Ping! ;)
Posted on 09/02/2009 5:04:37 AM PDT by Vincent Jappi
Jeffrey Lord has an interesting article today in The American Spectator. I have to admit that the title of Lord's article, "Is Sarah Palin the Next Ted Kennedy", gave me considerable pause. What could the two possibly have in common? Despite my misgivings, I felt compelled to read Lord's article. In his piece, Lord spends at least as much time comparing Governor Palin to Winston Churchill as he does comparing her to Ted Kennedy. I find the Churchill comparison much more appropriate.
Mr. Lord begins his piece with an account of one of Winston Churchill’s famous quotes:
The British statesman was a guest at a dinner in a private home. The dinner hour arrived and the guests made their way to the dining room. Churchill moved to a chair along the side of the table. Mortified, the hostess was quickly at his side, gesturing to the empty chair waiting for him. "Mr. Churchill," she said, "your seat is at the head of the table." To which Churchill responded in typical Churchillian style. "Madame," he said, "wherever I sit is the head of the table." And with that -- the Great Man sat down where he was.
Essentially, Lord's comparison between Governor Palin and Ted Kennedy revolves around his contention that both Kennedy and Palin, as well as Churchill, have (had in Kennedy and Churchill's case) a certain ineffable quality of leadership which only a select few have – the ability to change history through the sheer force of their personality and charisma.
With regard to Ted Kennedy, Lord cites the infamous Robert Bork’s America speech he delivered to the Senate within an hour of President Reagan's nomination of Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. Lord grants that Kennedy’s speech was one of his “less glorious” moments since it was, in my opinion, one of the most disingenuous and demagogic speeches I have ever seen Kennedy make (and that's saying a lot). But that misses Lord's point:
Whether you liked what Ted Kennedy said that day or hated it, whether you loved Ted Kennedy or couldn't stand him -- millions of people paid attention to him when he said it. In fact, in that instance for better or worse, depending on one's politics, Kennedy's statement signaled not just that Bork would have a difficult time being confirmed. His blunt remarks from the Senate floor set the stage for Bork's outright defeat, something initially considered impossible at the time. After all, Ronald Reagan was a popular president and Robert Bork was commonly considered by even opponents to be a legal giant. With his startling speech from the floor of the Senate, the sheer power of Ted Kennedy's personality and rhetoric changed the course of history.
Personally, I have never found anything admirable about Kennedy's role in preventing a man I consider to be the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in my lifetime from being confirmed. But again, that isn't Lord's point.
Lord also sees that rare "head of table" quality in Governor Palin.
This is a rare quality in political leaders. In reality it's a human trait, not a political one. Your Aunt Sally could possess Churchill's "head of the table" characteristic and not your Uncle Jim. Yet in the rarefied world of politics, where there is by definition a handful of nationally prominent politicians at any given moment, possessors of Churchill's "head of the table" trait stand out.
They possess, as did Winston Churchill, an unquantifiable capability that can not just electrify a room full of supporters but send them into passionate fits of ecstasy -- while simultaneously sending opponents into a furious, foaming rage. If these politicians master the art of using this quality, they can instantly play a huge role in anything from a winning political campaign to driving a piece of legislation across the legislative finish line. Or stopping it. By now, a year after her emergence on the national scene, it is crystal clear that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has this "head of the table" gene in spades.
[…]
Just as Kennedy managed to sink a once sure-thing Supreme Court nomination with his famous Bork speech, Governor Palin has managed to explode Section 1233 of the ObamaCare House bill with her vivid description of "death panels," severely damaging the President's entire legislative priority in the process.
Lord also discusses the unenviable position Governor Palin's potential GOP rivals will find themselves in if she does in fact run for president in the future:
Most Americans had trouble at any moment from 1963 until this past week identifying more than a handful of U.S. Senators -- but everybody knew Senator Kennedy. So too is Sarah Palin an instant standout among her Republican leadership peers, most of whom are unidentifiable to the vast American public.
[...]
It takes nothing away from Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee or Tim Pawlenty and others who may be presidential candidates the next time around, all of whom have had criticism of ObamaCare, to say that it was Sarah Palin almost single-handedly who has dealt a once hugely popular president a stunning defeat on a major aspect of his key legislative program.
[...]
Can you imagine how you must feel if you are an in-state rival like Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski? Who? Exactly. No one in Washington much less the rest of the country is huddled in a corner whispering -- "what did Lisa say?" Nor does America take much notice of Palin's potential 2012 rivals like Romney, Huckabee or Minnesota Governor Pawlenty. The New York Times isn't wasting ink being catty about Ms. Murkowski because, with no disrespect intended to Senator Murkowski, like most of her Senate colleagues her "head of the table" factor is exactly zero. There are no thundering editorials of disapproval for Romney, no Maureen Dowd snipes at Huckabee, no Keith Olbermann tirades about Pawlenty. It's Sarah Palin they can't stand, and it's visceral -- an immediate tip off to her Kennedy-like "head of the table" status.
[...]
Did you hear what Sarah Palin said today?
Chances are excellent that just as was true of Ted Kennedy, the answer will be "yes."
Read the entire article here.
Let me state for the record that I am still a bit uncomfortable with Mr. Lord's comparisons of Governor Palin to Ted Kennedy. However, Mr. Lord does a lot to assuage my initial concerns in some responses he makes to commenters at the end of his article. These comments are worth reading as they shed further light on Mr. Lord's article and the rationale behind it. In one of his responses, at 2:44 PM, Lord provides an excellent defense of Governor Palin's brilliant death panel metaphor:
ObamaCare is about government rationed health care. Or, as the president himself put it, taking one pill that's less expensive than the other because we can't get into judging people's spirit.
Well who exactly is the "we" here? Who is getting into the business of telling a patient they should take the blue pill and not the red pill? And why do they get to judge anything? The answer is "we" under this plan is the government, and the government is going to decide whether you are worth saving by rationing, end-of-life-counseling, cutting off your options. Read the bill. Also, take note of the case of Barbara Wagner in Oregon. Told by the state ObamaCare plan that they would not pay for her treatment, they were kind enough to send a letter informing her they would pay $50 bucks for the barbituates she could use to kill her self. Wake up, here, Rick. This amounts to a death panel - a perhaps vividly descriptive yet frighteningly reality that is being sold every time you hear the phrase "we need to cut costs." We do need to cut costs. Tort reform, not government rationed care, would be a starter. Fire a few lawyers, don't unplug Grandma. Then again, the lawyers gave more money to Obama than Grandma.
Back to Ted Kennedy who, in my opinion, was a buffoon. I never thought of him as a leader but as more of a bomb thrower, and not a particularly intelligent one at that. I continue to believe we would have never heard of the man if not for his wealthy and influential family who financed his successful Senate race in 1962. Once elected, his longevity had more to do with him being a Kennedy in Massachusetts and a desire for personal aggrandizement than anything else. I simply don't see Ted Kennedy as having had the "head of the table" trait that Winston Churchill had and Governor Palin clearly has.
Governor Palin, unlike Ted Kennedy, achieved all of her success on her own: no famous father, no famous brothers, and no vast family fortune. She is entirely self-made. She initially entered politics not to satisfy an overinflated ego but for the far nobler goal of improving the quality of education for her children. That is what true leadership is all about.
Despite my misgivings above, Lord’s article is quite thought provoking. He is a conservative and a supporter of Governor Palin. His comparison of Winston Churchill and Sarah Palin is intriguing to me. I have always been a huge fan of Mr. Churchill and I find Mr. Lord’s comparison to be spot on. Both fought for what they believe, regardless of the political fallout. “Politically speaking, if I die, I die” is inarguably a Churchillian attitude. It is the attitude of someone with that “head of the table” trait to which Mr. Lord refers.
Ping! ;)
See, here's where I have to object. I NEVER thought of T. Kennedy as anything but an wealthy, overindulged puppy and an intellectual fop... living on his family name (such as it was).
That`s how I see Kennedy as well. Same deal for Obama, I do not see anything charismatic from him either.
My favorite Churchill quote of all time.
“Mr. Churchill,” a woman upbraided him, “if you were my husband, I would put poison in your coffee.”
“Madame,” he replied. “if you were my wife, I would drink it.”
| Man robbed bank, sought prison, to get away from wife. |
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|
09/01/2009 10:20:03 AM PDT · by Deaner59 · 24 replies · 634+ views Associated Press ^ | September 1, 2009LANCASTER, Pa. -- A central Pennsylvania man says he robbed a bank in 2007 to go to jail and get away from his overbearing wife. Read more: http://www.postgazette.com |
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Sahah Palin as Winston Churchill? The ultimate ROTFLMAO moment.
To be sure, Sarah Palin never experienced such a crushing defeat as Gallipoli, and Churchill didn’t suffer so much systematic Communist character assassination. But he saw through Hitler’s intentions and that is enough to make him a great man.
Sarah Palin doesn’t seem to have that kind of humor.
But how many of those anecdotes are authentic?
British politics breeds excellent talkers; just listen to this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs
I agree with the poster, at least as far as he goes and as far as I read, regarding the bad fit of the late Kennedy with “Head of the Tableness”. There is no real comparison at all with Sarah Palin, who quite NATURALLY, in an entirely symbiotic way, comes to sit at the Head of the Table. (And will continue to, if my instincts are correct).
Kennedy’s position PERSONALLY, was never a “popular” one, and he’s no populist, and the people that elected him over and over did so because of the family Mythos, and because he’d managed to demagogue his way into being a particularly
useful apparatchik of Democrat Party Power. I knew that when he did the hatchet job on Bork, it was something of a turning point, and would “set the standard” for Democratic Party Rhetoric for years to come, as long as it got more salutes than catcalls when it was run up the flagpole. It did get more salutes, the Dem Party saw what a useful tool this kind of demagoguery could be, and it continues as a tactic up to this very day.They’ve mastered this “acting style”, in which gross overstatement is given free rein,ginned-up moral outrage is allowed to set the tone and parameters of discussion, thanks to the feebleness of “the opposition”, which, as we all know by now, constitutes a great deal of what has been wrong with the Republican Party. All we have to do is hear over and over in our inner ear, John McCain uttering his favorite phrase “The Lion of the Senate”, to know how it was that Kennedy, a totally artificial creation, got so far. So I would say in some sense Kennedy came to sit at the head of the table, but he ultimately got the “position” as dishonestly as he got everything else.
I love Sarah.
She has singelhandedly blown up Obamacare. They know it, State0run media knows it and history will record it as such.
Not a bad notch in her belt.
And what a talker!!! Why couldn’t we have a Republcian candidate who could say something as opposed to just mouthing words? I know, let’s import a Brit for our next president, we have already ditched the natural born citizenship requirement.
I’ve been dredging through “The Founders’ Constitution” online, from The University Of Chicago Press, and have found several instances of strong distinction between natural born subjects and natural born citizens, pluse plenty of anathema directed at the notion of such subjects ever holding national office in this country.
Given time, the truth will out. People are beginning to realize they’ve been bamboozled with focusing on the birth certificate, “fake” or not.
The Gray Communist IS a smooth-talking Brit, and a lot of good it has done the U.S.
The certificate issue is no less legitimate than the admission of British birth, and is no less likely to succeed than something which can only be understood by Constitutional scholars.
Winston could say that...probably the greatest figure of the 20th century..one of the most remarkable of the millennium
Sarah doesn’t suffer from the dreaded black dog either like Winston did.
I think that is why he drank so much
You have GOT to be kidding me. Churchill spent years in the political wilderness in the 1920's and 30's, constantly assailed by his political opponents, a lonely voice opposing Hitler and fascism. He clung to his core beliefs regardless of the consequences. Palin gets a little heat from her opponents and she quits her job and runs and hides on Facebook. If she has any core beliefs at all then they haven't been tested. If you want to compare what she's gone through to anything near what Churchill put up with then she's flunked, miserably.
Sarah Palin wasn’t jumping up and down yelling ‘Pick me! Pick me!’ She was in Alaska doing her job and got plucked out of there to be used by a total RINO who couldn’t seem to drum up a bit of interest in what he had to say.
To her credit she outshown him so badly that she re-energized the the people and they started standing up against the total government takover by The New Party commies hiding behind the DNC. This infuriated The New Party and it put the republicans into paranoia to an extent that they hung her out there and let her be crucified by the Obama Hate America Campaign. Even the republican women would not rally. For that, I spit on them.
John McCain appears to be a total coward, rather than the POW hero status he ran on. And the republicans still can’t seem to get their act together. They better take note...Sarah pulled down Obamacare with one Facebook post while they appeared helpless to stop it.
For the sake of this country, the republicans better get it together and pick a leader who can get the votes needed to push The New Party out of power. You’d think they’d get behind her and give her all the resources, all the help, and stand up with her to prove that they can help her find the answers, develop realistic policies, and most of all protect this country in a world gone mad with Islamic extremist influence and support by the old soviet commies.
The British subject at birth admission is damning, open and public. The source documents in the database driving the controversial, abbreviated Hawaiian form are unknown, deliberately concealed and legally very difficult to access.
There has been plenty of time, for the various parties to consider strategy, here. Just why is the focus being driven toward place of birth and not parentage with Obama, considering the concurrent situation of John McCain, comically “resolved” by the Senate to be a natural born citizen, despite the Senate having absolutely no authority over the matter, Constitutionally speaking? There is equivalence, and that equivalence is being avoided like the plague.
Hang a lantern on your real problem, and keep ‘em guessing and obsessing about something that very likely is completely extraneous, that’s what’s going on, here.
OK, then, what current, nationally viable Republican figure would you deem to be more deserving of such accolades?
Your revulsion regarding Sarah Palin aside, where do you fall in, among conservatives? I’ve watched you on FR, and debated with you on FR, and honestly have not seen any indication, one way or the other, in five years.
I admire her, myself. I’d like to see her in the White House. She has an innate grasp of core, conservative truths, lives them in fact, and needs no gold plated fluffery to put her vison across to the voting public as a result. So, she plays quite well as she is, no squealing consultant class required, unlike so many “packaged” politicians with no core beliefs at all, let alone tested ones.
Who does this remind me of? Ronald Reagan.
What I’m looking for now is courage. Sarah Palin has courage.
None. And that includes Palin.
Your revulsion regarding Sarah Palin aside, where do you fall in, among conservatives? I’ve watched you on FR, and debated with you on FR, and honestly have not seen any indication, one way or the other, in five years.
On the conservative side. Where do you fall in?
I admire her, myself. I’d like to see her in the White House. She has an innate grasp of core, conservative truths, lives them in fact, and needs no gold plated fluffery to put her vison across to the voting public as a result.
Really? And you base that on what?
Define conservative, as you see it, Non-Sequitur.
Really? And you base that on what?
Part of it is just visceral. The rest is based upon her words and her deeds not being in conflict, at any point that I can discern. She's pro-life, speaks it and lives it. She's anti-corruption, speaks it, enacts it, enforces it and lives it. She's pro-America, speaks it and lives it.
Unlike Romney, Gingrich, Huckabee ... toss out any other name even remotely considered for the Presidency. No comparison.
You choose to accept the leftist line, that she stepped down out of fear or something. I see it as a practical, if unorthodox, strategy to confront her adversaries in a manner that could not be accomplished while in the Alaska Governor's Mansion.
She's nearly single-handedly derailed these mandatory, odious "end of life" counselling, the so-called "death panels" with no more exposure than Twitter and Facebook, and so the "public option" appears to be going down the drain. These alternative media have been necessary to go above and around the MSM filter of derision, and she's succeeded.
I'll gladly work for her Presidential campaign. You can sit and sneer on the sidelines, being as effective as you've always been. Go support some packaged apparatchik puttybutt and see how far you get.
A little heat ? Um, what ? Did Churchill have his young daughters raped by the media and the popular culture ? Was he constantly being sued by Nazi-sympathizing Labourites to the point he could not carry out his duties in office ? Really, I have NEVER seen someone in public service gang-raped by a group of thugs and jackals calling themselves the purveyors of truth and honesty worse than Sarah Palin has. Fidel Castro enjoys more respect from the media, the popular culture, and the Democrat party than Gov. Palin does. Sick and evil.
Frum Effectively Concedes He Has Little Influence ("increasingly irrelevant" compared to Palin)
They were and are about as attractive as a maggot.
YYYYAAAAAAYYYYYY SARAH! Go girl go!
I just love that lady!
Sarah Palin’s resignation shows the same quality as Churchills’: an ability to distinguish the essential from the accessory and the intellectual courage to act upon such a distinction.
Nice,RC...I could NOT agree more.
If a stupid crack by David Letterman and ethics charges by political opponents are more than she can handle then she should by all means stay on the rubber chicken circuit where it's safe and out of politics.
You’re being disingenuous again, NS. Of course, the RINOs were just as gleefully gang-raping her as well... and still are.
Of course they are. Well, maybe Palin isn't really cut out for politics after all. maybe it's a good thing that she quit when she did.
No, she’s not cut out for “politics,” because she’s not a politician and she refuses to play those games. Indeed, she’s cut out to lead the nation as a states(wo)man, a very rare quality these days (at least amongst those currently or recently having held office). That’s why the left fears her so and why they must endeavor to destroy her.
OK.
That’s why the left fears her so and why they must endeavor to destroy her.
I think that what you see as 'fear' is actually disdain. Justified or not.
Fear, disdain, envy, jealousy... the attacks on her went well beyond the political. They were viciously and disgustingly personal. Attacks on her, her marriage, her Downs Syndrome baby, her daughters... and on and on. It wasn’t about destroying her chances for the Vice-Presidency or Presidency, it was about destroying her completely and absolutely as a person, and destroying her family. I have no hesistation in calling that pure evil.
TEA???? Tea doesn't grow in England!!!!
/slinking away
Ha! Classic. :)
So I see.
Hey a Mitt Romney supporter!!!!You would not make a good pimple on Sarah’s back side!!!
Try again.
You would not make a good pimple on Sarah’s back side!!!
And I take it you would?
Better than that I am a BIG supporter..How are things at DU???
bttt
Wouldn't know. So you think she's the real deal, huh? Why?
“Wouldn't know. So you think she's the real deal, huh? Why?”
A better question would be “why” cannot you see it?
LLS
Because I haven't seen anything to convince me. What is it about her that's got you convinced?
TEA! Remember, he was British....
But SHE was Nancy Astor, born in Danville, Virginia
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