She has set Obama Camp on fire.
You know when you hit a nerve. As the old saying goes, the sting in any rebuke is the truth. When Sara Palin claimed yesterday that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorist… boy-oh-boy did Obama and all his pals in our socialist media start to squeal!
AYERS ATTACK Is the president we want one who wants to pal around with a terrorist?
She rocked at Thursday’s debate. In what universe does a person go from having two bad weeks, painted by the media as a moron, to last night and not impress even people who don’t like her?
She is the governor of a state with an $11 billion operating budget, a $1.7 billion capital budget and nearly 29,000 employees; she’s got more executive experience than any candidate for president or vice president this year. In Alaska she took on the state political establishment, the incumbent Republican governor and the oil companies. She’s a rising star who accentuates John McCain’s maverick strengths and a “hockey mom” who has developed a powerful tie to ordinary voters.
From Kim Priestap at Wizbang:
“America, this is what a feminist looks like.”
Who said that about Sarah Palin? Would you believe the president of LA’s National Organization for Women, Shelly Mandel? Amazing! This is quite a moment for her to push back against the pressure from the feminist groups who see Sarah Palin as a traitor because she’s a Republican and pro-life who actually lived her principles. Let’s hope more mainstream, liberal feminists come out of their closets and support Sarah because, as Shelly said, Sarah supports women’s rights, equal pay, Title 9, and the middle class. She has integrity and demands it from others.
The Free Sarah Palin strategy has already begun to pay dividends.
“The political landscape here is littered with people who have underestimated Sarah Palin,” said Eric Croft, a former state representative who ran for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2006 and appeared with Palin during several early forums. http://quipster.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/underestimate-palin-at-your-own-risk/
By Sally Jenkins Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 2, 2008; http://scottthong.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/blatant-anti-palin-bias-in-the-liberal-media-a-collection/
Discipline and hard work plus a lot of knock you down and drag out situations have nurtured Sarah Palin. Her family is similar to the family portrayed in The Waltons.
It’s a household that explains much about Palin, 44, and how she acquired her set-jawed, swaggering demeanor, one that her mother first noticed “about the time she started to walk.” Above all, the house suggests how she came by her dissident, out-of-category feminism, a code by which she tackles old-boy networks relentlessly, while remaining blank if not unsympathetic on traditional women’s issues with a capital W, such as sexism in the workplace.
“I’m a little absent from that discussion, because I’ve never thought of gender as an issue,” she told Alaska Business Monthly after being elected governor in 2006.
It’s a code rooted in childhood experiences of backwoodsing and athletic striving “until she was literally red in the face,” according to her sister Heather Bruce, 45. They included leading her tiny high school to a state basketball championship, an event Palin once described as “life changing.” Composure was a genderless quality, earned under pressure — as in the time a grizzly bear climbed on the family car. “It didn’t matter if you were a man or a woman if you were going out to hunt,” says her brother Chuck Jr., 46.
They are experiences Palin will draw on to deal with crushing pressure of a different sort: her vice presidential candidacy and her debate Thursday night with her Democratic counterpart, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr (Del.). Friends and family insist that she will reassert her famous self-will when she takes the stage in St. Louis. “We all know what’s riding on it,” Chuck Jr. says. “But she has a history of coming through in big events.”
While watching his daughter on the Couric interview, he discussed some of the situations that have nurtured Sarah Palin.
Chuck has seen his daughter handle herself in other perilous situations and come out all right. A few years ago, he watched her pilot husband Todd Palin’s commercial fishing boat in a storm. Todd was working at his oil-field job on the North Slope, and Palin and her father had been fishing on Bristol Bay. “It was the toughest work I’ve ever done, and it wasn’t only hard, it was dangerous,” Chuck says. At the end of the run, they had to get the boat on a trailer amid crashing surf. As cold, metallic-sheened waves tossed the trawler around, Chuck quailed.
She did.
Then there is the calm visual that she projects. There was a stillness that she developed. You can easily see that as she developed survival skills. Serenity Under Pressure
In 1970, Wasilla was a village of 400 on the edge of the wilderness in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, a river-split basin where the first leg of the Iditarod dog sled trail runs.
The Heaths lived in a small cabin heated by a wood-burning stove, all four children crowded in an attic bedroom, where they huddled under quilts and watched their own breath. Since store-bought food was hard to come by, area families relied on wild game as their main form of sustenance. The Heaths and the Carters hunted together, and “one moose would feed both families for a winter,” Smith says.
Palin stacked firewood endlessly and worked in a large communal garden where winter vegetables were grown. Anyone who dined at the Heath home remembers large stews of whatever the family had shot. “Bear, moose, sheep,” recalls Kim Ketchum, one of Palin’s childhood friends.
By age 10, Palin was picking off rabbits out the back door and sniping at ptarmigan, an Alaskan game bird, on cross-country skis. Her father would rouse her at 4 a.m. to hunt duck before school. On hunts, she learned how to field-dress a moose, a fancy term for butchering it.
At 14 she was field-dressing moose which came in handy during the VP debate:
Chuck taught her how. She helped lift the legs, which weighed more than 100 pounds, while her father gutted and quartered the animal and then used a bone saw to take off the ribs. Next he began removing various organs for his biology class. He wanted to use the eyes for dissection. When he tried to hand them to his daughter, she finally rebelled. “I can’t,” she said, shuddering.
In the summers, she took swimming lessons in a Red Cross program at a lake, in water so cold it turned her blue and had kids digging in their heels at the shore.
Chuck thought his kids should learn “how to handle extreme conditions,” Heather recalls, and he dared the older Heath children to sleep outdoors on the coldest snowy night.
Nobody watched much television.
Just a thought as to why we have created a nation of whiny children.
Though they were baptized Catholic as infants, they attended a small gray evangelical church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, and Sally enrolled them in summer Bible camps directed by the pastor.
There was one indisputable lesson the Heath children learned about the wilderness: how dangerous it was.
Very similar to the Washington politic muck vat that she has now been thrown into.
Sarah Heath and her friends played ball with boys in the family’s hard, dirt-packed back yard. “It was just what we did,” recalls Palin’s friend Jackie Conn, now a detective with the Anchorage Police Department.
Nor did anyone question Title IX, the 1972 law that mandated equal opportunity for women in public education. It’s the rare feminist issue for which Palin is an unambiguous cheerleader. “I’ll tell you, I’m a product of Title IX in our schools,” she says on the stump. “Equal education and equal opportunities in sports really helped propel me into, I guess into the position that I’m in today.”
At Wasilla High School, she ran with a set of tomboy friends who competed year-round, because that’s all there was to do in town.
Can you imagine that? What is there to do in a small town? No wonder Team Obama doesn’t have a clue about small towns or how they grow people.
They ran cross-country in the fall for the track team — coached by Palin’s father — played basketball in the winter and softball in the summer.
When Chuck chewed her out like a football player, she stared back at him and nodded. “She just looked me straight in the eye, didn’t talk back or anything,” he says. “It’s a wonder she didn’t whack me.”
By all accounts, Palin didn’t need an external motivator. She understood she wasn’t a gifted athlete, so she decided to be a tireless worker. “She ran her guts out,” Smith says. And she did it with an obvious edge. “She was small and thin and active,” Heather remembers. “There was no slacking when that girl was practicing or competing.”
Palin had to wait until her senior year to become the starting point guard and co-captain on the basketball team, and then no one gave her squad much of a chance to go to the state finals the way the team had the year before.
Wasilla High coach in Don Teeguarden, a teacherly sort with a buried temper who in the heat of practice or a game would suddenly throw his gum and make the players run “killers,” sprints up and down the court. “The girls weren’t sheltered,” he says.
They developed a reputation for upsetting larger schools around state, especially their rivals in Anchorage, which had student enrollments upward of 1,200. “That was when the giant-slayer first appeared,” says John Bitney, a former friend and aide to Palin. “And the poise under pressure. You have to realize we were tenfold smaller, and it was the boondocks. It was a Hoosiers kind of thing.”
She usually had the responsibility of stopping the other team’s high scorer. Her nickname “Sarah Barracuda” is well known. But they also called her “The Pusher” for her ability to drive opponents to one side of the floor.
No one gave the Warriors any chance to win a title when they drew East High, a large Anchorage school that had beaten them by 40 points earlier in the season, as their first-round opponent in the state tournament. Wasilla won, 50-48, but shortly before time expired, Palin came down wrong and sprained her ankle, an injury she would play through during the rest of the tournament.
Now that is a team player. You start, you finish.
In the championship game they met another large institution, Service High. Wasilla took a comfortable early lead, but Palin, playing on her heavily wrapped, swollen, blue ankle, couldn’t move well enough to defend, and Service began to catch up. Teeguarden motioned her to the bench. “I just had to get her out, it was painful to watch her,” he says. Palin was devastated as she took a seat, and the coach put an arm around her. “Without you we wouldn’t be here right now,” he said. “You’re not done.”
She remained on the bench until slightly less than a minute remained. He wanted her on the floor.
With about 30 seconds left, Palin was fouled. She went to the free-throw line. She licked her fingertips, dribbled the ball a time or two, and knocked down the shot. “That iced it,” Teeguarden says. “At that point we exhaled.” Wasilla won, 58-53.
Michele Kohinka, who was the center for Service High, described Palin this way: “She was a little floor general. She didn’t score a lot, but she was a scrappy defender and was always the first to the loose balls.”
Hmm, sounds like she can still take it.
Palin had scored nine points in three games, and her sprain had worsened into a stress fracture.
…it’s one that may well have been the making of Palin. “Sarah’s not stuck in a high school victory trance,” Heather says. “But she has taken that feeling of accomplishment, of being part of a winning team, and all the hard work it took to get there, and uses those skills today.”
Says Teeguarden: “The idea of being in awe of people just isn’t in her nature.” Ketchum adds, grinning: “She likes an opponent.”
“Palin not only slaughters her prey. She impales its head on a stick and parades it around for her followers to jeer at”Gerard Baker
