Piers Akerman
WHAT is there not to like about Sarah Palin, a former beauty queen who enjoys taking down a moose or two and a caribou, while raising five joeys and cleaning up corruption in politics at a municipal and state level in the US?
Quite a bit, according to Fairfax executive and occasional commentator Bruce Wolpe, whose brief experience working for the Clintons in Washington apparently qualified him for the job of corporate affairs head on the amateur hour team selected by academic Fred Hilmer, the former chief executive of the flailing publisher, to decorate its tarnished mahogany row.
Writing in the Sun-Herald, Wolpe, a Democrat who never prevents his political affiliation from colouring his views, says John McCain’s choice as Republican presidential running mate, has, ``neither stature nor tethers.’’
``If [Democrat presidential candidate Senator Barack] Obama is inexperienced what are we to make of a person who has served for only two years as Governor of Alaska?’’ he asked.
Wolpe is half right—Obama is possibly the least experienced person ever to run for US president, having a resume as thin as rice paper and a sad history of cultivating the wrong people throughout his brief career.
Wolpe omitted to mention that among those Obama is tethered to are the unreconstructed 1970s Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, who Obama supported as a community activist; the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a racist church leader who, in the 20 years Obama attended his church, made a career out of decrying America and white people in general; Tony Rezko, the former campaign fund-raiser who assisted Obama with the purchase of his home three years ago, and who was convicted in June on 16 counts of corruption; Nadhmi Auchi, the Iraqi-born billionaire who bankrolled Rezko the day before the housing deal was settled in 2005, and who has had his US visa revoked because of what the Pentagon calls ``significant and credible evidence’’ of involvement in the Oil for Food scandal and illicit smuggling of weapons to Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Quite the Chicago Democratic machine team by any measure, but apparently not worth a mention in Wolpe’s Fairfaxian view of US politics, and Obama has been comfortable with their company ever since he launched himself as a community organiser.
Governor Palin, on the other hand, is no machine woman.
She’s her own woman.
If Obama’s followers were truly looking for a new face for American politics they would be falling over themselves to throw their support behind the 44-year-old Alaskan.
She entered politics at 28, winning a seat on the Wasilla city council as an opponent of tax increases. Four years later she defeated the three-term mayoral incumbent and dumped his cronies from the bureaucracy.
In 2003, she was appointed to Alaska’s important Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and rapidly began examining the ethics of the state’s Republican party chairman for conflicts of interest with big oil interests. The probe resulted in a substantial fine for the chairman. The following year she joined a Democratic representative’s ethics complaint against the Republican Attorney General over a trade deal. The Attorney General resigned.
In 2005 she challenged the sitting Governor in a three-way primary and won 51 per cent of the vote, compared to his 19 per cent.
What’s more, she knows the world of energy, understands the realities of the fuel squeeze and isn’t impressed by New Age Cassandras and their ultimatums on the future of Western civilisation.
This is a record that reflects experience, putting Obama’s part-time job as an Illinois legislator to shame, and making his one-term, one-vote Senate position look pathetic.
Little wonder that some Democrats have already begun to spin the line that Obama’s inexperience should be seen as a plus in a race against real professionals.
Whether Wolpe can swallow that or whether he will choke on its absurdity remains to be seen, but McCain’s choice of Palin has revived interest in what was otherwise a very dull race.
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Reinventing blackness
Andrew Bolt
Academic Mark Rose (above) doesn’t want whites to mess with his pure Aboriginal traditions, no matter how sexist and irrrational:
LETTING girls play the didgeridoo is like letting people play with razor blades, say indigenous commentators.
And a book that teaches girls to play the ceremonial instruments should be pulped because there are cultural taboos on women playing the male instrument, they say.
Academic and Aboriginal education advocate Dr Mark Rose said it was an “extreme faux pas” on the part of the publishers of the Australian edition of the Daring Book for Girls, set to be published in October…
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Also caused by too many emissions
Andrew Bolt
Reader Kate discovers another threat to the climate:
Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
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Carpenter builds junk to order
Andrew Bolt
What’s the word I’m looking for? Opportunist? Hypocrite? Populist? It’s certainly not “leader”:
WEST Australian Premier Alan Carpenter was forced to beat off claims of hypocrisy yesterday after admitting that he voted at last year’s ALP national conference to dump Labor’s long-standing three uranium mines policy.
After painting himself as an anti-uranium mining warrior during the campaign, Mr Carpenter refused to acknowledge there was any inconsistency in his decision to support changes that allowed more mines nationally.
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How low can Rundle sink?
Andrew Bolt
The far-Left’s Guy Rundle, correspondent for Crikey, will happily portray even a 17-year-old girl as a slut if that girl happens to be the daughter of a Republican:
“John McCain has a face that says ‘yes’,” some stooge said earlier at the GOP. Yeah, dude, but sadly, so does Bristol Palin.
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Lieberman switches tickets
Andrew Bolt
Joe Lieberman, the Democrats’ pick for vice president in 2000, addresses the Republican convention in 2008:
“Sen. Barack Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who can do great things for our country in the years ahead,” Lieberman said. “But my friends, eloquence is no substitute for a record — not in these tough times for America.”
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Small mercies
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann puts me right about yesterday’s rate cut:
This rate cut is not an admission that the RBA ‘got it wrong’ with the March rate increase. Far less the February-March hikes taken together.
And nor did the RBA get it wrong. If it erred, and I’m not saying it did, it was in not hiking more and/or quicker in 2007.
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Save Britain, not the planet
Andrew Bolt
Russia’s ruthless attack on Georgia, conduit of gas for Europe, makes it even more unlikely Britain will follow Kevin Rudd’s noble lead in slashing emissions, whatever the cost:
John Hutton, the Business Secretary, ... says Britain’s ability to generate its own energy needs to be above climate change in Government’s priorities.
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Rudd’s dud study
Andrew Bolt
The Opposition Leader is damned for heresy:
BRENDAN Nelson was yesterday accused of being “blissfully immune” to the effects of climate change after he said the crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin was not linked to global warming.
The Opposition Leader told the ABC on Monday night: “What’s happening at the moment in the Murray-Darling Basin is a consequence of two things: mismanagement of the entire system for almost 100 years and also the worst drought in 100 years. And it is quite wrong for people to suggest that what we’re seeing at the moment is a consequence of climate change.”
He’s right, of course. You can’t safely blame a single weather event on global warming. Besides, the world stopped warming a decade ago, and, what’s more, rainfall in Australia has actually increased, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, even if there have been the usual variations in its distribution
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Hitting the man who’d never hit back
Andrew Bolt
I can’t approve of the court action, but despise the cheap-shot cowardice of the artist:
An art gallery in Britain which exhibited a statue of Jesus Christ with an erection was taken to court by a devout Christian on Tuesday who said she was offended by the work and argued that the gallery would “not have dared” to portray Mohammed, let alone in that way.
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Obama flies, with the windy media beneath his wings
Andrew Bolt
Sucked in: Barack Obama matches his experience to Sarah Palin’s - but has to ignore her current job as Governor of Alaska to make himself look better by comparison:
“My understanding is that Gov. Palin’s town, Wassilla, has I think 50 employees. We’ve got 2500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe 12 million dollars a year – we have a budget of about three times that just for the month,” Obama responded.
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Palin spooks the castrated critics
Andrew Bolt
IF only Sarah Palin were just some famous guy’s wife.
Then, as with Hillary Clinton, the women’s groups and activists could love and pet her like a victim.
But the Governor of Alaska has torn up the script. Confounded the simpering stereotype.
Here is a caribou-hunting, moose-gutting, corruption-busting, oil-drilling, anti-abortion, beauty-pageant queen whose husband’s greatest claim to fame is to win the world’s most famous race for snow machines.
Her power is entirely her own. And it’s the equal of any man’s.
No wonder she’s unleashed the fury of the castrated Left, which in fear has attacked her and her 17-year-old daughter with the vilest - and most misanthropic - smear campaign you’ll have ever seen in politics.
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Writers miss the old devil
Andrew Bolt
THE Melbourne Writers’ Festival, which finished on Monday, sure missed John Howard.
Who can be bothered to talk local politics now that the monster of the writing class is gone?
Gosh, how our artists miss having someone to hate. Last year’s festival was so different. What a glorious taxpayer-funded hate-fest it was, then.
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DOG PENS OF WAR
Tim Blair
Australian soldiers in Afghanistan held four captured members of the Taliban overnight inside pens formerly occupied by bomb squad dogs. Certain groups are trying to work this up into an Abu Ghraib-style outrage. This is how the Sydney Morning Herald website is promoting the story on its front page:
There were no dogs in the pens with the prisoners. The SMH’s image is pure propaganda. For the record, here are the evil pens of dogness:
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EVIDENCE DE-EVIDENCED
Tim Blair
The Daily Kos post that led to so much creepy speculation about Trig Palin’s parentage – from Michael Moore and his comrades, among others – has been deleted.
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IT’S JUST NOT RIGHT
Tim Blair – Wednesday, September 03, 08 (02:45 am)
The New York Times suddenly finds a reason for women to stay at home:
With five children, including an infant with Down syndrome and, as the country learned Monday, a pregnant 17-year-old, Ms. Palin has set off a fierce argument among women about whether there are enough hours in the day for her to take on the vice presidency, and whether she is right to try.
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DAILY SUL
Tim Blair
“We can drop this crap now,” writes a DailyKos operative. “We look stupid pushing this rumor.” But Andrew Sullivan – now Stupider Than Kos™ – won’t let go:
What harm would it do to release the medical records showing that Sarah Palin delivered Trig on April 18 in Wasilla? This is not hard: there must be an obstetrician, medical records, and data that can easily refute this rumor. It is not out of the ordinary either: candidates routinely issue medical records. So let’s have them …
Why not kill this rumor with Palin’s medical records? A 43 year old woman’s pregnancy with a Downs Syndrome child would have been intensely monitored, and the records must be a mile long. Just release them, ok?
Sullivan is asking for further proof even after learning that Bristol Palin is five months pregnant. There’s no need for medical records. The rumour is already dead.
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WABBIT SEASON
Tim Blair
At the age of 10, Sarah Palin got her very own bunny rabbit. Which means to say that she crouched down in the grass outside her family home, aimed her shotgun and blew its furry little head off.
That’s how things work in Alaska. You kill stuff.
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THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING
Tim Blair
John McCain is bugging, apparently. This is according to someone called Diddy, who presumably is an expert in bugging and related entomological pursuits. Diddy is also a frustrated commuter:
Sean “Diddy” Combs complained about the price of gas and pleaded for free oil from his “Saudi Arabia brothers and sisters” in a recently posted YouTube video.
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