Quotes From Around Yon Sarahsphere
The report that she refused to prepare for the Couric interview makes everything quite clear. She wasn't overwhelmed with scripted answers and talking points that they had been forcing on her -- she was genuinely at a loss for coherent answers because she had not even attempted to prepare for the questions she would be asked, and so she tried to bluster her way through to rather calamitous results. Far from being a distorted or misleading image of what Palin knew on her own, that may have been the clearest picture of her understanding of the issues that we had in the last two months. In the last few days, I have seen remarks to the effect that "anti-Palin" conservatives are going to end up feeling foolish in the future for having doubted her qualifications, but with every passing day and each new revelation I am even more convinced that everyone who criticized her fairly on her record and statements will have no reason to feel that way.
The trashing of her is unseemly, and some of the particulars—the bathrobe bit for example—don't seem all that important. But if it is true that Gov. Palin did not know that South Africa was a country on the continent of Africa, it is the type of information that voters should know before her career progresses. And I don't think, by the way, that most people on the Left fear her.
I wrote that "The Palin choice is not as egregious as Bush’s decision to install Michael Brown at the helm of FEMA (Brownie had previously run the International Arabian Horse Association), but some swing voters may be forgiven for wondering whether McCain is perpetuating the Bush tradition of filling key posts with ill-qualified people . . . and, in the present case, somebody whom McCain barely knows at all." And referring to Hillary Clinton's female supporters, I also wrote that "millions of women are likely to feel insulted by the assumption that they'll flock to Palin merely because they all share the same gender. No doubt McCain would like to think that he can make inroads with the disgruntled Hillary Clinton sisterhood merely by putting Palin on display. But I hardly think that those women will march behind the GOP banner once they learn . . . that basically she stands for everything that Hillary Clinton has opposed for the past 35 years." If this was all obvious to observers like me, why was it not obvious to the McCain professionals? Palin ended up damaging McCain in the swing suburbs of swing states. Moreover, 60 percent of all voters told the exit pollsters that she was not qualified to be president, and perhaps that share would have been higher if some of the dirt now being leaked had surfaced earlier. Take last night's tidbit, for instance. Fox News, citing leaks from McCain advisers, reports that Palin didn't even realize that Africa was a continent. Seriously. She thought that Africa was one big country, and that South Africa was just one of the regions.
Sarah Palin left the national stage Wednesday, but the controversy over her role on the ticket flared as aides to John McCain disclosed new details about her expensive wardrobe purchases and revealed that a Republican Party lawyer would be dispatched to Alaska to inventory and retrieve the clothes still in her possession.
The Alaska state trooper who was the subject of harsh allegations by Gov. Sarah Palin was taken off patrols recently for his own safety, after her comments allegedly prompted a series of threatening phone calls, KIMO-TV in Anchorage reported Friday.
Some Republicans are still imagining that Palin will be the party's standard-bearer in 2012. That seems unlikely, unless defeat drives the GOP completely berserk. Palin is very unpopular in the country as a whole. Her support consists largely of thuggish pseudo-populists ensconced in talk-radio echo chambers, along with apocalyptic fundamentalists who see the anti-Christ in president-elect Barack Obama. Such factions do not a majority make, though they remain a sizeable minority. Indeed, they're a minority in need of a new leader, which is, ultimately, where I suspect Palin's future lies. She'd be a natural as a Fox News talk show host, a gig that will pay for all the department store binges she could ever want.
The day of the third debate, Palin refused to go onstage with New Hampshire GOP Sen. John Sununu and Jeb Bradley, a New Hampshire congressman running for the Senate, because they were pro-choice and because Bradley opposed drilling in Alaska. The McCain campaign ordered her onstage at the next campaign stop, but she refused to acknowledge the two Republican candidates standing behind her.
[C]onservatives are not going to be afraid to give President Obama constructive criticism when necessary, while we wait for 2012, when we can all get behind the Sarah Palin/Dan Quayle ticket (yes you can say you heard it here first: Palin will be the Republican nominee in 2012 and she will select Dan Quayle as her running mate to add experience and gravitas to the ticket). When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, Bob Dole famously said "Good news is, Clinton's on his honeymoon. Bad news is, his chaperone is Bob Dole." That was before the Internet. President Obama is going to have the whole conservative blogosphere as his chaperone.
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