They don’t mind her obviously limited curiosity or qualifications: they see a willing vehicle for their own ambitions, a woman who has the single quality that no politician can learn or acquire – star power.

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The Right in America are split three ways: there’s the liberal Republicans advocates of small govt, the flag wavers (McCAin) and the Bible thumpers – Palin.
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About 40% of the US population subscribe to beliefs associated with fundamentalist Christianity. These are not limited to, but include: the coming Apocalypse these days envisaged as a global war between Islam and Christendom with Israeli Jews either converting or perishing; the Rapture by which believers get whisked up to heaven to watch the Apocalypse in God’s own home theatre system; that the American system was originally intended to be a theocracy – a specifically Christian nation; that Science produces the Holocaust.
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That’s 2 out of every 5 Yanks. I’d wager not all of ‘em would be so extreme but still 40% acquiesce to literal and highly selective readings of the Bible and endorse this views. They also breed at a greater rate than their relatively secular fellow citizens. Say the secular Americans have two kids and the fundamentalist ones three on average. Wait 3 decades and do the math. Palin might not come back but we’ll see more of her like and I fear by around 2030 or so they’ll have the US govt sewn up.
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Do they mind limited curiosity? Hell no! It’s practically mandatory! As Ann Coulter said: My faith and reason tell me that God created the world and I’m not particularly interested in the details. I’ll find out when I meet my Maker.
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In other words speculative inquiry, free thought, empiricism are out. This is exactly what happened in the Islamic world c 1000-1200 ACE. Before 1200 the Islamic World was the global centre of science. And now?
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Not so hot.
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America RIP it was good while it lasted.

Hanson as I recall, said that abortions are a personal issue for women and they should decide for themselves.

So, in that respect, Hanson is better than Palin.

On the other hand, Palin has better teeth.

And she dresses much better. ($150K on clothes! What are made of, diamonds?)

Palin’s appeal to working class conseratives, or at least the heterosexual men among them, is that they’d like to have sex with her, probably the kind where they get tied up and whipped.

But that will pass.

Interesting point about Fred Thompson. I kind of liked him. At least, I liked the character he played on Law and Order.

Murkowski is a one of the handful of Republican moderates, pro choice and pro stem cell research. As Republicans go, she is the anti-Palin.

It could be quite a stoush. Myself, I reckon they should dispense with the primaries and go for naked jelly wrestling, best of three falls.

Of course, this is fantasy in more ways than one. Unless they are completely clueless, which is admittedly possible, the Republican party will realise that “energising the base”, all of maybe 20 million people, is not very helpful if you turn off the remaining 280 million.

If the Obama presidency turns out badly, sensible Republicans – the Governors of Minnesota, Michigan, what have you – will be lining up in 2012. That they weren’t in the race in 2008 is as relevant as Obama not being in the race in 2004.

In the meantime, watch the Republican party tear itself apart for the next two years. As they used to say in the 60s: burn, baby, burn.

What’s also done for Palin is the $150k that the Republicans spent on her clothing. If you’re going to present someone as a hockey mum, do that – but don’t spend a small fortune dressing her. Yeah, she needs to look nice but $150k is way too much – the whole ordinary hockey mum thing is shot, she’s just another pol who says one thing and does another. She’s committed the biggest sin in modern politics: she’s gone off message. She’s never coming back.

Noam Scheiber from The New Republic comprehensively demolishes the Palin spectre – with, of all things, a five-point plan here (subscribers only):

1.) Infrastructure. Yes, Palin is “wildly popular with the Republican base” … But there’s a big difference between being popular and translating popularity into money and votes. To do the latter, you need an organization of loyal, experienced operatives willing to devote themselves fulltime to a multi-year effort. Without that stuff, you’re just Fred Thompson — a popular idea that never pans out in reality.

Unfortunately for Palin, the only organization she can claim outside the McCain campaign is her husband Todd and a gang of Wasilla cronies — not exactly a Lincoln-esque team of rivals. And, while it’s possible that she’ll attract some interest from veteran Washington hands rooting around for the next big thing, I doubt the likes of Bill Kristol and Grover Norquist are going to ship off to Alaska to lay the groundwork for Palin ’12. As Thompson proved, it’s not enough to have a few opportunistic wiseguys occasionally phoning in advice. You need real loyalists.

2.) … “some conservative commentators have attacked her,” but … “these are a small minority and almost all of them work for publications aimed at mainstream readers, not the conservative subculture.” I’m not sure this is right. Yes, David Brooks works for a mainstream outlet. But Kathleen Parker lacerated Palin in National Review, while Peggy Noonan did the same in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. If there’s a better way to influence conservative opinion (at least in print), I’m not aware of it.

Anyway, I’m not so sure that the distinction between mainstream and conservative publications matters much these days. Former Bush speechwriter and conservative-in-good-standing David Frum laid into Palin in the National Post– not exactly the house organ of the conservative movement. But I doubt it passed into the ether without right-wing blog-readers hearing about it first. (Likewise, I’d guess Kristol’s pronouncements in the Times get as much play on conservative blogs as his pronouncements in The Weekly Standard.)

More importantly, while I agree that Palin’s critics are a minority on the right, that can hardly be reassuring to her. Partisans are loath to criticize their own in the closing weeks of a campaign. Surely numerous conservative Palin skeptics are keeping quiet till after the election, when there’s no risk of hurting their party. Which is to say, we’re clearly looking at the floor for Palin criticism, not the ceiling. It’ll get much worse from here on out.

3.) The McCain campaign has expertly exploited two grievances to deflect criticism from Palin: They either dismiss it as sexism or liberal media bias. The problem in a GOP primary is that it’ll be fellow Republicans — that is, Palin’s rivals for the nomination — who do the criticizing, rendering the media-bias charge inoperative. And while she can try to play the gender card, it’s not a charge that typically resonates with conservatives (that is, unless they can use it to bash Democrats and the media).

4.) There will be plenty of other candidates to fill Palin’s niche in 2012 — except much, much more competently. Mike Huckabee, for one, has demonstrated both an appeal to populist-minded social conservatives and an ability to speak coherently without notes or a teleprompter. Bobby Jindal has done the same. I have a hard time seeing Palin as much of a match-up for either of them.

5.) As I’ve argued before, Palin doesn’t wear well over any extended length of time—the reason being that her chief asset is novelty, which fades by definition. I’d venture that one reason she remains so popular among working-class conservatives is that they follow politics less closely than the rest of us, meaning they’ve had less time to get burnt out on her. (Though I’d concede that her appeal to this group is based on more than novelty alone.) Unfortunately, a presidential primary is one of the most drawn-out, grueling selection processes ever devised. If Palin didn’t wear well in a two-month campaign, I have a hard time believing she’ll wear well over an 18-month primary season.

The Republican candidate in 2012 will be someone who had nothing to do with McCain or Palin this time around. George W Bush wasn’t busting his gut for Bob Dole in ‘96, and John Edwards (Kerry’s running mate in ‘04) is political roadkill today. If she was any more dead, she’d be eulogised by Elton John: Goodbye Sarah P, though I never …

What about on a plaque on the Oval Office Desk ?

Gosh, if only the more than 100 million folks who are going to vote him into the White House know that his name is really Barack Hussein Obama, thinks may turn out very differently.

PS. There are many more Blacks in the US with the surnames “Washington” or “Jefferson” than there are whites with those surnames.

Would the reappearance of those names on a plaque on the Oval Office Desk be just too “normal” to merit any mention at all?

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1966134/posts

I reckon Huckabee and Romney will run again, some of the choices of some the diehards on the link are quite funny – Jeb Bush, General Petreaus, Newt Gingrich gets disqualified for believing in that “global warming cult,” Huckabee is too liberal (WTF)

What about on a plaque on the Oval Office Desk ?

As are the Palin children’s names among big fans of Jerry Springer.

“Barack Obama”

Then again, considering how he conducted the presidency, it could be argued that he wasn’t serious either.