Hillbuzz

Great post by Hillbuzz. 'Nuff said. (I'm just posting it here so I have it in my own archives):
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We’ve spotted Todd Palin a half dozen times now at events we’ve attended where Governor Palin has spoken, both on the 2008 Vice Presidential campaign trail in cities like St. Louis and Indianapolis, and in the years since, most recently in Rosemont and Washington, Illinois.

Todd’s there, in a sharp suit with colorful tie, standing behind dark, heavy curtains. He’s off to the side, out of the way backstage, watching his wife fire up the awesome on all cylinders before enthusiastic crowds hanging on her every word. There’s a twinkle in his husky blue eyes and the first twitch of a smile on a crisply-goateed impish face straining desperately to remain serious, surrounded as he is by burly men in suits with ear pieces, cell phones, iPads, and itineraries aplenty. Though the Palins are very much in the national big time now, and will be for the rest of their lives, Todd’s seemingly still very much “just Todd” — a regular, huntin’, fishin’, snowmachinin’, g’-droppin’, dude from Wasilla, married to an incredible woman he still can’t believe he was lucky enough to sweep off her feet. That smile’s a “I can’t believe we’re doing this” smile, married perfectly to a “What did I ever do to deserve a woman as awesome as this?” grin. It’s a match as natural, easy-going, and honest as the Palins themselves.

Todd’s a husband filled to bursting with pride in his wife and — like the rest of the people in whatever room in which she’s speaking — he’s simultaneously a proud American watching the 45th President of the United States taking the first steps of her nascent presidential campaign. There’s something about the way he looks at her when she’s speaking that tells us Todd’s not the least bit surprised by any of this, either. He’s always believed in her. He knew her determination and personal strength back when he watched her smoke her competition on the basketball court, when he was sitting in the bleachers marveling at the skills and prowess of the dynamo he’d soon marry. The woman who would grow up to be president — when America needed her most.

All these years later, that high school “Saracuda” is off the court and on the national stage, but she’s very much the Thrilla from Wasilla when her team — now expanded exponentially to the entire nation — is looking for its leader.

Twice in the last month we’ve had the sincere and unbelievable privilege of watching the Palins up close as the Governor delivered two important addresses in our home state of Illinois.

In both speeches, Palin cited President Ronald Reagan as a driving influence in her life and political career, drawing great attention to the fact Reagan was born and educated in Illinois — the state in which we believe Palin will officially launch her 2012 presidential bid on February 6th, 2011…Reagan’s 100th birthday. She’ll do it – we betcha – in either Tampica or Eureka, two cities in our state intimately connected to Reagan. And she’ll do it in the face of all the naysayers and talking heads in the Lamestream Media who obsessively strive every day to destroy her, to ridicule her, to mock her, and to tear her down. Because the media wants Barack Obama to win a second term, and they know Sarah Palin is the only thing that can stop that.

As supporters of Hillary Clinton, who worked tirelessly for her for two years until she suspended her presidential campaign in June of 2008, we know what it’s like to watch someone we respect and admire — someone we know would make an excellent president — come under constant and unrelenting attack from the Left and its propaganda arm (the paid spokespeople like Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper, and Rachel Maddow in the agenda-driven media). We see, clearly, the Left thumbing through the Alinsky Methods playbook it employed against Hillary in 2008, desperately trying to sink Palin early, to hobble her, to take her out of contention so the media can install a losing, mayonnaise-and-cucumbers milquetoast sandwich “it’s his turn” Republican like Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty as the Republicans’ 2012 nominee — to further the media’s pursuit of handing Barack Obama a second term.

But, in speech after speech, we see Sarah Heath Palin smacking back — HARD — as she lays the foundation for her presidential campaign in soon-to-be-historic addresses delivered in Obama’s own adoptive backyard of Illinois.

When she comes to places like Rosemont and Washington, she comes to speak, but not in the droning tone of professorial Obama descended from styrofoam-pillored Olympus with his edicts of the day, acolytes scattering lotus flowers at his feet and pouring sweet nectar of Lethe into poisoned chalices for the ignorant to drink. No, Palin’s not a pretender, a poser, not someone who spent countless hours listening to tapes of Jeremiah Wright’s fiery speeches to learn the cadences he’d need to sell his snake oil with maximum theatrics. Palin is not Obama the Lightbringer, the ethereal and magical being whom Oprah crowned “The One” and legions of cultish admirers paint astride unicorns in twisted fan art and hero worship. And that’s just the Nobel Prize committee.

Palin’s still very much the concerned mom who came to her first PTA meeting with something to say, and a plan of action for taking charge and making things better in her small town in Alaska. That same spirit echoed through everything she did after running for City Council, becoming Mayor, serving on the Oil and Gas Commission, and then leading the nation’s largest state as its chief executive. Governor Palin never lost that common touch, because no matter how high the office to which she was elected, Palin was just a mom looking out for not only her own kids, but the kids of all the other moms and dads in her constituency.

She is not, and doesn’t want to be, a prophet.

She does not pretend to be a Lightbringer.

Whatever that is.

She will never be painted upon a unicorn or called anything by Oprah that’s fit for print.

She’s just Sarah Heath Palin, and when she stands before a crowd of thousands, it’s like listening to a favorite aunt, or one of our friends’ moms, taking the microphone for a minute and delivering her message in a clear and concise way everyone in the room can understand. She’s not there to read poetry or to conjure fantastical, oratorial imagery to razzle, dazzle, and ultimately bewilder her audience. Palin’s there with one mission: to tell it like it is, whether you particularly like that or not, and then give you her best reasoned options for making the mess we’re in better. It’s all so little Trig and Piper, and all the other kids out there she’s looking out for, won’t have to inherit whatever crisis someone like Obama thinks it’s appropriate to push upon the future to solve. There’s no generational theft on Palin’s watch. No sir. You betcha.

In her speech in Rosemont, Palin quoted Thomas Paine, as he thought about the terrible situation the colonists found themselves in as they prepared to wage war against Britain for their independence. Many people didn’t want to fight, because fighting was such hard work. But, Paine thought about the future, and about the generations that would follow him in posterity and he accepted that fact the calamities at hand were falling on “his watch”. Fair or not, Paine knew he had to handle “his watch” and effectively resolve the problems so that the children to follow would not have to clean up that particular mess for him.

It was shameful to steal prosperity from the future because those in the present weren’t brave or strong enough to stand up and do what’s right, no matter how hard it was.

That sentiment ties into a common theme we’ve heard Palin repeat in both Rosemont and Washington, in regards to every able-bodied American having a duty to get up every day and work hard, to get a job and be productive, and to not expect the government to be the solution to all of their problems. In this, Palin cites President Reagan famously chastising those on the Left who demand a perpetual dole with neverending handouts to take care of all their needs. ”Government isn’t the solution to the problem, it is the problem”.

Sarah Palin, practically alone in the Republican Party, is charged with the task of reminding us how simple a fact this is. Certainly no man in the GOP has the guts to stand up and shout this obvious truth. It takes a mom from Wasilla to say what needs to be said.

Palin illustrates in her speeches how revelatory simplicity can be, and how much power an ordinary woman or man yields when they just can’t take it any more, when they stand up to be heard, and they challenge the Left at every turn.

In Rosemont, Palin cited the example of a father whose daughters worked incredibly hard to fundraise to send their basketball team to Arizona to participate in a national championship. The Leftist-controlled school district in Illinois barred the girls’ team from competing, because the Democrat Party in Illinois has decided to boycott Arizona for political reasons, claiming Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s decision to enforce federal immigration laws in her state was “not in keeping with the values the school district wanted to teach”. The father in Palin’s anecdote stood up and challenged the school district, since it continues to fund student trips to China. Palin echoed the father’s question as to what sort of values the Chinese hold for women, and how the school board’s decision to send students to China supports that message — and conflicts with the actions taken against Arizona.

Palin couldn’t contain the Reaganesque smile on her face when she talked about this ordinary man standing up with extraordinary strength and courage to challenge the Leftist bullies forcing their personal politics upon his family.

“Go rogue, girls, go rogue,” Palin urged the students, telling them to find any way they could to go west to Arizona, on their own pioneer steam, to claim the berth in the championship their hard work earned them. “Speak up. Shout bullies down. Do not let them cower you”.

When Palin hears about a team of basketball players being bullied by the Left, we can clearly see the Saracuda in her emerge, clear as day, ready to take on all challengers. We pity those in her wake, and more so those in her line of attack.

“Them’s fighting words!”, Palin exclaimed, vowing to do whatever she could in the situation to make things right, and to beat the Left at whatever game they are playing with the lives of high school athletes.

She’s going to do it, too, you betcha. And more likely than not all she’ll have to do is write about those idiots behind this on Facebook and they’ll crumple like soggy snowmen in her glare. Standing up at the podium in a leather jacket, with her hair back and her glasses gleaming on her face, she looked like a Kryptonian with a radioactive stare and the ability to do the impossible, by pure force of will and God-given determination.

This being Illinois, Palin encouraged everyone before her to constantly fight the corrupt system we live under. She talked about her friends joking that she should be worried about venturing into “enemy territory” by coming so close to Chicago, of all places, but Palin noted “it’s just Chicago…it’s not like I’m heading to MSNBC”. As bad as things are on the elected level in Illinois, one of the nation’s most corrupt states, Palin constantly draws attention to the agenda-driven, biased, and DNC-wholly-owned American Lamestream Media…which has declared itself to be her own personal rogue’s gallery of stupor villains.

But, they aren’t just Palin’s sworn enemies. MSNBC, CNN, and the news bureaus of the broadcast networks are the enemies of all Americans, since their clear and present lies on every topic imaginable to curry favor with and coddle the Obama Administration are doing great damage to the country as a whole. Palin knows they are doing everything they can to destroy her, and she says “Bring it”. She knows they are consistently lying to the American people, and she ingeniously and strategically employs new media and social networking tactics to expose them.

In both Rosemont and Washington, Palin highlighted all the bullies, thugs, liars, criminals, and emotional terrorists she’s been up against in the past — those on, and off, the MSNBC payroll. She took on the old boys’ fat cat corruptocrat network in Alaska — men in smoke-filled rooms smoking cigars, lighting $100 bills on fire to amuse themselves, wallowing in the troughs fed by the big oil companies like greedy little piggies. Palin busted through the stuffy oak doors of those boardrooms and let in the sun, a Slayer arrived once in her generation to drive a stake through the hearts of these oily vampires, exposing those crooks for who they were, no matter how much they tried to stop her.

It’s what she’s going to do to the national Lamestream Media, in all its hydra forms, and what she’s going to do to the graft and corruption at all levels of both the Democrat AND the Republican parties as well. That’s bipartisanship — PALIN-STYLE.

Big Momma’s in town. She’s the new sheriff. And it’s clobbering time, folks. Enter, the HOCKEY MOM.

Which is fitting, because one of the gifts Palin received in Rosemont was a hockey puck, from the local AHL team a young Alaskan she knows plays for. During the course of her speech and the question and answer session, the hockey imagery kept resurfacing, as a metaphor for the rough and tumble of politics, where no game is ever won without standing up to the opponent who’s trying his level best to beat the absolute tar out of you.

Can you just picture, in this visual, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, John Thune, or John Huntsman out there on the ice?

Timid, shy, shrinking like violets, they’d cling to the wooden rail around the rink, afraid to skate too fast or too hard because he’d lose favor in the eyes of the media. Democrats would whack them left and right, with high sticking and all manner of foul-worthy penalty-box-deserving plays, but the media refs would glide blindly by, giving Democrats every advantage imaginable while these effete and delicate cucumbers-and-mayonnaise wimps perpetually clamor for the love the Lamestream just won’t ever give them.

But, in skates Saracuda, hockey mom, and it’s a whole new game, folks. You thought the Hanson Brothers did a number on their opponents? Sarah Palin’s one mom, with more firepower than the lot of them. Her motto, as reiterated time and again in all of her speeches, is that there’s no retreat, ever…just reloading. Her dad taught her that years ago, and she’s been teaching it to everyone who got on her bad side ever since.

And that goes for America’s enemies abroad too, as well as the enemies of democracy that are the Lamestream Media and the current Socialist-Democrat party.

In both the Rosemont and Washington speeches, Palin clearly drew a line on the ice with her sharpest skate and dared anyone in the world to lay a finger on America’s greatest friend in the world, Israel. She extolled the virtues of Earth’s pluckiest and most determined nation — a country that sits upon the gates of Hell, that is often the only thing standing between order and chaos. Israel the brave, Israel the bold, Israel our true friend and ally.

We’d imagine President Palin defending Israel with the strength of a momma grizzly taking care of her cubs…or of a hockey mom jumping the railing and hitting the ice to pull an ogre of a bully off of her kid. The pitt bull’s got lipstick — to distract you from her bite.

THAT’S what America needs in a president. Five-by-five, 24/7, baby.

Instead of Obama’s bowing, his groveling, his apologizing, and his constant pandering to Muslims, whom he’s forever worried about offending — while sticking Israel square in the eye and smashing her into the ground with complete disregard for our decades-long symbiosis. All of Obama’s “HopeyChangey” unicorns-and-rainbows delusional nonsense is severely lampooned in both of Palin’s Illinois addresses. She asks her audience to think about all the ways in which Obama buffaloed them in 2008, all the ways he cloaked himself as a Clintonian/Jacksonian moderate-to-conservative Democrat, when in reality he was always the far Leftist, anti-Israel, soft-on-terrosim radical we’ve seen him as.

Palin noted repeatedly that now, at least, our one silver lining is that Obama has a record.

At last.

As bad as it is, at least people can finally bin the invisible man to something substantive.

The man who avoided as much responsibility as possible in his quest for job after new job finally made it to the top where he’s actually established quantifiable job performance. There’s no voting “Present” anymore. There’s no presenting himself as anything other than the radical he really is. There’s no more ability to lie and obfuscate, no matter how much the Lamestream Media enables him, so long as the American people wake up, stand up, and keep paying attention.

In both the Rosemont and Washington speeches, Palin drives home this notion that Americans need to focus their attention on the serious democracy and freedom jeopardizing specifics of what the Left is doing to this country in the Obama presidency. Namely:

(1) The Left has quadrupled America’s debt and has led us down the primrose path to stink weed insolvency.

(2) The budgets are unsustainable and will approach 100% of the GDP within Trig and Piper’s lifetimes. Not on her watch, is what Palin says, and she urges the rest of us to stand up and declare this to be OUR WATCH too.

(3) Obamacare is an unconstitutional mandate from the federal government to force citizens to purchase a product from a private company and enter into a non-negotiable contract that usurps our freedoms. It must be repealed in all its forms and those responsible for it booted from office with maximum prejudice.

(4) The Left is attempting to take control of all industries, so that the union leeches can demand ever more perks for doing continuously less work, bleeding all profits dry. Without industry, there is no America, there is no entrepreneurialism, and Greece is a solid example of what happens to a bloated and lazy society that thinks the bill for all its fun and games will never come due. Palin warns the same thing will happen to America, in Trig and Piper’s lifetimes, unless we all band together and do something about the Left in November and in 2012.

(5) America must never bow to anyone. NOT EVER. Terrorists must be called terrorists. Islam must not be coddled. Muslim terrorists should not be given the rights of American citizens, and they should not be held in greater regard by the president than the innocent Americans they murder.

(6) This nation must not engage in generational theft to pay for the pork barrel flights of fancy and the corrupt deals of fat cats and Washington insiders of today.

At the ballot box, Palin calls for a Restoration and Awakening of the American spirit.

As we see her presidential campaign forming, we sense her November book will teach us more about the platform she intends to advance, centered around the notion of American exceptionalism. Unapologetically. Undeniably. Unequivocably.

The campaign itself will be branded around Alaska — and Palin’s own upbringing in the wild having to fend for herself, rely on her own independence, and to work hard in adverse conditions to get everything she wanted in life. There were no hand-outs. There was no nanny state to take care of her. She learned that if she was hungry she needed to work hard to earn or hunt for her own food. If she wanted creature comforts, she had to apply herself to the tasks required to get them. There was no welfare. There was no “Obama Money” magically floating from the sky or delivered upon the back of fuchsia unicorns. The meat came from moose. The bucks came from babysitting or waitressing. The bull comes from Washington if you believe the government owes you anything.

Self-reliance. Determination. Hard work. Independence. Entrepreneurialism. PALINISM.

With Palin’s personal narrative and ready-made Alaskan frontier campaign motif driving this charge, Americans will harken back to the cultural images that unite us, of our founding fathers birthing this nation from nothing…of the Western settlers taming the wild and building a bicoastal continental country…of all the hard work the greatest generation put into fighting the powers of fascism and communism to secure peace, prosperity, and freedom for this world.

It’s going to be mighty hard for Barack Obama and his ragtag band of loons and Leftists to argue to Americans that the country would be better off following the path of Europe, as socialism across the Atlantic implodes and the lazy, welfare-dependent, corrupt, and hapless fools in the “socialist utopia” failed states drown in oceans of their own debt.

How will Obama contrast Palin in a general election, when Palin possesses more testicular fortitude than our fey, professorial, lecturer of a president could ever muster in his wildest dreams?

Though he’ll once again try to paint everyone who opposes him as a racist, and will try to use words like “polarizing” against Palin, as magical spells to convince some out there that she’s “unelectable”, in the manner in which he used these tactics against Hillary Clinton, we believe he’ll fail miserably.

Palin’s got his number.

She’s got the media’s number too.

And, we believe, she knows EXACTLY what the RNC plans to do to her so they could push the nomination to Mitt “It’s His Turn” Romney.

Watching Palin deliver these speeches, considering all of this, we kept looking to the side of her and at Todd smiling there in the shadows, watching everything from the sidelines, just as he did at Palin’s basketball games when they were in high school.

He’s smiling because he’s proud of his wife for the fight she’s put up so far, but the smile’s deeper than that.

It’s deeper than the love he has for her, and for the constant realization of how lucky he is to be her husband.

Todd’s smiling because he knows just what Palin’s going to do to her opponents.

He knows what she’s capable of. He’s seen her field dress a moose.

Seen it a million times.

That’s going all the way back to Saracuda’s days on the court when some out of town team arrived in Wasilla and underestimated the skills Palin possessed. They fell right into her trap, and she mopped the floor with them, just as she did all of those fat cats in their smoky rooms plotting and scheming against the people of Alaska.

In every challenge she’s ever faced, Sarah Palin has stood up and given her absolute all, never backing down, never surrendering…only pausing to reload, but not to retreat.

The Left has never faced anything like her before.

The woman lives rent free in the White House already — occupying a cavernous suite in Obama’s nightmares and imagination. At 3am, our current president, Dr. Utopia, is too exhausted to answer the phone because he gets so little sleep. Closing his eyes, he hears the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of blades slicking against the ice, bringing something strong, large, and massive his way…a thunder from the north…a polarizing force like an Arctic blast…a hockey mom and momma grizzly who is not going to let any of the Left’s usual nonsense stand in her way. It’s MOMENTUM, baby, in all caps, with a you-betcha twang.

If we were Romney, Pawlenty, Huckabee, Thune, Huntsman, Daniels, and even Michael Steele, we’d get little sleep as well.

She’s coming for all of them. They should know it.

Todd knows it.

He also knows she’s going to win — if she wants it, if she sets her mind to it, and if she answers the clarion call Americans in Rosemont, Washington, Chicago, Cleveland, Rochester, Milwaukee, Anchorage, and beyond want her to hear.

RUN, SARAH, RUN!

It sure doesn’t take much to prompt a spontaneous chorus of that at a Sarah Palin speech. We’re a bunch of gay Hillary guys in Boystown cheering amongst the loudest.

Todd’s smiling because his wife’s bringing this nation together like never before, against a common foe, just as she brought all those different players together on her basketball team and won game after game against all odds.

Now that she’s in the fight of her life, when it’s not a game, it’s much much more than a game and all of our lives depend on it, Todd’s smiling because he knows just what his wife is made of…and, just as he’s always known, he must know that’s going to make her our next President.