Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Palindrone

Gene at Harry's Place, writing about Sarah Palin:

So doesn’t a woman (or a man, for that matter) with a Down’s Syndrome baby and a pregnant teenage daughter have a responsibility to her family than she does to the rather time-consuming task of running for vice president and serving as Alaska’s governor? Please don’t tell me she can simply “do it all.”
Gene's comments were met with tepid enthusiasm, especially by women commentators.

Andrew Sullivan:
The salient political issues of the Palin pick are two-fold: Can Palin be trusted to tell the truth? And how competent is a campaign that picks a candidate without any serious vetting of stuff that can appear on the Internet within a few hours of the news? We need to refocus on those core questions. I fear the answers are: we can't trust Palin to tell the truth; and the manner of McCain's pick demonstrates some of the most grotesque incompetence in modern political history.
Andrew isn't distinguishing between things the Republican vetters were aware of and willing to wave through, and things the rest of us weren't yet aware of.

Meanwhile, it seems Palin comes from Alaska's "Bible Belt" - this piece by an Alaskan illustrated by the following picture:



I lived in Wasilla for about four months, in the early 1980s. I'm pretty sure the establishment above was called Huppy's Roadhouse back then. I spent about one night a week there. Behind the photographer's right shoulder was a restaurant that did an all-you-can-eat Sunday breakfast. They used to flinch visibly when they saw me walking across the gravel towards them, newspapers under an arm.

Happy days. But I can tell you this - Wasilla ain't no Bible Belt. "Full of mutants and outlaws", as one Anchorage resident described it to me, was nearer the truth.

I've never seen either political wing so rattled by a running mate choice. McCain must be blowing the smoke from the end of his gun barrel.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The screeching from the 'womyn' at various feminist hard left sites like Pandagon is very amusing to read... ;)

Peter Risdon said...

I must go and have a read. There's a lot of funny stuff about. This calls for popcorn and an easy chair.

Anonymous said...

It's funny only up to a point (when you are comparing their naked hatred to the likely comments they'd make should attacks of this sort be made on a Democrat nominee).

Too much of it, though, is liable to make that popcorn hard to swallow. There's some really sick people out there...

Unknown said...

"Wasilla ain't no Bible Belt. "Full of mutants and outlaws", as one Anchorage resident described it to me, was nearer the truth."

Actually, all of Alaska is pretty much like that. And not all the feminists are joining the smear campaign. Some are mightly pissed (in the American sense) about it, and so are their commenters. The biggest Hillary forum on the web is full of very angry women, too.