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Politics : The View From the Centre -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (713)	11/21/2009 3:57:42 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1134

Obama inspires; Palin connects They are, in the way of fate, curiously parallel figures Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009 3:01AM EST There are two great political speakers in the America today. Sarah Palin is the other one. Barack Obama's speaking skills are his signature talent. He's a platform performer, a speechmaker in the great tradition, a kind of teleprompter Cicero. The campaign to become President owed more to Mr. Obama's oratorical mastery than to any other element. His speech on race in America, necessitated by revelations of the ugly thoughts and sentiments of his hometown preacher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was the most important event of his campaign. If it had failed, his candidacy would have been doomed. Under pressure – the great test of the real speechmaker – he delivered. The other great speech of the U.S. campaign season was Sarah Palin's on receiving the vice-presidential slot on the McCain ticket. This was a speech delivered under even greater pressures than that of Mr. Obama. John McCain's choice of Ms. Palin had been early and widely criticized, and in some quarters ferociously reviled. She had never really been under the national spotlight before. The entire media were focused on her with an intensity almost unseen in the annals of vice-presidential politics. If she'd been just “okay,” or messed up, John McCain's campaign was over. It was the highest of high-stakes gambles. Did she deliver? She soared. She was the very acme of self-confidence and ease. She mixed a natural charm with a mischievous edge of sarcasm toward her opponents – even daring the unthinkable by pinging The One himself. It was her “first serve” on the national stage and she delivered an ace. The backwoods hick knocked it out of the hall that night – not only did she not sink the McCain campaign, she gave it the only real vitality and spark that gloomy, tight, fussy little campaign had from start to finish. Her speech, in fact, was the rhetorical equivalent of Mr. Obama's crucial one. They do not as speakers, it is obvious, share the same idiom. Mr. Obama is utterly composed, deliberate down to gesture and word, very conscious that he is a “figure” on a stage. Mr. Obama “bestows” himself on an audience. Ms. Palin has none of that. She will never speak in front of faux Greek columns. She walks on the stage much the same way she'd go into a gas station. But she's shrewd in her choice of themes, has a marvellous feel for her audience, and a confidence that will never be confused with arrogance. They are, in the way fate or the mysteries of politics sometimes offers such things, curiously equivalent or parallel figures, polar opposites but equals. Ms. Palin connects: Mr. Obama inspires. She's a latter-day frontier figure, impulsive, instinctive; he's pure urban cool, highly deliberate, even detached. Both have real charisma. It will make Obama fans perspire to hear this, but Ms. Palin has a more forceful bond with her supporters than he with his. Mr. Obama offers a kind of self-flattery to his worshippers. They feel exalted that they have the intelligence or sensibility to see how remarkable their man is. But he remains remote. Ms. Palin works close up. She offers those much invoked, but actually neglected figures, “the ordinary Joe or Josephine,” a real sense that she does represent them. Ms. Palin is in the hurricane's eye again with the publication of Going Rogue. The Associated Press assigned no fewer than 11 reporters to “fact check” Ms. Palin's memoir, a concentration of scrutiny AP would never presume to exert over the man who's actually in the White House. Elements of the press mock and scorn her with a fury that is near inexplicable. Rather fewer extol her gifts. But pro or con, the media cannot get enough of her. Professional feminists despise her, view her with unhinged contempt, as witness this classic assessment of academic Wendy Doniger: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.” Dutiful “progressives,” otherwise windsocks of sensitivity and nuance, revile her in the crudest, most extravagant terms. The intensity of their hostility, its unbridledness and dreadful tastelessness (the speculations on the birth of her Downs syndrome child) is an unwitting measure of her power. A truly dumb and witless person would not have the demure columnist David Brooks hissing dismissively, angrily in fact, on a Sunday morning talk show that Sarah Palin “is a joke.” Poor Mr. Brooks gets intellectual hives just thinking about her. Empty vessels do not inspire such venom and fury. Ms. Palin is a real and evolving element in the great story of American politics. She is the “other half” of the Obama moment, and she may be in the ascendant. Mr. Obama is losing his lustre, his appeal is dimming, at the very moment the Alaskan outsider is staking her claim. Those who call her a joke are expressing an anxious hope not offering a rational description. Ms. Palin has rare gifts and stamina enough to give them play. She is the second most outstanding figure on the great stage of American politics. Rex Murphy is a commentator with The National and host of CBC Radio's Cross-Country Checkup. theglobeandmail.com

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (713)	1/24/2010 1:45:31 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1134

The untouchable Mean Girls By Kevin Cullen January 24, 2010 Like a lot of kids her age, Phoebe Prince was a swan, always beautiful and sometimes awkward. Last fall, she moved from Ireland into western Massachusetts, a new town, a new high school, a new country, a new culture. She was 15, when all that matters is being liked and wearing the right clothes and just fitting in. She was a freshman and she had a brief fling with a senior, a football player, and for this she became the target of the Mean Girls, who decided then and there that Phoebe didn’t know her place and that Phoebe would pay. Kids can be mean, but the Mean Girls took it to another level, according to students and parents. They followed Phoebe around, calling her a slut. When they wanted to be more specific, they called her an Irish slut. The name-calling, the stalking, the intimidation was relentless. Ten days ago, Phoebe was walking home from school when one of the Mean Girls drove by in a car. An insult and an energy drink can came flying out the car window in Phoebe’s direction. Phoebe kept walking, past the abuse, past the can, past the white picket fence, into her house. Then she walked into a closet and hanged herself. Her 12-year-old sister found her. You would think this would give the bullies who hounded Phoebe some pause. Instead, they went on Facebook and mocked her in death. They told State Police detectives they did nothing wrong, had nothing to do with Phoebe killing herself. And then they went right back to school and started badmouthing Phoebe. They had a dance, a cotillion, at the Log Cabin in Holyoke two days after Phoebe’s sister found her in the closet, and some who were there say one of the Mean Girls bragged about how she played dumb with the detectives who questioned her. Last week, one of the Springfield TV stations sent a crew to South Hadley High to talk to the kids. One girl was interviewed on camera, and she said what was common knowledge: that bullies were stalking the corridors of South Hadley High. As soon as the TV crew was out of sight, one of the Mean Girls came up and slammed the girl who had been interviewed against a locker and punched her in the head. The Mean Girls are pretty, and popular, and play sports. So far, they appear to be untouchable, too. South Hadley is a nice, comfortable middle-class suburb that hugs the Connecticut River nearby and a certain attitude. “Things like this aren’t supposed to happen in South Hadley,’’ said Darby O’Brien, a high school parent, wondering why the bullies who tormented Phoebe are still in school. “And so instead of confronting the evil among us, the reality that there are bullies roaming the corridors at South Hadley High, people are blaming the victim, looking for excuses why a 15-year-old girl would do this. People are in denial.’’ School officials say there are three investigations going on. They say these things take time. That doesn’t explain why the Mean Girls who tortured Phoebe remain in school, defiant, unscathed. “What kind of message does this send to the good kids?’’ O’Brien asked. “How many kids haven’t come forward to tell what they know because they see the bullies walking around untouched?’’ They were supposed to hold a big meeting on Tuesday to talk about all this, but now that’s off for a couple of weeks. O’Brien is thinking about going to that meeting and suggesting that they have the kids who bullied Phoebe look at the autopsy photos. “Let them see what a kid who hung herself looks like,’’ he said. Last week, Phoebe was supposed to visit Ireland, where she grew up, and she was excited because she was going to see her father for the first time in months. She did end up going back to Ireland after all, and when her father saw her she was in a casket. Phoebe’s family decided to bury her in County Clare. They wanted an ocean between her and the people who hounded her to the grave. boston.com