Earth to Malkin: It's Newsweek.

(Sigh) And once again, there are times when conservatives suck.

I totally get why Malkin despises John McCain. What I don't get is how on earth she can be so gullible as to repeat Newsweek's narrative in this post.

Excerpt from Newsweek:

"Maverick" is a mantle McCain no longer claims; in fact, he now denies he ever was one. "I never considered myself a maverick," he told me. "I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities." Yet here was Palin, urging her fans four times in 15 minutes to send McCain the Maverick back to Washington.

Malkin quotes this and posts the McCain campaign vid "Palin Power."

First off, this is pathetic. It's ridiculous to blame Palin for the Maverick thing. Everyone has called McCain the "Maverick." If he chooses to be stupid about it now, I think it's fair to say that nobody saw that one coming.

Secondly, this came from Newsweek. Ten to one McCain was misquoted. Even if he wasn't, Newsweek will always spin things to blame Palin when they really had nothing to do with her. And Malkin apparently fell for it.

Please, PLEASE tell me that conservatives aren't this flippin' gullible!

Now, when it comes to McCain, I have heard that he is also trying to say now that what he supported before wasn't really amnesty. If he really is trying to pull that stunt, he's done. People will put up with a lot, but bold-faced lies? Eeesh. I don't think so.

The comments on Malkin's article are, of course, full of anti-Palin rhetoric from short-sighted little babies who still can't get over the fact that Palin is campaigning for McCain.

I am so sick of these fair-weather supporters. If you're that stupid as to swallow a Newsweek narrative hook, line, and sinker, please, by all means, leave and go anti-Palin. Your support wouldn't stand up in a Presidential race anyway.

Bottom line on McCain: Palin promised McCain she would help him with his reelection soon after they lost in 2008 (at least, that's my assumption). It's the first thing she told Glenn Beck when he asked why she was stumping for McCain - "I keep my word."

She's keeping her word. And she's not going to do it half-heartedly. She said that she would help him, and that's what she's going to do. If people have a problem with that, so be it. She's keeping her word.

As for any hand-wringing by the anti-McCain crowd that Sarah is messing it up for them - Please. Give the people of Arizona some credit. They'll put whoever they want to represent them in Congress, Palin or no Palin.

Mark Levin on Romney's Endorsement of McCain

Mark Levin talks about Romney coming out for the "Maverick" vs. Palin's endorsement:

McCain/Hayworth - Pot vs. Kettle?

Article in the Wall Street Journal. Excerpts:
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Mr. McCain is likely untouchable in a general election, but the smaller GOP electorate is challenging. A Rasmussen Reports survey last year found that 61% of core GOP voters thought he was "out of touch" and only a third believed he was doing a good job representing conservative values. Since then, his high-profile opposition to ObamaCare and a raft of TV ads has likely helped boost his numbers.

Nonetheless, former Congressman J.D. Hayworth is convinced his state's senior senator is vulnerable. Mr. Hayworth served 12 years in Congress until he was ousted in the 2006 Democratic landslide, in part because he was also seen as "out of touch" with constituents....

But Mr. Hayworth is confident he can catch up by portraying the 2008 GOP presidential nominee as someone who has "enabled" Barack Obama's agenda on economic and foreign policy.

"I'm giving Arizona Republicans a clear choice between a consistent, common-sense conservative . . . or someone who describes himself as a maverick, but is a moderate," he told the Washington Times yesterday.....

The outspoken former congressman may have talked a good game when he was in the House. But when it came to federal spending he -- more than Mr. McCain -- was an "enabler" of questionable budget items. It was Mr. Hayworth, not Mr. McCain, who voted for a 2003 prescription drug benefit that added enormously to the nation's future liabilities.

It was Mr. Hayworth who voted for bloated farm and highway bills, while Mr. McCain opposed them. It was Mr. Hayworth who was a consistent seeker and supporter of pork-barrel Congressional earmarks. Mr. McCain, on the other hand, never requested earmarks in appropriations bills and often led a crusade against those he felt were improperly slipped into bills.

All of this will make for a lively Republican primary and national political reporters can be counted on to portray the race as a moderate veteran against a "Tea Party" upstart. But the reality is a lot more complicated. Let's just say either man would have trouble convincing Barry Goldwater, Arizona's nonpareil conservative, that he was Goldwater's true heir.

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Huh. I've been wanting McCain to lose this race. Now I'm not so sure.

Palin Projection

The recent hubbub over Palin stumping for McCain has got me thinking about a problem that we knew existed among Palin's detractors, but now it's clear that it exists among her supporters as well: projection. People on both sides of the Palin aisle are guilty of seeing in the woman exactly and only what they want to see.

Anyone with a pair of eyes or ears over the last two years knows that Palin loves John McCain, that she holds no personal animosity towards John McCain, that she would never say anything bad about John McCain, and (in the aftermath of "Visorgate") she supports John McCain's reelection. She has said all of these things all along. When Palin's supporters were ready to hang McCain for not committing wholeheartedly after the election to support her if she ran in 2012, Sarah Palin came out and defended John McCain.

Do I want Palin to stump for the man? No. Do I wish she would just donate to his campaign and leave it at that, or not donate at all? Yes. Am I shocked and dismayed and disappointed and ready to drop Sarah Palin because of this? Absolutely not! I knew all along that this is where she stands. I may disagree with it, but I was never under the illusion that she was going to do anything else. So why is the conservative blogosphere buzzing about this?

It's a classic case of projection. We're all guilty of it. I'm guilty of it. While Palin's detractors view her as a wolf-killing Godzilla that's going to force them all to become Pentecostals, her supporters tend to see her as Reagan reincarnated and that she's going to storm into Washington with the carcass of a dead grizzly strapped to her back and a bazooka over her shoulder as she single-handedly slays any and all who are not purebred conservatives. The Glenn Beck/Tammy Bruce projection of Palin.

Sarah Palin has never once said that she is running for President. Whether you agree with it or not, Sarah Palin has been consistent in her support of John McCain. So if any of you have sour grapes about any of this, you have no one to blame but yourself. You've created a Palin in your mind that never actually existed.

When C4P first got started, there was a mission statement drawn up. One of the things in that statement was that we are not blind followers of Palin who actually have no idea of what she stands for. The opposite is true. We have researched her. We know exactly what her record is, how she works, and what she stands for, and that's why we support her.

What is the reality of Sarah Palin? Did she clean house in Alaksa? Yes. But she also worked with everyone, Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. Is she a conservative? Yes. But she has no problem working with those who are not. She is not an ideologue. She is a pragmatist. How on earth do you think she had such a high approval rating in Alaska? Do you think it's because everyone in Alaska is uber-conservative?

I find it very revealing that the McCain aides said that they didn't look at Palin to play to the conservative base, although that was the assumption. They actually chose her because of her ability to appeal to Independents. If you look at her record you will see that.

Perhaps this comes as a disappointment to some who have envisioned Sarah as their conservative or libertarian Messiah. Ladies and gentlemen, she is not "The One." She never claimed to be. There is no "One." There is us. All of us working together to try and salvage something of freedom and hope and opportunity and liberty in this country for the next generation.

Let's get an accurate description of Sarah Palin from Uncle Ted:



P.S. I love this blurb in Mark Steyn's article on President Obama:

The most striking aspect of his performance was how unhappy he looked, as if he doesn’t enjoy the job. You can understand why. He ran as something he’s not, and never has been: a post-partisan, centrist, transformative healer.

That’d be a difficult trick to pull off even for somebody with any prior executive experience, someone who’d actually run something, like a state, or even a town, or even a commercial fishing operation, like that poor chillbilly boob Sarah Palin.

At one point late in the 2008 campaign, when someone suggested that if Governor Palin was “unqualified” then surely he was too, Obama pointed out as evidence to the contrary his ability to run such an effective campaign. In other words, running for president was his main qualification for being president.

The irony? Palin actually has a record of working across party lines and of being able to bring people of all different ideologies together to accomplish a goal that moves things forward. Palin has the record to match Obama's rhetoric (minus the stupid stuff like rolling back the seas and the healing of the planet, of course).

An Interesting Anecdote

I was just running through the past few days of C4P. I've been awol for a couple days and wanted to catch up. This tidbit was there on their review of "Sarah from Alaska," that book the two reporters wrote:

Matt Scully was not initially overly impressed with the first draft of the speech he wrote for Governor Palin's convention speech. Palin subsequently became heavily involved in crafting the speech and had managed to pretty much memorize it.

Scully also wrote Palin's concession speech that she never gave. The version she was supposed to give if they lost had this line:

'It would be a happier night if elections were a test of valour and merit alone, but that is not for us to question now.'

I think Palin must have either been involved with the writing of the concession speech as well, or else known it to the point of memorizing it like her RNC speech, because she said almost exactly that line in this interview after the election:





Just an interesting tidbit for the night.