Posts Tagged ‘Sarah Palin’

The Republican U.S. Senate primary in Nebraska is the second tea party win in two weeks.  First, Senator Richard Lugar lost to tea party-backed Richard Mourdock in Indiana. On Tuesday, tea party favorite, Deb Fischer defeated establishment candidate Jim Bruning in a shocking late surge.

Fischer’s defeat of Bruning is remarkable.  She was heavily outspent and as of two weeks ago was a distant third in the polls.

Then Sarah Palin endorsed her, and she got the “big mo’.”  Palin still has star power.

Senator Jim DeMint was “all in” for Don Stenberg, but he couldn’t make it happen.  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell favored Bruning.

While Lugar’s defeat made national headlines last week, Fischer’s win is a much bigger story.

The bottom line: Palin is more important than two of the most important Republican Senators in the nation.

It isn’t exactly “Drill, Baby, Drill” but Obama’s decision to allow some offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico is a step in the right direction. He is also allowing some drilling off Alaska’s shoreline, while shutting off drilling in other areas of Alaska.

This was the second good move by Obama in the last few days. His surprise visit to Afghanistan was not just good, it was great. The troops needed the morale boost and Obama was right to firmly plant the flag on our offensive to root out terrorist in the region.

The President deserves our praise when he does the right thing, and in these two cases, he did.

Sarah Palin is going to have the last laugh.  After all the media scrutiny, the laugh lines by late night comics, the shabby treatment by her own staff and lawsuits over nothing, Sarah Palin is going to wow Oprah Winfrey and her audience and completely change the conversation about her viability for a Presidential run in 2012.

I suspect her appearance on Oprah will be among the most-watched episodes of all time, and it will create a spike in her book sales that will make Stephen King green with envy.

Palin will not pull any punches, and Oprah won’t land any blows and at the end of that show, millions of women are going to think to themselves, “Now that is some woman.”

Say what you will about the drama of Palin’s story for the last year. One thing for certain is that her Oprah appearance will just be the beginning of a Palin resurgence.

Today was Sarah Palin’s last day as Governor of Alaska.  Some on both the right and the left have written her political obituary. 

The left, particularly radical feminists, hate her with a passion because she breaks all kinds of stereotypes they want to force on women.  She’s beautiful, married to a real man, has kids (more than one or two!), chose life for her Downs Syndrome child and hunts.  She’s their worst nightmare!

And that’s why she’ll be back.  She is going to have rock star status on the GOP circuit for years to come, and at the right time, she’ll emerge as a contender.  Of course, guys like Romney and Huckabee and Jindal all hope that emergence is far into the future (if at all).

However, I think it’s tough for the GOP to have long term credibility if we don’t have strong and attractive female candidates at the upper echelon of our party.

Don’t count her out yet.

I have been a long time fan of David Letterman. Back in the day when he was doing the late, late show and wearing tennis shoes with his suit.  I remember being outraged that NBC picked Leno over Letterman. Letterman represented a younger, more hip audience (or so I liked to think of myself as hip at the time, and yes, I was very wrong about how hip I was. It’s amazing how a hick from Show Low can even begin to think that he is hip in any way, shape or form.)

Now, I missed the early part of the ongoing saga between Letterman and Sarah Palin stemming from a rather crude joke that Letterman told about Palin’s daughter and a baseball player.  Needless to say, Palin reacted, Letterman reacted to the reaction (clumsily), more reaction from Palin, Letterman reacts again, etc.

It culminated in Letterman getting to a real apology excerpted here (video of apology here):

“And then I was watching the Jim Lehrer ‘Newshour’ – this commentator, the columnist Mark Shields, was talking about how I had made this indefensible joke about the 14-year-old girl, and I thought, ‘Oh, boy, now I’m beginning to understand what the problem is here. It’s the perception rather than the intent.’ It doesn’t make any difference what my intent was, it’s the perception. And, as they say about jokes, if you have to explain the joke, it’s not a very good joke. And I’m certainly – ” (audience applause) “- thank you. Well, my responsibility – I take full blame for that. I told a bad joke. I told a joke that was beyond flawed, and my intent is completely meaningless compared to the perception. And since it was a joke I told, I feel that I need to do the right thing here and apologize for having told that joke. It’s not your fault that it was misunderstood, it’s my fault. That it was misunderstood.” (audience applauds) “Thank you. So I would like to apologize, especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the Governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke. I’m sorry about it and I’ll try to do better in the future. Thank you very much.” (audience applause)