McCain W I N S!!!

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
BTW Rufus -- I keep waiting for one of the pundits to pick up on the irony you pointed out a few days ago.

The Repugs promised to shrink the federal government; instead they grew it. Liberal goverment workers moved into northern Virginia to work in Washington D.C., and in doing so, they flipped Virginia from red to blue.

So far, no pundit has been as wise as thee.

Speaking of irony, today Rush Limpdick (I listened in the car strictly for schadenfreude, swear to god) rose the interesting point that the day's great civil rights victory (election of the first black president) ironically also contributed to a great civil rights defeat (passage of several major ballot measures hostile to gays), because according to exit polling, minorities (whose hugely increased turnout was a big factor in Obama's victory) had a far more anti-gay voting tendency on other parts of the ballot than whites did. I found that a little amusing.

[KrazyHorse]

minorities (whose hugely increased turnout was a big factor in Obama's victory)

You mean how blacks increased their share of votes cast from 11% to 13%?

[Darius871]

I was under the impression some of the anti-gay initiatives passed by that narrow a margin, or that black turnout was larger in those particular states, or both. If neither was the case, then Limpdick was talking out of his ass, which is highly likely.

[KrazyHorse]

I'm just trying to point out that the biggest factor in Obama's victory was probably college-educated, white, under 40 voters swinging toward him.

[Darius871]

I had in mind fairly vague exit poll suggestions like this from the SF Chronicle on Prop 8:

California's black and Latino voters, who turned out in droves for Barack Obama, provided key support for a state ban on same-sex marriage. ...

Exit poll data showed seven in 10 black voters and more than half of Latino voters backed the ballot initiative, while whites and Asians were split.

Though blacks and Latinos combined make up less than one-third of California's electorate, their opposition to same-sex marriage appeared to tip the balance. Both groups decisively backed Obama regardless of their position on the initiative.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...n111547S31.DTL

[Guynemer]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia
I had an internship at the Times once

You had an internship at the Washington Times?


That must have been surreal.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
I'm just trying to point out that the biggest factor in Obama's victory was probably college-educated, white, under 40 voters swinging toward him.

I don't disagree; even if their role in Obama's election was negligible, I guess the irony could be limited to the fact that blacks are statistically among the least sympathetic to the plight of gays who are roughly in the same spot that they were in half a century ago.

The other thread's title is dead-on, but what's especially sad is that those who were once on the receiving end of the bigot's boot are now wearing it.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Darius871
I had in mind fairly vague exit poll suggestions like this from the SF Chronicle on Prop 8:

I don't doubt that blacks and latinos voted disproportionately against gay marriage.

Just that the newspaper was pulling stuff out of its ass when they said that they turned out in "droves" for Obama.

[Naked Gents Rut]

I guess the irony could be limited to the fact that blacks are statistically among the least sympathetic to the plight of gays who are roughly in the same spot that they were in half a century ago.

Gays are in no way in "roughly the same spot" as blacks were half a century ago.

[Lancer]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia
Washington Times' Wes Pruden is gunning for Palin '12.

I had an internship at the Times once and I got to see him and Fran Coombs during a morning budget meeting. They both seemed pretty normal and decent, all politics aside.

Excellent link Alinestra...

"She didn't have a master's degree in women's studies from Harvard, nor had she ever taken a course in art appreciation at Stanford. She didn't have a doctorate from Yale in the poetry of Nineteenth-Century Romania or the politics of the Third Ten-Year Plan for Agricultural Reform in Uzbekistan. She was begging feminists with fancy credentials who had never accomplished anything to hate her, and they did. "

From the link above.

PRUDEN: Curtain rising on Campaign '12
Wesley Pruden (Contact)
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
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Buzz up!ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Now that all that business is settled, we can move on to something important -- the Campaign of '12, opening this morning.

Picking candidates four years out is a dinner-party exercise, more fun than Trivial Pursuit but no more enlightening than spin-the-bottle. Nevertheless it's what Washington groupies and junkies do. There's the delicious prospect of what will inevitably be called -- gasp! -- "a cat fight." Sarah Palin vs. Hillary Clinton. Yum, yum.

This assumes that (a) Gov. Palin wants a career in national politics and has caught an incurable case of Potomac Fever; (b) Barack Obama will reveal himself to be the sweet-talking, seductive empty suit that so many don't know and love with a feel-good speech for every occasion but maybe a one-reel wonder for all that; and (c) Hillary Clinton didn't really mean it when she said the chances of her trying again are approximately zero. Even a cautious bettor will be tempted to go for this trifecta.

Hillary has only to watch and wait, to see whether Mr. Obama is headed for Mount Rushmore or to the dustbin, where history consigns honey-tongued pretenders. She and Bubba paid their dues, campaigning for the messiah with the appearance of rooting for him, even if they did it with fingers crossed behind their backs. Hillary was hard on the job yesterday in New York, working the lines of New Yorkers waiting to vote. Bubba worked Florida hard enough that he can credibly take credit for what the Democrats accomplished there.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, still has to prove that she's the real goods with no imminent sell-by date. The press never let up from the hour John McCain introduced her as his running mate, mocking her as "Caribou Barbie" who abandoned her children for politics and failed her husband to march hopelessly out of step with real women. They roughed her up but she didn't whine, and when the press ridiculed her children, she shoved them proudly in their faces, even the little boy with Down syndrome. The governor had been a beauty queen and could still give a good account of herself arrayed against women two decades younger than she, with her dazzling smile, trim ankles, red spike heels and a body that turns every male head. Some women could never forgive her for that. Not only was she bereft of an Ivy League credential, but she succeeded as a graduate of the University of Idaho, with credits from Hawaii Pacific University, North Idaho College and even a semester at something called Matanuska-Susitna College. She didn't have a master's degree in women's studies from Harvard, nor had she ever taken a course in art appreciation at Stanford. She didn't have a doctorate from Yale in the poetry of Nineteenth-Century Romania or the politics of the Third Ten-Year Plan for Agricultural Reform in Uzbekistan. She was begging feminists with fancy credentials who had never accomplished anything to hate her, and they did.

Her smarter critics knew better than to show up at a Palin rally, where crowds bigger than John McCain's and some of them approaching the size of Barack Obama's went bonkers when she stepped on the platform. The multitudes cottoned to the plain way she talks, her lack of affect. She has the gift. Ronald Reagan had it first, the ability to connect with plain folks, telling it like the unwashed masses think things ought to be. Sarah Palin, like Reagan and Maggie Thatcher vastly underestimated early on, comes across as the real number.

She didn't have time to polish her act this time. She made the mistake of listening to the men who coached her for the disastrous interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, who asked the "gotcha!" questions prepared for them (and they didn't know the answers themselves), and only when she "went rogue" did Sarah Palin capture her moment. She can take a lot from John McCain's last hurrah, beginning with a list of people never to hire in 2012.

Almost anyone can cram for an exam; almost anybody can memorize the names of the assistant third secretary of the motor pool in Lower Volta and the keeper of the seal of the People's Republic of Western Granola; these are the questions the chattering class use as the test for true intelligence. Sarah Palin has the opportunity to seize the falling flag, to keep it away from the Republican careerists perfectly satisfied to be lickspittles permanently subservient to the majority Democrats. This could be a hoot, this Campaign of '12.


Sarah Palin

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

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[Bosh]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
I'm just trying to point out that the biggest factor in Obama's victory was probably college-educated, white, under 40 voters swinging toward him.

Well...

[Alinestra Covelia]

Originally posted by Guynemer


You had an internship at the Washington Times?


That must have been surreal.

I was on the Foreign News Desk under David Jones, who was a Canadian-born atheist with a largely liberal outlook on life. As you can imagine, he was a little unusual as a fixture at a church-run conservative newspaper with a strong pro-American streak of nationalism.

All the same, he was a great editor and had a very skilled staff of writers under him - and in my opinion the Times' foreign news coverage is every bit as good as the much-larger Post's. They have a single broadsheet page dedicated to World News and every weekday it rotates around the world regions, which is a dedication of column inches you basically never see anywhere else in print media.

[Guynemer]

Fair enough.



Regarding this:

She was begging feminists with fancy credentials who had never accomplished anything to hate her, and they did.

She was begging all feminists, credentials or not, to hate her. My wife (a devout Libertarian and feminist; I likes the crazy chicks) described it as the same way she felt about Katie Couric: it's great that a woman is getting the chance, but there are several more eminently qualified female candidates, and she was clearly chosen just for her gams. She is doomed to **** up, and as a result, set back all other women in the process.

The fact that it was Couric who started the Palin slide was just sweet, sweet irony.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Update: According to the Wikipedia page about the Washington Times, both Coombs and Pruden no longer hold any formal journalistic or editorial title. David Jones appears to have been promoted to a general managing editor position from merely being the foreign desk editor.

If the last bit is true, it'll be one of the best things the Times HR has done. Jones was a good man.

[Guynemer]

What sort of influence could he have from that post?