Palin, Shy Republicans, &c.

The post-convention, post-Sarah Palin rollout confirm what I predicted the day McCain named Palin as his Vice Presidential nominee: She is a game changer.

USA Today is showing a 10 point lead for McCain/Palin among likely voters.
Zogby has him up by 4.
And Gallup shows him up by 5.

Granted, the 538 guys' model suggests a convention bounce that eventually regresses back to the mean. But the game changer wasn't the convention, per se. It was a combination of naming Palin and Palin's speech. This has to be measured separately to the outreach effort that was McCain's speech on the last night of the convention. That speech, as I wrote previously, was not for the the people at the Xcel Center or the base, it was for the Independents who are concerned about Obama's experience and wonder how in the world he's going to pay for all of his proposed programs (high taxes). McCain's bio and his criticism of his own party appeals to those voters. The latest polls, in part, reflect that.

In my opinion, the most significant thing to come out of the Palin pick/Palin speech was the result it had among the conservative base. In 2004 Bush won with conservatives turning out in huge numbers and that's pretty much it. My biggest concern from the day McCain became the presumptive nominee was that those people would stay home.

Palin has solved that problem. In fact, she has solved it in an incredible way. According to 538 and Ace, Republican identification is at its highest levels since immediately following the Bush innauguration. In terms of party ID, Democrats have always led Republicans. That it is now 48-47 Dems vs. Reps is significant. Needless to say, the Republican base votes more reliably than the twenthysomething hipsters who derive their cool from the Obama campaign. I defy them to show up to vote in November. I don't think it will happen. By then, voting Obama, Guitar Hero.* will be passé.

- Watch this story to see if it has legs. Specifically, the high level of coordination between the Obama campaign and the angry leftwing nuts of his party. Palin was announced as the nominee and this group of crazies manufactured ridiculous lie after ridiculous lie about her.

Needless to say, their attacks didn't have the desired effect as they drove curious voters to watch Palin in record numbers when she spoke at the convention. The Obama campaign saw the backlash and put out the word to leave her alone. Now, reports Ace, the Kos Kids crazy reports are being deleted because, Ace thinks (and I think he's right) the Obama campaign realized their attacks were repulsive and counterproductive. If the Obama camp is giving marching orders to dKos, DU, and HuffPo, this is a problem--as in, an election rules problem.

- Last point: The debate that compares Dems #1 to Reps #2 is proving to be the coup I thought it would be. A given group will argue the merits of Mayor vs. Community Organizer & Governor vs. 19 Month Campaign For President and then, midway through, realize that they are talking about #1 vs. #2 and how bad this is for Democrats. It makes John McCain look like the wisened, experienced leader.

*Over-the-top performance, no real skill or experience.


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Whitewashing History, New York Times-Style

Sometimes we ask ourselves, "why do we still read the New York Times?"

And then we remind ourselves, "oh yeah, it's so the hypocritical haters don't accuse us of getting all our info--persuasive or otherwise--from the (what do they call it again? oh yeah, the "natty review." so clever, so original.) "Natty Review." It's the same reason we peruse the Daily Kos & Huffington Post, watch the Daily Show & The Colbert Report (genuinely funny, sometimes) and skim the angry-left ranting of the Seattle PI message boards.

Nevermind that the aforementioned hypocritical haters never read any of our stuff.
(And by that we don't mean this blog.)

Anywho, we ask ourselves these questions about our continued reading of the NYT because of ridiculous things like this, courtesy of James Taranto and Best of the Web:

The Jerusalem Post reports on a happy event for the Palestinian Authority:

President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday sent his regards to the families of Samir Kuntar and the other four Lebanese prisoners scheduled to be transferred to Hizbullah.

Abbas praised the prisoner swap and congratulated the Kuntar family.

Kuntar was in an Israeli prison for an attack that took place on April 22, 1979. Two years ago we quoted a survivor, Smadar Haran Kaiser, who described the attack:

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border.

Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer.

As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat.

They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. "This is just like what happened to my mother," I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl's skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

If smashing a 4-year-old girl's skull with a rifle butt makes Kuntar a hero, you have to wonder what one would have to do for the Palestinians to consider him a coward. The New York Times, meanwhile, describes Kuntar's attack this way:

Perhaps Israel's most reviled prisoner, Samir Kuntar, will return to a hero's welcome when he crosses into Lebanon this week, 29 years after he left its shores in a rubber dinghy to kidnap Israelis from the coastal town of Nahariya.

That raid went horribly wrong, leaving five people dead, a community terrorized and a nation traumatized. Two Israeli children and their father were among those killed.

What does the Times think would have happened if the "raid" had gone right?

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Maureen Dowd is a hack

This morning we received the following email, having been forwarded to us mass-style:

Hello Everyone:

New York Times columnist Maureen Down wrote a hateful, offensive, and untruthful article about the Mormon Church yesterday (Sunday, Dec. 9th). In it, she describes Church leaders as "authoritarian", asserts that the Church today does not "grant[] women and blacks equal status", and declares that Joseph Smith was a "lusty, charismatic Prospero." (Prospero, in case you are not aware, is a character in Shakespeare's The Tempest that uses sorcery to control the play's other characters.) She exclusively quotes Jon Krakauer (author of "Under the Banner of Heaven") as her "expert" on Mormonism.

Ms. Dowd's column falls far below the standards of professional journalism. She is loose with the facts. Her disdain for Mormons is apparent. You may recall that radio talk-show host Don Imus was forced to publicly apologize and leave his job for calling the women of the Rutgers basketball team "nappy-headed hoes." Ms. Dowd's comments were equally offensive to Mormons. I believe that she, like Don Imus, should apologize and lose her job.


Please take a few minutes to complete the following three steps:

1. Read the article entitled "Mitt's No JFK"

2. Send one short, RESPECTFUL email to publisher@nytimes.com and president@nytimes.com requesting that Ms. Dowd apologize and step down from her position.

3. Forward this email to all potentially interested friends/family in your email list.

Our first reaction to this email was surprise. We can't believe anyone still reads Dowd--a columnist whose scurrilous and spurious work would fit in better over at the Daily Kos or the Huffington Post.

If this email writer or anyone else thinks this is the first or worst or last of these types of columns, they had better brace themselves. Attention: much, much more to follow.

When you do write your email to the NYT publisher and president, make it a form letter. You'll be filling in a lot more names before this campaign is over.


***Update 1:26pm MST: From the Washington Post, a more "balanced" look at Mormonism (you know, one that doesn't rely on sensationalist John Krakauer for its information) by Michael Otterson entitled "Are Mormons Christians?"


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