So Funny, I Forgot To Laugh!

I've been watching this feud between David Letterman and Sarah Palin pretty closely, and I am ready to declare a pox on both of their houses. If you are unfamiliar with the genesis of this feud, you can read about it here, or get the gist of it by watching this:

I was all ready to come to David Letterman's defense when I first heard about this. After all, jokes are whan Letterman does, and pushing the edge of propriety is part of his job. Plus, Palin's daughter, Bristol, who is now 18, was, in fact, "knocked up" even before her Mom came in to the national spotlight. Bristol Palin is fair game. However... Letterman made a joke about Palin's daughter getting knocked up at the Yankees game, and the problem is... the Palin daughter at the game was not 18-year-old Bristol, but 14-year-old Willow.

I can't defend jokes about getting innocent 14-year-old girls pregnant. Letterman should have apologized, and explained that he got the daughters mixed up. That would probably have been the end of it. But Letterman is not really going to apologize. Late night talk show hosts don't DO that. He has to save face with his audience... More significantly to Letterman, he's now in a white-hot ratings war with NBC, where viewers are still trying to decide whether they like Conan O'Brian. Letterman could have handled this with more class, but he's not going to.

At the same time, I can't paint the Palins as real victims in this, either. The feud keeps Sarah Palin in the national spotlight, which serves her political career well, and she's been able to use it to whip up a frenzy (and a few bucks, I'm sure) from the conservative right. Palin is right to defend her daughter, but you don't see her doing anything to try and quiet the controversy, either. And her husband, Todd, who accused Letterman of making a rape joke, just takes a valid complaint against Letterman and skews it way out of proportion.

There is one other news item that, sadly, is also drawing some laughs. Through a spokesperson, Chastity Bono has announced that she is, after years of consideration, going to transition and become a man. I heard my friends discuss this on the radio this morning and have a good ol' belly laugh over her decision to become "Chaz Bono". One of the hosts went so far as to say "I thought she already WAS a man".


Look - you can think transgenderism is misguided and wrong if you want - but to mock and laugh at someone's personal life decision is both cruel and disrespectful. Chastity Bono never asked to have a public persona. She was born with it, and has dealt with it her entire life. There is no way this transition was going to be allowed to take place privately, so it took enormous courage for Chaz to go forward with it at all. He is getting by with his life the best way he can.

How can you laugh at that?

Election leftovers!

Two post-election things to post this morning... First - Senator John McCain proved he is a good sport during his appearance on Leno:



And Camille Paglia has offered her election post-mortem at Salon.com. There's something here for both parties, as Paglia shares her continuing affections for both Barack Obama and my gal, Sarah Palin! Enjoy the read!

Hey, Women! Can We Practice Some Civility?

Look, folks. I GET that I'm in the minority - especially around these parts - when it comes to admiring Sarah Palin. But I truly do not understand where the hatred and lack of respect towards her is coming from - especially among women.

I was reading a blog today that is managed by a group of women whom I respect and like very much. Here is the headline written about Sarah Palin:

You don't have to like Sarah Palin, and you certainly don't have to vote for her. But isn't it a slap to all women for a woman to call Sarah Palin a BITCH?

This is not an isolated case. Here's another example from one of my friends on Facebook - celebrating the fact that Sarah Palin has been turned into the subject of a porn video.

In all seriousness, is it disrespectful or demeaning to call a woman a bitch or to cast her image in a porn video ONLY if she's an Eastern Liberal elitist with a blueblood educational background? Do the same rules not apply to women who fall outside of that range?

It seems to me this is the equivalent of African-Americans saying it's OK to call each other "niggers", but it's not OK for non-blacks to use the word.

I'm not alone in feeling this way - Even Whoopi Goldberg, who is NO FAN of Sarah Palin, came out on "The View" yesterday and admitted the way other women have been treating Palin is disgraceful.

"Yeah, it’s horrible that she has gotten this much and- gotten this much rage in such a short amount of time. And I guess people don’t remember that when Hillary was running because maybe she ran- she had been out there longer and it was easier to take those same kind of ugly pot shots. You know, there’s something about strong women or women running that brings out the worst in people whether it’s on the Democratic side or the, or the Republican side, the point of the fact is, it’s crappy."

You all want to feel so morally superior in your disrespect, but all you are doing is shooting yourselves in the foot. This is a step backward for women... and not just the ones who know how to field dress a moose.

I Heart Betty White, Too!

To paraphrase my friend Jen paraphrasing former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, there is a special place in Hell for women (and men) who don't support Betty White!

Screw Obama/McCain - Let's Talk About Palin!

I skipped last night's debate between Obama and McCain, and opted instead to catch a recap on Nightline, which apparently proved to be a good decision because all the reviews seem to indicate the Presidential candidates were pretty darn boring...


So instead, this morning, I choose to discuss my fascination with Sarah Palin, who is decidedly less boring than the other three candidates! I call your attention to an article by Camille Paglia on Salon.com. Paglia is a self-professed liberal columnist and devoted Barack Obama supporter, who also happens to share my feelings about the Alaska Governor. Paglia shares my view that Palin has been criminally misjudged and that she is, in fact, an "uber" rather than "anti" feminist. Here are a few choice passages for those of you who opt not to read the entire column...


Although nothing will sway my vote for Obama, I continue to enjoy Sarah Palin's performance on the national stage. During her vice-presidential debate last week with Joe Biden (whose conspiratorial smiles with moderator Gwen Ifill were outrageous and condescending toward his opponent), I laughed heartily at Palin's digs and slams and marveled at the way she slowly took over the entire event. I was sorry when it ended! But Biden wasn't -- judging by his Gore-like sighs and his slow sinking like a punctured blimp. Of course Biden won on points, but TV (a visual medium) never cares about that.


The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.


One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is "dumb." Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.


Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant.


The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin's bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up. Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition -- without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She's no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she's pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite -- which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey's witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin's cadences and charm, she can't capture the energy, which is a force of nature.


I sometimes feel like I'm on a deserted island when it comes to my appreciation of Governor Palin, but then I look at the TV ratings for her debate with Joe Biden - 70 million people, the second largest televised debate of all time - and realize that a lot of you are, if not supportive, at least fascinated by her. And it makes me realize America's closets are jammed pretty tight with people!

I Heart Sarah Palin

There - I've finally come out of the closet. I love and admire Sarah Palin. She had me at "howdy!"

That is quite an admission to make in my world, which is dominated largely by liberal-leaning, academia-loving, Democratic loyalists - in other words, most of my friends and colleagues are, like myself, members of the mainstream media. My admiration for Sarah Palin was first savagely attacked by one of my closest friends less than 24 hours after she was introduced to the world, and I have kept my affections close to the vest ever since. But now that the Palin/Biden debate is out of the way, I'm coming out to one and all.

My closeted burden has been lifted because the pressure is finally off Palin. Now that the debate is over, she is going to take a backseat to her running mate for the rest of the campaign, and this time next month, Barack Obama will be elected President, as he probably should be.

There is no doubt to anyone with a semi-objective eye watching the debate that Joe Biden clearly won on content. In fact, it may have been the best public speaking I've ever seen Biden do. He was crisp with his comments, and I found him to be warm and engaging.

But I was darn proud of Sarah Palin as well. She could have gone "Admiral Stockdale" right from the start, but she hung in there with Biden for an hour and a half and never conceded her ground. She also wisely ignored Gwen Ifil's questions and Joe Biden's challenges when she didn't know the answers or have a comeback, and I was OK with that. She did what she had to do to not completely embarrass herself, and she did it with class, and humor and warmth.

A lot has been asked of Sarah Palin since she was grabbed from obscurity to become John McCain's running mate just five weeks ago, and she has held up as well as anyone in her situation could possibly be expected to. She was a shiny apple who was asked to be an orange on extremely short notice. Was she properly vetted in advance? No. Did she know everything that a candidate for national office needs to know? No. But when Sarah Palin was asked to help her party and her party's Presidential nominee, she stepped up to the plate. And that counts for a ton in my book, considering the knee-jerk savage criticism she has had to endure and the wilting pressure she has faced. She also, by the way, faced knee-jerk public idolatry that did not serve her well in the end, as supporters envisioned Palin as some sort of fantasy Samantha Stevens who could deliver votes with a twitch of her bespectacled nose.


Palin has been painted as "dumb" and "stupid"... an anti-feminist and a fundamentalist Christian whacko. She is none of those things. What she IS is "you and me." She IS an average person - someone who is an expert within her sphere of influence (i.e., running Alaska), with considerably fewer skills in areas that she has not had to deal with. Could YOU, for example, give an intelligent response on which factions are harboring Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in Afghanistan or Pakistan? Me neither.


The difference between Sarah Palin and the rest of us is that she was pushed into a national spotlight and asked to pretend to be something she is not... and she had to do it knowing that we knew she was playing a role. Put yourself in Sarah Palin's red high heels for a minute and imagine how well you'd have done answering Katie Couric's questions.


About three weeks ago, actor Matt Damon said Sarah Palin is "like a bad Disney movie." Well, you know what? I love Disney movies (big surprise there)... movies like "The Rookie" and "Miracle" and "Remember The Titans", where teams or individuals in unlikely scenarios face long-odd chances of succeeding, but still, in the end use their guts and determination to win. Well, Sarah Palin is not going to win - this time. The economic crisis has taken too much of a toll on the McCain campaign, and Palin's own inevitable struggles with the media have not helped in that regard.


But there's also a very good chance this Disney film is not over. If we've learned nothing else about Sarah Palin, we have learned that she is a highly skilled politician and a very good, if not great, communicator. Her affair with the camera lens rivals those of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and we have not seen the end of her. Say what you will about Palin's premature debut on the national stage - she has put her state on the map in ways that no politician has ever done before, and I think she'll definitely end up in Washington as a member of the U.S. Senate if that's what she wants.


That's when the real education of Sarah Palin will begin. And, by golly, those Democrats better gosh darn watch out then!

Houseguests - The Power Is Up For Grabs!

How's this for political analysis? As we move closer to election day, I'm finding myself more and more frequently comparing the Presidential campaign to the TV show, "Big Brother", at least in this sense...

In the game of Big Brother, losing contestants frequently try to make the claim that they have played the game honestly, with morally superior intent, and they invariably are shown the door because they are not willing (or are not smart enough) to make the cutthroat plays necessary to win the game. So the quandry becomes whether to be popular and lose, or to be lambasted and win.

In the game of Presidential "Big Brother" that is playing out in my head, Obama is coming out as the nice guy, and John McCain is coming out as the tough guy who just might win in the end.

The McCain campaign has been excoriated by the Obama camp (and by Democrats in general) for picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, a move that many on the left see as a cynical effort to pickup some Hillary Clinton supporters, and described by many as a "Hail Mary" pass to save a failing campaign. Well, for a while, anyway, the move worked, and it worked far better than even the McCain campaign could have imagined. Like her or hate her, Palin is still getting plenty of attention, despite the fact that a near-blackout has been imposed by the McCain campaign in terms of media access. Joe Biden is readily available to the media, but the way things have been going for him lately, don't be surprised if the Democrats put Biden in a media blackout as well!

Now, John McCain has announced he's suspending his campaign and returning to Washington until a deal is reached on a rescue package for America's financial system. The Democrats are crying foul once again, saying McCain's move is nothing but a political ploy to turn the attention away from his trailing poll numbers. They also are claiming "dirty pool", because they say Obama reached out to McCain first, only to have McCain go before the media first in order to get the "leadership" edge on the issue. In the game of "Big Brother", we call this "the player getting played".

There's no doubt McCain is making a big gamble here. His latest play could come across as a political ploy... OR it could come across as McCain being a renegade... actually doing something "presidential" and leading by example, leaving Obama in the dust to engage in the political game alone.

No matter how you look at it though, there is no doubt that in the Presidential campaign, John McCain has been more imaginative, and demonstrated that he's more willing to take chances than Barack Obama is. This could very well kill McCain's chances of being President. But if America elects John McCain on November 4th, it will be because he was doing what he needed to do to win the game.

Obama may be able to claim the moral high road.

But McCain will claim the White House.

An Instant SNL Classic!

If you missed the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, you missed an opening skit that will no doubt go down as a classic among more than 30 years of political SNL sketches... Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton. After watching this, I almost felt bad for Hillary. Almost.

Since NBC usually makes youtube take down its SNL clips, I have used the version from hulu.com (which NBC co-owns). It may include a 15-second ad, but it's worth the wait! Enjoy!

Back To Earth

Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. Well, actually, a LOT of Republicans said the election was over after Sarah Palin was picked to be John McCain's running mate. But at some point or other, Palin had to get off the campaign trail and say something in public that strayed from her well-crafted acceptance speech, which she had been repeating for over a week. And that point came on September 11th in Fairbanks.

Palin's performance in her first interview with Charlie Gibson should not be compared with the 9-11 disaster, although I'm sure some NY Times or Slate.com columnist will not be able to resist that allusion. This was not, however, Palin's finest moment. Gibson, rightly so, launched right into questions about foreign policy - the area that most people in America suspect would be Palin's weakest link. And she did prove to be pretty weak. Her answers concerning Israel and the Russian invasion of Georgia were clearly crafted by someone else and grafted onto Palin's brain. And she clearly had no idea what the Bush Doctrine was when Charlie asked her about it.

Red meat Republicans will be tempted to attack Charlie Gibson for his questions, or for the borderline-condescending manner in which he asked them. But they should stop right there. Charlie Gibson was hand-picked by the McCain camp, and can you really name anyone else of stature who would have treated Palin any more fairly? I will say I was not very comfortable with Gibson's grilling about God. Religion is a very personal thing, and what makes sense to one person vis a vis God may make no sense at all to someone else.

Palin supporters will give her a pass on much of the interview. Let's face it... the vast majority of Americans don't know anything about foreign policy - that's what we elect other people to worry about. And I, for one, had no idea what the Bush Doctrine was, either! I have never had any delusion that Sarah Palin knows squat about foreign policy, and I could frankly care less about her bona fides in that area. Most Governors who have ever run for President have the same weakness entering the White House, and they simply learn on the job.

However, Palin's struggles with Gibson DO mark an important point in the election. It will give Democrats (and the media - especially MSNBC) some traction for the first time since Palin was introduced to the public before the GOP Convention. And it should erase a good portion of the bump that McCain enjoyed after St. Paul.

In other words, it's game on!

P.S. - Watch this clip - and remember - we only tease because we love.

Equal Time

Here's the deal with Sarah Palin. Win or lose with McCain, she's going to be one of the leading faces of the GOP for the next 20 years. Having said that, I've been tough on the Democrats lately... Time for some payback in their favor...

Tread Carefully, Feminists...

The smell of hypocrisy hangs in the air over the Presidential campaign... Democrats are howling over the fact that the other side, the Grand Old (White Man) Party, has beaten the Dems to the punch and put up a woman as a Vice Presidential candidate. There have been chuckles over the relative inexperience of Sarah Palin, along with the fact that she comes from a small state, is pro-gun and pro-life, and now has both a baby with Down Syndrome and a daughter who is pregnant, proving without a doubt that she is an irresponsible parent to boot.

In essence, the Democrats are doing everything they can to marginalize Sarah Palin, just as all men tried to marginalize all women candidates a generation ago. If Sarah Palin breaks through the glass ceiling, are we to believe it won't count because her politics are not NOW politics? Do GOP women have to submit to chromosome tests to prove their gender?

Here's what is really at play here. Last Thursday night, the Democrats thought they had the election all but locked up after Barack Obama's electrifying acceptance speech in Denver. Obama/Biden vs. McCain/Romney? Surely an electoral landslide!

What the Democrats had not counted on is that the Republicans were slick enough to steal the spotlight and turn conventional wisdom on its ear. And now the Democrats are pissed.

They are pissed that what they thought would be a rout is now a horserace. They are pissed that, after finally getting Hillary Clinton to go away, her legacy remains alive in Sarah Palin. And they are extremely pissed that of the two parties, the one that had the imagination to nominate a woman was the party of Darth Vader and Dick Cheney.

This is a hypocritical temper tantrum in the making. Would feminist groups rather have a strong woman in the White House, even if she does not share the traditional NOW platform, or would they rather have Joe Biden in a dress?

I don't expect feminist groups to support the McCain/Palin ticket... But I would hope they don't spend the next two months trying to claim that Sarah Palin is not a legitimate candidate for Vice President. Like her or not, Palin is going to make the GOP ticket more attractive to voters. And that speaks to her power... as a candidate AND as a woman.

-- Written by a pro-choice, anti-gun Obama-leaning moderate who thinks candidates deserve the courtesy of being fully-vetted by the public instead of being instantly dismissed in order to justify a political stance.

The Presidential Race Has Just Gotten Much More Interesting!

I'm not saying I'll vote for her, or predict that her surprise selection will push John McCain over the top, but Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's arrival at the GOP VP nominee will no DOUBT make the rest of the Presidential race far more interesting that the selection of Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty would have been!

I can say as an old white guy myself that another old white guy in the number two chair (such as the -ahem- other VP candidate) would have been pretty dull, and left millions of more Americans sitting on the sidelines disengaged from the battle the rest of the way. I know that's what I had been planning to do, anyway!

I think Governor Palin handled herself extremely well in her introduction to the national stage, and I think she has at least caught the attention of blind Obama loyalists who were hoping that his acceptance speech Thursday night would effectively end the race.

Give the old guy credit... He had an ace up his sleeve, and he played it at a perfect time to steal the news cycle away from Obama... The people who say John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin was a desperation move may very well be right... But that doesn't mean it wasn't the right move at the right time... And I can GUARANTEE you that McCain/Palin will get far more attention from the media and the nation over the next two months than McCain/Romney ever would have!

Let the Games begin!

Oh - and if I'm not mistaken (I havent done the homework on this), Palin would be the first major candidate for President or Vice President to have a background in sports broadcasting since Ronald Reagan... Enjoy!