Legally Alaskan

Or: Base Hit

The more obvious (stated numerous time last evening) reference may be Reese Witherspoon's "Election", but I saw it more like Elle Woods all growed up.

Her early, narcissistic beauty-parlor life tossed away, fueled by the whiff of success, and imbued with ambition that even that Alaskan pipeline wouldn't be large enough to contain.

As the old saying goes, everyone gets 15-minutes of fame, and Sarah "Midnight Sun" Palin is not wasting hers, determined to make it the loudest, widest-screened, most enhanced technicolored 15-minutes your ever saw.

Ironically, back in 1972, Hunter S. Thompson noted that "the ego of a man running for president is equivalent of a moose in heat."

Perhaps, in the spirit of progress, the changing political landscape, and with Sarah "Midnight Sun" Palin in the race, that can be inclusive of vice-presidential candidates as well.

Is this the Republican Convention or a VFW jamboree?

Rather than bust, once-and-for-all, that ceiling with "18-million cracks", Moose Mommy went along reading, for her defining, national party debut, a man's speech, sprinkled with her up-from-the-snowshoe-straps Wasillian wahoo life, and doused with a Mount McKinley-sized dollop of Fly Boy's POW-POW-POW saga.

Speaker, after speaker have run the POW-POW-POW story to dizzying heights, akin to a fish tale, the catch getting larger-and-larger with each repetition.

The previous evening, boy, ol' pick-up truck Fred Thompson, he didn't just lather on the Aqua Velva, he also slathered the POW-POW-POW mantra, embellishing it with details.

I don't know if that was wise, as that certainly will raise the bar (which Palin happily picked up) on the Stumblin' Bumblin' McCain's daily use of it.

I'm a bit surprised he didn't take his over-acted line from 'The Hunt for Red October' to really scare the bejeezes out of the crowd;

"If we don't get behind John McCain, this election will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it"

Last evening Sarah Palin referred to it constantly, almost as if it were a break-point refrain in the speech.

Or that, if she didn't mention it enough, a giant red hook would yank her off stage.

The POW-POW-POW thing has been so marginalized, so watered down, no doubt, there has to be a few dittoheads out there, calling their travel agencies today, looking to see if they can use their Frequent Flyer Miles to book rooms at the Hanoi Hilton.

We're All Wasillians!

If McCain was rallying the NeoNitWits with his "We are all Georgians", than Sarah Palin mailed out the membership cards to the base that "We are all Wasillians".

The pundits are telling us today that she didn't need to talk about compassion and the middle class, just her being on stage last evening was the flashing neon billboard for that.

She highlighted her family with her hockey mom bona fides, to the point, I expected a campaign stump speech that she should be elected on the basis that she has a family.

"I have a husband ... I have children ... Elect me!"

She promised to be an "advocate" for children with disabilities once inside the White House, yet, offered not a single policy, action item or idea, let alone, branish evidence of anything she's done in Alaska.

Midnight Sun touted her lies of killing off the Bridge To Nowhere and boast of the reformer that she is (since her running mate believes middle class is people that earn $5-million-per-year, perhaps Moose Mommy has a similar threshold for reformers - that if you rake in $27-million in Earmarks, you can refer to yourself as a reformer - apparently the dividing line must come at $30-million, or more).

Eva Fairbanks, over on TNR;

Tonight, diminished expectations combined with Palin’s known-to-be-remarkable charisma made for the speech-making equivalent of putting a champ bowler two feet in front of a set of plastic duckpins.

It convinced me that she makes a good PTA mom, that she may make a fine mayor, that she hasn’t totally bombed as the essentially brand-new governor of the third-least-populous state in the Union, even that I might like to have a beer with her, or a glass of fermented whale milk or whatever one drinks with mooseburgers. But just because we’re a nation of a hundred thousand Wasillas doesn’t mean all those hundred thousand mayors ought to be in the White House. Tonight, she sounded for all the world like an unusually sharp version of those “regular people” they drag onstage at conventions to tell their stories in the off-primetime hours.

And her case for John McCain? Let’s just say I hope he has a better one for himself in store for tomorrow night. Extremely heavy on the POW material, it sounded less like an argument for a presidential nominee and more like the introduction to a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Her speech was three-pointed;

Wasilla - Bash Obama/Biden (and a significant portion of the country) for being leftist elitists - McCain POW-POW-POW

Who needs substance and solutions, when cheap hits and one-liners have the media drooling, with their tongues hanging out, ready to carry Palin off on their shoulders.

She hit it out of the park ...

The operative word, as pundits fanned themselves today, flush with equating Palin's speech with being cured at Lourdes, is that "she hit it out of the ballpark"

Poppycock!

She hit, at best, a seeing-eye single, a feat bringing the home crowd to its' feet, much like a rookie being called up from Triple A, getting into a game late in the season, and having a successful first-at-bat.

Sarah Palin is the "new" maverick.

Perhaps, but that remains to be seen.

Her record certainly doesn't carry the fibers of the maverick suit (we will have to check that, to see if she hoovered up a earmark to purchase herself a maverick title)

It should also be said, that a 72-year-old, party-toeing, multi-presidential-race loser being called maverick is like calling a 72-year-old Willie Mays "slugger".

It's a affectionate moniker, tossed at days gone by.

And there's always something creepy about people who give themselves, or referring to themselves constantly, by a nickname.

The country doesn't need a "pit bull with lipstick"

For it would come to a flat-brained pit bull (with or without lipstick) to stick one of their paws in their mouth, not only dissing, but insulting community organizers.

People who give of themselves to aid, help, assist and better others.

Oh, wait a minute ... That's right, she's a Republican.

They don't have community organizers, they, as evidenced by the Bush Grindhouse, have "corporate organizers", always at the ready to hand out a no-bid contract to a crony company.

Al Giordano called it "The Rookie Mistake", while Barry Crimmins labeled it "Tonya Harding with a speechwriter", and Chris Hayes, over on The Nation delivered the knockout blow;

But this kind of hits me where I live, since my dad is a community organizer, so lemme spell this out: the difference between a community organizer and a politician is that a community organizer can't tell anyone what to do. They have to listen. So they can't order books banned from a library to indulge their own religious sensibilities. They can't fire someone because they didn't follow orders to fire an estranged family member. They can't ram through a $15 million dollar sports complex that leaves their local town groaning underneath the debt. Unlike politicians, they don't have any power other than the power of people who want to see something changed.

Decades ago, before the ADA and a raft of other legislation, schools had essentially no requirements to provide decent education for special needs children. Then a movement of parents, engaging in - gasp - community organizing changed that. And they continue to fight day in and day out for educational equity for children like Sarah Palin's.

Too bad Sarah Palin just spit in their faces.

Now, spitting in our faces, is that what candidates who put "Country First" do?


Bonus Mommy Moose

Will Bunch - Attytood: Palin's speech to nowhere

Gloria Steinem - Palin: wrong woman, wrong message; Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger

Mark Kleiman: Palin v. Reality

Steve Benen: THE TRUMAN SHOW...

FiveThirtyEight: Cognitive Dissonance

The 1,001 Points of Light