One of the most pointed accusations Sarah Palin lodged against Barack Obama was the fact that, despite not authoring a single significant piece of legislation, he’s found the time to write two memoirs.

But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform, not even in the state Senate.

Annenberg’s FactCheck.org, who I find to typically be quite fair in their judgment, steps in to defend Obama. On this point, they write:

Palin’s accusation that Obama hasn’t authored “a single major law or even a reform” in the U.S. Senate or the Illinois Senate is simply not a fair assessment. Obama has helped push through major ethics reforms in both bodies, for example.

In advancing this argument, FactCheck.org oversteps in a significant way, and one that I believe they ought to reexamine in order to justify their argument - or failing that, to retract their point entirely.

The truth is that Sarah Palin’s statement is absolutely correct: neither Barack Obama nor the staffers in his employ (like speeches, remember, they tend to be written by others) have authored a single major law or reform.

The FactCheck.org folks first turn to the last part of Palin’s statement - “even in the state Senate.” They write:

Of course, we can’t say what Palin considers “major.” But if Palin’s own ethics reforms in Alaska were important enough to highlight in her convention address, then it’s only fair to credit Obama’s efforts on that topic. In 1998 in the Illinois Senate, Obama cosponsored an ethics overhaul that bars elected officials from using their campaign funds for personal use and and was called the the first major overhaul of Illinois campaign and ethics laws in 25 years. It also bans fundraisers in the state Capitol during legislative sessions. Obama’s Republican cosponsor Kirk Dillard even appeared in an Obama ad last summer describing Obama’s skills working with members of both parties to get legislation passed.

In this paragraph, FactCheck.org take an extremely generous view of legislative authorship. Bill cosponsors typically have very little to do with the drafting of a bill - especially in a state senate. Cosponsors are typically recruited after the bill itself is crafted, as a way of creating weight behind a piece of legislation and highlighting the importance of the measure. The ideal list of cosponsors includes members whose constituencies are most effected by the bill, a handful of influential committee members and leadership members who will determine the bill’s placement on the schedule for hearings, and at least one member of the opposing party (and sometimes not more than one - you just need one to call it “bipartisan,” as John McCain knows very well).

Some of these cosponsors will, on occasion, have an issue with one aspect of the legislation; they’ll sign onto the bill in turn for a small change in their favor, or more frequently, they’ll sign on to create some political cover for themselves. But in no sense is a cosponsor an author of a piece of legislation: neither they nor their staff drafted the legislation, and they do not have any opportunity to fundamentally alter the law except in the most extreme and odd circumstances.

Here’s a perfect example for you to consider: McCain-Feingold. The BCRA legislation is famous because of the two principal sponsors - but did you know there were 41 other co-sponsors in the Senate alone? They were:

Bayh, Bingaman, Boxer, Cantwell, Carnahan, Carper, Cleland, Clinton, Cochran, Collins, Corzine, Dayton, Dodd, Dorgan, Durbin, Edwards, Feingold, Feinstein, Graham, Harkin, Jeffords, Johnson, Kerry, Kohl, Landrieu, Leahy, Levin, Lieberman, Lincoln, Mikulski, Miller, Nelson, Reed, Reid, Sarbanes, Schumer, Snowe, Stabenow, Thompson, Wellstone, and Wyden.

There’s no question that Barack Obama has worked to get bills passed, in the state Senate and in the Senate. But if Hillary Clinton had claimed during the primary campaign to have “taken the initiative to reform Washington by authoring McCain-Feingold,” something tells me Obama would have pounced on that as a vast exaggeration - which, of course, it would be.

Cosponsors are allies in a fight: what they aren’t is, by any stretch, the authors of a piece of legislation.

FactCheck.org continues:

In Washington, Obama was instrumental in helping to craft the 2007 ethics reform law that ended gifts and meals from lobbyists, cut off subsidized jet travel for members of Congress, required lobbyists to disclose contributions they “bundle” to candidates, and put the brakes on other, similar common practices.

I’ve looked through FactCheck.org’s source list on this post, and unless I’m missing something, the only citation they have to support this argument is this article from Illinois Issues, a publication so unbiased in its coverage that it has repeatedly published the works of one Barack Obama on community organizing and other topics. Needless to say, surely you would have to have a better source to claim that Obama was “instrumental” to the crafting of a piece of major legislation. You’d think.

But let’s assume my depiction of cosponsorship is dead wrong, and that charitably, as a cosponsor, Obama should receive credit as a coauthor of the “Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.”

There’s only one problem with that: Barack Obama was not a cosponsor of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.

In other words, the only piece of legislation FactCheck.org claims as the basis for attacking Sarah Palin - their only citation for what is, by their measure, Obama’s sole significant legislative act in the U.S. Senate - is a bill he did not cosponsor, did not write, and did not do much except comment on in the press.

In fact, the only evidence that he did anything other than put pressure on the bill’s authors to include a few changed passages on bundling is that Obama participated in a few press events and conference calls about the bill. That’s really shoddy. I should hope FactCheck reconsiders this paragraph and their argument that Obama was “instrumental” in this legislative feat, because it’s the sort of thing that makes one wonder about fairness.

Finally, there’s this point:

In addition, we already noted in a recent article Obama’s efforts with Republican senators to help detect and secure weapons of mass destruction and to destroy conventional weapons stockpiles around the world, and to create a publicly searchable database on federal spending.

I’ll grant the validity of this paragraph, but I do not see how this conflicts with Palin’s statement in any way. Her argument was that Obama had not authored (or directed the authorship of - as I said, the lawyers ultimately write these things, so let’s not pick nits as some did with Palin’s speech being written by a professional in that area) a piece of significant law. This is absolutely true. There is no major piece of legislation in Obama’s resume that was authored, created, or even outlined by him - and if he were to introduce one tomorrow, that would still fail the test - it has to pass, remember, to become a law.

One does not expect Obama to match John McCain’s lengthy record of significant bills authored and successfully passed in his short elected career as a talented public speaker who happens to be an elected politician. But it’s more disappointing when you consider what a brilliant writer Obama is, and not just on matters of law or personal memoir: he’s a talented fiction writer, too.

Everyone knows Obama wrote a memoir, Dreams from My Father, covering his time in Chicago. What fewer know is that during his years as an organizer Obama was also working hard on fiction-writing. “He wrote stories about the people he was working with,” Mike Kruglik told me, “fiction that was beautiful, beautifully crafted, fantastically evocative about what it was like to be in that community, including how bleak the landscape was, how threadbare some of the institutions were, what it looked like and felt like.” I asked Kruglik if he had read the stories. “Yeah,” he answered. “[Obama] gave them to me. They were about what a pastor was doing with his church.” Kruglik says he can’t remember much beyond that — this was years ago — but given the prominent role that Obama’s pastors and his church have played in the campaign, there would probably be a great deal of interest in the stories today. But you won’t get them from Kruglik, who says he gave the stories back to Obama without making any copies.

This seems just the sort of skill that would be well-suited in crafting a major law or a reform. But we’ll have to wait and see if that comes to pass - despite FactCheck.org’s insistence, Barack Obama has not done that yet.

originally posted at redstate

Y esterday Moe and I with his colleagues in respected corners of the news media who had disparaged Sarah Palin, relying on the rantings from the foulest corners of the blogosphere as the basis for their articles. Douthat’s disappointment - along with that of his colleagues McArdle and Goldberg - turned slowly into outrage over the course of the day, as it became clear that much of his frustration was directed at the worst offender of them all: Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan is on the extreme edge of the assault on Palin - even as Campbell Brown and others have drastically scaled back their attacks on Palin as they realized their allegations were either unfounded, irrelevant, or significant stretches of fact, Sullivan continues to beat the drum. He repeats rumor and innuendo as established truth, but even worse, insists that every tabloidesque rumor be met with immediacy by Palin herself. It’s more than a little pathetic: Andrew Sullivan, once one of the most brilliant wits of the neocon blogosphere, now occupies that darkened zone of the tabloid preacher - the streetcorner pamphleteer who cries to all who will hear, “The Government will not respond to my writings the existence of extraterrestrials among us, and THIS LACK OF DENIAL PROVES DEFINITIVELY THAT THEY ARE HERE!”

As Jonathan Last blogs at the fantastic Galley Slaves: Sullivan demanded that he be able to inspect Palin’s amniotic fluid or Trig Palin’s placenta in order to determine the “hidden truth” about Palin’s pregnancy. Sullivan posted repeatedly, writing over and over again - with no basis other than his own expertise in photo analysis and the rantings of bloggers and commenters with no reputation for accuracy - that Palin’s pregnancy was a suspect issue that demanded clarification. Was the baby hers? Who was the father? Was it a faked pregnancy? All were questions that Sullivan insisted needed answering.

In the wake of revelations about Bristol Palin, rendering much of what he argued moot, Sullivan now insists that his continued writings and tabloidesque musings about Trig Palin’s conception and birth aren’t out of bounds at all, merely because the baby exists.

Presumably, they should put it wherever people put babies to keep them out of the public eye.

Sullivan’s public descent into rampaging dementia is frightening, and one wonders what it could possibly signify about his relationship with The Atlantic. I have been public for years in my belief that The Atlantic is the best magazine in America, and it has, as others have noted, a brand built on a century of brilliant writers and the best minds of the literati. Today, Sullivan represents a complete downfall of that brand name - embracing fully the worst kind of speculatory writing, based on nothing more than what he sees on television and receives from adoring fans in his inbox.

Sullivan has had a bizarre series of public loop-de-loops in recent months, primarily motivated by his devout affection for Barack Obama. His insistence on ignoring his own past political views led to a strong back and forth earlier this year, when Pete Wehner - who I know to be a former fan of Sullivan’s writings before the man went nuts - showed how Sullivan’s current claims completely conflicted with everything he’d once written about the war on terror. To which Sullivan, after much ridiculousness in response, could only respond: “I was deceived and feel terrible responsibility for my naivete.”

Perhaps someday Andrew Sullivan will say he feels deceived by the Andrew Sullivan he is today, and feel terrible responsibility for believing the rantings of the nuttiest members of the online left. But until that day, if it ever comes, he will keep up his courageous quest, insisting that he is just “posing questions,” that he has no bias on this point but a search for hidden, dirty, scandalous truth. He will ask the tough questions, the hard questions, the questions he can ask about medical practice and birth because of his long history as an OB-GYN, an educated nurse, and the handsomest midwife in the tristate area.

The Atlantic sure is getting what it’s paying for.

originally posted at redstate

Jennifer Rubin posts on something that’s a truly significant moment: The great Sally Quinn recants her position on Sarah Palin.

Quinn had been one of Palin’s biggest critics in the days leading up to her speech (read her column here). But yesterday in an interview with Bill O’Reilly, she declared: “I was wrong about her.”

I thought that she was amazing. in her speech. She was funny and smart and poised and confident. She gave a great speech, beautifully delivered. I think she is going to be a formidable opponent. all of that I think is — I was wrong about her. and I didn’t know anything about her. I probably didn’t know any more than John McCain did a few days before he picked her.

Sally Quinn deserves credit for being far more honest than most of her media colleagues - she’ll actually admit she doesn’t know everything. Of course, there’s no evidence that McCain himself hadn’t known this stuff in advance, as Jen points out. But I think there’s something more here: I think a woman like Quinn is a perfect example of the sort of feminist most likely to be moved by Palin’s 21st century subtext of feminine empowerment, and subtle rejection of the vestiges of sixties-era emasculating uber-feminism.

Where Hillary embraced the sixties’ sexual revolution view of womanhood, Palin rejects much of it - it doesn’t take a village to raise her children, she and her guy can do it themselves - but in so doing, doesn’t lose any of the toughness or confidence that she needs to be a leader. This is the sort of thing, combined with great natural charm and humor (she can smile as she twists the knife) that Quinn finds so admirable.

Kudos to Quinn for admitting her error. Now if only the rest of the media was so honest.

originally posted at redstate

So the best attacks the Democrats can muster against Sarah Palin’s epic speech is a twin version of the same spiel:

1) Sarah Palin did not write her speech. 2) Sarah Palin did not talk about education or health care in her speech.

Ha-ha. /Nelson

The first attack is just silly on its face. Every politician with national stature has speechwriters - every single one. They have a press secretary or a communications director or even someone whose sole task it is to craft words that will achieve the right message in a powerful way. Not all politicians are great writers - some are - but all of them need help in framing their message correctly.

Even Barack Obama. His muse is a 26 year old white kid nicknamed “Favs.” The NYTimes profiled him here.

You mean…even The One DOESN’T WRITE HIS OWN SPEECHES! gasp Yes, sadly, it’s true.

The second attack is a creature of the Sixties-21st Century divide that I noted yesterday, in this post about post-feminism politics, in which apparently Republican women should behave the way that the leftist media believes they should - sticking to soft and homey issues. Instead, Palin spoke forcefully about the kitchen table issues that matter just as much, if not more, to most blue collar and middle class Americans: energy, taxes, and the war. She’s a mother, yes, and has a PTA background - but that doesn’t mean she only has thoughts about the issues the post-sexual revolution media still views as “girl stuff.”

Speechwriting is an odd task, and extremely challenging. But it can also be very rewarding - last night, as Sarah Palin gave her speech, I saw Matt Scully looking up toward the press section on cue after every punchline, making sure it registered with the hacks at their laptops. He’s got to learn this woman’s voice quick, and last night was a fantastic start.

It’s always good to see what works when you’re trying to figure out a new voice, one you haven’t studied before - and Palin is very new, and very unique, which makes her input on these speeches all the more significant. Anyone could write a Joe Biden speech at this point - just take a few slugs of whiskey, and stream of consciousness for about 4 hours. Don’t edit anything. Palin’s probably tougher to write for in this moment, but it’s clear she’s a natural - and if you give her something above average, her own ability will make it shine.

Let’s give Dean Barnett the last word - he hits directly on why this attack on Scully’s existence is so ludicrous. Read it here:

2) Interesting that the Obama campaign has decided that it has a winner in pointing out that Palin “cheated” by having a speechwriter. Of course, a pliant media did its job last night in spreading this supremely lame talking point. The funhouse at MSNBC was all over it, and even half the panel at Fox saw it as a nugget of information requiring dissemination. One can only wonder why media analysts didn’t feel it necessary to point out that Joe Biden’s oratory also received the ministrations of speechwriting pros (all appearances to the contrary). Could it be that Biden’s speech was so dreadful, no one felt the provenance of the speech required clarification?

Of course, this weak return of serve is unlikely to have its desired effect of dismissing Palin’s performance. Once again, Palin spoke directly to the American people last night – they’ll make up their own minds about her. It must really concern the Democrats that Palin will have many similar opportunities in the future.

A couple of final points on this matter – if giving a great speech is so darn easy, how come Joe Biden, John Kerry and Chris Dodd with a combined 340 years in politics have never been able to pull it off? And if it’s such an irrelevant skill, why again exactly is Barack Obama the Democrats’ nominee?

—

The Nielsen numbers are out, and wow, they are good. Sarah Palin’s speech, despite being carried on only six channels compared to Obama’s ten, despite the lack of a huge venue or months of hype, was viewed by only a million fewer people than Barack Obama’s Speech o’ the Century.

Via Clayton, a few notable facts: Palin beat Obama in Persons 55+ (reliable voters!) and multi person white households; in the 18-34 demo (Obamas home base) Palin drew 81% of his audience; In the 18-49 demo she drew 88% of his audience; Palin trounced Biden in all categories except multi-person black households. And here’s more from Nielsen itself:

• The Sara Palin speech generated 37.2 million viewers, just a 1.1 million viewers short of Barack Obama’s record-breaking speech on Day 4 of the Democratic Convention. The Palin speech was carried on only six networks while the Obama speech was carried on ten (including BET, TV One, Univision and Telemundo).
• Palin attracted a large female audience (19.5 million women, or 4.9 million more than Day 3 of the Democratic Convention).
• Ratings for viewers 55+ (25.2) continue to be about ten times higher than for teens (2.2)
• Day 3 for the GOP attracted more Hispanic viewers (1.4 million) than Day 3 of the Democratic Convention (1.2 million), even though Univision and Telemundo did not carry the speech.

That last point is astounding. Even though it’s not a huge number, the fact is that Barack Obama had a ton of built in advantages for his speech - whereas the only one for Sarah Palin is that the media had placed expectations in such a negative way that everyone wanted to tune in (perhaps in hopes of a trainwreck?). And an excellent sign for the level of interest in Palin, and the number of people outside of the Twin Cities who viewed the speech as a defining event for this election.

originally posted at redstate, second part here

In case you hadn’t been reading us already. I’ll be crossposting everything shortly.

“My understanding is that Gov. Palin’s town, Wassilla, has I think 50 employees. We’ve got 2500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe 12 million dollars a year – [my campaign has] a budget of about three times that just for the month.”

“This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word “victory” except when he’s talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed … when the roar of the crowd fades away … when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot - what exactly is our opponent’s plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger … take more of your money … give you more orders from Washington … and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy … our opponent is against producing it.”

A week ago, from far and wide, the followers came to the mountaintop to glimpse Barack Obama in his moment of glory. And the New Adonis did not disappoint.

The event was an act of soaring political grandeur, inspiring the devoted flock to call out in hallelujahs. Yet in the speech itself, try and find it you may, but there was no phrase particularly memorable, no quotable line.

Do not hold that against his speech. It is not what Obama said that mattered.

The lasting image of Obama’s speech will be the spectacle itself: a Super Bowl halftime show without a game score to go with it (unless it is New Democrats 0, Neo-Old Democrats 1). No one is prompted to such an equivalent force of emotion, the tears of joy, at the idea of President McCain. At least, no sane person. But sanity itself is an act of rebellion in a civic universe where the political pageantry surrounding a man who has accomplished such meager political crumbs and done so little in life is enough – more than enough – to carry a candidacy based on the unassailable purity and goodness and untapped power of that one man all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania.

What Sarah Palin came the Twin Cities to say tonight mattered. It mattered because it proved she was not merely chosen for her gender, for her looks, for her style, or for the historic mark she represents for the Republican Party. She was chosen because of her beliefs - because she’s taken on the hordes of corrupt bureaucrats and pork swilling politicians, even those in her own party, to achieve what she believes is right. It’s because on the most crucial test for any politician - will you stand up, despite all the forces arrayed against you, for what you believe to be right? - Sarah Palin passed, and Barack Obama has that nagging Incomplete.

When has Barack Obama taken an arrow from his own party for anything he believed in? When has he decided that he would act, with bravery and courage, staking out a tough decision that he believed to be right, against the wishes of the old political masters of his party? When has he broken with the leftist base, who today screams with all their might that this woman is not fit to lead even as she governs a state budget and an employee base that dwarfs anything Obama has run, that her family is fair game because she is vile, that her place is the home and not the campaign trail, and cannot possibly be a mother and a political leader?

Obama has no lack of a certain kind of courage – give him that. It takes bravado of a sort to declare that you deserve the credit for so many things in the state senate, in a biopic video so short that it cannot find space to mention Columbia or Harvard Law, where you had no hand in the legislation, and most often voted “present.” It is courage of a sort to take a file photo of yourself standing alongside Dick Lugar as an indication that you, through sheer force of will and over the objections of the warmongering right, ended the expansion of nuclear weapons. It is a form of boldness, yes, to declare in one instant that John McCain is a man to be respected and honored, and in the next contend that this man – who defended the Democratic nominee in 2004 against all attacks, even accurate ones – has committed a grave insult against all in the arena by declaring, old war hero that he is, that he will put his country first.

That man in the arena presented himself the kind of savior America needs, after all of his promises, declaring his ascendant “humility.” He read the word off the teleprompter carefully, as if using his mouth in a way it was not used to. Humility. Yes, the humility that promises on the one hand to create massive corporate loopholes to encourage artificially-created jobs, then on the other to pay for them by closing massive corporate loopholes. The humility that swears in the one instant to lessen costs, and in the next to require vast sums of money from corporations to a degree that would drive any sane organization from our shores. The humility that promises to cut taxes, even for people who do not pay taxes, and pay for them by going line by line through the federal budget and cutting out the treasured programs managed and cared for by Democrats in the bureaucracy since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and defended by their allies in the Congress, with but the stroke of a pen.

And this is the man - humble, humble Barack, who has never cut one program, who has never shrunk one agency, who has never fired one bureaucrat - who says that Sarah Palin is too raw and naive.

One wonders which reporter will be brave enough to ask which major program he will cut first. He had, before people started paying attention to his campaign, mentioned NASA as a possible plum target – creating a sucking sound of irony, considering the prominent placement of the returning astronauts in his campaign video…but such needling questions are for after an election, not before.

Barack Obama came to Denver to give a Democrat speech. It may eventually be remembered as the apotheosis of a conventional Democrat speech: the images taken from places he did not live, jobs he did not work, wars he did not fight in, to connect with the broadest possible audience of people. It could have been given, nearly all of it, by John Edwards, man of the milltown – before he ceased to exist – or by Hillary Clinton, the original blue collar warrior from Chicago. It was a speech for Democrats, and delivered to Democrats – and hence the lack of the true outline that makes for powerful remarks. Like the State of the Union speeches given by the eloquent yet fickle President Clinton, it is assumed that this laundry list, a litany of campaign promises that merge together into a mushy feeling of warmth and contentment, would be met with glorious clamor, as if proceeding from the mouth of a god. And they were.

Sarah Palin did not come to speak as a god. Her words proceed not from the bowels of Olympus, but the heart of the enduring American spirit - the driving force that calls out from the rough frontier for young men and women to go West, and ever West. It asserts the worth of the seekers, the pioneers, and all those who are ever unsatisfied with the limits of the status quo - that things are as they ever will be, and you should accept it, and move on. She speaks to those who heed the call to carve out a spot of land and make it your own, to build a good home, to raise a good family, and to be ready, should they ever call for you, to defend the freedoms that made all this possible - to defend them with your all. This is an ordinary action - but in the course of doing it, it can become extraordinary.

What Sarah Palin said tonight matters. She asks you not to vote for her because of what she claims to be, but because of what she is - because of the principles that undergird her, that motivate her, that made her challenge the old guard in her own party and the bureaucrats in others - and now, to take on the self-proclaimed Arbiter of Change. What she said tonight shows that underneath her pleasant exterior and her mother’s smile is a sharp, talented executive - one who knows how to throw a punch, and how to make change a reality, not a promise. She is tough - she is a fighter - and she is not about to blink.

“Yes, I am a woman,” she says. “And I am ready.”

It was not what Obama said that mattered. Those were words – just words. He shined in his moment of beauty, his message delivered with the Chestertonian clarity of the absurd.

“No, I am not a man,” his speech declared, “I am a cause.”

And so, as the man has declared it, he is.

originally posted at redstate

Gov. Palin’s speech was directed not just at the audience in the chamber, but at the Clinton primary voters across the Midwest who could hear much in this speech that they could agree with. It did so by reframing, in powerful terms, the conservative reaction to the political tide of the sexual revolution and liberal feminism. Where Hillary Clinton framed her cracking of the glass ceiling as the triumph of the bra-burners of the 1960s, Palin frames it as a triumph of the conservative vision of empowered womanhood. It has more in common with Luce and Anthony than with Steinem and Friedan, based on a vision of the political leader as dedicated mother and political champion of patriotism and family.

But it’s more than that: what Palin showed us - and the reason someone like Wolf Blitzer can respond “a star is born” (even as Anderson Cooper still parrots the “Barack’s run a campaign! That makes him qualified!”) to the remarks - is that a woman can smile, and wield a knife at the same time. Most Republican conventions in recent years have featured milquetoast speeches from women who spoke more about lovey-dovey unobjectionable pro-American points. Palin could have given a speech like that - call it a Miss America speech - where she spent 15 minutes talking about special needs children and initiatives for school uniforms. Instead, she talked about Energy, Taxes, and Foreign Policy.

The only criticism Donna Brazile can manage is that this was a speech was drafted by Matt Scully, a speechwriter for Bush (and HW, and FDT, and many others); that’s fine. Barack Obama’s campaign is actually being run by people who’ve worked for John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt, Tom Daschle, Bob Torricelli, Fritz Hollings, and Eliot Spitzer. Among others.

originally posted at redstate

Josh Trevino, Redstate co-founder, encounters President Roosevelt.

“Colonel Roosevelt at your service, sir!” “Colonel Roosevelt, lovely to meet you.” “And where are you from, young man?” “I’m from Texas, Colonel Roosevelt.” “Texas! Why, I trained my Rough Riders at Fort Sam Houston!” “You certainly did, Colonel!” “And have you had a bully time at this convention?” “Except for the protestors, yes.” “Those anarchists! You know they did in our great President McKinley.” “Ah yes — the dastardly Mr Czolgosz.” “Indeed, sir! And they tried to get me in Buffalo some years later!”

And thus for some time. Needless to say, he’s a McCain man.

Follow the link for the inspiring photographic evidence.

Bully.

Well, that’s one way to rebut a rumor.

The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.

Bristol Palin, one of Alaska Gov. Palin’s five children with her husband, Todd, is about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, the Palins said in a statement released by the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said.

As blackhedd posted earlier: The foul denizens of Obama’s online base, who find the very idea of Sarah Palin as a strong feminist conservative mother absurd, engaged in the worst kind of putrid mudslinging over the past few days, suggesting in no uncertain terms that her daughter was the mother of Trig Palin. Of course, those of us who laughed at the baseless suggestions of the child-hating left (she’s not fat enough! they shriek) now know that to be impossible. We also know that McCain himself knew of Bristol’s pregnancy - which had to have made this past 48 hours all the more frustrating for the campaign. For all these reasons, it’s good to have this announcement come now.

We’ll see how the media inevitably bashes this young woman for her choice in the coming days, in the wake of covering up the John Edwards love child for 2+ years, and botching the story when it came out as they bent over backwards to avoid criticism. Nah, that wasn’t bias.

But it’s fitting that in this moment, one of the toughest a young woman can face, Bristol Palin has chosen on her own to take the right path. This baby is not a “punishment,”, as Obama so famously said; it is not an object to be destroyed, as Obama argued for in the Illinois State Senate; he or she is a human life, one worthy of receiving the love of a mother and father. And we rejoice in the knowledge that a family will receive this blessing into the world.

Have no doubts about this: Bristol Palin is brave. Braver than any of the hideous bloggers, hiding in their anonymity, who throw muck at her mother and who will doubtlessly revile her decision. Braver than the foes of the right to life who would offer her a knife and a vacuum to end this minor inconvenience. Brave enough to know that it’s not enough to talk about doing the right thing - it’s doing that right thing when the moment calls for it the most.

We thank her for making this choice now - her child will thank her forever.

We send our strongest prayers and best wishes for Bristol Palin, for her future husband, for her child, and for the entire Palin clan.

originally posted at redstate