Bent Notes

Well, Barracuda, you’re definitely doing what I said you needed to do in the last post.

Beautiful.  Magnificent. Marvelous.

“We gotta start telling the electorate what the other side represents.”

I’ve felt, since I saw her debut as veep candidate in Dayton, that it wasn’t the gosh-darn factor, the record of leadership in Alaska, or the strong marriage and big family that was what mainly made her a formidable asset.  I could just see that, within that snappy, attractive package was someone capable of waging war.

As I’ve said for months here at BN, you don’t go up against the Freedom Haters with anything less than a war mentality.  Even a fourth-generation military man like McCain doesn’t understand that.  Left to his own devices, he’d roll over for his own public, nationally broadcast disemboweling.

Fortunately, he has Barracuda now to be fierce for him, and for us.

Pour it on, Governor. Hourly, for the next thirty days.

She’s held her own on some key topics, but overall, it strikes me as less than what is needed.  Most dispiriting of all is the statements that give me the sense that the McCain people have successfully infected her with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.  Crud about how regulations are good.  Crud about “greed.”  Stuff about oil companies and “tax breaks,” whatever the hell those are (see Robert Novak’s Townhall column today, “What Is A Loophole?”).

Ironically, the other topic besides energy on which she’s doing best is foreign policy.  Good responses on Iran, Iraq, Pakistan.

I’m trying not to scare the hell out of my wife with my roaring and screaming whenever that stool sample Joe Biden opens his mouth.

Bottom line as of 10:08: This isn’t sufficient.  One year from now: block-by-block spy committees and re-education camps.  Two years from now: incinerated cities.

In Colorado Springs this morning, The Barracuda serves notice that the mentality of “Wheee!  Let’s take some more wacky risks with a bunch of anonymous people’s money!  If it goes sour, Uncle Sam will bail us out!” will get nowhere come January.

This whole thing has at its core our age’s disconnect between choices and responsibility.  Yes, risk is an honorable thing when the possible outcomes have been considered and weighed, but when the name of the game becomes over-the-top-clever repackaging of basic loan and investment transactions in forms ever more remote from the original exchanges of hard-earned money, it gets harder for those doing the repackaging to see how it can all come tumbling down.  It reminds me of the line in the Mose Allison song “Middle Class White Boy”: “I just wanna do everything wrong and still pick up first prize.”

Once again, Madame Vice President tells the people in plain English what’s going on - and what she and President McCain won’t enable.

First there was Michael Steele with his rhetorical device put to excellent use: “Do you put country first?”  And, of course, his phrase “Drill, baby, drill,” which the crowd immediately picked up as a chant and which will no doubt start turning up on tee shirts.

Then there was Mitt Romney, who took off the gloves in a way I’d never seen, and also gave an excellent explanation of what opportunity is and how the government can’t provide it - and how the FHers would squash it.

Then there was Linda Lingle, offering the perspective of a fellow female Republican governor and how she’s come to know Sarah Palin personally and see her character first-hand.

Then there was Rudy, who got right to the heart of the matter and asked why it is that the FHers never once at their convention used the term “Islamic terrorism.”  Of course, he was dynamite on every subject he touched.

And then, as Chris Wallace at Fox and Anderson Cooper at CNN both said afterward, “a star [was] born.”  Governor Palin is now permanently etched in our pantheon of historical figures: fierce defender of primary principles, folk hero, everywoman, and intellect of the first order.

Everything is different now.

The left will have to try some tactic other than the gutter politics of personal destruction, because they hadn’t counted on how it goes when you mess with the Barracuda.  She does what Dutch used to do: she takes her case right to the American people and resonates, big time.

What she’s done has very personal implications.  Take me, for instance.  I’m energized and I see possibility in ways I haven’t in years. I think freedom and huan dignity and the spread of proseperity have a chance.  That which is supposed to prevail in this universe is doing so.

Let’s roll.

The pathetic and poisonous efforts of the left to destroy Sarah Palin gives the lie to the meme that the oh-so-moderate chin-stroking urban/coastal chattering class has been trying to get us to swallow for a while: the notion that the culture wars were winding down and Americans were now more concerned with efficient delivery of health care and energy and other dry, arcane considerations.

The delicious irony is that it’s that sector of our society that, so far, has been the most shrill and murderous about the Palin candidacy.  It’s the magazine writers, TV commentators and lefty bloggers who are pulling out all the stops in their attempt to wreck the governor’s career and life.

John Edwards was wrong about what comprised them, but he was right in his basic assertion that there are two Americas.  The division is deeper than it’s ever been.

As a historian, I am interested in the roots of the schism.  It certainly goes back farther than the 1960s.  The New Left movement in academic circles got going in the 1940s and 50s with the works of William Appleman Williams and C. Vann Woodward.  But the whole thing really goes back even further.  There’s the Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s, Lillian Hellman, Walter Duranty’s puff-piece treatment of the USSR under Stalin.  Maybe it goes back to the salons in the Greenwich Village brownstones of the turn of the century.  American folk art is full of pairings of cousins, one a country bumpkin and one a city slicker, and I think that’s an element.  One could even make the case that the Enlightenment, which originated in Europe, with its forthright reliance on rationality and empiricism, paved the way.  In America, it led to a lot of offshoots from core Judeo-Christian thought, such as Unitarianism and the array of New Thought denominations.  Also, here one would need to concede that even such Founding Fathers as the Deist Jefferson were looking into interpretive ways to relate to scripture.  Still, relate to it he most definitely did.

In any event, at some point, a mindset ingrained itself into certain sectors of our society and spread to others.  It was based on a divorce from a foundational and commonly held set of assumptions that had, up to that point, been part of American life in such a broad sense as to be considered universal.  Church, family, gender differences, the relationship between industriousness and prosperity, sufficient understanding of human nature to make obvious the need for strong national defense - these were givens for pretty much everybody.

I was in the thick of the period when the Big Split became codified, when a sufficiently large plurality of citizens embraced it as to legitimize it in schools, workplaces and arenas of civic participation.  I sat in the back of high school math class and read Ramparts magazine and Do It! by Jerry Rubin.  I had shoulder-length hair, told my dad he was a fascist and a corporate fat cat. Spent days on end in the lysergic trenches.  Made a point of running as far away from square old Jesus as I could and insisting that some kind of all-is-one state of so-called reality constituted ultimate truth.

So I bear some culpability for the current diseased state of our precious nation.  What is so blessed about time, though, is that once you get smarter than you used to be, you can genuinely change.  You can pick a moment and declare, “That’s not me anymore.”

The horror, the ghastliness, of what the enemy in the culture wars is attempting to do to Sarah Palin has been a wake-up slap across the face for me.  I thought there was some tiny possibility that this was going to be a civil airing of differences, perhaps with some raised voices, close elections and strongly-worded polemics. 

No, this is an actual war.  My main encouragement about the odds for what is good and true prevailing stem from the resolve of those like the woman currently on the front line.  I think tonight she will serve notice that she can outgun any comers.

Did you hear what she said in response to someone’s question about whether she’s up to this state of affairs?  She posed a question and then answered it.  “Do you know the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom?” she asked.  And then she said, “Lipstick.”