A Common Sense Conservative View of Gay Marriage

Liberal and so-called progressive (hereinafter, LSCP) acquaintances are forever challenging my fierce opposition to gay marriage, and I’m forever flabbergasted by their failing to see how they shoot themselves in the foot by supporting the idea. I’m not even going to mention Leviticus’s revelation that God views same-sexed erotic interaction as abominable; we’ve been through that and through that and through that. Rather, I’ll belabor the obvious by noting that the legitimization of non-reproductive unions will inevitably slow the birth rate. Fewer births means fewer consumers, and fewer consumers means fewer jobs. If you want to keep unemployment hovering at or even above 10 percent, that is, just start joining gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the trangendered in holy matrimony!

Not, of course that LSCPs are likely to be troubled by mounting unemployment; why should they be when they imagine they can solve the problem as they solve every problem — by hurling money at it? Countless tens of millions unemployed? Just borrow more money from the Chinese! It’s fine; our grandchildren will pay it back, provided more of us don’t decide to go the gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered route and not produce any.

Many LSCPs purport to love animals as much as they do trees. But let’s imagine that, because of gay marriage, the human population plummets, with the result that there are fewer hunters. The deer population will rise precipitously, and the poor creatures will, because there’s only so much food for them in their natural habit, slowly starve to death. I don’t know about you, but if I were a buck, I’d sooner go out strong and proud and free with a bullet through my head than starve to death after having watched my does and fawns and what have you starve too.

It’s hardly as though we common sense conservatives see no upside to gay marriage. A child with two gay fathers stands to have a superior sense of both interior design and self-presentation. He or she is likely to be far more aware than normal kids of the importance of regular exfoliation and moisturizing, and more likely to appreciate musical theatre. I, for one, would have no reservations whatever about living in a world in which the recordings of Judy Garland singing the songs of master songwriters were appreciated as much as those of Katy Perry, let’s say. A child of lesbian mothers is apt to be precocious at woodworking and home repair, and will probably also develop an early affection for such fitness-promoting recreations as softball and volleyball, and is almost guaranteed to be more inclined than a normal child to believe that one can be attractive without the use of expensive cosmetics that were tested on animals.

Birth rates in societies in which homosexuality doesn’t exist, such as the Islamic and fervently Roman Catholic ones, continue to soar. It’s likely that in a couple of generations, we will continue to have God on our side, as we’ve always had, but stand to be so woefully outnumbered as to make God’s sympathies moot. Seen from this point of view, preventing across-the-board implementation of the homosexual agenda is necessary for nothing less than the survival of our way of life.

I have a couple of points to make about the fact that, through the end of 2009, Gov. Palin’s memoir Goin’ Rogue had sold 1,255,963 units, while her more recent America From the Heart: Ideals My Ghostwriters Cherish, has in a comparable period sold “only” 232,344 units — 23 of which, I’m proud to say, I gave as Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa gifts. First, Noam Chomsky and 10 of his favorite fellow so-called progressives would give you the fake leather elbow patches off their corduroy blazers to have combined sales of half of Heart’s. And the relatively slow sales of the second book owe to common sense conservatives realizing that, classic as it is, it will still be available to buy and savor when they’ve finished their seventh, eighth, or even ninth re-reading of Rogue, which has to be read several times even to begin getting out of it all that there is to get. In the fullness of time, I can see its sales comparing favorably to those of William Bennett's The Book of Virtues and the Harry Potter books.

Spermboys, Pit Bulls, and Second Chances

Even the most devoted of us common sense conservatives trying to clear Gov. Palin’s path to the White House has to pause every now and again to, as the young people say, “chill out”. Last night, with my two liberal and so-called progressive friends (who said we common sense conservatives are intolerant?) Janet and Nathan, I watched The Kids Are All Right, which has made every Ten Best of 2010 list in sight. I loathed it.

Teen children of a lesbian couple seek out their mom’s sperm donor, a motorcycle-riding organic restauranteur. One of the moms has an affair with him. The other mom is hurt and angry. The two teenaged children feel betrayed (as teenaged children do pretty much regardless of what happens, of course). The two moms remember that marriages and families are hard work, and figure out a way to reconcile. The end.

Performances by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as the moms: good enough to make you feel sorry for their having to work with a rotten script that contains exactly one interesting revelation: that some lesbians sometimes enjoy watching gay porn by virtue, if I got Moore’s character’s explanation right, of men being sexually protuberant. Performance by Mark Ruffalo as Spermboy: far short of mediocre. Photography and set direction: About on a par with Ruffalo’s performance as Spermboy, which is to say the first thing that struck me about the movie was how very ugly it was, how the camera seemed over and over to have been positioned at random.

I have long believed that, if you don’t count Keanu Reeves, who’s in a class all his own, Nicolas Cage is the worst actor of his generation. At least he takes chances, though; indeed, sometimes his awfulness is absolutely riveting. I’d much rather watch him than a non-entity like Ruffalo, about whom you can say nothing more laudatory than that he’s apparently able to remember his lines. He suggests no life beyond the scene in which he’s appearing, has no depth, is never interesting or surprising. You’ve heard movie stars described as so charismatic that it’s impossible not to watch them when they’re on screen, whether or not they’re speaking? Well, I find myself watching everything and everybody but Ruffalo. How does such a guy keep getting cast?

Here. I’ve done it. I’ve thought of someone as bad — the guy who played Ally McBeal’s love interest on television, Gil Bellows. And he was a Canadian.

I would never have dreamed a movie could make me long for Cameron Diaz’s self-delightedly ditzy singing, but the scene in Kids during which Benning’s and Ruffalo’s characters sing Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” over dinner managed it.

I blame myself. I should have known, as a common sense conservative, that a movie about deviates wouldn’t work for me.

In other news, the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, formerly known for wearing a bow tie, spoke for a great many of us on Tuesday when he objected to President Obama’s commending the Philadelphia Eagles football team for giving a second chance to Michael Vick, who raised pit bulls to tear one another’s throats out. “Now, I’m a Christian,” Carlson said. “I’ve made mistakes myself, I believe fervently in second chances. But Michael Vick…should’ve been executed…”

Naturally, the liberals and so-called progressives have been having a field day with this, pointing out that we common sense conservative Christians almost invariably append a statement beginning with but to such declarations as "I believe in second chances".

Yet another case of the LSCPs just not getting it! There is no logical inconsistency whatever in believing in second chances only for those who genuinely deserve them, just as there is none in believing unwaveringly in freedom of speech only for those who don’t wantonly abuse it. That one believes, for instance, that a television evangelist who has allowed himself to be seduced by a shapely young secretary obviously placed in his path by Satan himself should have a chance to redeem himself in no way compels him or her to believe that a person of color who has sanctioned dog-fighting deserves a comparable opportunity.

God's Will and Xanthan Gum

A great many Palin-related blogs, though I hate to use that remarkably ugly word,. are the work of liberals and so-called progressives whose freedom of speech would be rescinded in a society in which common sense enjoyed greater veneration, but at least they serve to remind us constantly of the shameless perversity of those who would slow Gov. Palin’s historic march to the White House. In one of them yesterday, the author bewailed Sarah’s seemingly having broken a law on which she herself signed off while leading Alaska to previously unimagined prosperity and respect in the world community — S.B. 72, which calls for the minor passengers of recreational vehicles to wear seat belts or other restraints.

Again we confront the LSCPs’ appalling inability to parse metaphor, just as all those years ago when they were up in arms about Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55,” which they denounced as hypocritical in view of Sammy’s enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan, that implacable champion of law and order. Strictly to keep up appearances, such laws as S.B. 72 are indeed on the books, but when the books restrict Americans’ personal liberties, the laws obviously become just ceremonial. It isn’t as though Gov. Palin, famously self-described as a Mama Grizzly, isn’t ever vigilant as to the well being of her fancifully named cubs. If husband Todd, behind the Palin family RV’s wheel, had to brake suddenly, you can bet your bottom dollar that Sarah would either grab the little ones’ ankles before they could become human projectiles, or quickly position herself between them and the windshield or the back of husband Todd’s head.

The whole seat belt thing is so typical of the Obamarxists. Suddenly Americans can no longer be trusted to make decisions about their own safety — as they can longer be trusted, if you believe Michelle Obama, to choose between invigorating exercise in the fresh air and sitting in front of some mindless reality television show, absentmindedly washing down with soft drinks great handfuls of potato chips fried in palm oil, or bon-bons full of xanthan gum. One look at the Palins, who — except for the apparently pregnant-again Pistol — are all svelte enough to be on the covers of magazines, makes very clear that Americans are indeed qualified, with God’s tacit guidance, to make such decisions without the help of Big Government.

Viewers of the most recent edition of Sarah Palin’s Third World Hell Holes, in which daughter Pillow accompanied her parents to Malawi, noticed that she’s an insufferable little eye-rolling bitch, as are so many young people in their mid-teens; it is God's will that, in teenage, children treat the two people in all the world who love them most worse than they will ever treat anyone else again. That Sarah had her many children over nearly two decades confirms that her judgment and foresight are impeccable, as only befits the exemplar of common sense conservatism. As the father of only one child, who in her teens became virtually unrecognizable as the sweet, affectionate, appreciative kid I’d known earlier, I often wished I had another child, whose ongoing adoration would reassure me that I hadn’t suddenly turned into a clueless, insensitive monster. When Pillow rolls her eyes at Sarah and husband Todd for, for instance, failing to understand that the ability to transmit and receive text messages is vital to her emotional well being, they can always summon Pillow’s adorable younger sister Wiper for consolation, or even the twins, Trig and Calculus.

Duping the Dems: Our Nation's Greatness Restored

If I had any reason to believe that liberals and so-called progressives (hereinafter LSCPs) in high places read today’s column, I wouldn’t write it, because it contains some revelations that could cause a lot of trouble if they fell into the wrong hands. You’ll notice that in the past few weeks a lot of actual Republicans have been taking shots at Gov. Palin. That great American hero Karl Rover said she shouldn’t be starring in her own reality show on television. That former Reagan strategist from Iceland whose name I’ve forgotten and am too lazy to look up said she wasn’t electable. Lovable Mike Huckabee said she was wrong to suggest that Michelle Obama was trying to take away the nation’s desserts. And now Dana Perino of Fox News — the same Fox News for which Gov. Palin is a commentator! – suggests that Sarah doesn’t write all the books and op-ed pieces and Twitter tweets and so on that appear below her by-line.

Naturally, the LSCPs are rubbing their greasy hands with glee, imagining this means that Sarah won’t be the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 2012.

How not to love anyone that gullible, that eager to be scammed?

What’s really happening, of course, is that the Democrats are being lulled into a false sense of security. Imagining, in the wake of all the above-referenced sniping, that Sarah will decide not to run, and that they’ll have to beat only the presidential-looking, but strangely charisma-free Mitt Romney, the left isn’t making a concerted effort to persuade Barack Obama to retire from politics next year, and to prime former Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to replace him and that knucklehead Joseph Biden as their standard-bearers in 2012. They’ll realize too late that they’ve been scammed, and will be stuck with Obama even as his approval ratings drop farther than anyone’s ever, the Republicans will unite behind Gov. Palin, and our nation will be on the verge of being restored to its former greatness.

We learn now with horror and indignation that WikiLeaks kingpin Julian Assange, who Gov. Palin quite astutely suggested should have been hunted down like any other terrorist and disembowled in the middle of Times Square, has just signed lucrative deals to write his autobiography for American and British publishers. A major Hollywood producer will reportedly announce his acquisition of the film rights later in the week; it’s already common knowledge that both Ryan Gosling and Owen Wilson have been approached about portraying the vile Australian rapist and traitor. Justin Bieber, in his motion picture debut, will portray Pfc. Bradley Manning, who leaked sensitive materials to Assange, Reese Witherspoon and Scarlett Johansen his two alleged rape victims.

Mortified though we may be to think of the loathsome cur Assange now being able to pay his legal bills, and maybe even have a few bucks left over for a Lexus, right-thinking Americans can take some solace in Sarah’s having received an advance of $12 million for her America by Heart: Ideals My Ghostwriters Cherish. Sometimes, in this crazy world, the righteous still do finish first.

Quick-Thinking Enough for the Presidency

That I almost missed Sarah Palin’s Third World Hell Holes last night had nothing to do with the frightful blizzard-like weather that kept me from the gym for the second day in succession (the place was to have been locked tight on Christmas). Rather, it was to do with the fact that, while making myself an ultradeluxe lasagna, with roasted carrots and zucchini, to enjoy over the course of the week to come, I was tuned into the Food Network on the little TV in the kitchen, and they kept showing commercials for catheters. Now, apparently, no Food Network viewer need use a dirty catheter ever again, as you can get 200 lovely pristine ones sent to you for a low, low price. I found most disturbing the juxtaposition of all this dirty catheter talk with Bobby Flay and his Japanese counterpart — Morimoto, if I’m not mistaken — competing to see who could make the more delicious meal using eggnog in everything.

I washed down a Valium with some bourbon, lay outside in the snow until I lost the feeling in my fingers and toes, hurried back inside — to whatever extent one with no feeling below his ankles can be said to have hurried — and got the old Magnavox on and warmed up just in time for the beginning of SPTWHH. Sarah and family this week visited the southern African country of Malawi, where the average annual income is $7.65, and where inexpressible misery is rampant. The lamestream media will no doubt attribute the Palins’ visit to Madonna’s having adopted a Malawian orphan, or sort-of orphan, a few years ago, but I prefer to believe that she made her choice strictly on humanitarian grounds — that she felt it her responsibility as a beautiful white goddess to give the populace hope, just as Madonna had, but without the intimations of perversity, and without diminishing the population.

I suspect that, in view of the tragic recall of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell last week, many centrist viewers might have been offended by the segment in which Sarah, at lunch with President Bingu wa Mutharika, husband Todd and Mrs. Mutharika, expressed her enthusiasm for Malawi’s fervent intolerance of homosexuality. The good news is that centrists are going to find themselves right next to liberals and so-called progressives in the litter box of history in a couple of years. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem!

I hugely enjoyed the musical portion of the program, during which Malawi’s premiere recording artist, Tay Grin (nee Limbani Kalilani), joined the Mutharikas and Palins for a medley of his big hit "Break Out", the Captain and Tennille’s "Love Will Keep Us Together", and, rather insensitively, Madonna’s "Like a Virgin", during which daughter Bristol’s embarrassment was palpable. I can’t imagine even the hardest liberal or so-called progressive heart not being touched by the taped segment showing Sarah, with tears in her eyes, handing out condoms, Bibles, and autographed copies of Goin’ Rogue in Chichewa, the country’s poorest region.

After that, it was both a wonderful surprise and a great relief to watch Sarah welcome the week’s surprise special guests Hugh Hefner and his new fiancée Crystal Harris, to whom he proposed on Christmas Eve. At 104, Hef is actually older than Crys’s great-grandfather, but the couple’s mutual adoration was nonetheless unmistakable. I loved the great aplomb with which Sarah handled their suddenly trying to stick their tongues down each other’s throats, from the look of it, right in the middle of responding to her question about the Playboy Foundation’s plan to distribute free Bantu-language editions of the magazine in the country’s schools to stimulate interest in literacy. “Hey, you two,” Sarah chirped brightly, missing not a beat, even while husband Todd cringed in embarrassment, “get a room, why doncha?” And her detractors would have you believe she’s not quick-thinking enough for the presidency!

I wasn’t at all sure I approved of how Hef, who clearly likes ‘em young and frisky, was leering at Bristol over his new fiancee’s shoulder later in the interview, but Bris is more than old enough to take care of herself nowadays, and in a fight between Hef and Bris’s new inamorato Gino Paoletti, I can’t imagine any common sense conservative favoring Hef.

An Observer of International Affairs to Be Reckoned With

This past Tuesday, on a radio show, that genial backstabber Mike Huckabee, whom Sarah will crush like a bug in the course of becoming the Free World's next leader, observed, “"Michelle Obama's not trying to tell people what to eat or trying to force the government's desires on people. She's stating the obvious — that we do have an obesity problem in this country." Well maybe you have, self-admitted “recovering foodaholic” and former 300-pounder, but Sarah, MILF that she is, hasn't, and regards a meal without dessert at the end as no meal at all, so STFU.

Another day, another reason, real or imagined — and almost always imagined! — for the lamestream to obstruct Gov. Palin’s historic march to history. Now they’re up in arms (albeit not nuclear ones!) about Sarah’s having quoted WikiLeaks-leaked diplomatic cables — even though she recently called for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be not "pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders" — in her thought-provoking USA Today op-ed piece about the urgency of keeping nuclear weapons out of Iranian hands.

God, the lamestreamers can be obtuse.

Imagine someone has robbed a bank on a windy morning, and then, in the process of fleeing, stumbles and spills his big duffel bag full of paper currency, which he hadn’t time to zip up back at the scene of the crime. The wind catches the money and blows it all over city. It’s one thing to condemn the actions of the bank robber, as Sarah condemned Assange, but quite another to condemn a passer-by a couple of blocks away who, seeing crisp $100 bills blowing in the wind, snatches at them eagerly. Sarah’s having repeated information that has entered the public domain no way constitutes approval of the original leak.

If it weren’t controlled by Jewish liberals and so-called progressives who would like nothing better than to see America on its knees, what the lamesteam media would be doing is celebrating Sarah’s keen insights and restraint. Whereas King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly asked the US to stop Iran’s nuclear experiments by force, Sarah, now indisputably an observer of international affairs to be reckoned with, wisely urges an escalation of existing United Nations economic sanctions. Take that, you naysayers who have continued to ridicule her for being able to see Russia from her front lawn!

If you’ll permit me, this is something on which I don’t actually share Gov. Palin’s view. I believe that we should implement regime change, exactly as we did in Iraq. Our road in that country wasn’t entirely smooth; about that there can be no debate. But it would be tragic to squander our hard-won experience, and not to apply it to Iran. And let us bear also in mind that we’ve still got lots of troops and equipment in the area. Rather than schlepping it all back here, and then having to pay through the nose to get them and it back to the Middle East at some unspecified future date, why don’t we get the job done now? It’s almost like living way out in the boondocks, driving hundreds of miles to the nearest mechanic, learning that your car needs both to have its transmission fluid replaced and the front wheels aligned, and having just one of those jobs done "to save money". That's false economy of a sort that I can picture no common sense conservative abiding! Bomb Ahmadinejad now!

In other news, Oprah, who recently refused to tell Barbara Walter if she thought Gov. Palin is qualified for the presidency, recently responded to Parade magazine’s question about whether she was scared by the prospect of Sarah’s imminent candidacy by saying “It does not scare me because I believe in the intelligence of the American public." The intelligence of the American public, that selfsame public that re-elected George W. Bush in 2004! And Sarah’s the one constantly accused of being snarky!

Nothing Left to Defend

According to an Education Trust report issued this week, nearly a quarter of recent high school graduates who attempted to join the army between 2005 and 2009 were rejected because of their inability to score at least 31 out of 99 on a test of basic reading, science, and math skills. The Pentagon is said to be especially nervous about this high rate of failure because 75 percent of those aged 17 to 24 don't even qualify to take the test by virtue of being physically unfit, having a criminal record, or having not graduated from high school. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has admitted, "I am deeply troubled by the national security burden created by America's under-performing education system." This from a man who can't even spell Arnie!

Have we as a people become so despondent and listless under the jackboot of Obamarixt tyranny as to have learned nothing from Gov. Sarah Palin’s ascension to the uppermost tier of American political theorists and leaders? Are we really oblivious to the fact that it isn’t all about the sort of intelligence tests of this sort measure? Has Gov. Palin's having come to embody the hopes and dreams of countless millions not made clear that sometimes being wily, or even just gorgeous, is at least as good as a lot of showoffy book-learning of the sort favored at expensive East Coast universities in which liberal elitists plot against their average, hard-working, God-fearing neighbors? And what of street smarts? How many young persons who have them in profusion are we barring from military service because their dozen-or-so years in public and other schools left them unable to successfully confront such questions as If 2 plus X equals 4, what is the value of X? That’s algebra (or al-Gebra, or al-Qaida!) — many of whose methods, not to mention name, derive from Arabic/Islamic mathematics — and I say to hell with it!

I’d bet my bottom dollar that when news of this study spreads, the liberals and so-called progressives are going to start screaming that so many of our young people being too fat even to take the test owes to American moms making their families s’mores after they’ve finished their moose chili, rather than letting Michelle Obama and her Big Government cronies reward them with a yummy broccoli floret or something. Which leads us to ask ourselves: If we’re going to surrender to tyranny and allow Michelle Obama to say we can’t have dessert, what would be the point of having a military at all? What would be left to defend?

As for the military, the answer — in view of the great success we had in Iraq bribing insurgents to come over to the side of freedom, democracy, and time-honored American values — is obviously to hire as our soldiers, sailors, flyboys, and what have you residents of miserable Third World countries who will, for a stylish uniform, warm barracks, delicious freeze-dried American rations in pouches, and a fraction of what we have to pay our own young people, eagerly defend our way of life.

It’s a win-win situation. Our way of life gets defended, tens of thousands of residents of the world’s most miserable countries get to sleep with full bellies in dry warmth, and our young people get to keep eating as many s’mores as they please, and spend their hours in school sleeping or sending subliterate text messages, without fear of being placed in the path of Taliban or al-Qaida bullets. Common sense conservatism!

In other news, there’s been considerable ballyhoo lately about the movie The King’s Speech, about King George VI’s stammering. I believe that those in whose veins (not to mention arteries!) royal blood flows ought to be able to be able to hire speech therapists — and ghostwriters, and press secretaries! — but I’m not so sure about ordinary folk. I had a classmate in junior high school who stammered so badly while delivering a report in science class one morning that he wet his pants, and burst into tears of shame, and was never heard from again. Some might argue that the teacher was a sadist for compelling him to continue even when it became clear that he could barely get a word out, but I’m not at all sure that those with embarrassing infirmities shouldn't be encouraged to make a spectacle of themselves in front of us normal folk. God must have made them weird for a reason, and I suspect it was to make the rest of us hesitant to have anything to do with them, and thus keep the race strong and proud. For that, no one need apologize!

My Life in Lingerie

The lamestream media is crowing about the apparent declining popularity of Sarah Palin’s Iowa. The prolific procreator and stranger to the great outdoors Kate Gosselin appearing on the show a few weeks ago with 14 of her 18 children inspired “only” 3.1 million additional viewers to tune in. Last week, without Gosselin to humiliate for not knowing a caribou from carob, Sarah attracted “only” 2.56 million viewers, as opposed to the 4.96 million who watched the show’s debut episode. The lamestream TV critics were quick to speculate that TLC might now decide against the Sarah Palin’s Third World Hellholes series they’d projected for next season.

Shed no tears for Sarah, though. To the rhymes-with-witches of The View, for instance, 2.56 million might not seem like very many, but what we have to bear in mind is that Sarah’s, except in rare cases, aren’t typical casual viewers, but deeply committed patriots intent on taking our country back from the Obamarxists and restoring our precious liberties and what have you. These aren’t people who settle for a particular program because the finger they use to depress the Up or Down button on their remotes gets tired, but who would gladly lay down their lives rather than continue to live under tyranny.

An even bigger consideration is that Sarah’s viewership began to decline only when the Jewish liberal and so-called progressive-controlled media hit her with their very best shot, rushing into production the unashamedly prurient My Life in Lingerie series. If you’ve somehow managed to remain ignorant of this Satanic filth — on CBS on Sunday evenings at eight, right after the still-popular (in spite of its being brazenly left-leaning) 60 Minutes — each week it follows a different “sex symbol” as she shops for and then models attire of the sort in which only a woman’s (male!) spouse should ever be allowed to see her.

And don’t imagine that its ratings haven’t been declining right along with Sarah’s. While 145.24 million tuned in for the first in the series, featuring Angelina Jolie in Victoria’s Secret, subsequent editions, featuring Jennifer Aniston, Pamela Anderson, Jessica Simpson, and Rachel Maddow, have attracted progressively smaller audiences.

I’m idealistic enough to feel strongly that TLC has a moral obligation to present the Hellholes series regardless of their ratings, as it won’t only expand Sarah’s world view before she deposes ObaMao in 2012, but also remind the viewer of how very much better we are than most of the world’s other countries. All too often, I think, we lose sight of that.

It appears now that Sarah’s daughter Bristol, who may or may not be pregnant again, has been seeing a lot of 20-year-old Alaska pipeline worker Giancinto “Gino” Paoletti, who helped her sell her condominium in Anchorage to express her disgust over only 67 locals turning up for Mom’s recent book-signing at the Dimond Blvd. Costco. Husband Todd is said to be incensed about her involvement with a foreigner whose name he can’t pronounce, even though Paoletti was born in Alaska no less than husband Todd himself, and even the most fervent xenophobe can usually handle Gino, at least in the sense of pronouncing his name.

In tacit acknowledgment of her having another bun in the proverbial oven, cute-as-a-button Bris has taken a new tack in her most recent TV spots promoting teen sexual abstinence. Whereas early spots ended with her looking soulfully into the camera and saying, “You can wait; you can!” in the new series, she says, a little bit saucily, in some viewers' eyes, “There’s lots of things you can do that’s like totally fun without his putting it in you, you know.” Younger daughter Pillow, meanwhile, is apparently in negotiations to begin dating the late Michael Jackson’s son Blanket, after having been advised by Bed, Bath & Beyond that neither of them will have to work another day in their lives if they can make this happen. Youngest daughter Paper, meanwhile, has been spending every spare minute during her winter break from school with chums Rock and Scissors, and reportedly continues, at her age, to find boys “gross.”

A Mental Hospital for the Deceased

This past weekend, Gov. Palin appeared at the Costco in South Anchorage, Alaska, to sign copies of her bestseller America by Heart: Ideals My Ghostwriters Cherish. Costco’s management had wristbands to hand out to ensure that at least the first 500 in line would be able to be able to see Sarah in person. That only 67 people actually showed up suggests that most of the local populace imagined they’d never even find a place to park, let alone get anywhere near the presumptive candidate. Of those 67, two — a blogger who’s been writing critically about Sarah, and a woman wearing a Worst Governor Ever T-shirt — were escorted out of the store. Naturally, the lamestream media and the liberals and so-called progressives (hereinafter, the LSCPs) were beside themselves.

Here we go again. You will find no more avid believers in the First Amendment, the one having to do with freedom of expression, than common sense conservatives; no way! But just as you don’t get to stand up in the middle of Walmart on the morning of Black Friday bellowing, “Fire!” you don’t get to say or write things that are grossly offensive to average, hard-working, God-fearing Americans, which is exactly what the evicted blogger, who ought to see how he likes it in Russia or North Korea, is in the business of doing. I mean, technically, you can, but if you do, it shouldn’t surprise you that two big security guards frog-march you out to the parking lot and dribble your head off the pavement until blood comes out of your ears, or even anus, not to get too graphic, but nothing makes me more furious than the abuse of freedom of speech.

As for the woman in the supposedly offensive T-shirt, that was no woman at all, but the late Wally Hickel, who, following the first of his two terms as Alaska’s governor, went on serve with distinction as Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Interior. Having declared posthumously that he spent his life on earth trapped in the wrong body, he now dresses as a woman, and is earning money for the first recorded posthumous gender reassignment surgery by singing John Denver and James Taylor favorites in Anchorage mall parking lots; the locals pay him to stop singing. Many Alaskans disagree with his self-assessment as the state’s worst governor, pointing to the undistinguished records of Tony Knowles, Steve Cowper, and Frank Murkowski, but self-loathing, which his campaign managers “spun” as humility, was a key hallmark of his political persona.

The main thing is that, far from having him thrown out of her book-signing, Sarah was having him guided gently back into the parking lot, where the shuttle bus from the mental hospital for the deceased of which he is now resident was waiting for him. I think we can agree, common sense conservative and LSCP alike, that it’s a pretty dismal state of affairs when a political leader gets vilified even for acts of charity.

Speaking of female impersonators, it’s hardly as though Sarah lacks a uniquely clear-eyed view of modern feminism. In one of my own favorite sections of America by Heart, she exposes it as a ploy to make women dependent on Big Government for protection from date rapists, more conventional rapists, and abusive husbands and domestic partners. Pointing out that she herself has watched several Super Bowls with husband Todd and other genetic males, and never once been walloped, clobbered, or even slapped, she denounces as false a 1993 report that found that Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year for violence against women. Common sense tells her — and us! — that if it didn’t happen to her, it didn’t happen to others either, and maybe it’s time that the feminist wives and girlfriends and what have you of LSCPs and reporters for the lamestream media think about shutting up and fetching their menfolk more Tostitos and Bud Lites, much as that rhymes-with-which Michelle Obama might want to keep to herself her stupid socialist opinions about what we should and should not be feeding our young people, who of course represent our country’s future.

The Boneheadedness of the LASCPs

The liberals and so-called progressives are having a field day gloating about ought-to-have-been president John McCain’s saying on Saturday, after Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed, “I hope…we understand that we are doing great damage. Today is a very sad day.” The LASCPs are gleefully pointing out that in 2006, the perennial Arizona senator — without whose perspicacity Sarah Palin, his vice presidential running mate, wouldn’t have come to the forefront of American political life — sang this very different tune: “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it." Against all odds and common sense, a Pentagon study released earlier this month found that allowing sexual deviates to serve without even pretending to be interested in the sorts of things their normal buddies like — gals with protuberant breasts, in the boys’ case, and boys with cute tushes and a fat wallet in the gals’ — might be fine, and both the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared themselves undiscombobulated by the repeal.

To any common sense conservative it’s pretty clear that when McCain said, “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it," what he was really saying, as any sensible person would have said, was actually, “Yeah, right; when Hell freezes over.” The LASCPs can be so helpless in the face of nuance or subtext! And these people imagine themselves capable of dealing effectively with Putin and Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez!

Sometimes, when I think of how much better off we would all be if McCain and Sarah had won in 2008, it makes me so sad and angry that I want to go into the wild and shoot something dead, or smash the windshields of cars with Obama or other socialist candidate bumperstickers.

There’s been a lot of speculation the past couple of weeks, since he pretty much wept through his 60 Minutes interview, about whether there’s something wrong with soon-to-be Speaker of the House John (Boo-Hoo) Boehner, something, that is, besides his having given Gov. Palin a hard time about the recent tax deal. (Sarah, bless her heart, didn’t think it did enough to ensure the ongoing comfort of the rich.) There are those who wonder if Boehner might be a bit too fond of his merlot, in spite of merlot having been portrayed in the 2005 Paul Giamatti vehicle Sideways as the wine of boneheads, or the mentally ill.

The whole episode serves to illustrate how much the country has degenerated morally under the stewardship of the Obamarxists. Years ago, when the would-be Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie cried tears of anger or frustration because a New England newspaper had called his wife Jane awful names, he was immediately pronounced unworthy of high political office. America in those proud days wouldn’t tolerate a crybaby. When Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974 because of the LASCPs’ relentless plotting against him, did so much as a single tear escape his eyes as he trudged for the last time toward the presidential helicopter? Not one! Now there was a leader!

The only thing you can say in Boehner’s defense is that only those things that matter most to most right-thinking Americans — family, or our brave young persons in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the American Dream — get him blubbing. It isn’t, in other words, as though he turns on the waterworks if one of his secretary points out that he has soup on his tie, or if a fellow Congressman threatens to punch him in the nose for not supporting a particular bill.

Speaking of Gov. Palin, Gallup found last month that 52 percent of “us” hold an unfavorable view of her, and a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll gleefully reports that her negative rating has actually increased since the debut of Sarah Palin’s Third World Hellholes on TLC several weeks ago.

As a people, we can be disastrously shortsighted sometimes, and this is clearly one of them. But don’t bet against the tide turning dramatically in the next few months, as we now learn of Sarah’s plan to step boldly out of her comfort zone and into the mainstream media’s crosshairs. On the evening of January 17, she will debate Noam Chomsky and the notorious (the LASCPs would probably prefer acclaimed) feminist, democratic socialist, sociologist and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich on PBS, with Katie Couric moderating.

This time, Sarah won’t be the one embarrassed.

Mr. Bigword Strikes Again: American Exceptionalism Explained

Well, so much for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I know that I, for one, will sleep much more soundly at night knowing that our country is being defended in part by persons better suited to decorating interiors or styling hair or running Websites featuring catty gossip about movie and other stars, persons likely to undermine morale in their foxholes and Humvees and what have you by whining about having been denied the chance to moisturize thoroughly that morning, or pouting if someone wants to listen to Slayer or Slipknot rather than Lady Gaga. So much for our remaining a beacon of moral clarity in this regard, as we now join non-exceptional countries in allowing deviates into our military. Another blow to American exceptionalism!

It’s a tricky thing, American exceptionalism. On the one hand, our believing we shouldn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else — that we are God’s favorite nation — irks many others; as George W. Bush pointed out, for instance, Islamic extremists hate us for our God-given freedom. On the other hand, we give other countries a standard to which to aspire, and you can’t convince me that isn’t valuable. The liberals and so-called progressives will tell you that our sense of what they dismissively term “entitlement” embitters other countries, in much the same way the beauty and grace of the hottest girl in high school will embitter not only other, less hot, girls, but also stammering, pustule-covered boys who would no more be able to speak to her than to the late Eleanor Roosevelt, even while their hormones are screaming at them to get busy. To those liberals and so-called progressives, I say, “Whatever.” If God didn’t love us most, he wouldn’t have made us the richest and purest of heart and best-looking!

I suspect that having been the pre-eminent hotty at Wasilla High School uniquely qualifies Gov. Sarah Palin to protect American exceptionalism. Last Friday, as you know, she submitted to an interview with Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts, even though the lack of a comma in the program’s title is known to bother Sarah, who’s something of a stickler for faultless grammar and lucid syntax. A lot of liberals and so-called progressives are whining about Roberts having handled Sarah with kid gloves; indeed, there are those who have wondered, with the utmost crassness, if Roberts having crawled up Sarah’s rectum over the course of the interview is going to cause the presumptive candidate eliminative problems at a time when American can least afford her suffering them. A contributor to Salon.com went so far as to assert that Sarah responded to Roberts’ hard-hitting questions with “free-associative demagoguery in a singsongy tone.” Mr. Bigword strikes again; how the liberals and so-called progressives must love that. To them, I say, “Get a life!”

Driving home from the gymnasium yesterday afternoon on the Hamilton Fish Bridge, I passed a big SUV with Palin in 2012 and I Love Jesus bumper stickers, and all of the early afternoon’s despair melted away like lemon drops; it felt like the Christmas season finally beginning in earnest. I smiled at the driver, a burly, ursine caribou hunter type in a bushy beard and baseball cap, but he was apparently entranced with whatever the Christian rock station was playing at that moment (my own car radio is tuned to the Christian hip hop station), and it occurred to me that if I didn’t turn back to the road ahead, Sarah might be denied my vote in 2012.

I feel strongly that she’s going to win in a landslide with or without me, but I think it’s human nature to imagine oneself key to the success of persons or ventures to which he actually matters not at all. As a boy in a Los Angeles beach community, I fretted that if I didn’t listen attentively to their game on the radio, the Dodgers would lose. This may sound foolish or even delusional, but when I became a substance-abusing college student whose infinitely greater interest was in rock and roll, the team went into a frightful decline. For the sake of the country I love, I must not and cannot make the same mistake with Sarah.

As I immerse myself in The Rich Man’s Table, his imagining of the life of Bob Dylan, I find myself wondering ever more implacably if Scott Spencer is the best living writer in the English language. He lacks E. E. Doctorow's moral ferocity, and his technique, paragraph by paragraph, doesn't compare to Martin Amis's, but for sheer originality of perception and beauty of expression, he stands alone, as witness: "We shook hands. Maya’s grip was slight, her hand little more than cool shadow in mine. She was full of solicitude toward me. 'I know…' — she stretched the word out, discovered rivers of complicity in the globe of the vowel…"

[Here yhe book’s narrator, Billy — the grown son for whose paternity the Dylan character, Luke Fairchild, refuses to accept responsibility — describes his fervently Marxist grandfather’s slide into dementia:] The books of philosophy, history, and literature he had so vigorously cross-referenced in his table talk by now faded from memory. His mind was a burned library — the spines and their titles still facing out from the shelves but the pages within turned to ash.

[At Esther’s bedside, Luke encounters a blues man who’d earlier sued Luke for plagiarism.] Now Joe was standing again, but this time he threw his arms around Luke and pulled him close, the way people will when death makes our squabbles so small, when it suddenly seems that our grievances and competition make as much sense as cattle vying for position in the slaughterhouse.

Many passages in which Billy talks about his father are as startling and revelatory as the best of the real Dylan’s songs:

He was the virtual prototype of the boy parents warned their daughters against. When Luke was young, fucking him was like running away from home, or maybe even joining the circus. He was vile, he was strange, the smell of freedom was all over him, that mixture of smoke and wind and cheap wine, as redolent as peanuts, sawdust, and elephants.

*

Mom used to say (though never to me) that Luke was an innocent, a child, beneath it all. Well, that innocence was long gone, swallowed by the muck of ego, entitlement, and drugs, revelation, conversion, and tantrum, blow jobs, anal sex, private showings, his pick of the litter, and a thousand and one rarefied pleasures and perversions I could barely imagine. He was paying the price for his life, organ by organ. And somewhere within him was the terrible sad panic of a once-holy man starting to realize that, despite everything, his body might outlive his soul.

*

Luke’s voice was startlingly low, a honey croon, so unlike his usual nasal, wise-ass, reedy kazoo of a voice that it caused me to wonder if he had just become a different person, or if his soul was like one of those flashlights that can shine red, white, green, yellow, or blue, mediated by a simple plastic dial over the face of it. But then I realized: this was his Nashville timbre, the almost comically resonant style he affected after he had repudiated the paisleyed psychedelia of the sixties, and began to boyishly idolize the cowboy singers, beer-bellied, eagle-eyed middle-aged men in string ties, the Nashville old guard, terse tough guys with barroom scars on their knuckles, or a bitten-off ear, a shattered knee, guys who spent more money on drugs than the Grateful Dead and Blue Cheer and the Stones combined.

*

He had a number of people on his beck-and-call brigade, people who tended to his menagerie of needs and whims. Needless to say, he did very little of the labor of his own life. It had been at least thirty years since he’d changed the sheets on a bed, or changed a light bulb, or stood impatiently in line for popcorn, worried the movie would start without him. Yet despite his twenty-four-hour coddling, he still maintained his angry, alienated sneer. He still wrote at if he were somehow an outlaw.

*

Luke was our tiny, holy kernel of hunger for heaven, sealed in a package with hundred layers of gaudy paper. He was wrapped in money, and he was wrapped in fame, in sex, drugs, politics, nostalgia, privilege; but when all of that was torn away, what was left? A soul, just a soul, a tiny, frail human soul, racing blindly and in terror through the dark woods.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 49: Disembowelment and Self-Expression

The lamestreamers are always up in arms about one thing or another, and lately it’s that Pfc Bradley Manning, who apparently describes himself as a whistleblower (for having leaked classified US army intelligence to WikiLeaks), but whom all right-thinking Americans regard as a traitor for whom no punishment could be too severe, is being kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day in advance of his trial. The lamestreamers point out that the European Court of Human Rights has in the past ruled that such detentions violate the rights they’re in the business of protecting.

Well, boo-hoo! Such American patriots as Mike Huckabee and Sarah have called for Manning to be publicly disemboweled for treason, and then fed to rabid dogs, and common sense tells us they’re right. And here the lamestreamers are whining about Brad not having enough company, or about his having been denied a pillow and sheets! Will I ever cease to be amazed at the gall of these people?

It gets worse. Council members in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, the notorious college town across the bay from San Francisco, are apparently on the verge of issuing an official resolution praising Manning, leading me to wonder if it isn’t the Berkeley City Council that needs disembowelment. When I lived in the Bay Area, and ventured from time and time into Berkeley for Thai food, I was appalled by the bohemians, opium fiends, sexual deviates, and Satanists I saw shuffling in sandals up and down Telegraph Avenue, many seemingly trying to resemble Jesus, or at least the classic western European conception of Jesus, except not nearly as clean. Others were perpetually engaged in animated shouting matches with adversaries whose presence they alone could detect.

As I have said here many times before, self-expression is all well and good when it doesn’t turn the stomachs of God-fearing average Americans, but in Berkeley it does. If Arnold Schwarzenegger is half the superhero he claims to be, he’ll figure out a way to drown everyone in the city, except the righteous, before he leaves office in January.

The appalling news from Berkeley makes all the more welcome that about Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin having been martyred Tuesday by the military jury trying him for his refusal — on the grounds that orders from Commander-in-Chief ObaMao are illegitimate because he was born in some Third World hellhole, rather than in Hawaii, as anyone with half a brain recognizes as implausible given his being an obvious Muslim and Marxist — to deploy to Afghanistan. The brave doctor now faces three years in prison for his beliefs, but you won’t see the Berkeley City Council planning to honor him.

A member of the British Parliament who previously served as a drugs minister in the Home Office (kind of the State Department) claimed yesterday that the war on drugs has been "nothing short of a disaster," and said it was time to study other options, including decriminalizing possession of drugs and legally regulating their production and supply.

His Home Office experience, Bob Ainsworth said, made clear that prohibition failed to reduce the harm that drugs cause in the UK, while his experience as a defense secretary focused on Afghanistan, "showed that the war on drugs creates the very conditions that perpetuate the illegal trade, while undermining international development and security". The only surprise is that President ObaMao didn’t immediately call a press conference to declare, “Me too!”

We in America have been hearing such nonsense for years now. Sometimes those from whom we hear it have so-called scientific data. At other times they invoke the success of liberalized drug policies in the Netherlands and Portugal. What few ever mention is that an enormous percentage of American convicts were incarcerated for drug offenses, and that the prison industry has been growing faster than nearly any other the past few decades, providing employment for countless thousands. We’re supposed to put all the correction officers and infirmary workers and wardens and what-have-you out in the streets, where they’re likely to be run over by drug addicts speeding away from condominiums they’ve just burglarized in cars they've just hot-wired?

America's is the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and our remaining No. 1 is very much dependent on our maintaining the war on drugs. Prisons: Build, baby, build!

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 46: The Heartstrings of Americans and Others

The transcript of footage shot in Haiti this past weekend for Greta Van Sussteren’s Fox-TV program On the Record puts to rest forever the lamestream media-fomented misperception that Governor Palin is something other than an acutely perceptive observer of international affairs.

Hardly has their helicopter set down than Sarah has coolly — and perceptively — assessed the Haitians' plight. “These people,” she observes, “have had natural disasters now. The cholera outbreak, it really lets us see opportunity to help and send a message back to those who are more privileged materially to have opportunity here to share with these who are hurting."

When Van Susteren — whose husband is on Sarah’s payroll, but who is unimpeachably objective nonetheless, in keeping with Fox News’ commitment to impartiality — notes that a lot of promised aid hasn’t yet materialized, Sarah laments that “a lot of aid that was planned ended up not where it should be on the frontlines where helping people, unfortunately. And I think they need the word out there that they are still in dire need here in Haiti, and they want that assistance — via materials, people, resources — to help them complete the mission here, and that's restoration of really this most beautiful area of the globe.” So much for those who continue to accuse Sarah of parochialism, who suggest that her adoration of Alaska and Iowa has made her blind to other regions’ woes and wonders!

Van Susteren advises Sarah that President Obama asked his two immediate predecessors, He-Whose-Name-I-Refuse-to-Type — the rhymes-with-which Hilary’s husband — and George W. Bush, to come tell the locals how sad their situation makes him, but that the Secret Service nixed the idea because of Haiti’s post-election rioting and lawlessness. Sarah sagely observes, “That is unfortunate of course that someone of his stature can be here to send that message to the world that there's still help needed. As we are driving around and seeing the armed guards out of the corner of our eye as we pass by, Greta, that's an illustration of the turmoil, the political unrest that is here.” In much the same way, we infer, that America’s armed policepersons illustrate our own growing political unrest under Obamarxism!

When Van Susteren points out that Haiti reminds her of Kabul, of which Sarah probably has indeed heard, Sarah is quick to explain, “That's natural disaster and the political unrest combined. There's elements that have combined to create this perfect storm of a lot of, again, resulting in dire need in Haiti. A lot of people who are more privileged and have more, that are able to share, if they can see this, hear the stories, certainly, I think that the heartstrings of Americans and others can be tugged and assistance can be provided here.”

Where others, lacking faith (the sort she shares with George W. Bush), might see only rubble, cholera, and despair, Sarah sees “beautiful, happy children who seem to be content and joyful and, look around, Greta, they don't have much. The babies don't have diapers. The kids don't have much. Yet they have smiles and they're looking around for, I think, for some little bit of compassion that the rest of us can provide.” It takes a mom like Sarah to remind us that infants don’t need diapers to be the joyful little creatures Jesus intended. Their having diapers might well make those caring for them more joyful, as even the most adoring parent or guardian is apt to have serious reservations about being, well, pooped all over, but leave it to Sarah to put the children first, where of course they belong.

In other news, many lamestreamers, not content to torment Sarah, have been going ever more vengefully after daughter Bristol, pointing out that the voice of the young abstinence enthusiast in her official pronouncements is very different from that in her Facebook messages, and suggesting that the former must be ghostwritten.

Can you tell which is which? “[Olbermann] accusing me of hypocrisy is by now an old canard. What Mr. Olbermann lacks in originality he makes up for with insincere incredulity.” Or: “That doesn’t even make sense you dumbass. And I’m successful because I’m a hard ass worker. Keep talking s--- though . . .”

Are the lamestreamers really unable to understand that the prose Bris composes painstakingly late at night in (Sarah’s) husband Todd’s book-lined library is apt to be very different from that which she types with one finger on her smartphone while changing the diaper of son Tripp, who does have diapers? That the lamestreamers have no conception of how much attention a child requires is probably explainable in terms of so many of them being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. And there's no room in Sarah's America for any of 'em.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 45: The Nerve of the Haters

In her daily press conference yesterday, Sarah bravely became the first American politician to express outrage at the number of Muslim immigrants who have been pouring over the Canadian border into Washington state the past few months. Islamophobes suggest that such sneaking may actually be the latest form of jihad, the idea being to cripple America by overloading its social services, as the Mexicans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, and what have you have been overloading those of Texas and California. Indeed, there are those who believe that the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Yemen have been bankrolling the human flooding of our southern border in order to divert attention from what’s happening up in the Northwest.

The Muslims, of course, pose a far greater threat than the Latinos, as they’re too busy being called to prayer to take the sorts of demeaning minimum-wage jobs at which swarthy Spanish speakers excel. And not only are Latinos eager to remove asbestos for whatever the guy who hires them for the day in front of Home Depot is wiling to pay, but theirs is also a far more enjoyable cuisine. Tacos, burritos, enchiladas, pork fajitas, and the like have all become integral in the American culinary landscape, whereas the various lamb dishes and hummus the towelheads seem to enjoy so much have barely gained a toehold. That Sarah herself is known to enjoy several Taco Bell dishes is really all you need know.

I suspect that Latino cuisine’s greater deliciousness owes in large part to the prominent role cheese, or queso, plays in it. I read recently that over the 4000 years mankind has existed, our DNA has not yet got through its head that we — or at least we Americans — don’t need to store fat as our ancestors did back at a time when they might not encounter an edible dinosaur for days; we are genetically inclined to crave fatty food, and thus to find pleasurable the sensation of molten cheese in our mouths. Islamic food denies us this pleasure, just as its music denies us that of actual singing rather than ululating.

To hear the lamestream media tell it, Sarah was disgruntled about how she was depicted — along with Julian Assange, Lady Gaga, Mel Gibson, Malia Obama, LeBron James, Courtney Love, Gen. David Petraeus, Federal Reserve Bank kingpin Ben Bernanke, and gay rights activist Michelangelo Signorile — on Barbara Walters’ Ten Most Fascinating People of 2010 special. None of the others, we’re to understand, expressed anything other than delight with his or her depiction. But the truth is that Sarah had no problems at all with the way she was presented, and in fact has gone on record as being grateful to Walters and ABC for bringing out that she in fact reads voraciously, and often in a particular text’s original language; she is presently enjoying Peter Schlemihl by Adelbert von Chamisso in the original German.

What she was actually disturbed about was that Walters selected Malia Obama, but not elder sister Sasha. It’s a testament to her ability to set partisanship aside when it comes to such matters as parenting, as she is as outraged by how Malia’s selection may have jeopardized Sasha’s self-esteem — just as she’s about to enter adolescence! — as she would be if one of Mitt Romney’s eerily indistinguishable sons had been chosen, but not the other nine.

Sig Rogich, viewed as a key Republican tactician since helping to re-elect Ronald Reagan in 1984, yesterday declared Sarah unelectable. Well, let’s hear, buster, what you’ve got to say when you haven’t been former US ambassador to Iceland — your native Iceland, mind you — and the PR whiz to whom Mike Tyson turned for brand restoration after biting Evander Holyfield’s ear. The nerve of the haters!

In my view only two good things have ever come out of Iceland — Sigur Ros and Bjork, whose infamous swan dress from the 2001 Oscars was indisputably the garment of the decade, regardless of what those in the business of ridiculing stars' attire might tell you. Our having an embassy there makes about as much sense as our having one at Knott’s Berry Farm. A typical waste of taxpayer dollars.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 44: Fareed It and Weep

The lamestream media were sploodging all over themselves yesterday about how cruelly Sarah treated her fellow Learning Channel star Kate Gosselin on Sunday evening’s edition of Sarah Palin’s Iowa, leaving the blonde mom and her eight little ones in the middle of a cornfield and virtually daring them to try to find their way back to civilization. For these lamestreamers — most of whom, unashamed hypocrites, are no doubt fervently into Darwin — I have only three words: Survival of the fittest. America in 2010 isn’t for the effete, homosexual, or namby-pamby, but for the rugged outdoorsperson who can skin a caribou even while changing the diaper of an infant with special needs and pointing out the folly of Ben Bernanke’s stewardship of the Federal Reserve Bank. If Kate Gosselin doesn’t like that, she can take her brats and her blonde highlights to any number of socialist nanny states, and STFU.

We now learn that on the Samaritan’s Purse helicopter home from Haiti this past weekend, Sarah was reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (known earlier as Remembrance of Things Past) — in the original French. So much for those who regard her as an intellectual lightweight who never reads anything more challenging than text messages and People Weekly, one of the two periodicals (with Us) to have been delivered every week to her office when she was the governor of Alaska, before she realized she could better serve God in other ways.

In other news, that slimy little British kissup Piers Morgan, who’s going, inexplicably, to take over for Larry King on CNN in 2011, has told the British tabloids that he’s “banned” Madonna from his show, even though it doesn’t really exist yet, because she’s not as interesting as the more recent version of herself, Lady Gaga. God, I love when the Satanists and perverts and liberal elitists bite one another’s backs in public. If CNN had any decency — as they haven’t since the appropriately xenophobic Lou Dobbs left them — they’d have offered the job to someone like Billy Graham, of whose son Sarah is now Best Friend Forever. At 92, the great evangelist might have lost a step or two, but King, whose original surname was recognizably Jewish, wasn’t exactly known for his own nimble wit, and he’s only 87.

Mutt Lange, the producer who broke Shania Twain’s heart, but not before producing her 643-million-selling album Come On Over, has been invited to come on out of retirement to oversee the recording of Sarah’s Sanctimony Records debut single with Haiti’s Sweet Micky, denied the presidency of his little country because he’s merely a celebrity with below-average intelligence, mangled syntax, and virtually no knowledge of anything except how to amplify his own celebrity. Sarah is reportedly pushing for their first recording to be of Phil Collins’ "Against All Odds" because it’s made her cry every time an American Idol winner has sung it, whereas Micky is pushing for a reworking of his 1989 hit "Konpas Foret des Pins."

Speaking of CNN, their resident towelhead (though he takes it off when on camera) Fareed Zakaria (near left) this past Sunday labeled as “total nonsense” Glenn Beck’s observation that one in 10 Muslims is a terrorist. What a surprise! He said that there were 11,000 terrorist attacks around the world in 2009, and that there are 157 million Muslims, meaning that 1427 of them would have had to be involved in the average attack for Glenn’s observation to hold water, and we’re to understand that the typical attack involves three or four guys. So here we have yet another case of needing to use common sense, rather than be bamboozled by liberal elitist-manipulated statistics. Whom are you, as a level-headed, hard-working Christian American going to believe, a guy named Glenn — even if he spells it with two n’s — or one named Fareed?

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 43: The Blinders of Liberal Bias

It should surprise absolutely no one that Sarah’s visit to Haiti over the weekend has been the object of the lamestream media’s fiercest ridicule. They ridiculed the fact that her visit was sponsored by Samaritan’s Purse, the Christian charitable organization run by Billy Graham’s boy, pointing out that during the 1994 Rwandan refugee crisis, Samaritan's Purse staffers stayed in luxury hotels while tens of thousands died all around them of cholera, and sent stretcher bearers to carry the sick only if a third person was available to run alongside comforting the victim with passages from the Bible. They decried Purse’s having required victims of El Salvador's 2001 earthquake to attend prayer meetings before they could receive aid. They ridiculed even her attire — cargo pants, a T-shirt that read My Daughter Almost Won Dancing With the Stars, and All I Got Was This @#$%&* T-Shirt, and designer sunglasses.

These people just don’t get that which is obvious to Sarah and those of us who love her — that it’s all well and good to administer oral rehydration salts to a cholera victim, or to pull someone out from an earthquake’s rubble, but if you don’t tend to their souls in the process, your effort’s in vain. The world has quite enough non-believers running around, spreading Satan’s and the liberal elitists' lies.

They ridiculed Sarah as well for pronouncing “joyful” those being treated for cholera at Samaritan Purse’s facility in the north Haiti town of Bercy (for security reasons, she steered clear of Port-au-Prince, even though husband Todd was itching to shoot rioters). As though you or I, if we were cholera-ravaged African-Americans, wouldn’t ourselves be pretty joyful to find ourselves being grinned at by a beautiful white lady in designer sunglasses!

They ridiculed her for handing out to the local children gift-wrapped copies of her 2009 bestseller Goin’ Rogue, pointing out that relatively few Haitians read at all, and fewer still read English. Such naysayers! We common sense conservatives would much rather believe that while the populace is largely illiterate now, it might not be in five or 10 or 15 years, provided the earthquakes and hurricanes and cholera leave anybody alive. And English is God’s language. When was the last time any of these lamebrains opened a night table drawer in a Courtyard by Marriott and found a Bible in anything other than English?

Honestly, the lamestreamers are so literal and shortsighted, so blind to the power of metaphor! It may well be, as they so delighted in pointing out, that the good, if severely ill, folks of Bercy hadn’t the faintest idea of who Sarah was. But what she was, and is, is clear to anyone not wearing the blinders of liberal bias — a symbol of inextinguishable hope. In the weeks to come we will surely see that her visit to Bercy did more to stop its inhabitants’ vomiting, diarrhea, and leg cramps than all the oral rehydration salts put together.

If there were few surprises in the lamestream media’s reaction to Sarah’s humanitarian mission, it hardly means that the weekend was devoid of surprises. Hearing, from many of those on whose feverish foreheads she placed her cool white hand without regard for her personal safety, that they were less upset about having cholera than about the exclusion of compas star Michel Martelly (aka Sweet Micky) from the runoff election for president, she phoned the head of Sanctimony Records, the biggest Christian music label in Alaska, to volunteer to record a single with Martelly, and to donate 25 percent of the profits to his next presidential campaign.

But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! Inspired by the popularity of Sarah Palin’s Iowa, the reality show all America has been tuning into so eagerly every Sunday night since mid-November, producer Mark Burnett has invited Sarah to make another series, to be re-titled Sarah Palin’s Third World Hellholes. Each week, between cavorting adorably with family and friends, confronting all the vicissitudey things all average American moms must confront, she will visit a part of the world as miserable as Haiti, and, in association with Christian benevolent groups with political clout, make the locals joyous.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 42: Cookies for the Haitians

I’m sure the lamestream media will think of a million ways to besmirch Sarah’s visit to Haiti this weekend. They’ll say she’s accompanying Franklin Graham, spawn of the famous evangelist Billy, on behalf of the Christian relief organization Samaritan’s Purse, just to make herself appear less parochial — and to get on the good side of those evangelicals who might otherwise support the cute-named Mike Huckabee as the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

But let the lamestreamers make their ugly accusations; the earthquake- and cholera-ravaged African Americans in Port au Prince who have suffered so awfully this year will be no less grateful for the homemade cookies Sarah will reportedly offer them. And I wonder what those who accuse her of having no interest in the printed word will say when — because her firm belief is that the intellect craves nourishment as voraciously as does the body — she is seen autographing and distributing copies of her 2009 bestseller Goin’ Rogue that otherwise might have wound up humiliated on bookstore discount tables. The great irony being that Kreyol is one of the few languages into which the book hasn’t been translated.

Once finished at the Port au Prince Barnes & Noble — assuming it’s withstood the civil violence and frequent visits by Sean Penn that have ravaged the already-devastated city in recent weeks — Sarah and Frank, as he presumably permits close friends and powerful politicians to call him, are scheduled to head for a local cholera clinic, where Sarah will apparently attempt to evoke the martyred Princess Diana by holding up an ill infant for photographers.

As of this writing, it has not yet been confirmed that husband Todd and daughter Bristol will be accompanying the presumptive candidate and her new (not really that new, since she defended his assertion early in 2010 that our current president was born a Muslim) BFF Franklin on the visit to Haiti, though it is known that husband Todd had hoped to be able to bust a cap in the ass of a looter, or three.

The lamestreamers are sure to make a lot of racket about Our Gal’s apparently imminent first visit to the United Kingdom too, for purposes of communing with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whom she has described as one of her political idols in spite of having not knowing her from Becky Thatcher (in Tom Sawyer, you see) before John McCain’s thugs insisted in 2008 that she bone up on recent world history. Between now and then, someone presumably advised her that the so-called Iron Lady was a big favorite of her hero Ronald Reagan. Now if only someone would advise Sarah that Baroness Thatcher suffers from severe dementia, and that Sarah might be better advised to head for two other countries she’s gone on record as hoping to visit, Israel and Africa. Or it may be that Sarah is looking forward to chatting with a political leader, even a retired one, over whom she will be able to lord it intellectually.

If we were advising her, we would, on balance, suggest that she give the UK a wide berth. If Sarah and husband Todd have found the American tabloid press annoying, there are no words for what they will find its British equivalent. British newsstands are full of magazines devoted to photographs of celebrities with dark spots under their arms, or cellulite, or herpes blisters. The comperes (that is, hosts) of their late-night television chat (that is, talk) shows are either cheeky (that is, brazen and irreverent) or pompous, and unlikely to be mesmerized (that is, mesmerized) by Sarah’s spunk and charm. And to them, the word spunk means something very different from what it means to hard-working, average Americans, and indolent rich ones alike.

Scott Spencer: I Am Not Worthy

Thank God for NPR, province of the liberal elitists though it may be (he said ironically). If I hadn’t listened by chance to Teri Gross’s interview with Scott Spencer on my iPod during one of my early autumn constitutionals, I wouldn’t have read his latest novel, Man in the Woods, and been so awed by the beauty of his writing as to seek out all his earlier stuff. All of it humbles me, and I am not easily humbled.

I’m afraid I’ve folded many of the pages of the copy of his 1986 novel Waking the Dead I borrowed from the East Fishkill Community Library, as I've been resolved the past view days to try to demonstrate why I love his writing so much. I might just as well have folded no pages, as every three paragraphs or so he expresses something so beautifully as to take your breath away.


Here the narrator talks about a recovering alcoholic’s yearning for drink:

I wanted a drink, many drinks, many many many drinks. There was a moment after the first drink when you knew there were more to come, and you could walk through yourself as if through the rooms of a cozy paid-for house and the painters had just arrived to put the primer on and soon everything would be painted your favorite colors.

*

I put my arm tentatively around [his teenaged nephews], trying to embrace them in a way that seemed somehow casual, athletic, using that code masculine shame has created for affection.

*

Mileski’s eyes clicked in her direction. He made a small, tight smile that was all but hidden by his beard; the whiskers around his mouth shifted like grass will when something unseen suddenly slithers through.

*

It was one of those extravagantly sunny winter mornings, as if all that low trembling gray had just been wrapping paper and this perfect blue dome was the gift inside.

I’ve had the sort of fight he describes so gorgeously here:

I took the day off from classes and Sarah stayed home, too. We lied to each other and said we wanted to work out our difference, to put our house back in order, when in fact our anger with each other had awakened a kind of awful perversity and what we really wanted was to use the stick of our intelligence to wedge into the crack in the earth between us and to open it further and further — until the other could suddenly see the emptiness below and panic.

*

Here the narrator has just tried to reassure his brother's Asian girlfriend about her lack of facility in English:

She gave me a quick, sour look and I realized that my saying she spoke more English than I spoke Korean and then my saying I spoke absolutely no Korean had turned what I’d meant to be a compliment into a slight. But of course it wasn’t a compliment in the first place. It was merely a bit of patronizing banter and as she turned her mouth down and glanced away from me I felt a surge of horror at myself — true horror — because it seemed suddenly that a sensitivity that I had always assumed was my second nature had turned into (perhaps had always been) something really rather coarse — a salesman’s friendliness.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 37: Chucks

According to WikiLeaks, on this Sunday evening’s edition of Sarah Palin’s Iowa, Sara and husband Todd and the children will help her pop — retired science teacher and track coach Chuck Heath — decorate the Christmas “tree” made of the antlers of the moose and caribou Chuck has assassinated over the years, and the spines of a couple of lamestream media types who, during the 2008 presidential election, weren’t quite as judicious as they might have been about whom they approached for interviews. At the time of “publication,” FAITP remained unable to confirm that Mr. Heath will be a contestant in the next Dancing With the Stars series, but knows for sure that he placed third in a university-wide twist contest at the University of Idaho in 1962, and is also adept at more contemporary dances, like the mashed potatoes. We have no more reason to infer that he was ever romantically linked to the recording artist most closely identified with that dance, Dee Dee Sharp, than that Jacqueline Onassis dated twist avatar Chubby Checker.

Our understanding is that Mr. Heath moved his family from Idaho up to Alaska because of his love of nature, which love most commonly takes the form of his going into the wild and killing something. A lot of people find this brand of outdoorsmanship incomprehensible or even objectionable, but if they read their Bibles, which says clearly that God gave us white people dominion over all the beasts and wildlife and so on, they would STFU, to use Willow’s increasingly famous acronym.

In any event special surprise guests on Sunday night’s SPI will apparently include Dr. Stephen Hawking, with whom the candidate will chat about quantum physics and the upcoming 27th season of American Idol, which all the Palins are known to enjoy together with big bowls of popcorn except when flamboyant homosexual contestants are singing, in which event they all hurry into husband Todd’s study for a few moments’ joint Bible study, or a “family conference.” Musically, the show will be Wayne-themed, with Fountains of Wayne, Wayne Newton, and Lil Wayne all appearing and, with any luck, “jamming” after their various individual segments. The Miami Heat’s Dwyane Wade will teach husband Todd how to shoot free throws (though not, let's hope, how to spell Dwayne!), and son Traction will do impressions of his former Army buddies, this in spite of the critics’ lukewarm reception to his earlier such impressions on the show. If a Palin is anything, it’s resolute.

I couldn’t, speaking of television, help but enjoy Internet terrorist Julian Assange’s appearances via video hookup the past two nights on Letterman and Conan. You might have imagined, in view of his imminent arrest on rape charges — in Sweden, it’s considered rape if, for instance, you don’t withdraw in humiliation if your partner asks if it’s in yet — and of the fact that many American political leaders have called for him to be hunted down like a dog (or, in Sarah’s case, like a moose or caribou) that he’d have been ill-at-ease and terse, but he turned out to be an engaging raconteur in spite of his excruciating northeastern Australian accent.

I’ve always been a sucker for such grace under fire. Long before my recent conversion to common-sense conservatism, I passionately loathed Richard Nixon, but had to admit to having been hugely impressed by his courage the day in August 1974 he left the White House for the last time. How he managed to walk to his helicopter and then wave triumphantly (too triumphantly in the circumstances!) at the press without bursting into tears of shame or rage or despair was beyond me. I actually felt sorry for the loathsome son-of-a-bitch, in a way I don’t ever picture myself feeling sorry for George W. Bush.

If you were a science teacher, and your grown daughter didn’t believe in evolution, as Sarah apparently does not, would you perhaps question your own abilities? I think I might, which isn’t to say that I hold with Darwinism, another ploy by the elitists to make the salt of earth feel stupid.

I wonder if, during his lifetime, anyone addressed Darwin as Chuck, as they do Sarah's pop. I think it would have served to make his views a lot more palatable to average Americans.

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 35: Keeping Americans Safe From Australians

As one who fights tirelessly in this journal for the restoration of our precious liberties and the preservation of tax cuts for the wealthy, I, as all other common-sense conservatives, am very much in favor of freedom of speech on the Internet. But the WikiLeaks unpleasantness of the past couple of weeks reminds us how easy it is to abuse that freedom. Julian Assange, a known Australian, has gravely embarrassed the American government, revealing, for instance, that our brave men and women in uniform continued to torture Iraqis even after Abu Ghraib, and that their commanders understandably got sick and tired of writing detailed reports about the atrocities some of our soldiers, crazed with homesickness, committed. Naturally, I’m no fan at all of that rhymes-with-which Hilary Clinton, but when I learned that WikiLeaks’ publication of sensitive State Department cables will make it difficult for our diplomats to spy effectively on the countries to which she’s dispatched them, I was as incensed as the next patriotic American.

I couldn’t agree more with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — the handsomest man in Congress, by the way — whose view is that Assange “is a high-tech terrorist. He’s done an enormous damage to our country, and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law." We must bear firmly in mind that the law is a living thing, written not by God, but by man, and therefore subject to revision. A law that doesn’t protect decent, God-fearing Americans from Australians does indeed call out for revision.

Naturally, I’ve been disgusted with the ObaMao administration’s typically effete, ineffectual response to Assange’s treason. They've blocked his access to his financial assets, frightened the likes of Amazon.com and his Internet service provider out of doing any business with him, frozen funds earmarked for his legal defense even as they were encouraging our Swedish allies to charge him with sexual improprieties, gotten our friends in high places Down Under to threaten to revoke his passport (Julia Gillard may be no one’s MILF, but she knows on which side her toast is Vegemited), and even threatened him with assassination.

They stopped short, though, of advocating that he be hunted down like any other terrorist; it fell to mama grizzly Sarah Palin to summon the moral fortitude for that. And here she showed herself to be very much more circumspect than her fellow former governor and Jesus-lover Mike Huckabee, who wants to see hanged the American soldier thought to have passed documents to Assange. Well, in Sarah’s America, we’re not going to be so quick to hang those who’ve fought to protect our precious liberties, buster.

In other news, results from this year’s Programme for International Student Assessment, announced this week by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, show Asian, and especially Chinese, 15-year-olds to be the world’s best-educated. Ours, meanwhile, placed 23rd in science, 17th in reading, and 31st in math.

We must bear in mind here that while those in the Third World are spending 16 to 18 hours per day studying, our own youngsters are out enjoying precious freedoms of which the Chinese, for instance, can only dream — “cruising” in their own cars, sending each other text messages, listening to iPods the Chinese couldn’t hope to afford, binge-drinking, and getting each other pregnant — just generally having the sort of fun God put American teens on earth to enjoy. Would we really want our youngsters to be as hard-working as those in the Third World? Would that not jeopardize their God-given feeling of entitlement?

So Belgium, Estonia, Iceland, France, and the Slovak Republic all finished ahead of us; so friggin’ what? My guess is that they cheated; honestly now, have you ever met an Estonian you trusted? Be that as it may, in your face, Turkey, Mexico, and Greece, three of the five countries whose kids ours did better than. If we can kick the butt of the so-called cradle of civilization, the birthplace of geometry, I don’t think we need to apologize to anybody.