[Rhodes22-list] Political Cartoon ...

[Brad Haslett]

Robert,

McCain had his first meeting with the SarahCuda back in February, so
if he gets upstaged, he has no one to blame but himself.  Murkowski
passed her over as the appointment to his Senate seat in favor of his
daughter and that bit him in the ass big time. She didn't just beat
him for Governor in the primaries, she smoked him, then took aim at
the former Democratic Governor candidate and put him away with a clean
kill.  Moose isn't the only thing she has a deadly aim for. They've
been trying to get that gas pipeline built in Alaska for years and
Sarah got tired of pussy-footing around with the oil executives and
put it out for bid, same as the Governors jet, and guess what, it's
being built.  There was a great line in her speech about her parents
raising her to believe there wasn't a door a woman couldn't walk
through.  Based on the 'good ole boys' experience in Alaska, you
better move out of the way of the door if Sarah wants to walk through
or you'll get flattened. If McCain makes it to the White House, I hope
he gives her this task as her first job, "Sarah, Pelosi hasn't done
jack about 'draining the swamp' in two years, go take of that and get
back to me next week for a new assignment"  I'm not quite sure if
she's the second coming of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, or Teddy
Roosevelt, but she's a breath of fresh air.  Too bad you have to go
overseas to get a good media perspective but I'm attaching The Times
of London's take on things.

Brad

------------------

>From The Times
September 5, 2008
Sarah Palin: it's go west, towards the future of conservatism
Her thrilling convention speech showed that the Governor of Alaska is
a force to reckoned with. But she might be more than that
Gerard Baker

The best line I heard about Sarah Palin during the frenzied orgy of
chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion
that greeted her nomination for vice-president a week ago came from a
correspondent who knows a thing or two about Alaska.

"What's the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?"

"One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let's be honest, pretty
sexy piece of eye-candy.

"The other kills her own food."

Now we know, thanks to her triumphant debut at the Republican
convention on Wednesday, that Mrs Palin not only slaughters her prey.
She impales its head on a stick and parades it around for her
followers to jeer at. For half an hour she eviscerated Mr Obama in
that hall and did it all without dropping her sweet schoolmarm smile,
as if she were handing out chocolates at the end of a history lesson.

There's a powerful danger in the sheer thrill that has followed her
astonishing performance that we could get carried away with John
McCain's running-mate. Some of the coverage has a hyperbolic tone to
it. Not since Paris handed that apple to Aphrodite has a man's
selection of a woman had such implications for the future of our
civilisation.

So let's stipulate one obvious and important piece of wisdom about US
elections. The choice of a vice-presidential candidate rarely makes
much of a difference. The pundit class waxes historical in the
excitement of the moment but usually the vice-presidential choices go
back to playing second banana. However mawkishly we dwell on the
mortality of the presidential contenders, it is they who determine the
voters' decision.

This one, to be fair, could be different. For at least the next few
weeks the press will follow Mrs Palin's present and dig deeper into
her past, still hoping for some morsel of stupidity or evidence of
cupidity to doom her. But in the end, barring such a discovery, this
is still an Obama-McCain contest.

But let me try to explain why Mrs Palin, whatever impact she might
have in November, may be a figure of real consequence in our lives.

It's partly about what she represents and partly about what she has
already done, but mostly about where she and her ilk might take the
Republicans - and possibly America.

It never ceases to amaze me how the Left falls again and again into
the old trap of underestimating politicians whom they don't
understand. From Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to George Bush
and Mrs Palin, they do it every time. Because these characters talk a
bit funny and have ridiculously antiquated views about faith, family
and nation, because they haven't spent time bending the knee to the
intellectual metropolitan elites, they can't be taken seriously.

So the general expectation was that Mrs Palin would stumble on to the
stage in high heels, clutching her sprawling, slightly odd family
(five children! how weird), mispronounce the name of the Russian Prime
Minister, mutter a few platitudes about God, and disappear for ever to
a deafening chorus of sniggers.

No one paid much attention to the fact that she had been elected
governor of a state. Or that she got to that office not because,
unlike some politicians I could mention, her husband had been there
before her, or because she bleated continuously about glass ceilings,
but by challenging the entrenched interests in her own party and
beating them. In almost two years as Governor she has cleaned out the
Augean stables of Alaskan Government. You don't win a statewide
election and enjoy approval ratings of more than 80 per cent without
real political talent.

Never mind all that. She didn't have a passport! She was a former
beauty queen! It was so axiomatic that she was a disaster that I was
told by lots of savvy men - with deliciously unconscious sexism - that
the real problem was what the choice said about Mr McCain and his
judgment: cynical, irresponsible, clueless. It was as if Mrs Palin
wasn't really a human being at all, but an article of Mr McCain's
clothing that showed his poor taste, like wearing brown shoes with a
charcoal suit.

So here's why she matters.

First of all she offers an opportunity for an ailing Republican party
to reconnect with ordinary Americans. She's conservative, but her
conservatism is not that of the intolerant, uncomprehending white male
sort that has so hurt the party in recent years. She is much closer to
a model of the lives of ordinary Americans - working mother,
plainspoken everywoman juggling home and office - than any Republican
leader in memory.

The contrast with Mr Obama is especially powerful. The very fact that
Mrs Palin didn't go to elite schools but succeeded nonetheless - the
very ordinariness with which she so piquantly jabbed Mr Obama on
Wednesday - is what will make her so appealing to Americans. And as a
pro-life conservative she debunks in one swoop the enduring myth that
all women subscribe to the obligatory nostrums of radical feminism.

But there's more to it than that.

The Republicans have decided that they are not going to make the
mistake Hillary Clinton made and run against the effervescent Mr Obama
on the premise of experience.

Experience hasn't got Americans into a very comfortable place. They
want change. Before he signed up to some of the less attractive
Republican attitudes this year, Mr McCain's career had embodied that
change - the anti-establishment candidate running against his own
party. Now he is joined by a woman who, in her short career, has done
the same thing.

Democrats think that Mr McCain, with the social conservative Mrs
Palin, will launch an old-fashioned culture war at them, using her
appealing manner to drive a populist assault on the familiar
Republican issues of God, guns and gays.

Perhaps this Manichean interpretation will prove true. But I suspect
that it misses the real appeal of the Republican team. The opportunity
for McCain-Palin is not reaction, but reform - a reform rooted in a
distant conservatism that could be due for a comeback

Hailing from Arizona and Alaska, the Republican ticket has a chance to
rekindle a western conservatism different from the old Yankee
paternalist sort or the Bible Belt version. They like their guns out
there (some still kill their own food) and they are pro-life and
deeply pro-America, of course. But at a time of grave challenges, the
themes of economic freedom and opportunity, the resistance to the idea
that government holds all the answers, could resonate with voters.

This is an election, as the Democrats have realised all along, about
an America on the cusp of change. With the moose-hunting,
establishment-taunting Mrs Palin at his side, Mr McCain might
represent a bigger change than the one that his opponents are
offering.

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Robert Skinner
<Robert at squirrelhaven.com> wrote:
> Figured I'd clean up the pic a little, and guess what I found?
>
> Tootle wrote:
>> http://www.nabble.com/file/p19332637/Trophy.tif Trophy.tif
>>
>> Ed K
>> Greenville, SC, USA
>>
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