Sarah Palin: "Nancy Pelosi is a dingbat"

Here's the clip with Palin's "dingbat" comment.

The entire interview:

Sarah Palin debuts at Fox News

And the left goes bananas. Fox's US competitors (greatly lagging in viewership) are all ramping up the derision. Our own Globe and Mail serves up a typically over-the-top reaction:

Palin fits in totally at Fox – standing up for ignorance and stupidity.

Nice. Palin sure seems to draw out the petty meanness in her critics. It's weird - they must feel extremely threatened.

Anyway, more power to Sarah and to Fox where ratings ought to rise even further above the competition.

Sarah Palin’s brand of feminism

"Dissident feminist" Camille Paglia is enthusiastic:

I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match: this woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humour.
[...]
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand-new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut at the Republican convention, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist.
[...]
In the US, the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women. Our president must also serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, so a woman candidate for president must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making.

As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing for 20 years that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than women’s studies with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances.

The gun-toting Palin is a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the civil war — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men, which is why men could regard them as equals — unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the eastern seaboard.
[...]
... that’s the Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism — a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter.
[..]
Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today’s pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.

[via David Thompson]

Sarah Palin: McCain’s pick for running mate

So who is Sarah Palin? Here are some cherry picked facts from this profile:

elected governor of Alaska in 2006

43 year old mother of five

hockey mom
lives on a lake
ice fishes, snowmobiles, hunts,
NRA member
has a float plane
husband works for BP on the North Slope

a politician of eye-popping integrity

promised: to end corruption in state government, cut spending, and provide accountability.

[took] on the Republican establishment ...lodging .. ethics complaint[s]

crushed the Republican hierarchy (virtually all male) and nearly every other foe or critic

One of her first acts as governor was to fire the Alaska Board of Agriculture

[strong] conservative ... in 2007 vetoed 13 percent of the state's proposed budget for capital projects

most popular governor in America

most popular public official in any state

unabashedly pro life

as star of her high school basketball team she got the nickname "Sarah Barracuda"

describes herself as "pro-business and pro-development."

In her selection speech in Dayton, noting that today was near the 88th anniversary of women winning the vote in America, Palin praised Democrats Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton as current examples of women’s progress and encouraged “Hillary’s 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” to vote Republican.

Great pick John! She looks and sounds like a winner.

Sarah Palin on Glenn Beck


Update: Mark Steyn comes out of his hiatus to comment on Palin's appointment. Not surprisingly, he likes her.