational history. Attack her family. Make fun of her husband, her children. Unleash the noted gynecologist Andrew Sullivan to prove that Palin’s fifth child was really her grandchild. Hit her with everything we have: Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, taking a beer-run break from her quixotic search for Mr. Right to drip venom on Sister Sarah; post-funny comic David Letterman, to joke about her and her daughters on national television; Katie Couric, the anchor nobody watches, to give this Alaskan interloper a taste of life in the big leagues; former New York Times hack Todd “Mr. Dee Dee Myers” Purdum, to act as an instrument of Graydon Carter’s wrath at Vanity Fair. Heck, we even burned her church down. Even after the teleological triumph of The One, the assault had to continue, each blow delivered with our Lefty SneerTM (viz.: Donny Deutsch yesterday on Morning Joe), until Sarah was finished.

You know what? It worked!
McCain finally succumbed to his long-standing case of Stockholm Syndrome (“My friends, you have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency”), Tina Fey turned Palin into a see-Russia-from-my-house joke, “conservative” useful idiots like Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker hatched her, and finally Sarah cried No más and walked away. If we could, we’d cut off her head and mount it on a wall at Tammany Hall, except there is no more Tammany Hall unless you count Obama’s Tony Rezko–financed home in Chicago. And it took only eight months — heck, Sarah couldn't even have another kid in the time it took us to destroy her. That’s the Chicago way!

Yes, my friends, it’s once again time to quote Sean Connery’s famous speech from The Untouchables, written by David Mamet — the lecture the veteran Chicago cop gives a wet-behind-the-ears Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner, back when he was a movie star) while they sit in a church pew. “You want to get Capone? Here’s how you get him: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” If you just think of us — liberal Democrats — as Capone you’ll begin to understand what we’re up to. And we just put one of yours in the morgue.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but maybe now you’re beginning to understand the high-stakes game we’re playing here.
This ain’t John McCain’s logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United States of America. This is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won’t be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it.

In other words, stop thinking of the Democratic Party as merely a political party, because it’s much more than that.
We’re not just the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition. Not just the party of Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Richard J. Croker, Bull Connor, Chris Dodd, Richard Daley, Bill Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II. Not just the party of Kendall “Agent 202” Myers, the State Department official recruited as a Cuban spy along with his wife during the Carter administration. Rather, think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.

If you had any sense, you would start using our tactics against us.
After all, you have a few lawyers on your side. Sue us. File frivolous ethics complaints against all our elected officials until, like Sarah, they go broke from defending themselves. (David Paterson would be a good place to start.) Challenge the constitutionality of BO2’s legion of fill-in-the-blank czars — none of whom have to be confirmed, or even pass a security check. (Come to think of it, neither did Barry.) Let slip your own journalistic dogs of war, assuming you have any, to find Barry’s birth certificate, his college transcripts, whether he applied to Occidental as a foreign student, and on which passport he traveled in 1981 to Pakistan with his friend Wahid Hamid, for starters.

You might also want to think about interviewing New York literary agent Jane Dystel, who a) contacted the totally unknown Obama in the wake of an adulatory New York Times piece in 1990 and b) got him a $125,000 advance for a memoir that c) he couldn’t write, even after a long sojourn in Bali, which d) got the contract canceled, whereupon e) Dystel got him $40,000 from another publisher, following which f) the book finally came out to glowing reviews and g) Obama fired her. Wouldn’t she have an interesting story to tell?

Of course, you won’t. You’re too nice, too enamored of history and tradition to realize that the rules have changed. Remember, I live and work in a town where, “Hello, he lied,” isn’t a joke; we men of the Left are perfectly comfortable lying, cheating, and stealing — hello, Senator Franken! — in order to attain and keep political power. Not for nothing is one of our mottos, “By Any Means Necessary.” You see, we’re the good guys, and for us the ends always justify the means. We are, literally, shameless, which is why Bill Clinton is now a multi-millionaire and Eliot Spitzer is already on the comeback trail.

In Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, “the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” This is the book that “Reset” Rodham (what ever happened to her?) and BHO II grew up reading and continue to live by. If you don’t understand that that’s the way we see you — as the enemy — then you’re too dumb to survive. Remember that for us politics is not just an avocation, or even just a job, but our life. We literally stay awake nights thinking up ways to screw you. And one of the ways we do that is by religiously observing Alinsky’s Rule No. 4.

Did Sarah stand for “family values”? Flay her unwed-mother daughter. Did she represent probity in a notoriously corrupt, one-family state? Spread rumors about FBI investigations. Did she speak with an upper-Midwest twang? Mock it relentlessly on Saturday Night Live. Above all, don’t let her motivate the half of the country that doesn’t want His Serene Highness to bankrupt the nation, align with banana-republic Communist dictators, unilaterally dismantle our missile defenses, and set foot in more mosques than churches since he has become president. We’ve got a suicide cult to run here.

And that’s why Sarah had to go. Whether she understood it or not, she threatened us right down to our most fundamental, meretricious, elitist, sneering, snobbish, insecure, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders bones. She was, after all, a “normal” American, the kind of person (or so I’m told) you meet in flyover country. The kind that worries first about home and hearth and believes in things like motherhood and love of country the way it is, not the way she wants to remake it.

What you clowns need, in other words, is a Rules for Radical Conservatives to explain what you’re up against and teach you how to compete before it’s too late. Luckily, since I care about money even more than I care about politics, I have just such a book in the proposal stage, currently making the rounds of various publishers, assuming any of them are wise enough to take me up on it.

And, yes, this time it really is personal.

— David Kahane is pushing for a new national holiday to commemorate the destruction of Sarah Palin, and is hopeful that his senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, will co-sponsor it, along with Henry Waxman in the House. You can second the motion at kahanenro@gmail.com or on Facebook.

article.nationalreview.com