I don’t want to claim that Sullivan is neutral on the subject of Sarah Palin, but that sounds a little extreme for him. Can you cite a reference for that comment or are you just manufacturing a source of outrage?

Did you see Palin coyly “My bad” when she was talking to O’Reilly about the Couric interview? Give me a break! This woman is a pest that represents everything that is wrong with the current GOP.

You say she is being treated unfairly and in a ’sexist’ way. Not true. She has created her own monster, Dragonlady- see above why . She alone created her image- not the media, not the Democrats, not McCain’s handlers, and not David Frum.

Have you also noticed how she constantly puts Trig in the spotlight? Every chance she gets, she has that little child in the klieg-lights, holds him up to ‘prove’ what a ‘great Mom’ she is, then hands him off to an aide. Her fans drool. The rest of us gag.

I would have a lot more respect for her if she dropped the flirtatious winking, blowing kisses, The Lipstick- Schtick and keep Trig away from the front of cameras and screaming fans. Her kids shouldn’t be props.

There it is again…Palin is a MOM…and a GRANDMOM to boot.
Apparently Hillary is not a mom; or Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, and on and on.

How come none of these women are ever described this way? How come Hillary’s supporters never went around holding out her MOMness as a singular acheivement?

Like I wrote yesterday, how odd it would have been had we went around in 1979 saying that “you should respect Ronald Reagan because he is a DAD, and a GRANDDAD, and he likes to chop wood, and ho by the way, he is a DAD!”

Sarah attracts such personal venom, dragonlady, because she herself IS her policy, her vision, her position.
Her actual talking points are so bog-standard GOP positions, that they aren’t worth talking about, even among her supporters. No one is making a big deal of her energy policy; no one really cares about her foreign policy. Her supporters support Sarah the person, the mom, the grandmom, the hockey mom, the hunter mom, the Everymom.
The more she and her supporters run with this line about how unfair her coverage has been, how mean and vile it is, the more we want to say, “put on your big girl panties and deal with it”.
All politicians get bad press, but whining and sniveling isn’t theway to turn it around.

What people often forget is that politicians have the ability to write their own headlines. During the 80’s, the media largely detested Reagan; one issue that the intellectual left was fond of was the Nuclear Feeze (anyone remember that?). Support for The Freeze was a standard prerequisite for being a Serious Intellectual for most of academia.
Then one day Reagan announced that he was pursuing, not an arms limitation agreement, not a freeze on expansion of arms, but a Nuclear Reduction, an agreement to actually reduce the number or arms.
Overnight the Freeze disappeared, and Reagan was seen as a wise peacemaker, not the mad bomber of liberal fantasies. He wrote his own headlines, and created his own personna.
I am oversimplifying history, but only slightly, to make a point. The 24/7 new cycle needs to be fed information; Sarah feeds them nothing but gossip, easily disprovable lies, and absurd positions. If she were to find an issue, and stake a firm positon, one that serious people could talk about and discuss, she would be taken seriously.

“It was Andrew Sullivan who so-called CentristNyer calls ‘objective’ ”

First of all, I never called Sullivan himself “objective.” He clearly can’t tolerate her and what she stands for. What I said is that he’s willing to use objective standards to measure her words and that seems perfectly fair. When she says “X” but the record shows “Y,” and she does it REPEATEDLY, he’s right to call her out on it. (How is it that nearly everyone in the McCain campaign disputes her account?)

The thing that really drives most of Sully’s Palin-related posts is not even so much that she’s doing it — it’s that she’s not being called out on it. She hides from real journalists, giving interviews to softies like Oprah or shills like Hannity. She calls any efforts to probe her policy ideas or thoughts on the world “gotcha questions” or she deflects them with winks and “I’ll get back to you on that” and never does.

As for Andrew’s fixation on the facts surrounding Trig’s parentage, he’s only observed that there are many odd and unexplained parts of the story and asked that these be addressed. Does asking questions make you “unhinged”? Compared to the Obama birthers — who have produced lawsuits, submitted legislation and produced multiple fake birth certificates — Sully sets the standard for sanity.

What’s less talked about is the darkness in women. It’s the tendency to revel in emotional excess and make everyone around her either happy and joyous, or miserable. And this sort of insecurity is why some women take great pleasure in watching another woman she does not like being humiliated, or a willing accomplice. They take even greater pleasure in it when she happens to be attractive. Women at times are their own worst enemies.

“Please Dragonlady, don’t defend the indefensible. ” What’s indefensible to me is why Frum, you, and others won’t stand up and say the rhetoric defiling her as a woman is wrong. Not liking her as a politician is one thing; standing by silently while others turn her into a sexual object is quite another. First Frum questioned her electability and competence as a politician. Fair enough. Then he launched into personal attacks. Not cool. No he’s turning her into a sexual object with some of his posts. This should be hands down unacceptable. But since you’re silent about it or agree with him, I can only conclude you tacitly approve of watching another GOP female being torn down in such a manner. Talk about tasteless and sexist.

One more point if I may:

If the GOP were larger (say 47 seats in the Senate), it would NECESSARILY be more amenable to dealing with the Dems. Why? Because to get to 47, the GOP would have to run moderate candidates in Blue and Purple states. And so a larger GOP would necessarily be a more diverse GOP, a more moderate GOP.

Right now, the GOP in Congress is mostly down to its conservative core, with just a few exceptions like the Maine sisters. And that core is so ideologically opposed to the Dems that any negotiating is really impossible.

it all comes down to the same thing: As long as the GOP is centered in the Deep South and some Mountain states, it’s ideologically too purist and too far from the mainstream. And that makes effective governance impossible.

The GOP today, with no real leverage to deal with Obama, doesn’t have that luxury. The Dems have the votes to do whatever they want. All the GOP can do is point out failings of those Dem bills.