The Sound & The Fury (Updated)

Gov. Palin's story is pretty amazing. Add to that, her resume, in every objective sense, stacks up better than the 1st term Senator's from Illinois. As Newt Gingrich called it yesterday.



The scale and fevor of the attack on Gov. Palin goes beyond anything I have observed from the left during my lifetime, and that includes some incredibly scurrilous attacks on a wide range of minorities and women. It all stands in incredibly stark contrast to the pass the media has given to Obama on his history and history of associations. Twenty years of association with Rev. Wright alone and the embrace of Black Liberation Theology should at a minimum have been fully vetted. Instead, the silence on the air waves and in print has been palpable.

The media are attempting to define Gov. Palin as illegitimate for the nation before the nation can make up its own mind. As Howard Kurtz memorializes in WaPo today, Steve Schmidt of the McCain camp has accused the media of "attempting to destroy Gov. Palin."

The Beltway Boys have a roll-up of some of the most recent, though they leave out the odious Barney Frank pronouncing open season on the Palin family. Their theory is that Palin is both an outsider and a threat to entrenched Washington culture and power brokers, thus the zeal to destroy her as a legitimate politician. I think that is correct, but it goes one further.

Ed Morrisey at Hot Air believes that the media inquisition has been motivated by McCain fooling the MSM, with this now being the MSM's way of trying to justify their blindness by showing the McCain pick makes no sense. That is colorable, but I do not believe accurate.

I think Michelle Malkin hits this one on the head when she writes today of the four stages of conservative female abuse. As the says:

Liberals hold a special animus for constituencies they deem traitors. Minorities who identify as social and economic conservatives have left the plantation and sold out their people. Women who put an "R" by their name have abandoned their ovaries and betrayed their gender. As female Republican officeholders and female conservative public figures have grown in number and visibility, so has the progression of Conservative Female Abuse. The astonishing vitriol and virulent hatred directed at GOP Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is the most severe manifestation to date.

This will succeed or fail depending on the performance of Gov. Palin. If the country likes her, the liberal elites pushing the inquisition of Gov. Palin will pay dearly. If she does not give a bravura performance tonight, the feeding frenzy of the left will make the last few days look like glowing coverage. My gut tells me that Gov. Palin is up to the task. My brain is damn well hoping its right.

(Update) I have to add this from Peggy Noonan at the WSJ who captures all of this perfectly:

Gut: The Sarah Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work. It's not going to be a little successful or a little not; it's not going to be a wash. She is either going to be magic or one of history's accidents. She is either going to be brilliant and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books. Of which there should be plenty, as we've never had a year like this, with the fabulous freak of a campaign.

More immediately and seriously on Palin:

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to a future Obama candidacy.

She could become a transformative political presence.

So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.

And it's going to be brutal. It's already getting there.

There are only two questions.

1. Can she take it?

Will she be rattled? Can she sail through high seas? Can she roll with most punches and deliver some jabs herself?

2. And while she's taking it, rolling with it and sailing through, can she put herself forward convincingly as serious enough, grounded enough, weighty enough that the American people can imagine her as vice president of the United States?

I suppose every candidate for vice president faces these questions to some degree, but because Palin is new, unknown, and a woman, it's all much more so.

Amen (and I wish that I could write like that).

(H/T Hot Air)