Posted on 10/12/2008 8:04:47 PM PDT by neverdem
David Brooks is taking some heat from doctrine-enforcement agents of the left and right for stating, in an interview with me at that famed redoubt of populism Le Cirque that Sarah Palin represents a "fatal cancer" for the Republican Party...
(Excerpt) Read more at jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com ...
Oh well. Reagan was married twice and Palin isn’t fit to stand in his shadow.
You realize that the Taft family has a longer Yale (and Skull and Bones—which Alphonso Taft helped found) tradition than the Bush family?
Neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln attended college, so by your standards, they would have been unqualified to be president.
I get it now you, were a Giuliani guy. Palin must seem like a real knuckle dragger to you.
Will FR embrace socialism to make way for Rudy Giuliani as a Republican presidential candidate?
Sunday, April 22, 2007 3:37:00 PM · 2,932 of 18,438
Melas to Spiff
“The battle lines are drawn between conservative and liberal - not Republican and Democrat.
Sigh, the trouble is that we cannot agree on what is liberal and what is conservative. What I do know is that honesty is a conservative value, and as such, I will not lie to you, Jim or anyone else and pretend that I’m supporting a candidate that I don’t support just to remain in good standing on FR. I’m supporting Rudy, I have been for quite some time, and I intend on continuing in that endeavor. If that is enough to now get me banned from FR, so be it.
To thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day, that thou cans’t not be false to any man. —Shakespeare.”
Since you seem to be on a mission to dig up old posts, for clarity’s sake, please remember to add that even in April of ‘07, I made it abundantly clear that I was voting for the GOP nominee, no matter who it was.
That's your opinion. Would you care to elaborate on why you think she doesn't have the leadership or intellect? As far as gravitas, who had any since Eisenhower or MacArthur, and why did they have it?
I’m glad that you will pull the lever, but as evidenced on this thread and since Aug. 29, you will attack that ticket with real Giuliani supporter passion.
I heard that the DemoncRATS were doing their”dummifaction” thing back then, and were saying that Ike was to dumb to be President. Ike, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, and the main architect of D-Day, was considered too dumb by the Dims!
Giuliani wasn’t the guy. When push came to shove he came up empty and the votes weren’t there. That happens. Lacking psychic powers, I had no foreknowledge. However, at least it didn’t take me as long as the Hunter supporters to realize the political reality around me.
Do these "betters" include Alger Hiss, the Soviet spy who liked to brag about being a Harvard graduate?
“However, at least it didn’t take me as long as the Hunter supporters to realize the political reality around me.”-————————————————————————————————
I read very many of your posts, I know that you dislike conservatives, it was a trait of the Giuliani diehards.
I agree.
I think it was Chesterton that pointed out that the most important duty in a traditional democracy was the meting out of justice, and our founders left that up to twelve anybodies culled from the street.
Buckley said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2000 names in the Boston phonebook than the faculty at Harvard.
There is a tradition of populism in conservatism and even in liberty itself. Our nation was not formed to be ruled by a junta of "experts". But by the people. The citizen-servant-representative.
Someone like Palin is an absolute godsend. If her principles are sound, then her judgements will be sound.
The ruling elite has proven that they have no principles. They cater to moneyed interests and political expediency, and our country has some serious problems as a result.
Anytime there is an opportunity to vote for someone that is not an Ivy leaguer, doesn't have a law degree, is unapologeticly pro-life, pro-military, pro-family, pro-guns, is a great speaker and communicator, energetic and hardworking....well, conservatives should give her their vote.
Do you need a Ph.D. to describe all the messes that we have accumulated since FDR and the New Deal? We can trace the majority of the country's problems to rat initiatives. How about the economy and the Wall Street meltdown? Can you say the Community Reinvestment Act, Acorn and Obama? What about Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare? Who stopped drilling for energy?
McCain, with his generally populist rhetoric, does nothing to change this. And Palin only further continues the trend.
Those are two different types of populism that appeals to different segments of the electorate. The appeal of Palin is that she counters the cultural marxism afflicting our country since the 1960s while at the same time attracting small 'l' libertarians and a bunch of women just because she's a woman. Give Palin some time. Who says she's not a quick learner?
I’m just the opposite. McCain never had me until he picked Palin. McCain could drop dead today and I’d pull the lever only because of Palin.
Truth plainly spoken cannot be overcome. That is the secret to her success.
Are there gaps in her knowledge? Indubitably. But her instincts and guiding principles are without fault, and those are far more important. She is, I think, heiress to the tradition of Reagan, Truman, Lincoln, and Jackson, all of whom were ridiculed for their lack of education and sophistication, yet achieved success beyond the dreams of any intellectual.
Look, I went to an Ivy League grad school. I know who Reinhold bloody Niebhur is; I wrote a term paper on his attempts and ultimate failure to synthesize Marxism and Christianity. I'm an economic conservative and social moderate, who has never been red-hot on abortion. I'm nominally Catholic but skating dangerously close to agnosticism. I speak three languages and am unbeatable at Trivial Pursuit. I've read Marx, Herodotus, Burke, Joyce, Gibbon, Rousseau, Hayek, Plato, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Friedman, Popper, Darwin, Sartre, Montesquieu, Woolf, Kierkegaard, Boorstin, Locke, and the Federalist Papers.
In short, I could sit with David Brooks and Chris Matthews and Kathleen Parker at a Manhattan cocktail party and give them all tingles up and down their legs for a week if I were a candidate for President. But I'm not, and never will be, and never would want to be, because I know that at my core I do not have what it takes. She does.
No politician in my lifetime save Ronald Reagan has awakened my desire to fight for the American dream quite like Sarah Palin. Beneath the accent, and the sometimes fractured syntax, and the grins and winks, there is a voice that speaks with the accumulated courage and wisdom of four hundred years of the American experiment. Everything this woman is and does and has done, she accomplished by her own pluck and native intelligence. She is utterly fearless, with a pitch-perfect balance between compassion and ruthlessness, and an immense gift for speaking to and for the common man and woman.
It is only by an accident of birth that she grew up in a little hick town with less than sterling educational opportunities. If her father had been able to send her to Wellesley and Yale like Hillary Clinton, I tell you that Hillary could not now dare to stand on the same stage with her. I know that she is a quick study who will rise to the occasion, absorbing all she needs to know for a successful Presidency in the first six months on the job.
If you've seen her pre-campaign interview with Maria Bartiromo, you've seen how well she can speak extemporaneously on topics she knows well. If she seemed to stumble a few times over the past six weeks, I think it is because she was over-programmed and over-scripted by the campaign staff, and (at least at first) scared to say anything that would contradict something McCain may have said on the Senate floor six years ago. Silliness like the "maverick" meme or Alaska's proximity to Russia sound like words that were put in her mouth by the Bush/McCain morons. When she speaks her own words in her own voice, it is far more authentic.
I do not presume to know the nature of the Divine, but I cannot help but think that we owe it to the hand of Providence that she was raised up to fight for us at this time of great danger. If McCain wins, as I expect, I believe it will be she who has carried him across the finish line, she who has energized him and roused the masses, she who is to be thanked for rescuing us from the most dangerous Gramscian termite ever to foul our national political stage.
I would follow her banner to the gates of Hell. She is magnificent.
Don’t let the wolf pack group think on this forum bother you.
There are way too many “I am god therefore what I say is right” people here.
Well, their supporters at the 1952 GOP convention sure didn't. They supported Bob Taft as the Main Street candidate, only to see the New York lawyers (repping for Old Money) screw them again by pulling Dwight Eisenhower out of a hat ....(thus wrote Theodore White, years later).... and getting Sen. Dick Nixon of California to be their messenger boy and backstairs amanuensis, in traducing Gov. Earl Warren of California into delivering the California delegates for Ike. Warren, of course, got the Chief Justiceship. What odds Ike made a "damn fool mistake" in nominating him, like he said so memorably?
And then, of course, Ike tried to drop Dick. Twice, as I recall.
And then Ike told Dick not to contest the Cook County graveyard vote in 1960; it was more important, said Ike, that no dirt attach to the presidency, and that the People not be scandalized. So Dick folded his tent quietly despite the pleas from his supporters to sue, to demand an investigation. Never mind that the guy with the shovel digging up all those graveyard votes was Sam Giancana himself, "Momo" the Mobster, and one of the most unsavory men ever to have dealings at only two degrees of separation from the President.
"Momo", by the way, died with his shoes on ..... six .22-caliber bullets in the face, very professional hit, about the time his name came up in an investigation.
> I know I’m going to catch all kinds of hellfire for this, but to be honest, she’s just too damned redneck for me.
I can respect that: you won’t catch Hellfire from me. Sarah Palin is the sort of candidate that would polarize (no pun intended): she either works for you or she doesn’t. It would be difficult to be neutral about her.
Speaking personally, I think she’s the best thing to have happened to the GOP in a long time — possibly since Reagan. I wish I could vote for her: I’d almost give my left nut to have someone of her caliber to vote for here in New Zealand. So once you guys have finished with Palin I’d be grateful if you’d send her down our way.
As to being a Redneck, well — I’m a Kiwi Redneck, so that works for me just fine.
For a rebuttal to David Brooks remark and recent column on Sarah Palin see:
Sarah Palin Tags David Brooks “It” - The Professionals’ Attack on the Working Class
by Wayne Lusvardi
PasadenaSubRosa.Typepad.com
See link here: http://pasadenasubrosa.typepad.com/pasadena_sub_rosa/2008/10/sarah-palin-tag.html
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