You mean you haven't heard? Well, I'd hate for you to be the last to know.......
Posted on 08/20/2011 11:45:34 PM PDT by Windflier
Not true, and Sarah has explicitly made the point herself. No regime can succeed without virtuous citizens, and no evil regime can long remain evil if it is peopled by virtuous citizens. We can and do all make a difference, regardless of vocation.
she was either incapable or unwilling to win in Alaska
This refers to the general allegation that she quit. I call it “allegation” because “quit” is a charged word and in the sense it which it is typically applied to her is demonstrably not true. To expose this consider the following groups of questions:
1) Why is quitting bad? If someone quits smoking, isn’t that good?
2) Do you still have your first job? If not, doesn’t that mean you too are a quitter? If you did quit, did you have a good reason for quitting? Doesn’t that mean there can be good reasons for quitting?
3) Is quitting due to a lack of will to do the right thing what really bothers you? If so, wouldn’t you have to first know what is the right thing to do? Does it matter if a person’s history shows that in the past, they never quit out of a lack of determination, but out of a need to position themselves to do the right thing?
4) Is a lack of ability to solve a particular problem always bad? What about the field commander who won’t “quit” a futile engagement, even if faced with overwhelmingly superior firepower? Isn’t it better, if possible, to surprise the enemy by changing the equation into one you have a chance of winning?
I liken this whole “quitter” meme to the Kobayashi Maru scenario in Star Trek. Palin was faced with what appeared to be a fatal dilemma, in 2D chess, an inescapable checkmate. But, like Kirk, she reprogrammed the game to one she could win. I am an attorney, and I can tell you there were limits on how she could solve the problem. Obama’s DNC was supporting the operation to hit her with a new ethics charge an average of once every three weeks. The people doing the attacking apparently stated openly that they intended to immobilize her governorship and break her financially. Under the rules of the game, as long as she honored the rule of law, she was tied to a scenario where she could not defend herself in the press and could not ethically prevent, by any legal or political mechanism, the attacks from occurring. Whereas her opponents, being liberals, found obeying the law inconvenient to their purpose, and repeatedly violated the law by leaking one negative headline after another, with no adverse repercussions. If she had stayed in that situation, the only possible outcome was complete destruction of her ability to govern, complete destruction of her political reputation, and ruinous, insurmountable personal debt.
I have challenged others and I challenge you. You claim her strategic retreat reflects either an inability or an unwillingness to beat back the assault while retaining an effective governorship. I put it to you directly: By what as yet undiscovered mechanism, within Alaskan legal and political parameters, should she have solved the problem? I am still waiting a response from the others. Perhaps you will be the first. And after you have solved that, please also suggest alternatives that George Washington could have used, as he too was an avid user of strategic retreat in the face of overwhelming firepower. I look forward to your response.
Of course, despite all the foregoing analysis, it will not be possible to have such illuminating conversations with every possible voter, and some percentage will remain, to the end, unreached. The question is not whether some will be affected by lies and misrepresentations. The misinformed you have with you always (even with respect to your own candidate). The question is whether, in the context of a strong and broad support apparatus, which you admit Palin has, you can move enough people into the “informed” column to make a difference.
You offer a glancing blow at answering that question, but your piece errantly assumes static conditions, that people will all remain frozen exactly where they are today, and that we have via polling an accurate representation of where they are frozen today. But a static analysis inherently lacks the modeling power to yield an accurate electoral prognosis. For that you need dynamic analysis, which entails looking at multiple simultaneous possibility sequences and in dynamic interaction with each other over time.
For just a small example, with respect to the “quitter” meme, many core Palin supporters are finding that A) it is relatively easy to overcome among family and friends who are not hardcore leftists, using an approach similar to the questions above, or B) it just doesn’t matter to these people as much as some political types think it should. This means that even if the polling data were an accurate snapshot of current conditions, and that the “quitter” meme had a quantifiable relationship with the purported negatives (and I am not aware of any such documented correlation), that there is significant activity in play, right now, that is diluting those negatives with truth. “Palin evangelism,” if you will.
In my own experience, I have repeatedly been able to push people who were fixated on “the big quit” to a place of “wow, I never knew that, I’ll give her a second look.” That’s all we may need for now. Like a friend of mine in sales told me (we were talking about Sarah), you don’t always have an option of getting to “total victory” in the first encounter. Sometimes it is enough to plant the seed of understanding. Then later, when, as Peter Singleton puts it, we start getting help from heavy artillery and air cover, we will start advancing in big steps into enemy territory and the push for total victory moves from mere possibility to likely reality.
The other big variable in this situation that makes it quite unlike either the Goldwater or the Reagan era is the dynamic of modern communication and information technology. I’m going out on a limb here and postulate that whereas in the bad old days of Walter Cronkite & Company, the left could wag the dog according to a prefabricated narrative, we now have the talking right, social media, internet news, all diminishing greatly the ability of establishment media to wag the dog, thereby increasing the power of unvarnished truth to do a little dog-wagging of its own.
Put another way, if a lie can get around the world before the truth can get out the front door, modern technology has made possible for the truth to catch up to the lie in less than one news cycle. That makes it much more difficult for the enemies of freedom to succeed with manufactured lies. That’s why Iran, Egypt, China, and other totalitarian countries have resorted to shutting down or severely controlling the internet media, and why our own beloved regime is toying with similar concepts. Freedom of speech plus the internet makes lying much harder. That hurts Obama, but it helps Sarah.
So, while I think it is right to respect the challenge of the task, it is also important to assess the task correctly, and to keep perspective on what it could mean to fail, because retaining who we are as a people is far more important than winning any given political contest. As has been pointed out elsewhere, if you surrender a good, conservative candidate to the volcano god of the MSM, in the hopes they will leave your personal favorite alone, you are sadly mistaken.
So you see, there is a sense in which we are all in this together. Yes, we need to vet candidates. But no, we should never sit back and accept the destruction of one of our own by the left as if it were the inevitable consequence of ruthless nature. Such thinking is surrendering to the enemy, surrendering to the Nietzschean norm of brute animal force over truth and reason, and it is inherently self-destructive of us to do so, because if we let the left get away with robbing us of Palin, just because they say so, we show them we are too weak to ever be taken seriously. If in all this there is a hill worth dying on, undoing the Palinization of Sarah Palin in time for this race is it.
Ha! You betcha, Sarah’s holding the ace!
LOVE it!
Only two? Must be off your usual game today...
My God. Are you drinking, or sniffing glue?
At least learn how to spell "Palin" if you want to be taken seriously. It does no good to pull on those "biggy boy" pants to try and impress the FReepers if they just keep falling around your ankles and tripping you up.
The puffed-up, self-absorbed poppinjays who post tomish, massive-paragraphed non-sequitirs obviously cut-and-pasted from someone else's work (without attribution!) in a blowhard attempt to avoid addressing a rebuttal wherein their original assertion was "PWNED!" is disgusting, lame-assed and transparent.
And what's with always posting the oval photo of that old fag under all your ridiculous blather? Is that supposed to make you seem serious or believable? Because it doesn't... it just looks limp and frisky.
Take a hike, Lubo.
;^\
You mean you haven't heard? Well, I'd hate for you to be the last to know.......
And that's all that voters will be thinking about next year.
Buh bye, Barry. Say hello to your replacement. Do try to be gracious about it, alright?
Sir SR, that is a great post. May I use it elsewhere, giving credit though not to myself but you?
Nathan, The critical thing is, can Sarah change minds? Given this political environment, it will be much easier. And I don;t know how you score serious speeches, but in fact she has given major economic speeches in India and Hong Kong, has written op-eds for WSJ (IIRC) on QE I and II, has written in detail on policy in Facebook on many issues, health care, energy, economy. But if you think this is all SP will do, I believe you are quite mistaken. I believe she will be interviewed , probably live, by major media, when time is right. She has in fact talked at length off the cuff for several MSM journalists recently. Do you not notice these changes? Maybe I am wrong but she has probably done far more then Bush, Clinton or of course BOZO at this stage with regard to policy.
As for the quit meme, she has done all that writing, 2 books, dozens of speeches, flown 100,000s miles since July 2009, campaigned for many candidates,hardly the sign of a quitter. I have always thought she resigned in July 2009 to prepare for a presidential run. She has undoubtedly taken some criticism made by people like you to heart, because there was more work to do for her as a national candidate-—and that is a good thing—she will definitely be a better candidate for it. Could it be she would have resigned in july 2010 to run for president had not the Libturds made things unbearable? I dont know but in any event it was clear to many of us she quit in July 2009 to run-—but for plenty of good reasons she did not announce it then. Even talking head Bill Kristol said as much in his first reaction to news that SP had resigned.
So we will see—but i believe she quit the GOV for a few reasons, but one was to run for president, or put herself in a position where she could (all this seasoning in national politics, foreign speeches, travel, how does she do that as AK governor?)
You have been re-hashing that stupid garbage in response to unsuspecting FReepers since at least October, 2006. As proven on this thread here, post # 29.:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1711516/posts
Any time someone overreacts so vehemently to a simple prank line, it's a clue as to their having something to hide... some devious deception they don't want exposed, as it would make them look not like the honorable victim that they are pretending to be, rather it would confirm that they themselves are possessed of the lack of integrity they are trying to pin on another with their vile subterfuge.
You've been "outed." Now leave me alone, phony.
;^\
Thank you. You are a man of intelligence, breeding, and honor.
Thank you. Hope is still alive.
Ping to post #145
i meant #141
It all came to me, Gargantua, as an epiphany when I contemplated your symptoms. The malady is easy to describe: The unfortunate patient, unable to deal with the substance of what he reads and bereft of factual answer for it, resorts to attacks against those whom he regards to be the author of his misery, much like the ancient Pharaohs who cut off the heads of messengers bearing bad news. Our modern Pharoah cannot, of course, physically decapitate anyone in ether-space so he becomes a mighty potentate astride his own keyboard and lashes out to assassinate the character of these cyber devils. After he has pushed the Reply button and sent his screed into cyberspace, he enjoys a rush of adrenaline and a psychotic high which, of course, is inevitably followed by a deeper low from which he cannot emerge until he finds another victim for his calumnies. The disease is progressive and up until now there has been no known cure.
My antidote for your Ad Hominem Distemper is simplicity itself: Whenever you feel an attack coming on do not resist, for that only leads to the cold sweats, rather, you should embrace it because, after all, acceptance of the disease and your powerlessness over it are the first steps in your recovery. Do not try to avoid your keyboard but eagerly reach out for it. We know that you have nothing to say about the substance of the matter, we know that you've been confused by the reality with which you have been confronted, we know how feverish and insecure you feel as a result, we know how much you feel the need to blackguard someone.
Remember, no one here in the clinic is trying to hurt you we are trying to help you. Now, as calmly as you can, get ready to return to your keyboard for your first therapy session. But before you touch the keyboard, spray it down well with antiseptic and don't forget your computer screen as that will be no doubt as befouled as your keyboard. I recommend rubber gloves.
It is clear that your disease is progressing rapidly. First you falsely accuse me and another Freeper of a fraud and now you falsely accuse me of plagiarism. This is to be expected in the downward curve of your progressive and incurable distemper. Clinically, there is no time to waste if we are to help you. After you have put on your rubber gloves and cleaned your keyboard and your computer screen, take up your keyboard and type as instructed:
TOUCHÉ
and follow the instructions as printed.
Good luck in your recovery and I hope you find comfort knowing that we are all praying for your salvation.
Your friend,
Nathan
Now, if you would like to be mature about it, please tell us exactly which of Palin's post-quit activities required anybody to vote for her with consideration given to her quitting or in any way was impacted by the fact that she quit. And then, if you've gotten that far, please tell us exactly how that means that her quitting will not be a factor sould she run and get the nomination.
I posted two, there are more but either one of the two I posted will suffice.
The MSM has destroyed Palin’s image, all without her help, despite some accusations against her one reads here (all MSM inventions, or MSM magnifications), and they are just getting warmed up on Perry. Don’t ever think he will escape what the propaganda machine has done to the Bushes, to Dan Quayle and to the stupidest of them all in the minds of many liberals to this day, Reagan.
So very sad. But you did ask for it by feigning outrage at my suggestion (now proven to have been correct, by the way) that you were deceitfully misrepresenting with your postings here.
You're incapable of acknowleging that, now that you've been proven to be a fraud, nothing you post matters any more. You are tainted, spoiled goods. Desist. Seek the help you pretend that I need. Have you no vestigial shred of honor left?
Every dishonest jailbird blames the cop who caught him. It's not an original concept, Lubo. It's just sad...
yada, yada, yada, doo. I hate Palin, how 'bout you?
wtc, you bore me. All of you PDSers do. I've spent the last two and a half years doing my level best to help you see Palin from a different perspective, but you're simply too fixed in your views about her to even look.
I tire of explaining the same things to you over and over and over again. I'm sure that most other Palin supporters do, as well.
We're coming into the home stretch here, and it's looking very likely that Governor Palin will announce her bid for the nomination in the near future. Because of that, we Palin supporters are now more interested in focusing on helping her in every way we can, than in continuing the incessant debates with her long time detractors.
I may be the first to say this to you, but you're going to begin hearing this more and more from Palin supporters.
The disease is advancing rapidly and the patient is obviously deteriorating and coming to a crisis. The staff has collaborated and unanimously decided to name these new symptoms because the psychosis is so pronounced. We have concluded to call gargantua's newly developed psychotic eruption as the Captain Queeg Syndrome after the neurotic episode portrayed in the novel and film, The Caine Mutiny, in which the Humphrey Bogart character has a neurotic episode in front of his crew. In the scene Capt. Queeg turns his own ship upside down in a useless search for missing strawberries which we find out later he had known all along had been eaten by the mess boys. The poor soul was trying to live again a triumph of his youth to compensate for his manifest inadequacies. In the scene, he told his crew that he proved with scientific certainty that the strawberries had been stolen.
We now see the same syndrome replayed in the poor wretch, Gargantua. The patient behaves exactly like Capt. Queeg who measured out scoops of sand to prove that the strawberries had not been eaten in the regular mess but stolen. Now Gargantua boasts that he has, like Capt. Queeg, done "a little research" and, it is important to note the neurotic use of the word "see" followed by the self-congratulatory, "I knew that you were just cutting-and-pasting when you posted that huge vomitous fake article in reply to my annhialating your non-point. "
Obviously, the neuroses has spread to every cognitive region of the brain and the prognosis is guarded. Recommended treatment requires hospitalization and a 24-hour suicide watch as there is a reasonable fear that the patient might become a danger to himself or others.
Follow-up reports to be submitted as needed.
Respectfully submitted,
Nathan Bedford MD
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